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

Efficient environmental search is an important and adaptive everyday skill. A particular feature of theoretical interest is whether large-scale search is informed by the spatial statistics of the environment-probability cueing is a robust effect in two-dimensional visual search tasks, but studies of large-scale search have generated equivocal findings. Here, we examined whether sensitivity to a statistical cue specified within an allocentric reference frame is modulated by the presence and location of environmental landmarks. Participants explored fully immersive virtual environments, wherein they were presented with an array of locations (columns) and required to search them for a hidden target (i.e., the column that changed color upon activation). A target was present on each trial, appearing within the cued hemispace on 80% of trials. In Experiment 1, the array was surrounded by a featureless circular wall, and participants exhibited no reliable cueing effects. Experiments 2 and 3 introduced a stable landmark into the environment and manipulated its location to be either orthogonal or adjacent to the cued hemispace. Participants reliably biased their search in response to the probability cue, although learning was only observed when the landmark was positioned along the axis orthogonal to the midline separating hemispaces. These findings suggest that adapting search behavior in response to a statistical cue is facilitated by the presence of a stable landmark when it is specified independently of the searcher's viewpoint, although this is dependent upon the spatial relationship between the landmark and the distribution itself. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Efficient written word recognition is crucial for effective reading and comprehension. However, whether deaf people recognize written words through the same psychological mechanisms as those of hearing individuals remains controversial. The present study utilized mouse-tracking technology to examine the differences in the transposed-character effect and the substituted-character effect during the recognition of four-character Chinese words between prelingually deaf adults (PDAs) and their hearing counterparts. The PDAs were found to experience greater difficulties in recognizing Chinese written pseudowords although both groups exhibited significant transposed-character effects with lower accuracies, longer response times, and larger areas under the curve in transposed-character pseudoword conditions. Furthermore, the PDAs demonstrated more pronounced substituted-character effects in the substituted-character pseudoword conditions compared with hearing people. These results revealed that Chinese written word recognition of the hearing participants followed the multiple-route model derived from alphabetic languages, while PDAs tend to rely more on whole-word and orthographic processing due to their limited access to phonological information. This study can provide theoretical guidance and potential targeted intervention measures for enhancing the reading abilities of deaf individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Successful goal-directed behavior requires not only selecting the correct response to an object in our environment but also requires selecting the correct object in our environment upon which to act. While most task-switching studies investigate the selection and maintenance of mental representations of response options (so-called response sets), they often do not investigate the selection and maintenance of mental representations of object selection (so-called stimulus sets). In the present study, participants were exposed to a taskswitching paradigm with multiple stimuli in which the relevant stimulus set (i.e., which object to respond to) and response set (i.e., how to respond to that object) independently either repeated or switched on each trial. Of interest was the nature of the task set representation required, and whether response set and stimulus set could be updated independently. Guided by predictions from a computational model of dual-task control (executive control of the theory of visual attention; Logan & Gordon, 2001), seven experiments were conducted that evaluated the independence of task-set components. All experiments confirmed executive control of the theory of visual attention's predictions of an underadditive interaction between response-set and stimulus-set sequence-diagnostic of independent and parallel reconfiguration of components. However, limitations to this independent updating were observed when participants were encouraged to selectively prioritize response-set or stimulus-set reconfiguration via component-specific preparation manipulations. The results are discussed in terms of various hypotheses on the structure of task-set representation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In this study, we investigated human causal learning in a continuous time and space setting. We find participants to be capable active causal structure learners, and with the help of computational modeling explore how they mitigate the complexity of continuous dynamics data to achieve this. We propose that participants combine systematic interventions with a narrowed focus on causal dynamics that occur during and directly downstream of their interventions. This task decomposition approach achieves comparable accuracy to attending to all the dynamics, while discarding almost half of the data. We argue this strategy makes sense from a resource rationality perspective: Ignoring dynamics outside of interventions saves computational cost while the interventions naturally decompose the global learning problem into a series of more manageable subproblems. We also find that when the causal relata are given real-world labels, participants will use their domain-specific priors to guide their structure inferences. In particular, individuals with accurate prior expectations were less likely to make the common local computations error of mistaking an indirect for a direct relationship. Overall, our experiments reinforce the idea that humans are frugal and intuitive active learners who combine actions and inference to optimize learning while minimizing effort. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

If some list items are studied strongly and others weakly, many memory models predict the effect of strength on memory will be larger when strengths are mixed within a list than between pure lists of a single strength: a list-strength effect. In explaining why list-strength effects were elusive in old/new recognition, Shiffrin et al. (1990) introduced differentiation. This gave the model a way to produce an inverted list-strength effect, which they thought was usually offset by the coexisting expected "upright" list-strength effect. Alternatively, attentional subsetting theory (Caplan, 2023; Caplan & Guitard, 2024b) predicted inverted list-strength effects in some circumstances by considering how the dimensionalities of attended feature spaces might differ for strong and weak items. Inversions were indeed found in manipulations of stimulus duration (e.g., 500 ms vs. 2,000 ms study time/word). Here we replicated the pattern when display time was equated (Experiment 1) and with massed repetition (Experiment 2), ruling out the relevance of vision-locked features and the number of stimulus onsets. Both theoretical accounts of inverted list-strength effects, however, miss the fine structure of the data, namely, reduced hit rates for weak items in pure than mixed lists and the reverse effect (albeit less robust) for strong items. Model fits suggested the critical factor is that list composition parametrically influences the number of deep features processed at test combined with participants' response bias adapting to list composition. In sum, inverted list-strength effects are robustly found in manipulations of item study time and point to differential processing of probe features depending on list composition, compatible with most models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

There is empirical evidence that people have some intuitive discomfort when they judge that a believable, but invalid response is logically valid. This has led to the hypothesis that there exists a form of "logical intuition" that is responsive to logical form. However, there is also clear evidence that when reasoning with identical forms of inference, responses are not uniform but are instead modulated by access to semantic information related to potential alternatives. In two preregistered studies, we examine the hypothesis that differential access to such information determines the extent to which intuitions signal discomfort. To examine this, we constructed syllogisms using the same logical form but having either few or many alternatives associated with the premises. In Study 1, we show that when accepting a believable conclusion as being valid, confidence was lower for syllogisms having many alternatives. In Study 2, we show that people "like" conclusions based on logically invalid syllogisms having few alternatives more than those based on syllogisms having many alternatives. These results provide clear evidence for a form of "logical intuition" that relies on access to semantic information rather than pure logical form. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

There is now robust evidence of priming effects during sentence processing for adjacent words that form collocations (statistically associated combinations). However, there is very limited evidence regarding how nonadjacent collocations might facilitate processing. Furthermore, no previous research has examined how nonadjacent collocations interplay with other (non)collocational material in the surrounding context. We employed "nested" collocations for the first time, in which more than one contextual element (verb, adjective) is a potential collocate for a noun. For example, in a verb-adjective-noun (V-A-N) phrase, two collocations may be "nested" ("express concerns" + "valid concerns" = "express valid concerns") or only the verb (nonadjacent) or adjective (adjacent) might be collocational. In an eye-tracking experiment with L1 English speakers, we manipulated the collocational status of adjectives adjacent to the noun, (V)-A-N, and verbs nonadjacent to the noun, V-(A)-N. Our results replicated the basic adjacent effect and produced evidence of facilitation for nonadjacent collocations. Additionally, we find preliminary evidence for a syntactic primacy effect, whereby collocational links involving the verb prove more impactful than adjective-noun collocations, despite nonadjacency. Importantly, the results reveal cumulative facilitation in "nested collocations," with a boost resulting from the simultaneous effects observed in adjacent and nonadjacent collocations. Altogether, the results extend our understanding of collocational priming effects beyond single collocations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In conflict tasks, congruency effects are thought to reflect attentional control mechanisms needed to counteract response conflict elicited by incongruent stimuli. Although congruency effects are well-replicable experimentally, recent studies have evidenced low correlations between congruency effects measured across different paradigms, leading to a heated debate over whether these low correlations indicate a lack of construct validity or are rather attributable to high measurement error, as indicated by the poor reliability typically displayed by congruency effects. In the present study, we investigated whether the poor reliabilities of congruency effects are due to their poor theoretical specification. Specifically, we tested whether the psychometric properties of congruency effects can be improved by focusing exclusively on those trials in which response conflict is theoretically expected to be highest. We considered two factors modulating the degree of response conflict: previous trial congruency, with higher conflict following congruent trials, and the time elapsed since stimulus onset, with higher conflict in fast responses. Data from 195 participants completing a Simon and a spatial Stroop paradigm showed that generally poor split-half reliabilities for the full set of trials improved greatly when excluding postincongruent and slow trials. Importantly, between-task correlations also increased substantially when controlling for these factors, suggesting that, with increased reliability, these tasks capture common attentional control ability. Our results suggest that individual differences in conflict tasks can provide valid and reliable measures of inhibition as a major component of attentional control when focusing on the trials with the theoretically highest response conflict. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The allocation of attention during reading has long been a central focus of research. A key question concerns the extent to which lexical processing is influenced solely by the difficulty of currently fixated words, as proposed by the serial attention hypothesis, or whether it is also influenced by the difficulty of upcoming words (i.e., parafoveal-on-foveal effects [PoF effects]), as proposed by the attention gradient hypothesis. The present study provides oculomotor and neural evidence for how mislocated fixation can influence PoF effects in Chinese reading. We manipulated preview words following the target words (repeated vs. original) and categorized the two-character target words into two fixation position groups (Character 1: no fixation error group vs. Character 2: potential mislocated fixations group). Experiment 1 used an eye-tracking technique, and Experiment 2 coregistered electroencephalogram and eye tracking with a larger character size to validate the findings. Overall, the results indicated that inhibitory repeated PoF effects were observed only at Character 2, as evidenced by fixation durations and fixation-related potentials. These findings provide novel eye-movement and neural evidence suggesting that inhibitory repeated PoF effects may, at least in part, be related to mislocated fixations caused by fixations on posttarget words that are mistakenly recorded as being at the end of target words due to measurement (or saccade) errors, while attention remains focused on repeated preview. Taken together, these findings suggest that the mislocated fixation account, situated within the serial attention hypothesis, provides a viable explanation for interpreting the PoF effect without requiring parallel processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Regressive eye movements are commonly observed in response to syntactic ambiguities, yet their characteristics and role in ambiguity resolution remain unclear. This study examined two key questions about rereading in Chinese garden-path sentences: (1) whether rereading is selective, meaning that readers allocate more or longer fixations to specific regions following garden-path disambiguation and (2) whether rereading facilitates comprehension by aiding the recovery of the globally correct interpretation. We therefore conducted an eye-tracking experiment on sentences featuring a naturally occurring syntactic ambiguity (NP1 + VP + NP2 + de + NP3). The results provide clear evidence of selective rereading, as readers refixated the ambiguous region after encountering processing difficulty. However, these refixations did not aid ambiguity resolution, suggesting that while regressions reflect sensitivity to processing disruptions, they do not always contribute to successful reinterpretation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).