Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition最新文献

We investigated how anticipated naming difficulty affects voluntary language choice and switching behavior in three experiments. L2 speakers of English (E1: 87 native Dutch speakers, E2: 105 native Dutch speakers, and E3: 65 native Indonesian speakers) performed an online picture-naming task with free language choice. We used image degradation to manipulate the early, prelexical stages of word production to be easy (intact image) or difficult (degraded image). In Experiment 2, we also manipulated word frequency. We hypothesized participants would use English (their nondominant language) and switch languages less on degraded- versus intact-image trials. Participants took longer to name degraded than intact images and lower than higher frequency words, as predicted. They also responded faster on English trials (reverse dominance effect) and language repeat trials (voluntary switch cost) and used English more for higher than lower frequency words (all ps < .001). Crucially, though, results refuted our other predictions: There was no effect of image degradation on language choice or switch choice (p > .05). This suggests that early prelexical sources of naming difficulty do not affect voluntary language selection. These data support modular theories of language production, meaning language decisions at the lexical stage occur independently from the visual processing or conceptual stages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Context influences how people cope with distraction. For example, a parent might "tune out" a child's voice more while reading than while cooking. The contextual boundaries of control processes that enable people to cope with distraction over relatively long (e.g., minutes) timescales, however, remain unclear, especially in cross-modal tasks. Therefore, we conducted three experiments with a prime-probe task (N = 144) to investigate the boundaries of a laboratory index of these control processes called the list-wide proportion congruency effect (LWPCE). Specifically, we investigated whether (a) sensory modalities on their own or (b) task sets based on sensory modalities serve as boundaries for the LWPCE. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that the control processes underlying the LWPCE transfer from trials with auditory distractors to trials with visual distractors only when the task structure biases participants to think of auditory and visual stimuli as belonging to the same task. Experiment 3 revealed that participants exhibit such a bias when they cannot classify most of the trials as "purely visual" or "purely auditory." These findings support the view that task sets serve as boundaries for the LWPCE. They also reveal the precise conditions under which control processes transfer across different sensory modalities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Language control is the process that manages cross-language interference, helping multilinguals to successfully adapt their language choice to a given linguistic environment. Traditionally, language control has been investigated using language-switching experiments that rely on cued picture naming. However, in real-life settings, language choice is not always externally imposed, and language production involves complex and varied syntactic constructions beyond the single-word level. Here, we present findings from French-English bilinguals who switched between languages from one sentence to the other, parting from an action description task. We compared findings from two linguistic contexts: one wherein participants could freely choose when to switch (voluntary language switching) and one wherein they were told when to switch (cued language switching). Overall, our reaction time and filled pause analyses showed no significant switch costs during cued language switching. During voluntary language switching, we observed significant switch costs in second language and a repetition cost in first language. Our findings contrast with those encountered in single-word production experiments and highlight the importance of studying bilingual language control in ecologically valid environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A reconstruction-of-order task illuminated the dynamics and strategies that underlie serial order recall. An initial benchmark experiment, either with no variation in spatial positions or with spatial positions coinciding with temporal positions, yielded bowed symmetrical serial position functions in each case, consistent with both simple chaining and simple positional coding models. In contrast, these simple models were challenged by two additional experiments, which orthogonally varied temporal and spatial positions. These experiments yielded large performance differences between recalling temporal and spatial information. In the temporal condition, participants attempted to reconstruct the temporal order of words that were positioned alphabetically within a vertical array. In the spatial condition, participants attempted to reconstruct the spatial positions of words presented in a temporal sequence based on their alphabetical order. After viewing each list, all the words appeared alphabetically, and participants reconstructed the order of the words according to their instructed condition. Compared to temporal recall, spatial recall exhibited superior performance and a more bowed symmetrical serial position function. Analyses showed the effects of temporal contiguity in the spatial condition and spatial contiguity in the temporal condition. These findings suggest the theoretical conclusion that participants do not focus on the words' identities but rather on the temporal-spatial pattern in which the words occur during the study display (i.e., the temporal sequence of the spatial locations in which the words are shown). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A now well-documented finding is that nonwords created by transposing two internal letters (e.g., vetrical, vercital) are perceived as being more similar to their base word (i.e., vertical) than nonwords created by substituting other letters for the transposed letters (e.g., vefsical, versifal). Most of the relevant research on transposed letter (TL) effects has involved a masked priming procedure with a lexical decision task. The results have typically been explained in terms of the interactions between the orthographic coding process and the lexical access process. The present research was an investigation of TL effects when the TL nonword is a target in both lexical decision tasks and same-different matching tasks in an attempt to determine whether the effect patterns could be explained in a way that is reasonably similar to how current orthographic coding models explain TL effects in masked priming experiments. Essentially parallel results of large TL effects for consonant-consonant transpositions and smaller, but highly significant, TL effects for vowel-vowel transpositions were observed in the two tasks for both adjacent and nonadjacent transpositions. The implications of our data pattern, particularly the large consonant-vowel effect size difference, for accounts of the relevant processes are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The left-digit bias (LDB) is a tendency to estimate differences between numbers sharing the same leftmost digit (e.g., 47 and 49) as smaller than between numbers with different leftmost digits (e.g., 49 and 51) in nonspatial evaluations and number-to-position tasks. In the present study, we examined motoric consequences of LDB by measuring angles of spatial-localization responses in circular space as participants localized spoken numbers (1-12.5 in 0.5-unit increments; e.g., "two point five") on a clock-face arrangement. To test the role of visual feedback, the task was performed either with (N = 27) or without vision (N = 23). After correcting for cyclical errors in angular localization, we found that targets sharing the same leftmost digit were indeed placed closer together in angular space than equidistant targets with different leftmost digits, regardless of visual feedback. This LDB manifested as compression of decimal targets toward the lower boundary of their leftmost digit category. Our findings demonstrate the robustness of LDB signatures across task settings, extend them to angular measures, and point to cognitive rather than perceptual origins. They are consistent with the overweighting of leftmost digits during number processing, which asymmetrically compresses representational space toward lower same-digit boundaries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Modeling reaction time data using diffusion models comes with the advantage of separating different processes involved in decision making. Each parameter of the diffusion model is assumed to translate into one (or more) process(es). If this assumption holds true, selective manipulations of specific processes involved in decision making should selectively influence the related parameter, but not any other parameter (high convergent and discriminant validities). We present two experiments (total N = 104) and one simulation study that-using a manipulation of the difficulty of encoding in a lexical decision task-tested the convergent validity of the nondecision time t₀. As hypothesized, we found large effects on t₀ in both experiments but also medium to large effects on the drift rate v as well as on the starting point z. Our simulation study suggests that the effects on the drift rate, but not on the starting point, might be explained by incorrect assumptions about the intertrial variability of the nondecision time. Our results speak in favor of a high convergent validity of t₀ but question the discriminant validities of v and z, at least under the assumption that our manipulation affected encoding selectively. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

It is intuitive to think that retrieval cues always aid recall. Surprisingly, cues sometimes hurt recall. This counterintuitive phenomenon occurs regardless of whether the cues come from a social (a person) or a nonsocial (a computer or article) source. However, we do not know whether recall impairment differs depending on the source, raising the question-do social versus nonsocial sources create differential impacts on memory and, if so, what theoretical mechanism underlies this difference? We addressed these questions by directly comparing memory impairment across collaborative recall (cues received from social sources) and part-list cued recall (cues received from nonsocial sources). We aligned the two procedures by taking the recall output of each collaborative group and generating cues for part-list cued participants. This yoked design enabled us to present identical cues and equate their presentation sequence across the two cuing conditions. We also devised a group-level recall index for the part-list cued "groups" yoked to the collaborative groups, thus equating the recall metric between conditions. Across two experiments (N = 270), we replicated both the standard collaborative inhibition and part-list cuing impairments. Collaborative groups exhibited more reciprocal influence on one another's recall than part-list cuing participants, producing responses from the same taxonomic category as the cues more often than part-list cuing participants, and exhibiting greater collective memory. These findings provide evidence for the operation of the cross-cuing mechanism in social remembering relative to nonsocial remembering. We discuss these theoretical contributions and implications for education, information transmission, beliefs, and collective narratives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Most prior studies of polysemy have focused on main effects of the number of related senses (NOS) associated with a word on processing. However, a small number of studies have reported interactions between NOS and other psycholinguistic covariates which can moderate, or potentially reverse, these main effects. Such interactions have important implications for understanding how different representations are gradually activated over time and whether this occurs in an interactive or stage-like fashion. We tested for interactions between 15 psycholinguistic covariates and NOS in megastudies of visual and auditory lexical decision, naming, and semantic decision. We leveraged dimensionality reduction techniques applied to the covariates to maximize the robustness of our inferences. We found that interactions were prevalent, particularly for covariates associated with lexical and semantic representations. In most megastudies, when another aspect of the word facilitated access (e.g., high frequency), the facilitatory NOS effects were attenuated, but did not reverse to become inhibitory. In semantic categorization, if another aspect of a word facilitated access, an inhibitory effect of NOS became even more inhibitory. These results are largely, but not completely, consistent with the results of past studies. They support a cascaded/interactive account of processing wherein the processing of word senses is fundamentally intertwined with the processing of various covariates at the lexical and semantic (but not sublexical) levels. Our work offered insight into how statistical methods and megastudy data can be further leveraged in this area and extended to other ambiguous words (e.g., homonyms). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which graphemes evoke specific color experiences. This study investigates whether the color-naming and retrieval tasks of the synesthesia Stroop produce congruency effects that reliably index the synesthetic experience compared to nonsynesthete controls. Experiment 1 compared 18 associator grapheme-color synesthetes and 18 nonsynesthete controls. The nonsynesthete group memorized five letter-color pairings before performing both a color-naming and a retrieval task. While a congruency effect was observed in the color-naming task for synesthetes only, both groups demonstrated congruency effects in the retrieval task. Furthermore, associator synesthetes showed larger congruency effects during the color-naming compared to the retrieval task, a pattern originally attributed to projector synesthetes. Experiment 2 examined whether associator synesthetes would also exhibit congruency effects for nonsynesthetic letter-color pairings. Following a brief exposure to a novel letter-color association, synesthetes exhibited a congruency effect solely in the retrieval task, mirroring the findings from nonsynesthetes in Experiment 1. These results align with MacLeod and Dunbar's continuum of automaticity, suggesting that congruency effects emerge when retrieval processes are less automatized than color-naming ones. Moreover, the presence of congruency effects in both synesthetes and nonsynesthetes indicates that the retrieval task may not differentiate synesthetic experiences from briefly memorized associations. These findings question the utility of the retrieval task of the synesthesia Stroop as an objective tool for distinguishing synesthetes from nonsynesthetes. It also reinforces the need for refined paradigms that better capture the perceptual properties underlying synesthesia. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).