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

It has been repeatedly shown that individuals track speaker-specific language use during interaction. Most studies focused on how this facilitates meaning inference when interspeaker variation differentiates between two or more alternatives, or how it allows for successful lexical alignment. However, it has been unclear whether mapping interspeaker variation is stored actively, and if so, what purposes this storage serves. In a pseudointeractive experiment, we created interspeaker variation in naming preferences, such that one speaker (the common speaker) consistently produced favored words, and the other speaker consistently produced less-favored/disfavored words (the uncommon speaker), across two conditions-one where both speakers were relatively common, and one where one of the speakers was highly uncommon. Participants engaged in a picture selection task, at first as matchers (where they were instructed by one of the speakers-each in his/her turn-which image to choose), and then as directors (where they were the instructors). They were then tested on how well they mapped interspeaker variation and how they generalized it linguistically and socially. Participants were successful at directly mapping interspeaker variation in naming preferences. Furthermore, they used this information in (a) lexically aligning with their interlocutors, (b) hypothesizing about unexposed word choices by these speakers, and (c) creating social representations of the speakers as individuals. In line with surprisal-driven learning accounts, these effects were larger for a speaker that used highly uncommon words. Our results suggest that individuals store interspeaker variation explicitly, which in turn helps them to predict their interlocutors' future linguistic and social behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Many working memory (WM) paradigms involve recalling multiple items from the same memory set. Participants rarely repeat items they have already recalled, avoiding repetition errors. To prevent these errors, WM models incorporate a response suppression mechanism that removes recalled items from the set of response options. Despite its importance for our understanding of WM, response suppression has received limited direct testing. To address this gap, we used computational models implementing two hypothetical mechanisms of response suppression to derive predictions and tested these predictions experimentally. Participants were asked to recall the same items multiple times during a single trial. If already recalled items are removed from the response set to prevent repetition errors, memory performance should be impaired when the same item is tested again. Contrary to this, we found that memory performance was unimpaired when the same item was tested a second time, and even displayed a recall advantage. Therefore, this study demonstrates the implausibility of response suppression to account for how people avoid repetition errors. We discuss alternative explanations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Reports an error in "A grain of truth in the grain size effect: Retrieval practice is more effective when interspersed during learning" by Hilary J. Don, Shaun Boustani, Chunliang Yang and David R. Shanks (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2024[Nov], Vol 50[11], 1791-1810). In the article, the copyright attribution was incorrectly listed, and the Creative Commons CC BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "2024 The Author(s)," and the omitted disclaimer is present as: Open Access funding provided by University College London: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0; https://creativecommons .org/licenses/by/4.0). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format, as well as adapting the material for any purpose, even commercially. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2025-46535-001). Retrieval practice is a powerful method for consolidating long-term learning. When learning takes place over an extended period, how should tests be scheduled to obtain the maximal benefit? In an end-test schedule, all material is studied prior to a large practice test on all studied material, whereas in an interim test schedule, learning is divided into multiple study/test cycles in which each test is smaller and only assesses material from the preceding study block. Past investigations have generally found a difference between these schedules during practice but not during a final assessment, although they may have been underpowered. Five experiments confirmed that final assessment performance was better in students taught using interim than end tests in list (Experiments 1, 2, and 5) and paired associate (Experiments 3 and 4) learning, with a meta-analysis of all available studies (k = 19) yielding a small- to medium-sized effect, g = 0.25, 95% confidence interval [0.09, 0.42]. Experiment 5 finds that the higher level of practice retrieval success in interim tests contributes to the grain size effect, but the effect is eliminated if these tests are too easy. Additional analyses also suggest that the forward testing effect, in which tests promote subsequent learning, may be a major cause of the grain size effect. The practical and theoretical implications of these demonstrations of robust grain size effects are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Strong versions of the embodied account of language processing propose that comprehension depends on the mental simulation of sensorimotor experiences conveyed by linguistic meaning. Primary support in favor of this view is based on demonstrations of processing advantages for compatibility between an action implied by sentence content and concurrent sensorimotor processing. Although these effects have been reported across a variety of contexts, various attempts to reproduce these results, both through direct replication and conceptual extension, have not been successful. We present a series of experiments that examine the viability of previous methods used to obtain compatibility effects and the validity of the typical interpretation of such effects as evidence for mental simulation of described actions. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence that compatibility between sentence content and sensorimotor processing does not produce robust compatibility effects. Further, our findings suggest the data obtained from some studies that have been successful in generating compatibility effects can be accounted for without appealing to the notion that these effects are due to the simulation of actions implied by the meaning of a sentence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

One of my clearest memories from graduate school is a piece of advice offered by Dr. Janet McDonald, a wise and caring mentor who taught a rigorous first-year statistics course: "You really want to aim for the top-tier cognitive journals, like JEP: LMC." That was my first introduction to what it means to publish in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (JEP:LMC). Over the ensuing 2 decades or so, I had the chance to learn more about what makes the journal unique as a contributing author, a reviewer on the Consulting Editor board, and a guest action editor. Based on these experiences, I came to see JEP:LMC as a premiere outlet for studies that employ careful methodology, produce informative results, and articulate a clear theoretical framework for interpreting these results and relating them to other phenomena. As editor in chief, I will seek to maintain this high standard and build on the journal's strengths. This document describes the general approach that I plan to take as editor, and I hope to convey information that will be helpful for submitting authors, reviewers, and action editors. In general, I do not plan to make any sweeping changes. I am humbled by the accomplishments of my predecessor, Aaron Benjamin, and a long line of editors in chief before him. JEP: LMC has a consistent record of promoting the practices and values that support solid science, and my main focus will be to uphold this reputation and continue to make progress on research reforms. I see this editorship as a chance to play a small role in ushering in the future of cognitive psychology, a field that is currently in a transition period in terms of both methodological practices and theoretical perspective. I think JEP:LMC can play a leading role in this transition, and I hope to gently guide authors, reviewers, and editors in the direction of both more rigorous theorizing (ideally relying on formal models) and more sophisticated methodological practices that optimize the value of open science tools and modern approaches to statistical inference. I also hope to expand the pool of contributors by helping a diverse array of early-career scientists learn the keys to success in the journal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Prediction during language processing has been hypothesized to lead to processing benefits. These possible benefits have led to several prominent theories that center around prediction as an essential mechanism in language processing. Such theories typically assume predicting is better than not predicting at all, but do not always account for the potential processing costs from failed predictions. Predicting wrongly can be costly, but the cost may depend on how wrong the prediction was. Across three experiments, we manipulate cloze probability, semantic relatedness, and language modality (production vs. comprehension) to determine whether predicting almost correctly is better than predicting completely incorrectly, and if so, if predicting almost correctly is better than not predicting at all. Results showed that when a predicted ending is replaced with a related term, it is processed faster than when it is replaced with an unrelated term, but that related term is not named more quickly than when it appears after a low constraint sentence. This pattern held regardless of whether participants were asked to produce the sentence-final term by naming a picture (Experiments 1 and 2), or if they were asked to perform a semantic classification of the sentence-final word (Experiment 3). Thus, predicting almost correctly is better than predicting completely incorrectly, but it's not better than not predicting at all. This carries implications for current accounts that argue for processing benefits of prediction during language processing, and suggests that prediction may be used to fine-tune the language system rather than to speed language processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We examine whether information lying above and below a line of text being read can impact on reading fluency. We did so by placing length-matched flankers above and below each word in a sequence of words. We found that identical flankers facilitated sentence reading, compared with syntactically correct different text flankers, in both reading-for-meaning (Experiment 1) and grammatical decisions (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 replicated the same text facilitation in grammatical decisions and found no significant difference between different word and nonword distractors. Experiment 4 tested for an impact of case matching across targets and flankers and found a significantly greater same text facilitation when targets and flankers were in the same case. These results suggest that the same text facilitation effect might well be driven by crowding mechanisms that are more sensitive to vertically aligned information when reading horizontally aligned text. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual working memory (VWM) is a store for temporary maintenance of visual information. It is often disregarded, though, that information is typically stored to enable actions. Therefore, the context of these actions is of great importance for how VWM is used. Here, we questioned whether the severity of the consequence of an action might affect how well information is memorized, and how cautiously it is utilized. We employed an (online) copying task, in which participants reproduced an example display comprised of six items in a grid, using a pool of items. Crucially, we manipulated the severity of penalties: participants had to wait 5 (high) or 0.5 (low error cost) s after an error. Additionally, we manipulated the accessibility of task-relevant information (a well-studied manipulation in this paradigm): participants had to wait 5 (high) or 0.5 (low sampling cost) s to inspect the example. Our results show that with higher error cost the number of inspections remained comparable, but the number of errors decreased. Furthermore, they show that with higher sampling cost the number of inspections halved, and the number of errors increased. Thus, more severe action consequences increase the reluctance to act on uncertain information in VWM, but do not lead to more attempts to store information in VWM. We conclude that, in contrast to the effect of the accessibility of information, action consequences do not affect how well information is memorized, but affect how cautiously this stored information is utilized. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The mental time line (MTL) is a spatial continuum on which earlier events are generally associated with the left space and later events with the right space. Accordingly, past- and future-related words receive faster responses with, respectively, the left and the right hand. Yet, it is currently unclear whether the MTL is activated by the whole word or whether it can be triggered by more subtle sublexical cues, such as verb-endings, and whether the activation of this spatial continuum is an automatic phenomenon. The aim of this study is to test whether verb-endings do bring conceptual information that is in turn capable to activate the MTL and whether this activation holds also when the temporal information is not explicitly processed. We designed three experiments. In Experiment 1, consisting of a temporal categorization task, and in Experiment 2, consisting of a lexical decision task, we tested Italian tensed verbs (trov-avo "I found," trov-erò "I will find") and pseudo-verbs (trop-avo, trop-erò). Results of Experiment 1 showed that both tensed verbs and pseudo-verbs were spatially coded on the MTL. Results from Experiment 2 showed that the MTL is activated by the verb-endings also when temporal information was task-irrelevant (i.e., lexical decision task). Experiment 3 further clarified that the spatial-temporal congruency effect does not emerge during the evaluation of an inhomogeneous set of stimuli (i.e., when adding to the stimuli time-unrelated fillers). Overall, the present findings indicate that sublexical strings carry specific semantic information that comes into play in the generation of spatial-temporal associations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Visuospatial working memory (VSWM) helps track the identity and location of people during social interactions. Previous work showed better VSWM when all faces at encoding displayed a happy compared to an angry expression, reflecting a prosocial preference for monitoring who was where. However, social environments are not typically uniform, and certain expressions may more strongly compete for and bias face monitoring according to valence and/or arousal properties. Here, we used heterogeneous encoding displays in which two faces shared one emotion and two shared another, and asked participants to relocate a central neutral probe face after a blank delay. When considering the emotion of the probed face independently of the co-occurring emotion at encoding, an overall happy benefit was replicated. However, accuracy was modulated by the nonprobed emotion, with a relocation benefit for angry over sad, happy over fearful, and sad over happy faces. These effects did not depend on encoding fixation time, stimulus arousal, perceptual similarity, or response bias. Thus, emotional competition for faces in VSWM is complex and appears to rely on more than simple arousal- or valence-biased mechanisms. We propose a "social value (SV)" account to better explain when and why certain emotions may be prioritized in VSWM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).