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

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) 2026 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) 2026 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) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Bilinguals simultaneously activate both languages during comprehension and production, requiring cognitive control to manage cross-language interference. Language-switching naming tasks using pictures or digits are traditionally employed to study this control. However, comparisons of these stimuli are scarce, raising critical questions about whether they engage similar cognitive processes. Importantly, assuming their equivalency risks overlooking key aspects of bilingual language control mechanisms. To investigate this, 192 native Chinese speakers learned Turkish words under seven conditions designed to manipulate semantic and associative relationships: unrelated pictures, semantically and associatively related pictures, as well as digits and magnitudes presented either sequentially or randomly. After learning the words to criterion accuracy, participants completed a language-switching picture-naming task. Results revealed larger switching costs for digits than unrelated pictures, an effect absent for magnitudes or other picture types. These findings suggest that digit naming may bypass semantic processing pathways, diverging from the top-down processes typically engaged in picture and magnitude naming. This divergence highlights key differences in cognitive processing and emphasizes the need for caution when comparing stimuli in language control research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study investigates whether voluntary saccades or fixations on an item ensure its visual working memory consolidation through three experiments, which used modified attribute amnesia paradigms. In each trial, all the items were first masked, and participants needed to gaze at the masked locations to temporarily unmask the items below. They were asked to search for the target and report its location in presurprise trials and then were unexpectedly asked to report its identity in a surprise trial and two control trials. In Experiments 3 and 4, the participants were further asked to retain information for a brief while before reporting colors or identities. Report accuracy in the surprise trial was significantly lower than in control trials across four experiments, indicating that an attribute amnesia phenomenon was found. All these results demonstrate that neither voluntary saccades toward an item nor fixations on it are a sufficient condition of automatic visual working memory consolidation of it, indicating the separation between the mechanisms of foveal attention and visual working memory consolidation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Numerous episodic memory research studies have shown that young adults use self-initiated intentional strategies to encode verbal stimuli and that self-initiated intentional encoding strategy use plays a significant role in memory performance. However, the types, frequency, and effectiveness of self-initiated intentional memory retrieval strategies that young adults use during free recall of verbal stimuli from episodic memory have not been systematically investigated. The goals of this study were to (a) systematically examine the types and frequency of self-initiated intentional memory retrieval strategies that young adults use to recall individually presented unrelated words and to (b) investigate whether use of self-initiated intentional memory retrieval strategies during free recall could benefit memory for individually presented unrelated words in addition to use of self-initiated intentional memory strategies during encoding. Young adults intentionally encoded individually presented unrelated words, completed a free recall memory assessment, and made retrospective open-ended and frequency rating scale encoding and retrieval strategy reports. Several types of self-initiated intentional memory retrieval strategies were reported. Ninety-seven and one hundred percent of participants reported using at least one self-initiated systematic intentional memory retrieval strategy in their open-ended and frequency rating scale strategy reports, respectively. Participants reported using individual self-initiated intentional memory retrieval strategies to try to recall 10%-59% of words on average. Self-reported use of concept imagery and sentence generation retrieval strategies predicted free recall when controlling for self-reported use of concept imagery and sentence generation encoding strategies, suggesting that use of self-initiated intentional memory retrieval strategies could benefit verbal episodic memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Adaptive control refers to flexible adjustments in control settings in response to conflicting situations. There has been a long-standing debate as to whether this adaptation relies on a domain-general or domain-specific process. Recent models predict a U-shaped relation where only highly similar or highly dissimilar tasks show adaptation across tasks, because only those tasks can be represented or activated in parallel. While there has been an abundance of evidence for adaptation within and across highly similar tasks, only some recent studies have reported adaptation across highly dissimilar tasks, with some failures to replicate. In order to further investigate this, we interleaved two very different conflict tasks, a manual multisource interference task and a vocal picture-word interference task. We ran this experiment in Dutch (Experiment 1) and Mandarin (Experiment 2). Across the two experiments, results show no cross-task conflict adaptation. These results do not fit with the suggestion of domain-general adaptive processes nor with the hypothesis of a U-shaped model. Instead, our results are most compatible with a task-specific view on the mechanisms behind adaptive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

It is well established that in sentences exhibiting quantifier scope ambiguity such as "a hiker climbed every hill," the surface scope interpretation (where a single hiker climbed all relevant hills) is preferred over the inverse scope interpretation (where multiple hikers each climbed potentially different hills). However, less is known about how individual differences modulate these preferences. In this study, we asked how language experience, as measured by print exposure, affects acceptability judgments and reaction times for surface versus inverse interpretations of sentences with quantifier scope ambiguity. We found that print exposure predicts both of these measures: participants with higher scores on measures of print exposure gave ambiguous sentences lower ratings than participants with lower levels of print exposure and had significantly longer reaction times for inverse scope items in particular than participants with lower levels of print exposure. We conclude that high print exposure may strengthen expectations for the dominant surface scope interpretation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

How do we tailor learning experiences to promote the formation and generalization of conceptual knowledge? Exposing learners to a highly variable set of examples has been postulated to benefit generalization, but evidence is conflicting. In the present study, we manipulated training set variability in terms of both the typicality of training examples (high vs. low coherence) and the number of unique examples (small vs. large set size) while controlling the total number of training trials. The face family category structure was designed to allow participants to learn by picking up on shared features across category members and/or by attending to unique features of individual category members. We found relatively little effect of set size but a clear benefit of high-coherence (lower variability) training both in terms of category learning and generalization. Moreover, high-coherence training biased participants to make judgments based on shared features in both categorization and recognition. Using an exploratory model fitting procedure, we tested the hypothesis that high-coherence training facilitates prototype abstraction. Instead, we found an exemplar model advantage across training conditions. However, there was also systematic misfit for all models for some trial types, including underestimating the influence of shared features in categorization responses. Overall, we show that high-variability training is not necessarily beneficial for concept learning when the total length of training is controlled. Instead, training on typical examples promotes fast learning and broad category knowledge by helping learners extract shared category features. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study investigated the word-form encoding process of handwriting in a nonalphabetic writing system, Chinese. The form-preparation paradigm (Experiment 1) and the picture-word interference paradigm (Experiment 2) were adopted to examine the facilitation effects of radical or logographeme overlap in Chinese handwritten production. Three different groups of Chinese writers were involved: Mainland Chinese participants who mainly used phonology-based Chinese input methods (Pinyin) for typewriting and the simplified Chinese script, Hong Kong participants who mainly used orthography-based input methods (e.g., Sucheng, Cangjie) and the traditional script, and Taiwanese participants who mainly used phonology-based input methods (Zhuyin) and the traditional script. The radical effects were consistently observed in the two paradigms across groups, indicating a prominent role of radicals in planning Chinese handwritten production. The Hong Kong participants showed a significantly larger radical effect than the Taiwanese participants, suggesting an influence of typewriting experience on the salience of radicals during Chinese handwriting. On the other hand, the logographeme effects were significant in the Mainland participants only and significantly smaller than the radical effects in the form-preparation paradigm and at 0-ms stimulus onset asynchrony in the picture-word interference paradigm. No significant difference was found between the radical and logographeme effects at -100- and 100-ms stimulus onset asynchrony, suggesting that the time courses of radical processing and logographeme processing are similar despite the lower salience of logographemes in planning Chinese handwritten production. Overall, these findings suggest that radicals and (nonradical) logographemes are processed at the same level of word-form encoding during Chinese handwritten production, but with different saliences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).