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

The notion of a response criterion is ubiquitous in psychology, yet its cognitive and neural underpinnings remain poorly understood. Two experiments and extensive computational modeling were used to test between two strikingly different interpretations of the criterion. The traditional account is that decisions are made by comparing the stimulus value to a stored value of the criterion. A conceptually different interpretation is that learning instead is a process of associating responses with stimuli and that the criterion is simply the hypothetical value that separates stimuli associated with contrasting responses. The experiments and modeling tested between these two interpretations by contrasting the effects on criterial learning of feedback delays versus increases in the duration of the intertrial interval in a one-dimensional category-learning task. The empirical results strongly suggested that human criterial learning is sensitive to feedback delay but not to the duration of the intertrial interval. The computational modeling showed that these results are compatible with a stimulus-response learning account, and incompatible with all versions of the stored-criterion account, except for the subset of these models that explicitly assume the criterial updating process is sensitive to feedback delay. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding how people make decisions across various contexts is at the core of theoretical and applied work in behavioral decision research. In this study, we investigate how process tracing contributes to the understanding of common and distinct processes underlying risky and intertemporal choices in three eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 elicited behavioral patterns that were interpreted as supporting a common mechanism (i.e., the common ratio effect in risky choice and the common difference effect in intertemporal choice). In contrast, Experiment 2 elicited behavioral patterns that challenge this unified perspective (i.e., the peanuts effect in risky choice and the magnitude effect in intertemporal choice). Experiment 3 elicited both sets of behavioral anomalies and varied the display format of choice options, testing the generalizability and variability of information search patterns across different contexts. The results suggest that people not only exhibit distinct behavioral anomalies but also engage in different information search patterns in risky versus intertemporal choice. Furthermore, information search patterns, as well as the between-task differences thereof, appeared to be sensitive to stimulus designs and display formats. In so doing, we provide a process-level framework to test the common and distinct cognitive processes underlying different choice tasks across different decision contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The long tradition of studies on phonological working memory (pWM) in speakers of various languages has indicated that pWM is limited and susceptible to the effects of word length, lexicality, serial position, and phonological markedness. In the present study, we examine these aspects of the pWM in a different modality: sign language. We developed a test battery for the assessment of pWM in Israeli Sign Language, including four serial recall tasks (simple lexical signs with short and long path movement, pseudosigns, and compound signs), and administered it to 37 adult native signers of Israeli Sign Language. We found that sign language users exhibit effects on pWM that are similar to those reported for spoken languages, including lexicality, phonological markedness, and serial position. The effect of sign length was found to be determined by the number of syllables, but not by temporal duration, number of sequential segments, or length of path movement. Phonological substitution errors in pseudosigns mainly involved the handshape parameter; more errors occurred in marked than in unmarked handshapes, and more perseverations than anticipations. Number of hands involved in the sign did not affect spans. Our findings show that the general properties of pWM are shared by signers and speakers, pointing to modality-free pWM mechanisms, and also reveal some modality-related differences. These similarities in pWM mechanisms suggest that phonological information is processed similarly regardless of its nature (auditory-verbal or visuo-spatial). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention and working memory are thought to be closely linked, with the assumption that attended information can be remembered and reported within the time window of working memory. However, the phenomenon of attribute amnesia challenges this view by showing that participants fail to report a specific attended information (termed as the key feature), even though they had just used it for a task. Such observation raises questions about whether the report failure of key feature reflects a lack of working memory encoding for attended information. While previous studies have yielded contradictory results on this issue, the present study aimed to reconcile these seemingly conflicting findings by identifying future relevance as a critical factor driving the memory encoding of attended key features. The current results showed that when the key feature became irrelevant after being attended, it was not automatically encoded into working memory; however, when the key feature might become useful in future tasks, it was intentionally encoded into working memory. Overall, we concluded that the attended information could not automatically enter into working memory but would be actively encoded into working memory when expected to be useful in the future, supporting that working memory encoding is adaptive to future relevance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Remembering the temporal dynamics of past experiences helps people plan for the future. Previous studies using discrete pictorial stimuli showed that people are better at remembering the temporal order of items occurring within the same perceptual context than items spanning across a contextual boundary, suggesting that event segmentation can structure temporal order memory by resetting item-level binding mechanisms. However, in meaningful everyday scenarios, other mechanisms may play equal or greater roles: Two potentially powerful candidates are hierarchical event structure and knowledge about typical temporal order. In a pair of experiments testing order memory with both short (2.5-min) and longer (20-min) delays, we presented narratives that described everyday activities with semantic constraints on order for fine-grained actions or for coarse-grained activity units. Constraints on either level improved order memory, at both delays. In some cases, this reversed the typical finding that temporal order memory within events is better than across events. An additional experiment revealed that serial recall was chunked based on coarse-level event membership and that semantic order constraints helped organize recall order. A final experiment showed that even in the absence of semantic constraints on coarse-grained activity, participants could use episodic memory for coarse-grained order to constrain memory for fine-grained order, given accurate source memory. Collectively, these results provide evidence for important roles played by hierarchical event structure and prior knowledge in scaffolding reconstructive memory, indicating that reconstruction processes use multiple sources of information in addition to simple episodic associations between fine-grained units. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Filtering is a cognitive mechanism that regulates how information is encoded into working memory. It minimizes the retention of irrelevant information while facilitating the maintenance of task-relevant information. While prior studies have examined the filtering of task-irrelevant distractors, it remains unclear whether information that needs to be briefly processed-but not maintained-can be partially filtered out. To address this, we developed a novel complex-span task involving three conditions: a pre-cue condition, where stimuli are identified as memory items or distractors before they are processed, thus allowing for filtering; a retro-cue condition, where this information is given only after processing, preventing filtering; and a control condition without distractors. Across three experiments, memory performance in the pre-cue condition was comparable to the retro-cue condition but worse than the control condition. In addition, using the memory measurement model (Oberauer & Lewandowsky, 2019), we estimated the memory strength of distractors and found the same strength of distractors retained in working memory in both pre- and retro-cue conditions. These findings suggest that information requiring processing cannot be selectively filtered out during encoding into working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Past research has shown great similarity in the patterns with which information appears in different natural environments. Most memory experiments present information in very different patterns than these natural patterns. Experiment 1 used a continuous recognition design in which subjects saw words in an order that mirrored the order in which items appeared in one data source, tweets from highly followed tweeters. The fluency with which they could recognize these words (measured as inverse efficiency) had high rank-order correlation with the environmental probability that they would occur again. The inverse efficiencies can be predicted by the reciprocal square-root law, derived as the optimal mapping between probability in the environment and speed of memory access. A generalized prediction algorithm is developed for predicting the results of any continuous recognition experiment from environmental probabilities. Experiment 2 tests predictions of this algorithm for three orders of presentation: natural as used in Experiment 1, random, and spaced wherein items occur with equal spacing and frequency. As a further test, the generalized prediction algorithm is applied to the results from another continuous recognition paradigm (Bright et al., 2022). The article discusses the challenges that must be addressed to enable environmental analyses to predict memory performance more generally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

We tested two competing hypotheses about the nature of multifeatured object representations in visual working memory. One is that all object features are integrated into an object file. The other is that locations are critical for maintaining the bindings of visual features of an object. We developed an experimental paradigm that bridges the visual working memory and object-file literatures. Several multifeatured objects were presented simultaneously, followed by a retention interval in which placeholders either moved or not. Participants were then given one feature of a randomly chosen object as a cue and prompted to report the other two features of the same object. Applying multinomial process tree models to evaluate the competing accounts of how multifeatured objects are represented in memory, we found evidence supporting the object-file theory and challenging the location-binding hypothesis. We conclude that bindings of features within the object can be maintained after motion. Furthermore, pairwise bindings between color and shape are robust against motion, implying that location is not essential for visual feature bindings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Strategic monitoring is the heightening of monitoring in relevant contexts where prospective memory (PM) targets are expected and the relaxation of monitoring in irrelevant contexts. There is ample evidence for strategic monitoring, but most studies instructed participants about relevant contexts (e.g., PM targets will appear in words but not in nonwords). In Experiments 1 and 2, we examined whether strategic monitoring emerges without such instructions when participants must learn that words are the PM-relevant context. Participants monitored more in words than in nonwords, demonstrating experience-guided strategic monitoring. However, this pattern emerged even before the first PM target, suggesting a word-monitoring bias. In Experiment 3, the PM-relevant context was shifted to nonwords so that evidence for experience-guided strategic monitoring could not be attributed to a word-monitoring bias. Participants monitored equally in words and nonwords. Collectively, Experiments 1-3 revealed no clear evidence of experience-guided strategic monitoring independent of a word-monitoring bias. Experiment 4 was identical to Experiment 3 except that participants were directly instructed that PM targets would occur in nonwords. There was only short-lived evidence of instructed strategic monitoring. Our findings cast doubt on the possibility that strategic monitoring can arise through experience (i.e., via the learning of associations between contextual cues and PM relevance), suggesting that strategic monitoring may require instructions. Additionally, we found a previously undocumented word-monitoring bias. Understanding this bias is important for instructed and experience-guided paradigms, as it can mimic strategic monitoring when words are the relevant context or obscure evidence of strategic monitoring when nonwords are the relevant context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Speakers sometimes produce lexical errors, such as saying "salt" instead of "pepper." This study aimed to better understand the origin of lexical errors by assessing whether they arise from a hasty selection and premature decision to speak (premature selection hypothesis) or from momentary attentional disengagement from the task (attentional lapse hypothesis). We analyzed data from a speeded picture naming task (Lampe et al., 2023) and investigated whether lexical errors are produced as fast as target (i.e., correct) responses, thus arising from premature selection, or whether they are produced more slowly than target responses, thus arising from lapses of attention. Using ex-Gaussian analyses, we found that lexical errors were slower than targets in the tail, but not in the normal part of the response time distribution, with the tail effect primarily resulting from errors that were not coordinates, that is, members of the target's semantic category. Moreover, we compared the coordinate errors and target responses in terms of their word-intrinsic properties and found that they were overall more frequent, shorter, and acquired earlier than targets. Given the present findings, we conclude that coordinate errors occur due to a premature selection but in the context of intact attentional control, following the same lexical constraints as targets, while other errors, given the variability in their nature, may vary in their origin, with one potential source being lapses of attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).