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

Where a reader's eyes land in a word both reflects and affects their word processing efficiency. Readers tend to land short of the center of a word, missing the optimal viewing position (OVP), especially when they skipped the previous word. Once they land, landing position error, or the deviation from the OVP, leads to shorter fixations-an inverted optimal viewing position (IOVP) effect. However, deaf readers who are early signers are highly efficient-they read faster, skip more words without negatively impacting their comprehension-and this efficiency may be related to their saccade targeting ability. We investigated the landing positions and fixation durations for reading level-matched deaf and hearing readers in a study run from 2022 to 2024. We found that deaf readers (a) landed closer to the OVP, indicating more accurate saccade targeting and (b) showed smaller differences between landing positions following skipping compared to nonskipping saccades, suggesting their increased word skipping does not incur a penalty like skipping does for hearing readers. They exhibited similar inverted optimal viewing position effects as hearing readers, suggesting their increased saccade targeting accuracy does not come at a cost to word processing. We discuss how their overall reading efficiency may be due in part to their ability to target saccades accurately to the OVP, even after they skip the previous word, and the possibility that this might be related to their wider reading spans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Lapses of sustained attention cause slips-of-action, but overt errors can be avoided if attention can be reoriented to task demands sufficiently quickly. Despite the ubiquity of such "near misses," little research has been dedicated to examining the speed of attentional recovery after a lapse of sustained attention. The present study investigated how frequently and how quickly participants are able to reorient attention after a lapse in a modification of the Sustained Attention to Response Task that required participants to make two simultaneous responses on target trials instead of withholding responses. On most trials in which a lapse occurred, participants were able to reorient attention well within the timeframe of a single trial, with corrective responses made within ∼200 ms of execution of the erroneous response, faster than responses to targets in a simple target detection task. These findings show, for the first time, that participants are able to rapidly and flexibly reorient attention to task demands after a lapse of sustained attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Effective gaze-based joint attention requires distinguishing between communicative gaze and private gaze. Eye contact and repeated averted gaze shifts to the same location are key cues for gaze-based communication, but the temporal and perceptual dynamics of these cues in signaling communicative intent remain unclear. This study examines three perceptual properties of dynamic eye gaze displays and their influence on the perception of communicative intent. Autistic and nonautistic participants completed a semi-interactive task with an onscreen agent displaying dynamic eye movements searching for an object. Participants decided whether the agent was privately inspecting the objects or requesting the participant to "give" them one (i.e., attempting to communicate). We manipulated whether the agent displayed eye contact, made repeated gaze shifts at the same object, and the duration of gaze displays. We measured the frequency of "give" responses (indexing perceived communicative intent) and reaction times (indexing response certainty/bias). Participants were most likely to perceive communicative intent following displays comprising eye contact and repeated gaze. Gaze duration was a less potent signal, but increased perceptions of communicative intent in the absence of eye contact and repeated gaze. Autistic and nonautistic participants exhibited similar patterns, challenging the view that autistic people have broad "deficits" in understanding social gaze cues. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous studies have demonstrated that attentional selection is biased toward locations likely to contain a target and away from those likely to contain a distractor. These biases are thought to arise from statistical learning, which adjusts weights within a spatial priority map to optimize attentional selection. While prior work has shown statistical learning based on across-trial probabilities, it remains unclear whether individuals can learn associations between distractor and target locations within a given trial. To investigate this, two experiments employed the additional singleton paradigm, in which, sometimes, the location of the distractor predicted the location of the target. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that participants responded faster when the distractor appeared at a location predictive of the target, suggesting successful learning of the within-trial association. Experiment 2, which incorporated eye-tracking, showed that this benefit was not because of proactive suppression, but instead driven by faster disengagement from the distractor, as reflected in reduced dwell times. These findings demonstrate a novel form of statistical learning based on within-trial spatial associations. They also indicate that the spatial priority map can be dynamically updated following attentional selection, a process potentially reinforced by the execution of a motor response. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study investigates how the sensorimotor and semantic systems influence object processing. Participants selected images labeled as tools or nontools using a large mouse which requires power grip or a small mouse which requires precision grip. The upright and rotated objects were presented to induce stable and variable affordances, respectively. Response times and both temporal and spatial indicators of mouse movement trajectory were recorded. The processing advantage observed when an object's motion representation congruent with the mouse response, compared to the incongruent condition, is termed as the compatibility effect. Our findings revealed that graspable nontools resembling tools could also activate affordances. Critically, the stable affordances rely on long-term memory representations of object knowledge, while variable affordances depend on online processing of immediate visual or sensory cues, emphasizing the interaction between conceptual and motor systems in object processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The human ability to categorize scenes has been related to the usage of both object and global scene information. In three experiments (carried out in 2024), we compared the utility of these sources of information and assessed the time course of their usage by reducing scenes to single objects or visualizations of global scene information (textures). Experiment 1 showed that both types of information were of comparable utility under controlled viewing conditions and could be used concurrently. However, a simple combination of object and global scene information was not sufficient to explain fast scene categorization. Experiment 2 demonstrated how the participants' preference for either type of information varied over different stimulus-onset asynchronies between stimulus and mask as well as the objects' size and eccentricity. Experiment 3 showed that, on average, participants nonetheless benefitted from the presentation of object before global scene information in line with the notion of local-to-global information usage. In summary, we show that both object and global scene information are useful for human scene categorization. We further suggest that information usage over time is flexible and depends on the availability of object information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The global-local processing framework has garnered significant attention in cognitive psychology, sparking debates regarding its existence and implications. While some cognitive and clinical studies suggest the existence of a general global-local system, recent studies have raised questions about its validity. This study aimed to investigate one crucial aspect of this question-the transferability of primed global or local processing styles across different tasks and modalities. To this aim, 120 participants were randomly assigned to a global or local priming group, using a visuospatial Navon-like task. Subsequently, they completed tasks assessing global-local processing tendencies in (a) a visuospatial task similar to the priming task, (b) a visuospatial task different from the priming task, and (c) an auditory task. The results yielded a significant transfer effect of global-local processing tendencies across all tasks and modalities, with priming influencing subsequent processing styles. These findings support the existence of a general global-local system that extends beyond specific tasks or sensory modalities. Furthermore, they provide initial evidence that this system can be influenced. These results are consistent with some previous studies but not with others, highlighting the differences in the definition of the global-local system as a potential cause for discrepancies. Potential implications for various psychological aspects such as decision making and mental health are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The pseudohomophone (PH) effect refers to an established finding whereby in a visual lexical decision task, nonword letter strings that are pronounced like real words (e.g., WAWK) are harder to reject than nonword strings that are not pronounced like real words (e.g., FLIS). This article reports three lexical decision experiments that aimed at further exploring the underlying processing mechanisms. In Experiments 1 and 2, we compared PHs like WAWK with unpronounceable nonwords like NRUG and pronounceable nonwords like FLIS, making sure that all stimuli (including real-word fillers) were carefully matched in length, bigram frequency, and number of orthographic neighbors. Matching stimuli in this way resulted in the real-word fillers to be of low lexical frequency (lower than for the PHs' base words). Experiment 1 employed a standard lexical decision task, whereas Experiment 2 used the two-alternative forced choice eye-tracking paradigm originally developed in Kunert and Scheepers (2014). Both experiments converged on showing a reversal of the classical PH effect: while unpronounceable strings like NRUG were correctly rejected relatively quickly, PHs like WAWK were indeed easier to reject than pronounceable nonwords like FLIS. Our final Experiment 3, by contrast, confirmed a "classical" PH effect when the same nonword stimuli were tested against high- rather than low-frequency words as fillers. We conclude that the direction of the PH effect strongly depends on the overall material context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Task switch costs are affected by the pairings of stimulus and response modalities. For example, switch costs are reduced when switching between visual-manual and auditory-vocal tasks compared to switching between visual-vocal and auditory-manual tasks. These modality pairing effects are generally interpreted as reflecting increased crosstalk between the stimuli and response-related action effects for the two tasks. However, the exact mechanism by which this crosstalk operates-stimulus-effect priming or conflict between central operations-is unclear. In four experiments, I manipulated the modality compatibility between stimuli and experimentally induced action effects, such that tasks overlapped in the stimulus modalities, effect modalities, both, or neither. Experiment 1 conceptually replicated prior reports of modality pairing effects in task switching in which switch costs were reduced when similar stimulus and effect modalities were encapsulated within tasks. In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3, symmetrical switch costs across tasks provided evidence against the stimulus-effect priming account, instead suggesting that modality pairing effects stem from interference between the representations engaged by central operations. These results help to characterize the mechanism underlying modality pairing effects in task switching and add to a growing body of work illustrating how relationships between stimuli and response-related action effects influence response selection processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual working memory (WM) can hold a limited amount of information for a short interval. The current study investigated whether the features of the objects maintained in WM are represented in a dependent or independent manner. Across five experiments, we presented multifeature objects (color and shape) and investigated whether remembering one feature is correlated with remembering the other feature. To answer this question, we divided the continuous response distribution into five quintiles according to the accuracy performance, then computed the area under the curve of the continuous response of the other feature, thus calculating the area under the curve for a given feature for each quintile of the other feature. A dependent object representation predicts a correlation between these measures, indicating that remembering one feature is correlated with remembering the other feature. In all five experiments, in which we used different stimuli (triangles or polygons), different memory exposure intervals (1,200 or 300 ms), and different response procedures (sequential or simultaneous responses), we found strong evidence for a dependency between the object's features. We conclude that this current analysis was able to reveal strong feature dependency in WM. These findings support the conclusion that visual WM relies on object-based representations and that all the objects' features are represented in a dependent manner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).