Journal of Experimental Psychology-Human Perception and Performance最新文献

We examine how first-language (L1) Spanish listeners with varying levels of experience with English recalibrate their phonemic category boundaries following exposure to second-language (L2), American-English-accented Spanish. Specifically, we examine changes to voice onset time boundaries, which are often positively shifted when produced by American-English-accented Spanish speakers (as compared to L1 Spanish speakers). Our results demonstrate that listeners make adjustments to their phonemic category boundaries following exposure to accented words with the critical sounds in onset position (e.g., "bailar" and "parir," meaning "to dance" and "to give birth," for the /b/ and /p/ phonemic categories). In many cases, generalization of phonemic learning was also observed, such that boundaries for categories that were not presented in training were also adjusted. Surprisingly, however, there were cases in which boundaries for trained categories did not show adjustments; for example, listeners trained with items for all places of articulation showed recalibration of their bilabial boundary but not their alveolar and velar boundaries. Also notable was the role of the Spanish listeners' experience with English: More experienced listeners showed more positively shifted (English-like) boundaries in the pretest session. This suggests that more experienced listeners may have rapidly identified the American-English-accented Spanish and applied their English category boundaries accordingly. We conclude that listener accommodation of L2 accent is supported by a phonemic recalibration mechanism and that experience with the L1 of an L2-accented speaker facilitates rapid recalibration of phonemic categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

A persistent belief holds that humans can imagine visual content but not odors. While visual imagery is regarded as recreating a perceptual representation, it is unknown whether olfactory mental imagery shares a perceptual format. Visual imagery studies have demonstrated this perceptual formatting using distance and shape similarity judgments, whereas olfactory studies often use single-odor vividness ratings, complicating the establishment of perceptual formatting for odors. Using odor pair similarity scores from two experiments (odor-based: 8,880 ratings from 37 participants, including 20 women; label-based: 129,472 ratings from 2,023 participants, including 1,164 women), we observed a strong correlation (r = .71) between odor-based and label-based odor pairs. The correlation was unaffected by gender and age and was present in a wide range of self-perceived olfactory functions. Pleasantness similarity was the main determinant of overall similarity for both odor-based (r = -.63) and label-based (r = -.45) odor pairs. We then used a large language model to derive semantic similarity scores for the labels of all odor pairs. Semantic similarity only mediated a small part of the observed correlation, further supporting our conclusions that odor imagery shares a perceptual formatting with vision, that odor percepts may be elicited from verbal labels alone, and that odor pair pleasantness may be a dominant and accessible feature in this regard. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans are so sensitive to faces and face-like patterns in the environment that sometimes we mistakenly see a face where none exists-a common illusion called "face pareidolia." Examples of face pareidolia, "illusory faces," occur in everyday objects such as trees and food and contain two identities: an illusory face and an object. In this study, we studied illusory faces in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm over three experiments to explore the detectability of illusory faces under various task conditions and presentation speeds. The first experiment revealed the rapid and reliable detection of illusory faces even with only a glimpse, suggesting that face pareidolia arises from an error in rapidly detecting faces. Experiment 2 demonstrated that illusory facial structures within food items did not interfere with the recognition of the object's veridical identity, affirming that examples of face pareidolia maintain their objecthood. Experiment 3 directly compared behavioral responses to illusory faces under different task conditions. The data indicate that, with extended viewing time, the object identity dominates perception. From a behavioral perspective, the findings revealed that illusory faces have two distinct identities as both faces and objects that may be processed in parallel. Future research could explore the neural representation of these unique stimuli under varying circumstances and attentional demands, providing deeper insights into the encoding of visual stimuli for detection and recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent empirical findings demonstrate that, in visual search for a target in an array of distractors, observers exploit information about object relations to increase search efficiency. We investigated how people searched for interacting people in a crowd, and how the eccentricity of the target affected this search (Experiments 1-3). Participants briefly viewed crowded arrays and had to search for an interacting dyad (two bodies face-to-face) among noninteracting dyads (back-to-back distractors), or vice versa, with the target presented in the attended central location or at a peripheral location. With central targets, we found a search asymmetry, whereby interacting people among noninteracting people were detected better than noninteracting people among interacting people. With peripheral targets, the advantage disappeared, or even tended to reverse in favor of noninteracting dyads. In Experiments 4-5, we asked whether the search asymmetry generalized to object pairs whose spatial relations did or did not form a functionally interacting set (a computer screen above a keyboard vs. a computer screen below a keyboard). We found no advantage for interacting over noninteracting sets either in central or peripheral locations for objects, but, if anything, evidence for the opposite effect. Thus, the effect of relational information on visual search is contingent on both stimulus category and attentional focus: The presentation of social interaction-but not of nonsocial interaction-at the attended (central) location readily captures an individual's attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Many studies have linked musical expertise with nonmusical abilities such as speech perception, memory, or executive functions. Far fewer have examined associations with basic auditory skills. Here, we asked whether psychoacoustic thresholds predict four aspects of musical expertise: music training, melody perception, rhythm perception, and self-reported musical abilities and behaviors (other than training). A total of 138 participants completed nine psychoacoustic tasks, as well as the Musical Ear Test (melody and rhythm subtests) and the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index. We also measured and controlled for demographics, general cognitive abilities, and personality traits. The psychoacoustic tasks assessed discrimination thresholds for pitch and temporal perception (both assessed with three tasks), and for timbre, intensity, and backward masking (each assessed with one task). Both music training and melody perception predicted better performance on the pitch-discrimination tasks. Rhythm perception was associated with better performance on several temporal and nontemporal tasks, although none had unique associations when the others were held constant. Self-reported musical abilities and behaviors were associated with performance on one of the temporal tasks: duration discrimination. The findings indicate that basic auditory skills correlate with individual differences in musical expertise, whether expertise is defined as music training or musical ability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Multi-item retro-cueing effects refer to better working memory performance for multiple items when they are cued after their offset compared to a neutral condition in which all items are cued. However, several studies have reported boundary conditions, and findings have also sometimes failed to replicate. We hypothesized that a strategy to focus on only one of the cued items could possibly yield these inconsistent patterns. In Study 1, a Monte Carlo simulation showed that randomly selecting one of the cued items as the focus in each trial increased the chance of obtaining significant "multi-item retro-cueing effects" on the mean accuracy over the trials, providing an incorrect conclusion if interpreted as evidence for attending all the cued items. These high rates to obtain such data fit with inconsistent patterns in the literature. To try and circumvent this situation, we conducted two new experiments (Studies 2A and 2B) where participants were explicitly instructed to fixate their gaze on all the cued positions, verified through eye tracking (Study 2B). These produced robust multi-item retro-cueing effects regardless of previously identified boundary conditions. Notably, gazes were clearly fixated to multiple cued positions within each trial. Nevertheless, simulation revealed that our accuracy patterns could also in principle be produced by single-item enhancement on each trial. The present study forms the first step to disentangle overt gaze-based allocation of attention from single-item focusing strategies while also highlighting the need for improved methodologies to probe genuine multiplicity in working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The study of attentional allocation due to external stimulation has a long history in psychology. Early research by Yantis and Jonides suggested that abrupt onsets constitute a unique class of stimuli that captures attention in a stimulus-driven fashion unless attention is proactively directed elsewhere. Since then, the study of visual attention has evolved significantly. This article revisits the core conclusions by Yantis and Jonides in light of subsequent findings and highlights emerging issues for future investigation. These issues include clarifying key concepts of visual attention, adopting measures with greater spatiotemporal precision, exploring how past experiences modulate the effects of abrupt onsets, and understanding individual differences in attentional allocation. Addressing these issues is challenging but crucial, and we offer some perspectives on how one might choose to study these issues going forward. Finally, we call for more investigation into abrupt onsets. Perhaps due to their strong potential to capture attention, abrupt onsets are often set aside in pursuit of other conditions that show attenuation of distractor interference. However, given their real-world relevance, abrupt onsets represent the exact type of stimuli that we need to study more to connect laboratory attention research to real life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The question of whether low-level perceptual processes are involved in language comprehension remains unclear. Here, we introduce a promising paradigm in which the role of motion perception in phrase understanding may be causally inferred without interpretational ambiguity. After participants had been adapted to either leftward or rightward drifting motion, resulting in the reduced responsiveness of motion neurons coding for the adapted direction, they were asked to indicate whether a subsequent verb phrase denoted leftward or rightward motion. When the adapting stimulus was blocked from visual awareness under continuous flash suppression, wherein only the influence of low-level perceptual processes existed, we found the response inhibition in the adapted direction across diverse verb phrases, indicating that desensitization of motion perception impaired the understanding of verb phrases. Our findings provide evidence for the functional relevance of motion perception to phrase understanding. However, when the adapting stimulus was consciously perceived, wherein both the influence of low-level perceptual processes and high-level cognitive processes coexisted but counteracted each other, we found different results for diverse verb phrases. Our findings highlight the importance of considering the influence of conscious awareness on how visual perception affects language comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Human listeners have a remarkable capacity to adapt to severe distortions of the speech signal. Previous work indicates that perceptual learning of degraded speech reflects changes to sublexical representations, though the precise format of these representations has not yet been established. Inspired by the neurophysiology of auditory cortex, we hypothesized that perceptual learning involves changes to perceptual representations that are tuned to acoustic modulations of the speech signal. We systematically filtered speech to control modulation content during training and test blocks. Perceptual learning was highly specific to the modulation filter heard during training, consistent with the hypothesis that learning involves changes to representations of speech modulations. In further experiments, we used modulation filtering and different feedback regimes (clear speech vs. written feedback) to investigate the role of talker-specific cues for cross-talker generalization of learning. Our results suggest that learning partially generalizes to speech from novel (untrained) talkers but that talker-specific cues can enhance generalization. These findings are consistent with the proposal that perceptual learning entails the adjustment of internal models that map acoustic features to phonological categories. These models can be applied to degraded speech from novel talkers, particularly when listeners can account for talker-specific variability in the acoustic signal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Motivational theories of imitation state that we imitate because this led to positive social consequences in the past. Because movement imitation typically only leads to these consequences when perceived by the imitated person, it should increase when the interaction partner sees the imitator. Current evidence for this hypothesis is mixed, potentially due to the low ecological validity in previous studies. We conducted two experiments (N_{Experiment 1} = 94, N_{Experiment 2} = 110) in which we resolved this limitation by placing participants in a virtual environment with a seeing and a blindfolded virtual agent, where they reacted to auditory cues with a head movement to the left or right, while the agent(s) also made a left or right head movement. We tested the effect of model eyesight (Experiments 1 and 2) and social reward on imitation (Experiment 2). Data were collected in 2023 and 2024. As expected, participants tended to imitate the agents. However, we found only limited evidence for the effect of model eyesight on automatic imitation in Experiment 1 and no evidence for the effect of model eyesight or social reward in Experiment 2. These findings challenge claims made by motivational theories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).