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

Previous research has shown that high math anxiety (HMA) detrimentally impacts math performance; however, limited work has examined how math anxiety may impact math learning. The present study drew on our understanding of disparate long-term learning and memory systems to provide a framework for how HMA potentially disrupts specific types of math learning. Adult participants completed unfamiliar multiplication trials (e.g., 219 × 4 = ?) in two sessions across consecutive days. Repeated problems enabled retrieval arithmetic learning by repeating the same four problems a total of 72 times each (288 total trials). Unrepeated problems enabled procedural arithmetic learning by repeating a consistent problem structure but without ever repeating a specific problem (288 total trials). HMA subjects (HMAs) showed impaired learning of unrepeated problems suggesting that math anxiety may have disrupted procedural math learning. Conversely, learning of repeated problems was accelerated in HMAs relative to low math anxious subjects, suggesting enhanced retrieval learning. We interpret these results within the context of effort-avoidance and well-established learning and memory systems, suggesting that HMAs enhance effort on declarative memory-mediated retrieval learning possibly at the expense of efficiency gains in procedural memory-mediated learning of computational procedures. This work also suggests that the mechanisms linking math anxiety with math performance may differ in important ways from how math anxiety impacts math learning. Further, this work highlights the potential value of considering how math anxiety interacts with multiple types of math learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Interlocutors in conversation coordinate to achieve very short transitions between acoustic turns. The mechanisms supporting this coordination remain an area of active investigation. A large body of work has considered the cues that might clue next speakers (i.e., interlocutors awaiting their upcoming turn in conversation) that the floor is about to be yielded. Less attention has been given to the cues that next speakers might emit when preparing to take the floor. Most work that has considered cues from next speakers has emphasized manual gestures and nonspeech facial movements, and it has seldom examined the effects of these cues on onlookers. The present study proceeded from the insight that kinematic speech articulation necessarily precedes the onset of phonation, at the beginning of a new turn. Across four web-based experiments (total N = 171), participants viewed the beginnings of speech turns drawn from an audiovisual database of natural two-way conversations. In all experiments, participants were tasked with timing keypresses to coincide with audible speech onset. Visibility of facial movements (including lip movements) was manipulated. Experiment 1 compared clips with digitally obscured and unobscured faces. Experiments 2-4 compared clips that did or did not include isolated visualizations of lip movements. Experiment 3 varied the presence of speech audio, and Experiment 4 manipulated whether initial lip position was informative to the target utterance. Overall, findings suggest that visible lip motion facilitates detecting acoustic speech onset, especially if that motion is directly relevant to the speaker's phonetic goals. Implications for conversational turn-taking are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The three-factor model of executive functions is widely employed in cognitive control research. However, recent studies have revealed psychometric problems with commonly used difference scores in behavioral measures of executive functions. Examining behavioral scores, several studies were unable to find a coherent factor structure for executive functions or identify significant individual differences in specific executive function abilities. These findings have raised questions about the utility of established measurement scores for executive functions. Our study sought to reassess the three-factor model proposed by Miyake et al. (2000), employing event-related potentials from electroencephalography as a means to directly probe underlying cognitive processes, leveraging the electroencephalography's high temporal resolution. We conducted an analysis of the factor structure of the three executive functions (updating, shifting, and inhibition) in a sample of 148 participants. We employed Bayesian structural equation models to examine the relationships between the mean amplitudes of the N2 and P3 components, obtained from a battery of nine executive function tasks. Our results indicate that amplitudes of the event-related potential components measured in executive function tasks almost exclusively represent variance related to general processes rather than executive function-specific variance. Notably, no task demonstrated variance uniquely attributable to individual differences in executive function processes added through experimental manipulations. These results cast doubt on the validity of current executive function tasks in accurately reflecting individual differences in these processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We present four experiments that examine perception and memory for a novel set of auditory stimuli, using multidimensional scaling and cognitive modeling to clarify how people perceive and recognize these items. The stimuli are auditory "textures" constructed by adjusting the distribution of power across upper frequency bands. In Experiment 1, people rated similarity between pairs of stimuli; in Experiments 2 and 3, they also engaged in a recognition memory task using the same stimuli. In Experiment 4, they did all the same tasks from the first three experiments and rated stimuli for distinctiveness. Multidimensional scaling suggested the stimuli were perceived along three dimensions, a result which replicated across all four experiments. While recognition performance was affected by similarity, serial position, and list homogeneity, it was not related to distinctiveness ratings. These effects were accommodated by the exemplar-based random walk model (Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997), extending prior work (Visscher et al., 2007) to show that recognition memory and similarity perception for static stimuli in the auditory domain are fundamentally like those for static stimuli in the visual domain-though particularly strong recency effects in the auditory domain suggest the influence of an additional sensory representation like echoic memory. We conclude by discussing how the stimuli introduced in this article can be used as "building blocks" to test hypotheses about perception and memory for complex, naturalistic sounds such as speech or music while retaining tight experimental control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Four experiments investigated the importance of metric relationships in the representation of order in memory. We used a cued recognition procedure in which a cued letter in a probe array is matched to a memory list. The spacing between the letters in the memory list and the probe array was either the same or different. Theories of serial memory in which order is based on the ordinal relationships predict that cued recognition performance would remain the same over changes in spacing. Theories of serial memory in which order is based on metric relationships predict that performance would decline when spacing changed. In all four experiments, we found memory performance was the same regardless of the spacing of the arrays. We compared memory performance to perceptual matching performance, displaying the probe and the "memory list" simultaneously. Perceptual comparisons were strongly influenced by changing the spacing. Performance was worse when the spacing differed. We conclude that order in perception is based on metric relationships but order in memory is not. These results support ordinal theories of serial memory. Even if metric relationships are stored in memory, they do not appear to be necessary for item selection and retrieval. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Theorizing in psychology about latent processes often relies on inferences drawn from empirical interactions. Dual-process models of recognition memory are popular in part because of the straightforward explanations they provide for such empirical interactions, including those between memory for items and memory for contexts in which they occur. Attention is one variable that reveals such a dissociation: When attention is divided at encoding, memory for context appears to be more severely impaired than item memory. However, empirical dissociations, even double dissociations, can be found even when only one latent process underlies performance. State-trace analysis offers an alternative means of assessing the number of latent variables underlying recognition memory. Unlike the dissociation approach, it has the desirable characteristic of treating the dependent variables as having ordinal, not interval, measurement characteristics. In three experiments, memory for items and context was measured under full and divided attention across four levels of study time. Across all three experiments, state-trace analyses revealed that a single, common latent variable underlies performance in all conditions and so indicates the sufficiency of a single memory process in explaining the underlying dissociations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Mnemonic discrimination of visual objects entails differentiating among repetitions of target objects, unstudied foil objects, and, critically, lure objects that are similar, but not identical to, studied objects (e.g., a different coffee mug than what was studied). Correctly rejecting lures may involve hippocampal pattern separation, a process that orthogonalizes representations of similar experiences. However, lures can also be rejected when recollection of studied objects enables detection of changed lure features. The present study examined whether verbal justifications of recognition decisions in an object-based mnemonic discrimination task could reveal recollection rejection as the primary basis for lure rejections. Across multiple study-test trials, participants studied everyday objects and, at test, attempted to classify similar lures, studied targets, and novel foils. Participants sometimes verbally justified their decisions. Machine learning classifiers showed that verbal justifications discriminated among different classifications given to the same item types for both in- and out-of-sample data. Lure rejection language often expressed the use of recollection of studied objects to detect changes in perceived objects (viz., recollection-rejection strategy). Verbal justifications also discriminated correct from incorrect responses better than numeric confidence, which could not be explained by a model assuming a one-dimensional memory strength signal. Finally, verbal justifications best predicted accurate recognition decisions for all item types at the highest level of subjective confidence, which further implicated the use of recollection. The present findings verify that lure rejections in mnemonic discrimination tasks do not only reflect hippocampal pattern separation but also suggest that rejections reflect recollection of studied targets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Prosody plays a fundamental role in both speech and music. In spoken language, word-level local prosodic cues, such as segment duration, contribute to word recognition. This study investigated whether individual differences in musical abilities are associated with the utilization of prosodic cues during spoken word recognition, both in speech-in-quiet and speech-on-speech conditions (i.e., in the presence of competing talkers). Using the visual world paradigm, we measured listeners' gaze fixations and pupil dilations toward images depicting a referent (e.g., hamster) and a competitor word (e.g., ham), while they simultaneously listened to utterances containing the referent word, whose segment duration either matched or mismatched the referent, with the mismatched duration signaling the competitor word. Participants with varying musical backgrounds completed tasks assessing rhythmic and melodic abilities, and a questionnaire evaluating overall musical sophistication. Our results revealed that listeners with higher scores across the three measures exhibited greater sensitivity to durational cues, as indicated by increased fixations to the competitor and greater pupil dilation when the durational cue mismatched the referent word, both in speech-in-quiet and speech-on-speech. These findings highlight that individual differences in musical abilities are associated with the use of prosodic cues during spoken word recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Linguistic focus triggers the activation of contrastive alternatives to the expression in focus (Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010). Priming studies, which did not manipulate the discourse context of sentences containing foci, have suggested a two-stage model of how alternatives are considered in real-time comprehension: First, semantic associates are activated as in normal word recognition, and then, alternatives that contrast appropriately with a focus are selected from among them (Husband & Ferreira, 2015). Reading, memory, and visual world studies, however, have shown that comprehenders also utilize discourse information and world knowledge to identify alternatives (Fraundorf et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2015; Sedivy, 2002). This article considers two extensions of Husband and Ferreira's (2015) model that take discourse information into account: one in which discourse information is only used at a late stage to select appropriate alternatives after semantic associates are primed and one in which discourse information may itself be used to activate alternatives during earlier processing stages. Under the first, purely selection-based model, any effect of the discourse (in)appropriateness of alternatives should not be contemporaneous with effects of semantic association, because discourse information should be used only in the selection process, after an initial candidate set has been activated. Three incremental comprehension studies using the Maze task do not support these predictions. The results indicated contemporaneous effects of discourse information and semantic association on comprehension of potential alternatives, pointing instead to a model with effects of discourse at an early stage of activation. Comprehenders access discourse information to differentiate among potential alternatives, whose activation does not depend exclusively on semantic associate priming. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study investigated the effect of working memory ability on strategic offloading behavior as well as the subsequent recall of valuable information when the external store becomes surprisingly unavailable. Participants completed a battery of working memory tasks followed by a value-directed remembering task wherein they studied lists of words paired with point values counting toward their score if recalled and were allowed to offload some of the words. On the first four lists, offloaded words were accessible during the test. However, on the fifth list, the offloaded words were not available on the test, and this was a surprise to some of the participants. Participants were then given a sixth list wherein they were told that the offloaded words may or may not be available on the test (the offloaded words were not available). Results revealed that individuals with high working memory were more strategic in their offloading decisions, preferring to offload the highest valued items. However, when the offloaded words were surprisingly unavailable, participants with high working memory ability showed poorer, even negative memory selectivity relative to individuals with low working memory (i.e., they were unable to recall those high-value words that they offloaded). Thus, the cost of offloading might be more dangerous to individuals with high working memory ability, and the present study illustrated a paradox whereby having a high working memory ability and being more strategic can become detrimental. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).