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

Current theories of speaking suggest that the structure of the lexicon is flexible and changes with exposure. We tested this claim in two experiments that investigated whether the word frequency effect was moderated by item repetition within and across experimental sessions. Participants named high frequency (HF) and low frequency (LF) pictures (Experiment 1) and words (Experiment 2) six times. In both experiments, participants were faster to name HF than LF pictures or words, but this effect was eliminated with repetition. Importantly, this word frequency effect was still absent when participants returned up to 2 weeks later and named old HF and LF pictures, whose names they had produced before, together with new HF and LF pictures, whose names they had not produced. These findings suggest that producing a word multiple times in short succession alters its long-term accessibility, making it easier to produce later. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Statistical structures and our ability to exploit them are a ubiquitous component of daily life. Yet, we still do not fully understand how we track these sophisticated statistics and the role they play in sensory processing. Predictive coding frameworks hypothesize that for stimuli that can be accurately anticipated based on prior experience, we rely more strongly on our internal model of the sensory world and are more "surprised" when that expectation is unmet. The present study used this phenomenon to probe listeners' sensitivity to probabilistic structures generated using rapid 50 ms tone-pip sequences that precluded conscious prediction of upcoming stimuli. Over three experiments, we measured listeners' sensitivity and response time to deviants of a frequency outside the expected range. Predictable sequences were generated using either a triplet-based or network-style structure, and deviant detection contrasted against the same set of tones but in a random, unpredictable order. All experiments found structured sequences enhanced deviant detection relative to random sequences. Additionally, Experiment 2 used three different instantiations of the community structure to demonstrate that the level of uncertainty in the structured sequences modulated deviant saliency. Finally, Experiment 3 placed the deviant within an established community or immediately after a transition between communities, where the perceptual boundary should generate momentary uncertainty. However, this manipulation did not impact performance. Together, these results demonstrate that probabilistic contexts generated from statistical structures modulate the processing of an ongoing auditory signal, leading to an improved ability to detect unexpected deviant stimuli, consistent with the predictive coding framework. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Navigating the world and remembering events require processing information from various sensory modalities. However, research on human spatial memory and navigation is dominated by vision and little is known about the nonvisual senses. According to a recent theoretical framework, spatial memory and navigation evolved together with olfaction to aid navigation. We tasked participants with memorizing locations of odors and sounds in a virtual reality setting, hypothesizing that odor memory representations would disproportionately interfere with sound memory representations. In three recall times (immediate, 15-min delay, and 1-week delay), we tested whether spatial memory of odors would retroactively interfere with sounds. We predicted that performance should decline more in the sensory modality encoded first than in the modality encoded second, due to retroactive interference, especially when sounds are encoded first. Results indicated a decline in spatial memory performance over time, and similar retroactive interference effects from smells and sounds, but no olfactory-specific interference. However, exploratory results indicated that olfactory retroactive interference is apparent in error trials where participants tended to misplace sounds in the vicinity of smells related to the same concepts (e.g., misplacing the sound of a coffee maker at the location of the smell of coffee). There was no similar interference from sounds on odor misplacements, suggesting asymmetry or "olfactory dominance," at the conceptual level. Our exploratory results suggest that the hypothesized unique role of olfactory retroactive interference might manifest in the type of errors, rather than in overall performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A long-standing debate in the psychology of learning and memory is whether contingency awareness-explicit recognition of the relationship between conditioned stimuli and unconditioned stimuli-is a prerequisite for fear acquisition in humans. In an extensive participant pool (N = 895), we systematically investigated the impact of manipulating core experimental parameters and individual differences that may moderate contingency awareness. Key parameters included the presence of online expectancy or fear ratings, engagement in concurrent tasks, sensory modalities of conditioned stimuli and unconditioned stimuli, and type of instruction. These manipulations strongly influenced the proportion of participants who acquired contingency awareness, ranging between 47% and 96%, with only aware participants exhibiting conditioned responses. We confirm that contingency awareness is necessary for human fear conditioning and highlight the parameters that experimenters can use to ensure learning. Individual differences in age, personality traits, and working memory capacity did not contribute to the probability of becoming contingency aware. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior research using attention-demanding tasks has shown that performance can be improved by allowing individuals to control the pacing of trials. This result suggests that people can monitor fluctuations of attention and can take advantage of this metacognitive awareness to synchronize moments with high demand to moments of heightened attention. In two experiments, we decomposed the benefits conferred by self-pacing within the context of a model of attentional capture rooted in signal detection theory. We employed a common orientation discrimination task in which set size varied across blocks of trials. Some subjects controlled the onset of each trial (self-pacing), and others did not. Model analyses revealed that self-pacing both increases target strength and decreases target variability. The between-trial wait times of self-pacing subjects supported the view that these benefits arise in part from the fact that participants appreciated the greater difficulty of larger set sizes and deployed a policy of waiting longer between trials during blocks with larger set sizes in order to offset the larger decrements associated with tasks of greater difficulty. Metacognitive control of self-pacing appears to benefit attention by enhancing the detectability of targets and by reducing the occurrence of target presentations during moments of lessened attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The majority of reading research takes place in high-income "Minority World" countries where children typically begin learning to read in early childhood. This research, however, does not reflect the experience of many children around the world who learn to read later in childhood or in adolescence. Crucially, children who learn to read later in life may rely on different cognitive systems. Specifically, procedural learning, which supports sequence and pattern learning, reaches maturity around early adolescence, while declarative learning, which supports the arbitrary mapping of form and meaning, continues to develop into adulthood. The declarative/procedural model of learning posits that the role of declarative learning increases as an individual ages, and as it matures, will overlap and compete with typically procedural-supported learning. Therefore, declarative-supported learning may lead to poorer outcomes for older first-time readers. This study examined the potential competition between procedural and declarative learning among emergent readers (n = 88) in rural Cote d'Ivoire, aged 10-16. We examined performance on culturally appropriate declarative and procedural memory tasks, and found that declarative learning competes with procedural learning, such that stronger declarative memory negatively impacts the development of early reading skills. These findings are important for understanding the role of learning systems, and their interaction with age, in supporting literacy development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In free recall procedures, the order and timing of participants' responses can inform our understanding of human memory. Analyzing a corpus of more than half a million freely recalled words from 127 young adult participants, we develop a statistical model of interresponse times (IRTs) as a function of the temporal and semantic relations among the recalled items and their positions in the output sequence. Residual IRTs exhibited strong sequential dependencies, being positively correlated at lags of one and two transitions. We used this IRT model to evaluate the hypothesis that chunking helps participants learn unstructured materials. Specifically, we hypothesized that chunks would appear as a slow IRT, indicative of a boundary, followed by a sequence of fast IRTs. Model-based analyses that included sequential dependencies in IRTs offered evidence for spontaneous chunking in free recall of lists that lacked any grouping or hierarchical structure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory has a limited capacity, and it is therefore crucial to carefully control what information is stored in working memory. It has been suggested that there is a fundamental limitation in the control of working memory in that salient objects will automatically receive enhanced representations. These accounts propose that salient objects automatically compete within working memory, and this competition cannot be prevented by preemptive attentional orienting. The present study questions this claim. Specifically, we investigate a prior study claiming that attentional cueing is insufficient to eliminate salience effects in working memory recall (Constant & Kerzel, 2025). We propose that these findings occurred because participants were not sufficiently encouraged to attend to the cues in these studies. Across two experiments, we improve attentional orienting to the cues by strengthening their predictiveness and by increasing their duration. We find that attentional orienting can completely prevent salience effects on working memory recall, contrary to the conclusions of the original studies. These findings favor a more flexible account of working memory, whereby top-down control can be used to reduce the influence of salience on memory representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

While the influence of reward on working memory has been explored extensively, it remains unclear how reward and punishment affect working memory encoding when people are not intentionally encoding their experiences. This study aimed to address this question by integrating reward and aversive conditioning into the attribute amnesia task, which investigates working memory through a surprise test. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to report the location of a color-singleton letter. The reward group experienced associations between color and reward, while the no-outcome group completed the same task without any reward feedback. The results showed that, when unexpectedly asked to report the identity of the color-singleton letter on the surprise trial, the reward group showed no better performance than the no-outcome group, despite the color singleton being rendered in the high-value color. Additionally, the reward group showed lower accuracy in reporting the identity of the color singleton in the trial immediately following the surprise trial, where the color singleton was again presented in the high-value color, compared with the no-outcome group. Experiment 2 replicated these results with a different group of participants undergoing aversive conditioning with electric shock during the attribute amnesia task (shock group). These findings suggest a limitation in the ability of stimulus valence to enhance working memory encoding. Moreover, encoding a valent stimulus feature may interfere with the encoding of other stimulus features. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Fluency with multiplication facts provides a strong foundation for future mathematics learning. Models of number fact storage and retrieval suggest that multiplication facts are stored in an associative network whereby neighboring facts (e.g., 6 × 7 and 6 × 8) can interfere with one another. While existing theoretical models account for the skilled retrieval of number facts, an understanding of how interference develops during learning, and hence the need for inhibitory control during learning, is poor. In a preregistered study, we tracked adults as they learned a set of new multiplication facts, and we monitored the interference between facts throughout their learning. Our findings are the first to show that interference emerges early in the learning process as individuals acquire knowledge of new facts. Moreover, interference does not decline as learning continues, even when retrieval accuracy is high and individuals continue to practice facts that they already know. These findings are consistent with theoretical assumptions and models of multiplication fact networks proposed by Ashcraft (1987), Campbell (1995), and De Visscher et al. (2016) but do not support the model proposed by Verguts and Fias (2005). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).