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

How does the language comprehension system identify and interpret word constituents-or morphemes-during sentence reading? We investigated this question by employing words containing semantically ambiguous roots (e.g., bark, with meanings related to both "dog" and "tree") which are disambiguated when affixed by -ing (e.g., barking; related to "dog" only). We aimed to understand whether higher-level access to the meaning of the root bark would be constrained by lower-level morphological affixation. In Experiment 1, using eye-tracking, participants read sentences containing words with semantically ambiguous roots, such as barking (a prime), combined with targets that were either related to two meanings of the root (dog, tree) or they were cloze and unrelated controls. All five eye-tracking measures we employed (first fixation duration, gaze duration, go-past time, total reading time, and regressions to target) showed no difference between the two root-related targets, which were slower than cloze, but faster than unrelated. Results show that even in cases where a meaning is inconsistent with the full word form (barking-tree), both meanings of the ambiguous root are activated. These results were supported by Experiment 2, employing a maze task in which the time to select the cloze (night) continuation for the sentence He heard loud barking during the … was disrupted by the presence of distractors related to both meanings of bark. We discuss the implications of these findings for the nature of morphological parsing and lexical ambiguity resolution in sentence contexts. We suggest that word recognition and lexical access processes involve separating roots from affixes, yielding independent and exhaustive access to root meanings-even when they are ruled out by affixation and context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Relations between conative factors (task-specific motivation, attention self-efficacy, and self-set goals) and individual differences in attention control (AC) performance were investigated in two latent variable studies. Participants performed AC tasks along with measures of working memory and processing speed. During the AC tasks, participants self-reported their motivation, self-efficacy, and self-set goals for the tasks. Task-unrelated thoughts were also assessed. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that latent factors for the constructs could be formed and the conative factors were each related to the AC factor. Structural equation modeling further suggested that the conative factors tended to account for unique variance in attention, even after accounting for shared variance with working memory and processing speed. These results provide evidence that conative factors are important for individual differences in AC and further suggest that multiple factors likely contribute to variation in performance on AC tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A photo lineup, which is a cross between an old/new and a forced-choice recognition memory test, consists of one suspect, whose face was either seen before or not, and several physically similar fillers. First, the participant/witness must decide whether the person who was previously seen is present (old/new) and then, if present, choose the previously seen target (forced choice). Competing signal-detection models of eyewitness identification performance make different predictions about how certain variables will affect a witness's ability to discriminate previously seen (guilty) suspects from new (innocent) suspects. One key variable is the similarity of the fillers to the suspect in the lineup, and another key variable is the size of the lineup (i.e., the number of fillers). Previous research investigating the role of filler similarity has supported one model, known as the Ensemble model, whereas previous research investigating the role of lineup size has supported a competing model, known as the Independent Observations model. We simultaneously manipulated these two variables (filler similarity and lineup size) and found a pattern that is not predicted by either model. When the fillers were highly similar to the suspect, increasing lineup size reduced discriminability, but when the fillers were dissimilar to the suspect, increasing lineup size enhanced discriminability. The results suggest that each additional filler adds noise to the decision-making process and that this noise factor is minimized by maximizing filler dissimilarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Causes sometimes decrease rather increase the probability of an effect, as when drinking coffee lowers the probability of sleep or an aspirin eliminates a headache. This research tests how two causal reasoning errors that have influenced the development of theories of human causal reasoning manifest themselves in the presence of inhibitory causal relations. Past research with generative causal relations (a cause makes its effect more probable) has shown that people violate the Markov condition, the pattern of independence that should obtain among causally related variables. And it has shown that they explain away-the phenomenon in which one should lower likelihood of one event when another is discovered to have occurred (e.g., exonerating one murder suspect when evidence against another is found)-too little or not at all. The new empirical findings reported here reveal that both sorts of errors manifest themselves when inhibitory causal relations are present although, unexpectedly, the direction of those errors sometimes reverses. Only the mutation sampler, a rational process model of human causal reasoning, correctly predicted these novel empirical findings. These results support the view that causal reasoning errors can be understood as arising from rational inference constrained by limited cognitive resources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

We present a model-based analysis of aging effects in three symbolic numeracy tasks using three groups of subjects (young adults, 60- to 69-year-olds, and 70- to 90-year-olds). The tasks are number discrimination (is this number greater or less than 50), number memory (was this number in the list of numbers just displayed), and number line (point to where this number is on this number line). The first two tasks were fit by the standard two-choice diffusion model and the last one by the spatially continuous diffusion model (Ratcliff, 2018). Results showed good fits of the models to accuracy (choices) and response time distributions. In the tasks, nondecision time (the time to encode a stimulus and make a response) increased with age, but the amount of evidence needed for a decision (boundary settings) increased in the number discrimination and number memory tasks, but not the number line task. The number discrimination task produced conflicting accuracy and response time results as a function of age, but the model-based analyses resolved these differences. In the number memory task, drift rates (evidence used to drive the decision process) were lower for the older adults than for young adults, but for the other two (easier) tasks, there was no change in drift rate with age. The analyses extracted differences among individuals in model components, some of which were systematic across tasks. In particular, drift rates were correlated across tasks, which shows consistent individual differences across tasks, results that could not have been obtained without model-based analyses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Speaking two or more languages shows bilingual flexibility, but flexible switching requires language control and often incurs performance costs. We examined inhibitory control assessing n-2 repetition costs when switching three languages (L1 [German], L2 [English], L3 [French]). These costs denote worse performance in n-2 repetitions (e.g., L2-L3-L2) than in n-2 nonrepetitions (e.g., L1-L3-L2), indicating persisting inhibition. In two experiments (n = 28 in Experiment 1; n = 44 in Experiment 2), n-2 repetition costs were observed, but only for L2. Looking into L2 trials specifically, we found n-2 repetition costs when switching back to L2 from the still weaker L3 but not when returning from the stronger L1, suggesting that L2 is a strong competitor for L3 (requiring L2 inhibition) but less so for L1. Finding n-2 repetition costs supports an inhibitory account of language control in general, but our study shows only partial evidence for the theoretically assumed more specific relation between language dominance and language inhibition (i.e., only for dominance relations with respect to L1 and L3 when switching back to L2). Taken together, the findings thus suggest the need for further refinement of the concept of language dominance and its relation to inhibition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Penn Electrophysiology of Encoding and Retrieval Study (PEERS) aimed to characterize the behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) correlates of memory encoding and retrieval in highly practiced individuals. Across five PEERS experiments, 300+ subjects contributed more than 7,000 memory testing sessions with recorded EEG data. Here we tell the story of PEERS: its genesis, evolution, major findings, and the lessons it taught us about taking a big scientific approach in studying memory and the human brain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

We investigated memory encoding and retrieval during a quasinaturalistic spatial-episodic memory task in which subjects delivered items to landmarks in a desktop virtual environment and later recalled the delivered items. Transition probabilities and latencies revealed the spatial and temporal organization of memory. As subjects gained experience with the town, their improved spatial knowledge led to more efficient navigation and increased spatial organization during recall. Subjects who exhibited stronger spatial organization exhibited weaker temporal organization. Scalp-recorded electroencephalographic signals revealed spectral correlates of successful encoding and retrieval. Increased theta power (T+) and decreased alpha/beta power (A-) accompanied successful encoding, with the addition of increased gamma (G+) accompanying successful retrieval. Logistic regression classifiers trained on spectral features reliably predicted mnemonic success in held-out sessions. Univariate and multivariate electroencephalographic analyses revealed a similar spectral T+A-G+ of successful memory. These findings extend behavioral and neural signatures of successful encoding and retrieval to a naturalistic task in which learning occurs within a spatiotemporal context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning traps arise when early experience leads to a false belief about the reward structure of the environment which, in turn, leads to avoidance of rewarding options. Previous work on the negative effects of such traps has focused on static learning environments. The current work examines an additional negative effect of learning traps in dynamic environments-blindness to change in the features that predict decision outcomes. In two experiments (N = 416), participants had to decide whether to approach members of two different categories, respectively associated with either gains or losses. Early in learning, a category rule involving two feature dimensions predicted category membership. Subsequently, there was a change in the feature composition of this rule. When outcome feedback was only provided when an item was approached, a substantial proportion of participants fell into the trap of using a simple one-dimensional rule to guide approach decisions. Most of these participants did not notice the subsequent rule change and never learned the new rule. Signaling the possibility of rule change (Experiment 2) had no effect on change blindness for those in the learning trap but did improve learning of the new rule for those who initially avoided the trap. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study examines the impact of neighborhood size (number of other two-character words sharing the same character at the same position) on Chinese lexical processing, along with its joint effects with variables such as character frequency, word frequency, and semantic transparency. Previous factorial experiments have yielded conflicting results that are difficult to reconcile with existing models (Li et al., 2015, 2017). To provide high-powered tests for these theoretically important effects on visual word recognition, we leveraged the megastudy approach and used linear mixed-effect analyses to investigate lexical decision and naming responses to a large pool of two-character Chinese words (N > 17,000) sourced from Tse et al.'s (2017, 2023) database. In all analyses we controlled for extraneous orthographic (e.g., stroke count), phonological (e.g., consistency), and semantic (e.g., transparency) variables. In addition to evaluating Li et al.'s (2015, 2017) models, we also investigated whether the parallel dual-route mechanism, which entails lexical access via whole-word or character decomposition-then-composition, could account for neighborhood size effect and its interactions in lexical decision and naming. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings on the specificity of lexical effects with regard to character position and lexical processing task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).