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

We interact with our environment through our actions, sampling information from environmental effects following them. Here, we asked how control over action and ensuing effects influences long-term memory for the effect content and the actions that produced them. In three experiments, participants carried out spatial actions, which produced the movement of a box wherein an image was presented. The box either moved spatially congruent or incongruent with the participants' action. Memory for images was later tested in a recognition test, and we additionally probed whether participants retrieved the action used to produce an image when being cued with said image. In a fourth experiment, we kept the spatial effect component constant to directly investigate bindings between action and effect features. We found evidence for a facilitating influence of congruency on declarative memory for effect content and on action retrieval by perceived effect content. Moreover, if effect content was enriched with a spatial feature, such retrieval was only observed if that feature was spatially congruent rather than incongruent to the action that had produced that content. Thus, features of a single action-effect episode can be integrated and represented in long-term memory, and the formation of these representations is facilitated by control. We propose that feature bindings can be conceptualized as source memory, representing how environmental effects were produced. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Higher level cognition depends on visual working memory (VWM), the ability of the brain to maintain and manipulate internal representations of images that are no longer present. A key question is whether VWM representations are maintained in a sensorylike or an abstract, nonsensory format. While progress has been made in understanding memory-relevant features, the nature of memory-irrelevant features remains less clear. Here, we used a dual-task paradigm to investigate how and when memory-irrelevant features interact with concurrent visual information. Across three experiments, participants performed either a visual search task (Experiment 1) or a perceptual discrimination task (Experiments 2 and 3) involving memory-irrelevant features, while concurrently maintaining another feature for later retrieval. Experiment 1 showed that VWM biases attention toward stimuli matching the memory-irrelevant features, with the magnitude of this bias decreasing monotonically as feature similarity decreased, a pattern consistent with the psychophysical similarity structure in perception. Experiment 2 revealed that memory-irrelevant features bias ongoing perception, as reflected in shifted discrimination thresholds. Experiment 3 further demonstrated that such VWM-biased perceptual effects occur only at short delays and diminish at longer delays. Together, these results provide converging behavioral evidence that the representation of memory-irrelevant features in VWM involves a sensorylike format, whose transient influence on perception reflects the time-limited nature of sensory representations. Overall, these findings advance our understanding of the representational nature of VWM content and shed light on the dynamic interplay between memory and perception in higher level cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

While previous studies have focused on how contextual elements influence reading, our research adopts a novel approach to the dynamic interaction between words and their context. Using eye movements during naturalistic Serbian sentence reading, we analyzed how both morphological and semantic information carried by consecutive nouns in a sentence impact reading behavior. We considered a broad range of potential predictors, categorized as either benchmark (word length and frequency), paradigmatic (relative entropy, letter-triplet activation, and competition), or syntagmatic (cosine similarity, contextual similarity, and typicality) to predict four eye movement measures: landing position, first fixation duration, total fixation duration, and average pupil size. A multivariate statistical model that enabled simultaneous testing of multiple predictors against several dependent variables revealed a complex interaction among word properties within context. While previously identified predictors such as length and frequency come out strong, our approach reveals the relational nature of word- and context-specific effects and brings out how both paradigmatic and syntagmatic information shapes language processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

While native speakers of a language have tens of thousands of words at their disposal, they still regularly create and use novel words. Since this comes with communicative risks and costs-most importantly, not being understood by recipients-there have to be (perceived) advantages to creating novel words that outweigh these issues. We systematically explore these factors in a controlled experimental setting. We presented participants with images of existing and new animals with increasing degrees of conceptual distance to existing animals. Participants have to refer to these images either in an open format or with single words. The images are presented either in isolation (Experiment 1), or with two distractors created from different (Experiment 2), or the same base animals (Experiment 3). Each image is repeatedly presented to investigate effects of repeated reference and presentation. We measure how often participants create novel word labels for the stimuli and derive hypotheses for the main effects and key interactions of conceptual distance, target frequency, distractor frequency, response format, and task setting from a theoretical framework based on the Gricean pragmatic principles as well as the concept of common ground. Conceptual distance, response format, and experimental task setting have clear effects on the number of novel word responses. However, we observe no effects for target or distractor frequency, suggesting no effect of common ground in our experimental setting. Participants also tend to overspecify their responses, rather than strictly adhering to pragmatic principles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Category learning involves grouping items based on their shared characteristics or a shared association. Despite being important for individuals of all ages, there is little research on how older age affects category learning and generalization. Moreover, there is no research, to date, on the extent to which individuals tend to adopt the same categorization strategy across different to-be-learned categories. In this study, healthy young (aged 18-30, n = 77) and older adults (aged 60+, n = 74) completed two categorization tasks in separate sessions approximately 48 hr apart, with the category structures remaining constant across sessions but the stimuli differing. We compared categorization accuracy and prototype, exemplar, and unidimensional rule model fits across age groups and across sessions. In both sessions, there was an age deficit specific to learning items near the category boundary. Despite differences during learning, there were no significant age differences in generalization performance. Fitting formal categorization models revealed a comparable proportion of young and older adults best fit by the prototype model overall, but a continuous measure of prototype model fit advantage showed higher correlation across sessions in older compared to young adults. Together, these findings show that older adults consistently rely on typical training items to learn categories and are more stable in their prototype strategy use than young adults, which can be effective in supporting generalization performance at young adult levels. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in attentional abilities and learning were examined in a latent variable study. Participants performed a variety of learning tasks while pupillary responses were recorded during learning (a measure of the intensity of attention) and participants provided self-reports of off-task thinking (a measure of the consistency of attention), learning strategies, motivation, and self-efficacy in some of the learning tasks. Participants also performed measures of attention control and working memory. Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that attentional abilities were best represented as three separate factors (behavioral measures of broad attention control, pupillary measures of the intensity of attention, and self-reports of the consistency of attention) and each factor was correlated with the learning factor. Learning was also correlated with working memory, strategy use, motivation, and learning self-efficacy. These factors were differentially correlated with the attention factors. Structural equation modeling suggested that attention control had a direct relation with learning and also demonstrated indirect relations via strategy use and self-efficacy. The intensity of attention was related to learning via indirect relations with attention control, strategy use, and self-efficacy. The consistency of attention was related to learning indirectly via attention control and strategy use. The current results suggest that individual differences in attentional abilities are important for learning and these relations are due to a combination of cognitive, strategic, and conative factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

How is a word visually recognized? We investigated word recognition by employing a novel psychophysical task in which word segments (true morphemes or nonmorphemic orthographic sequences) were colored blue/red, red/blue, or black, while participants wore anaglyph glasses. The color combinations split the words either at the morpheme boundary (legal split) or at one character to the left or to the right of the split (illegal split). This manipulation divided the retinal information along the fovea, allowing us to project the different word segments to both left and right hemispheres via contralateral and ipsilateral visual pathways. Our goal was to investigate the roles of morphology and semantics in the early moments of visual word recognition, potentially tapping functional properties of the visual word form area. Participants (N = 72) performed a masked lexical decision task (60 ms exposure) to semantically transparent compounds (e.g., football), monomorphemic pseudocompounds (e.g., shamrock), and unsegmentable monomorphemic words (e.g., jeopardy). We found an effect of legality for compounds and pseudocompounds, when presented via the stronger contralateral visual pathways, suggesting an early morpho-orthographic segmentation, but with true compounds yielding faster and more accurate responses than pseudocompounds across all projection combinations. Our results are compatible with a model of visual word recognition involving an initial stage of morpho-orthographic analysis that is insensitive to semantics, followed by later stages of morphological computations and semantic access. Although our evidence relies on a psychophysical task, we suggest that these processing stages are in line with a functional division between visual word form area-1 (orthographic) and visual word form area-2 (lexical) in the early visual word recognition system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

To what extent do bilinguals activate information associated with the language that they are not currently using? To address this, we conducted three large-scale picture-word interference experiments involving highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals in English-only (Experiment 1, one-language context) and mixed English-Chinese (Experiment 2, two-language context) settings and a control experiment involving monolingual English speakers (Experiment 3). In all experiments, participants named pictures in English while ignoring English auditory distractors that were phonologically related to the Chinese translations of the picture names (phono-translation distractors). Chinese-English bilinguals in both the one-language and two-language contexts were quicker to name pictures when just preceded by phono-translation than unrelated distractors, but no such facilitation was observed for monolingual English participants. In all experiments, participants showed inhibition for semantically related distractors and facilitation for phonologically related distractors. Taken together, our findings suggest that words from the nontarget language can be activated even when that language is irrelevant to the task, but the activated nontarget candidates do not compete for lexical selection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Older adults may have weakened connections between words and their sounds/spelling, which affects top-down, but not bottom-up language processes (Burke et al., 1991). Similarly, bilinguals may show weaker connections in the same system because the frequency of input for each language is lower than in monolinguals (Gollan et al., 2008). We studied whether younger and older French-English bilinguals experienced top-down and bottom-up orthographic facilitation during the typed naming of English pictures while ignoring a visual distractor word. Half of the targets were interlingual homographs (e.g., "coin" [French meaning: corner]) and were paired with a semantic distractor ("bill"), a translation-related distractor ("nook") that was (related to) the French meaning of the homograph, or an unrelated distractor ("dust"). The other half were nonhomographs (e.g., "chin") appearing with a semantic ("jaw"), (bottom-up) orthographic ("chip"), or unrelated distractor ("jar"). Top-down orthographic facilitation was measured as the difference in first keystroke latencies between the translation-related and unrelated condition in homographs and bottom-up orthographic facilitation as the difference between the orthographic and unrelated distractor in nonhomographs. We found no top-down orthographic facilitation in either group, whereas bottom-up orthographic facilitation was generally observed. These findings support the idea of weakened connections in bilinguals and old age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Students are often taught that testing themselves will help them retain new material. Less well known, however, is that testing oneself before learning can also produce benefits (the "pretesting effect"). Prior studies have indicated that the semantic relatedness between the provided information (cue) and the answer (target) may be critical for this effect. Here, we investigated this by measuring the trifold relationship between cue, target, and guess using continuous relatedness measures. In Experiment 1, participants learned cue-target word pairs by studying or generating guesses based on the cue word before taking a test on both cue-target pairs and the original cue-guess combinations. We found a robust difference in accuracy favoring pretesting over studying, regardless of cue-target relatedness. In Experiment 2, we further examined if errorless generation contributed to the pretesting effect by adding a condition in which cue and target were present, but subjects still generated a related word. Cue-target memory was better in both the pretesting and generation conditions than the study condition. In both studies, while cue-target relatedness benefitted accuracy overall, these benefits did not interact with pretesting or generation pair conditions. Importantly, we observed an interaction between the cue-target semantic relatedness and guess-target semantic relatedness only in the pretesting condition, demonstrating a benefit for (incidentally) high relatedness between guesses and targets when cue-target relatedness was low and an impairment when cue-target relatedness was high, likely reflecting interference between target and guess. Our results illuminate the importance of considering guess quality in uncovering the mechanisms in pretesting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).