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

People often complain about distraction by irrelevant sounds that reportedly hamper performance on concurrent visual tasks demanding the allocation of focused attention toward relevant stimuli, such as processing street signs during driving. To study this everyday issue experimentally, we devised a cross-modal distraction paradigm, inspired by a standard visual-distraction paradigm (additional-singleton paradigm) that is highly sensitive to measure interference on the allocation of attention. In a visual-search pop-out task, participants reported whether a salient target (a tilted bar) was present or absent, while a completely irrelevant, but salient auditory distractor accompanied some trials. To our surprise, the results revealed no notable distraction on visual-search performance (controlled for speed-accuracy tradeoffs). Reliable auditory distraction failed to occur even when the distractor was a (highly salient) auditory oddball or was additionally presented with a temporal advantage of 300 ms. However, when the auditory modality was made relevant globally while maintaining its irrelevance to the visual-search task, we finally observed the expected interference effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

People can learn to control their thoughts and emotions. The scientific study of control has been conducted mostly independently for cognitive and emotional conflicts. However, recent theoretical proposals suggest a close link between emotional and cognitive control processes. Indeed, mounting evidence from clinical sciences, social and personality psychology, and developmental neuroscience suggests that the ability to control thoughts and behavior goes hand in hand with the ability to control emotions. Yet, the precise interface between control over cognition and emotions remains controversial. The present study investigates the question whether control is a general-purpose mechanism or rather a set of domain-specific mechanisms. Following previous research, we tested participants' control in a cognitive and an emotional Stroop task and assessed the congruency sequence effect (CSE) which has been taken as a marker of cognitive or (implicit) emotional control, respectively. Going beyond previous research, we asked how control in one domain (e.g., cognitive) interacts with control in the other domain (e.g., emotional) on a trial-by-trial basis. In four experiments (N = 259) presented participants with a task-switching design that intermixed cognitive and emotional conflicts. This procedure produced significant CSEs across cognitive-emotional domains, suggesting that control can interact across domains. However, effect sizes of within-domain CSEs were twice as large, indicating that control is also domain-specific. These results neither support the general-purpose account nor the domain-specificity hypothesis of control. Rather, a hybrid account fits the data best, which also reconciles previous behavioral and neurophysiological findings, suggesting domain-general and specific processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Automatic imitation, in which one person's movement is affected by the observation of another person's movements, has been widely reported. However, it remains unclear how automatic imitation changes over a wide age range, particularly during childhood. In this study, we examined the differences in the tendency for automatic imitation between adults and children and the cross-sectional age-related changes in children aged 5-12 years, using a stimulus-response conflict paradigm. In this task, participants perform a choice-reactive finger movement corresponding to a given response stimulus while observing another participant's compatible or incompatible movement stimuli. The tendency for automatic imitation was assessed based on the reaction time, correct rate, and inverse efficiency score. The results showed that the degree of automatic imitation was weak until the children were 7 years old. Interestingly, our results show that the tendency for automatic imitation during childhood changed to an inverted U-shape, indicating nonlinear changes in automatic imitation during childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

According to action control theories, responding to a stimulus leads to the integration of response and stimulus features (e.g., color, shape, etc.) into event files. Upon feature repetition, the event file is retrieved, affecting performance. However, the resulting so-called binding effects are typically absent when participants localize targets in a sequence. Here, only a location change benefit emerges, known as inhibition of return (IOR), unmodulated by feature repetitions and changes. This has often been replicated in attentional orienting research. However, in these experimental designs only the individual stimulus feature is systematically varied to repeat or change. Based on the dimension weighting account from visual search, we hypothesized that the lack of binding effects in localization performance is due to a lack of systematically varying feature dimensions. In three experiments, participants localized targets in the left or right hemifield. The target appeared at multiple possible locations with gray distractors (Experiment 1), at multiple possible locations without distractors (Experiment 2), and at two possible locations without distractors (Experiment 3). Crucially, the nonspatial identity of the target repeated its dimension with or without the individual feature, or it changed its dimension. Whereas a binding effect between response and feature was absent, we found a binding pattern between response and feature dimension. IOR was always present. The results fit well with theories of different research strands-action control, attentional orienting, and visual search-suggesting that these gain impact by incorporating each other's ideas, leading to an all-encompassing understanding of selection and action. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior research has investigated the quality of information a reader can extract from upcoming parafoveal words. However, very few studies have considered parafoveal processing in bilingual readers, who may differ from monolinguals due to slower lexical access and susceptibility to cross-language activation. This eye-tracking experiment, therefore, investigated how bilingual readers process parafoveal semantic information within and across languages. We used the boundary technique to replace a preview word in a sentence with a different target word during the first rightward saccade from the pretarget region. We manipulated both preview language (nonswitch vs. code-switch) and semantic relatedness (synonym/translation vs. unrelated) between previews and targets. Upon fixation, target words always appeared in the same language as the rest of the sentence to create an essentially monolingual language context. Semantic preview benefits emerged for nonswitched synonym previews but not for code-switched translation previews. Furthermore, participants skipped code-switched previews less often than nonswitched previews and no more often than previews that were unfamiliar to them. These data suggest that bilinguals can extract within-language semantic information from the parafovea in both native and nonnative languages, but that cross-language words are not accessible while reading in a monolingual language mode, as per the partial selectivity hypothesis of bilingual language control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

According to perceptual dehumanization theory (PDT), faces are only perceived as "truly human" when processed in a configural fashion. Consistent with this theory, previous research indicates that when faces are inverted, a manipulation hypothesized to disrupt configural processing, the individuals depicted are attributed fewer uniquely human qualities. In a seminal paper, Hugenberg et al. (2016) reported that faces appeared less creative, less thoughtful, less empathetic, and possessed less "humanness" when inverted. Across four highly powered and preregistered experiments, we demonstrate that inversion does not influence the attribution of uniquely human traits specifically. Rather, in line with research on face processing, inversion impedes face encoding more generally, causing trait attributions to tend toward the mean. Positively valanced faces (i.e., those judged to be trustworthy when presented upright) are perceived to be less creative, considerate, thoughtful, and empathetic when inverted. Conversely, negatively valanced faces (i.e., those judged to be untrustworthy when presented upright) are judged to be more creative, considerate, thoughtful, and empathetic when inverted. Furthermore, we show that the effect of inversion on judgments of "humanness" reflects a general phenomenon that can be replicated with other (nonface) stimulus categories that also possess a canonical orientation. These findings suggest that a key line of evidence for PDT is considerably less convincing than it first appears. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The visual system continuously adapts to the statistical properties of the environment. In this study, we demonstrated that training significantly enhanced subjects' perceptual sensitivity to co-occurrence statistics in naturalistic textures. The learning effect was specific to the statistical component and spatial location. By examining the time course of learning, we found that learning was accelerated at an untrained location. Our findings establish a link between statistical learning and visual perception, indicating multistage plasticity beyond V1 in the visual hierarchy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

When experimenters vary the timing between two intersensory events, and participants judge their simultaneity, an inverse-U-shaped psychometric function is obtained. Typically, this simultaneity function is first fitted with a model for each participant separately, before best-fitting parameters are utilized (e.g., compared across conditions) in the second stage of a two-step inferential procedure. Often, simultaneity-function width is interpreted as representing sensitivity to asynchrony, and/or ascribed theoretical equivalence to a window of multisensory temporal binding. Here, we instead fit a single (principled) multilevel model to data from the entire group and across several conditions at once. By asking 20 participants to sometimes be more conservative in their judgments, we demonstrate how the width of the simultaneity function is prone to strategic change and thus questionable as a measure of either sensitivity to asynchrony or multisensory binding. By repeating our analysis with three different models (two implying a decision based directly on subjective asynchrony, and a third deriving this decision from the correlation between filtered responses to sensory inputs) we find that the first model, which hypothesizes, in particular, Gaussian latency noise and difficulty maintaining the stability of decision criteria across trials, is most plausible for these data. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

People process stimuli that have been arbitrarily associated with the self versus with a stranger preferentially, but congruence effects can modulate self-prioritization, as when the self is paired with, for example, symmetrical versus asymmetrical stimuli. In two experiments, we examined the interaction of self-prioritization with number magnitude when participants associated the self or a stranger with specific number symbols such as "2" presented as natural, negative, and ordinal number types (Experiment 1), or abstract numeric concepts, such as "larger than 5" (Experiment 2). Empathy and personal distance were also assessed. While self-prioritization emerged in both experiments, number type (natural, ordinal, and negative) had no effect on performance. Furthermore, correlations with empathy and personal distance did not emerge consistently. An interaction between number magnitude and self-assignment was observed for the magnitude comparison matching task (e.g., > 5) (Experiment 2), but not in the specific number (e.g., "8") matching task (Experiment 1). The null interaction may reflect the fact that encoding symbol identity, but not number magnitude, was sufficient for the symbol-matching task. The order of numbers and self-associations also had an effect. In sum, this study is the first to show that self-prioritization emerges for symbolic numbers and can even occur with abstract categories, such as a range of numbers (e.g., > 5). Furthermore, congruence effects between number concepts and labels (e.g., for the stranger, less is better) may also affect performance. However, this would appear to depend on the task context, such as whether numeric magnitude was needed to complete the task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).