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

People continuously scan their environment for potential threats to ensure survival. To make safe decisions, individuals assess their affective responses at various distances from potential dangers. This evaluation of anticipated feelings informs their decision-making process and subsequent behavior. Threat intensity is a key feature of this assessment. However, there is a lack of consensus on how threat-related anticipated negative affect decreases with distance as a function of threat intensity. Here, we propose the steeper gradient hypothesis: a faster decrease in negative anticipated affective responses with distance for more intense as compared to milder threats. To test this hypothesis, we conducted six experiments in which we examined the interaction effect between threat intensity and distance from the threat on various anticipated affective responses, by using different threats inductions (e.g., level of criminality; Experiments 1-4) and different spatial contexts (e.g., bird's eye views; Experiments 1 and 2). Our results consistently support the steeper gradient hypothesis, regardless of time perspectives (renting an apartment vs. temporarily occupying a spot) or samples (French vs. Americans; convenience vs. selection from a broader national sample). The present contribution, at the intersection of affective, social, and spatial cognition, advances our understanding of how one perceives and anticipates to respond to environmental threats. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory is crucial for short-term information processing, but its limited capacity means items are not represented with perfect fidelity to the external world. Many systematic patterns of error exist that are thought to be telling of the underlying mechanisms that process and maintain information in memory. Here, we suggest that the processes governing some of these patterns of errors are interrelated and highly individual. Specifically, we look at how perceptual structure relates to stimulus-specific biases in color and further explore the possible implication of this connection for contextual biases like serial dependence and repulsion between concurrently presented items. In Experiment 1, using a novel within-participant serial reproduction method, we reveal reliable attractors in color space across individuals, as well as individual differences that significantly influence these stimulus-specific biases. Simulations based on an independently measured perceptual structure of the stimulus space reproduce the group-level differences but do not capture the observed individual variation. In Experiment 3, we investigate how contextual biases-serial dependence when remembering one item and repulsion when remembering two items-interact with stimulus-specific properties. We identify color-specific properties of these contextual biases, as well as individual differences in the magnitude, direction, and stimulus-specific nature of these biases. We argue that because stimulus-specific biases are connected to perceptual structure, this same latent structure may impact contextual biases. Overall, we show a strong connection between stimulus-specific biases, contextual biases, and perceptual structure, as well as rich individual differences in these biases. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The interaction between temporal processing and physical effort plays a crucial role in our daily activities. The present study therefore assesses the effects of a simple(est) physical effort (i.e., isometric handgrip) on temporal processing with concurrent time reproduction/production and handgrip tasks. Isometric handgrip can induce physical arousal, thereby accelerating time and leading to overestimation when sensory timing is under physical effort, but underestimation when the motor timing is under physical effort (i.e., arousal hypothesis). Alternatively, handgrip may directly impair temporal processing given the potential competition for attention, resulting in underestimated durations when sensory timing is under physical effort and overestimated durations when motor timing is under physical effort (i.e., competition hypothesis). Our data collected in 2023-2024 revealed that high physical effort increased estimated durations in the time reproduction task with concurrent sensory timing and handgrip (Experiments 1-2) but decreased estimated durations in the time production task with concurrent motor timing and handgrip (Experiment 4), supporting the arousal hypothesis. Two additional experiments ruled out some alternative accounts (e.g., response bias). In Experiment 3, the handgrip effect was absent when time was cued, instead of being experienced, under handgrip. In Experiment 5, the handgrip effects of sensory timing and motor timing canceled each other out (i.e., the El Greco effect) when both sensory timing and motor timing were under handgrip. Overall, these findings suggest that physical effort distorts perceived time, with increased arousal likely contributing to the acceleration of temporal processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory (WM) plays a pivotal role in cognitive processes; yet, its resources are strictly limited, making it crucial to understand how these resources are allocated. Motivation, such as reward and punishment, has been widely recognized as a key factor influencing WM. Previous research has either examined the impacts of reward and punishment on the availability of WM resources separately or focused solely on the effects of reward on resource allocation. We posit that integrating these effects into a single study is essential for a comprehensive understanding of their interplay. To this end, we conducted three experiments using a delay estimation task, combined with the Target Confusability Competition model, to systematically investigate how reward and punishment affect the availability and allocation of WM resources. In Experiment 1, participants memorized the orientations of two arrows, each associated with reward or punishment cues. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants encountered both reward and punishment cues within the same trial, testing three hypotheses about resource allocation: reward dominance, punishment dominance, and no difference. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that reward and punishment equally enhanced the availability of WM resources. In Experiment 2, which was the first to integrate rewards and punishments within the same trial, reward prioritized the allocation of WM resources over punishment. Eye-tracking data from Experiment 3 indicated that this effect was driven by greater attentional focus on reward targets, which led to more WM resource allocation. We provide novel evidence that reward outweighs punishment in WM resource allocation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Pointing gestures are commonly used to guide the attention of others to objects in the environment, such as an animal hidden in the landscape. This raises the question of how another person's pointing gesture informs the visual search for the referent. We tested the hypothesis that pointing gestures are perceived as marking regions of space that define where participant search for the referent. In three experiments, participants searched for a pointed-at target object that was embedded among distractor objects arranged with different spatial densities while eye movements were tracked. Participants searched in a restricted region surrounding the position they perceived as pointed-at. However, the sizes of the searched regions depended considerably on the density of the search display, refuting the hypothesis that pointing gestures strictly mark the to-be-searched region. In addition, participants sometimes scanned objects that they would not even consider as pointed-at. We suggest that a flexible time-correlated criterion or a hybrid spatiotemporal criterion determines the sizes of the searched region. In summary, even if a pointing gesture was perceived as indicating a region of the search display, it has either a relatively weak or no effect on the size of the region that is eventually searched. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual imagery and short-term memory utilize similar brain networks, but the extent to which they are related remains unclear. Here we explore whether the capacity of visual imagery (as yet unknown) is similar to the known capacity limits of visual working memory (VWM) and visual short-term memory (VSTM). Experiment 1 explored capacity limits in imagination, VWM, and VSTM using a novel paradigm that, for the first time, provided estimates of capacity across these tasks. Imagination capacity was lower than that of VWM and VSTM. Experiments 2-4 eliminated alternative explanations of this capacity difference. Manipulating the time available to generate, update, and maintain an image (imagination task) or encode, update, and maintain an image (VWM task) did not influence performance in either task (Experiment 2). Manipulating the cue location and the size of the cued area had no specific influence on the imagination task (Experiment 3). Changing the test display (Experiment 4) showed that presenting all items at test (configural information) benefited VSTM performance, presenting a single item benefited VWM performance, and manipulating test display had no impact on imagination performance. In Experiment 5, increasing object complexity eliminated the difference between VSTM and imagination capacity; however, VWM capacity remained higher than that of imagery. For the first time, these experiments using analogous tasks demonstrate a difference in the observed capacities of VWM and imagery and provide the first measurable indication of the extent to which top-down (imagery), versus bottom-up activation of sensory systems (memory) supports the representation of perceptual stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Action control theories assume an integration of all stimulus and response features of an action episode into a so-called event file. The repetition of any of the integrated features in a subsequent action episode retrieves the whole event file. Depending on the (partial) match/mismatch of current and retrieved event files, performance is improved. Central to this idea is the evaluation of current and previous features (or their mental representations) as repeated or changed. However, this evaluation is not absolute but depends on various internal and external factors. In the current study, the evaluation was influenced externally by the context. In one experiment (n = 63), a response (R) was given during the presentation of two different red hues (distractor stimuli S). Stimulus-response binding effects were stronger when the background color during the task was a third red hue compared to when the background color was green. This result indicates that the relation between the red hues (rather change or rather repetition) differed because of a change in the background color, which served as a contextual reference and caused a merging or separation of the red hues' mental representations. This finding demonstrates high flexibility in feature processing, showing how human action control processes adapt to changing environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Retrospective attention refers to the prioritization of contents held in working memory, a process investigated using the retro-cueing paradigm. This process is evidenced by the retro-cueing benefit, characterized by better performance for retrospectively cued trials. However, traditional statistical analyses fall short in distinguishing between decisional and nondecisional processes underlying this benefit. A pivotal contribution by Shepherdson et al. (2018) addressed this gap by applying drift-diffusion modeling which integrates both accuracy and reaction time measures to disentangle these processes. Their key contribution lies in demonstrating that retro-cues enhance the quality of working memory contents and enable their retrieval in advance of decision making-effects that occur independently of shifts in decision criteria. Building on Shepherdson et al.'s work, we encourage future drift-diffusion model-based retro-cueing studies to pursue precise, mutually exclusive hypothesis testing and to integrate behavioral and neural data to more clearly distinguish between competing explanations of the retro-cueing benefit. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined distractor effects caused by neutral versus emotional faces in a perceptual load paradigm. In a series of experiments, we asked participants to categorize female or male names (the target) into their respective genders. The target was presented with 1, 3, 5, or 7 pseudonames (i.e., varying perceptual load) in the center of the screen, with an irrelevant face distractor (to the right or left of center). At low load, we expected flanker effects (i.e., faster responses if face gender and name gender were congruent compared with the incongruent condition) that were expected to vanish at high load, in line with the perceptual load literature. For emotional faces, however, flanker effects were expected to be present at all load levels. In Experiment 1, we presented happy versus neutral faces. In Experiment 2, we presented angry versus neutral faces. In Experiment 3, we replicated both earlier experiments, varying types of emotion in a between-participants design. All experiments show an emotional flanker effect advantage, meaning that at a load level where neutral flanker effect ceases, emotional flanker effects persist. Finally, the analysis of the full data set supported our hypothesis that flanker effects for emotional faces but not for neutral faces were found even at the highest load level. We discuss the results given the prevailing theories to explain perceptual load effects, with an emphasis on attentional slippage theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In 1992, this journal published one of the most influential articles in the field of visual space perception and action ("Visual Space Perception and Visually Directed Action" by Jack Loomis, José Da Silva, Naofumi Fujita, and Sergio Fukusima). Loomis et al. showed that in the scale of space that accommodates ambulatory locomotion, perception of locations and that of the distance between them are dissociated. This dissociation is particularly notable when the perceived locations form an interval that is parallel to an observer's sagittal body axis: While the interval appears to be much shorter than it physically is, indication of its two ends through action-based measures (e.g., walking to them without vision) yields no evidence of such perceptual foreshortening. The current article briefly reviews the literature that follows this discovery and discusses its lasting influence. In particular, the authors focus on the view articulated by Loomis et al.-open-loop motoric tasks are particularly useful for measuring perception of ambulatory space-and point out that it continues to be relevant to cutting-edge research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).