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

Semantic context effects in picture naming and categorization are central to word production theories. However, unlike naming studies, categorization studies have shown inconsistent results. Recently, Wöhner, Luckow, et al. (2024) replicated the inconsistent pattern in blocked categorization in a within-participant and within-item design. Pictures were presented in a semantically homogeneous or heterogeneous context. In the homogeneous context, there was interference for naming and facilitation for naturalness categorization, but no context effect for size categorization. The authors concluded that the inconsistent categorization findings in their own and previous studies could be due either to the use of tasks based on different kinds of features (stored in semantic memory [natural vs. man-made] vs. ad hoc [smaller vs. larger than a standard]) or to a difference in the response mapping for the exemplars from the semantic categories creating the context (convergent vs. divergent). The present study again contrasted the Wöhner, Luckow et al. tasks, but used materials that resulted in convergent response mapping for both categorization tasks. There was semantic interference in naming and semantic facilitation in both naturalness and size categorization. This pattern suggests that convergent response mapping, not the use of a task based on a stored semantic feature, is critical for obtaining facilitation in blocked semantic categorization. Our result provides further support for the notion that semantic interference in blocked word production has its locus at the lexical level and its origin at the semantic level. This conclusion does not depend any longer on data from only a single categorization task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Among several items held in working memory, an item can be prioritized by focusing attention on it. Some studies found that an item in the focus of attention is better protected from interference than other items in working memory. Others have found that a prioritized item is particularly vulnerable to interference. These two groups of studies have used different ways to study information in the focus of attention in working memory. Protection for the prioritized item has been found when a retro-cue has been used to direct attention to this item, whereas particular vulnerability has been observed for the last-presented item of a serially presented list, which is often assumed to remain in the focus of attention during the retention interval. As these two methods might represent distinct forms of prioritization, we examined whether these two prioritization modes result in opposing results. To do so, we sequentially presented four to-be-memorized colored shapes and probed memory with a recall task. We varied the presentation of interfering visual stimuli following the last list item. In half of the trials, we indicated which item was most likely to be probed using a retro-cue (Experiments 1 and 5) or a precue (Experiments 2-4). We observed some evidence for the last-presented item being particularly vulnerable to visual interference but only in specific task situations. Generally, we observed that memory items were equally vulnerable to visual interference regardless of their priority state in working memory and regardless of the prioritization mode used. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This perspective reflects on the significant influence that the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (JEP) has had on my research into the involuntary capture of attention. From foundational debates on automatic versus goal-driven attentional control to incorporating the concept of selection history, JEP has consistently provided key theoretical insights and robust methodological frameworks. I describe how specific contributions from the journal have shaped my approach to studying distractor suppression and the role of learned routines in managing attention. Finally, I consider how JEP continues to guide emerging directions in attentional research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Research has shown that increasing stimulus eccentricity can shorten temporal estimations and integration. Endogenous attention has been shown to prolong subjective duration and stimulus processing, especially for more peripheral stimuli. This study investigates the impact of endogenous attention on the perceived duration of peripheral stimuli. In a temporal bisection task, participants judged the varying duration of a probe stimulus (20-220 ms) presented at 3° or 9° of eccentricity left or right from fixation as either short or long. The probe stimulus was either preceded by a valid or neutral central arrow cue (Experiment 1) or valid or invalid central arrow cue (Experiment 2) to manipulate endogenous attention. Eye movements were monitored with an eye tracker. In both experiments, subjective duration decreased with increasing stimulus eccentricity, consistent with earlier findings. Reaction times were lower for valid cues in both experiments, indicating that the cue was successful in shifting attention. While there was no significant difference in perceived duration between valid and neutral cues (Experiment 1), perceived duration was lower for invalid cues compared to valid cues (Experiment 2). In both experiments, there was no interaction between eccentricity and cue. The results are discussed in the context of the underlying processes involved in temporal processing and the notion that perceived duration does not differ between attention distributed over the screen or directed toward the peripheral stimulus, but directing attention away from the stimulus shortens perceived duration. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Adolescence is a critical period for developing adaptive cognitive control, including the ability to selectively switch attention in response to changes in the environment (cognitive flexibility) and regulate attention (metacognition), through monitoring performance and employing adaptive control strategies. However, little is known about how individual differences in adolescent metacognition impact the spontaneous use of strategies for improving cognitive flexibility. In a sample of 141 participants aged 11-15 years (collected between July 2022 and February 2023), adolescents spontaneously controlled their own preparation time in a cued task-switching paradigm. Adolescents spontaneously adopted the strategy of increasing preparation time for switch trials relative to repeat trials. This strategy use differed for individuals in distinct metacognitive profiles and was positively related to subjectively and objectively scored self-report measures of metacognition. Therefore, individual differences in adolescent metacognitive ability predict the adoption of spontaneous strategy adjustment to enhance cognitive flexibility, suggesting that improving metacognition may encourage the adaptive direction of capacity-limited attention resources among adolescents. Participants were largely from high socioeducational advantage schools in Australia, which should be taken into account when generalizing the present results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This study concerns motor representations acquired in learning to write. Most theorists assume that at the highest levels of the motor programming hierarchy, learned motor programs for writing characters (e.g., "A") are effector-independent, specifying the order and trajectories of writing strokes in a form not tied to specific effectors (e.g., right hand). On this view, once a high-level motor program has been learned with one effector, that same program will be used for writing with other effectors. However, in experiments conducted during 2018-2024, we found a clear qualitative difference between dominant and nondominant hands for participants writing in uppercase print: the direction of horizontal writing strokes (rightward or leftward) varied systematically with the hand used for writing. We interpret this phenomenon as evidence against the standard effector independence hypothesis and offer two alternatives. The first proposes that even the highest level motor programs are effector-specific. The second assumes that high-level motor programs learned with one effector can drive writing with other effectors, yet may be nonoptimal for a novel effector, in which case a new motor program may be generated. Both hypotheses imply a dual-route conception in which a high-level motor program may be activated either by retrieving a previously learned program from memory, or by generating a new program on the fly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

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).

The way we perceive the movement of two intersecting discs can be influenced by auditory information. When a brief tone is played while these discs overlap, people tend to report that the discs bounce off each other instead of streaming past each other. This is known as the auditory-induced bouncing/streaming illusion. Both perceptual/attentional and decisional processes have been discussed as explanations for the bouncing/streaming illusion. In four experiments, we study how the abruptness of tone onsets and offsets affects the bouncing/streaming illusion. We found that tones with more abrupt onsets and offsets resulted in a higher proportion of bouncing impressions than those with smoother ones (Experiment 1). This effect was not due to differences in loudness between the tones (Experiment 2). Additionally, we found that the abruptness of the tone onset, rather than the offset, caused the increase in bouncing impressions (Experiment 3). This effect was observed regardless of the temporal alignment of the tones with the moment of visual overlap (onset-aligned vs. centered vs. offset-aligned; Experiment 4). In sum, our results revealed evidence in favor of a chain of perceptual as well as decisional processes contributing to the reported bouncing/streaming impressions, and we discuss how both might interact during the resolution of the ambiguous bouncing/streaming display. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous studies have demonstrated that auditory cues are integrated with other sensory cues for navigation. However, the extent to which auditory cues are used remains an open question, particularly in the context of reduced availability of visual landmarks. Sensory cue-combination paradigms have used homing tasks to quantify how much a single cue contributes to spatial updating. These paradigms have tested whether multisensory cue integration fits a model of optimal integration, or the reduction of multisensory variability in the form of a maximum likelihood function based on the variability of a single sensory cue. Here, we test the extent to which individuals rely on spatial auditory landmarks relative to body-based self-motion cues in the absence of useful visual landmarks. Twenty-seven participants with normal sensory acuity completed a homing task in virtual reality with auditory landmarks, self-motion cues, or both. Furthermore, a condition with a covert spatial conflict was introduced to test how much participants rely on either auditory landmarks or self-motion information. As a group, participants relied more on body-based self-motion cues than on auditory landmarks; however, there was a wide range of sensory cue weighting strategies. We found some support for optimal combination of these two sets of sensory cues, a novel pairing in the absence of visual spatial landmarks. Overall, these data indicate that the provision of auditory landmarks may complement spatial updating during navigation. This finding may be of particular value to individuals with visual impairments who struggle with effective spatial updating. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).