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

The year 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance (JEP:HPP). JEP:HPP started as a standalone journal in January 1975 under the editorship of Michael Posner. The semicentennial birthday is a special occasion and warrants a special recognition. To celebrate, the editorial team curated a series of articles that explored the impact, the reach, and the value of research published in JEP: HPP. The articles were published throughout 2025. While scientific journals are often evaluated through metrics like impact factor, our celebratory articles show that the influence of JEP:HPP extends far beyond such simple measures. The 27 articles that made up the celebratory series demonstrated the vast reach and diverse influence of research published in JEP:HPP, crossing millennia from Plato to modern feminism to address questions ranging from perception of beauty (Grzywacz, 2025), music (Prpic, 2025; Sears, 2025), human reasoning (Fischhoff, 2025), and language acquisition (Nazzi, 2025) to attention (Olivers et al., 2025; Sauter, 2025; Zhang et al., 2025), representation of space (Yamamoto & Phillbeck, 2025), mental imagery (Martarelli & Mast, 2025), working memory (Olivers et al., 2025), cognitive (Logan, 2025), and attentional control (Montakhaby Nodeh, 2025), as well as social perception and action (Ferier & Heurley, 2025; Hafri & Papeo, 2025; Oswald, 2025). The anniversary series of articles included seven invited literature reviews, three editorial perspectives, and 17 readers' perspectives. Each contribution gave a window into a finding, a researcher, and a time. We got a peek into research from 50 years ago-the ways in which "subjects" were tested, data were plotted, and graphs were physically printed. The authors shared the story of data, how they came about, and how they continued to "live" in the literature. This capture of time, from 1975 to today, was one of the motivating factors in planning the celebratory series. The idea was to honor not only the journal but also people connected to the journal over those 50 years- those who led the journal, those who published in the journal, and, of course, those who read the journal. Thus, as the series celebrated the contributions of research published in JEP:HPP, it also celebrated the community of researchers making JEP:HPP, the diversity of our research questions, opinions, methods, and data, as well as the unity with which we converge in our keen interest in understanding the human mind. The editorial team received enthusiastic contributions from both established and up-and-coming junior scientists who are just embarking on a career journey similar to that taken by their predecessors. And while the two groups may differ in their training and methodological affinities, they appear to share the same passion and fire for scientific discovery (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Are eye movements miscalibrated when the distance to be crossed is misperceived? The two-visual-stream hypothesis posits that while perception is influenced by visual context and thus prone to illusions, actions rely on context-independent metrics and are thus unaffected by such distortions. In contrast, empirical evidence consistently shows that saccadic eye movements are influenced by the Müller-Lyer illusion. However, this finding could be explained by saccades being attracted toward the figure's center of gravity, while perceptual distortion would result from distinct mechanisms. To disentangle these effects, we conducted four experiments (N = 114) between 2022 and 2025, measuring the amplitude of saccades performed along horizontal lines embedded in Müller-Lyer figures carefully designed to control for center-of-gravity biases. Results showed that both saccade amplitude and length judgment were systematically modulated by the illusion beyond what could be attributed to changes in the actual center of gravity, its saliency, or computation time. Additionally, the illusion's influence on saccade amplitude diminished after a longer previewing time (2,000 ms) compared to a shorter one (50 ms). These findings support the hypothesis that perception and oculomotor behavior rely on a shared visual representation that is influenced by contextual information but becomes more precise with increased processing time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The production of a word is delayed by the recent production of one or more semantically related words. This phenomenon, known as semantic interference, has been observed in picture naming tasks involving either large sets of pictures named once (continuous naming) or small sets of pictures named repeatedly (blocked-cyclic naming). It has been attributed to an adaptive learning mechanism that operates after each naming episode. However, the interference develops differently in these tasks: It is cumulative in continuous naming and noncumulative in blocked-cyclic naming. It has been suggested that the small local response sets in blocked naming are easily identified and stored in working memory, which then introduces an additional process that constrains the interference. We reasoned that this process would be less effective as the local response sets increased in size, resulting in cumulative interference. In blocked naming experiments involving local response sets of 10 or 19 items, we found that the interference did not increase continuously; rather, it carried on across more presentations than for the typically used small sets. This finding lends support to the notion of a control mechanism that operates gradually and interacts with an adaptive learning mechanism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

How does the visual system achieve efficient information selection under limited processing capacity is a fundamental question in cognitive psychology. Through three experiments, the present study reveals a time-constrained two-stage visual selection mechanism. Experiment 1's color search tasks demonstrated bilinear Search Time × Set Size functions, with a clear kink point at 50-100 ms after stimulus onset, showing shallower slopes (2.7-10.4 ms/item) before versus steeper slopes (10.7-20.7 ms/item) after, indicating two distinct processing stages. Experiment 2 extended these findings to digit search: despite capacity differences (color = 7.6 vs. digit = 3.8 items), the critical kink point time remained stable (60-70 ms), suggesting cross-stimulus generalizability. Experiment 3 disrupted this bilinear pattern by delaying search onset, confirming its time dependence. Individual analyses showed unimodal kink point time distributions (peak 60-80 ms) but multimodal set-size distributions, indicating time-driven stage transitions. These findings establish that visual selection has a time-based parallel-to-serial transition, and the early parallel stage has a stimulus-dependent capacity. This two-stage selection model integrates the core tenets of the Guided Search model and attentional window theories, offering a new perspective for the architecture of visual information processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Tucker and Ellis (1998) is a seminal work in perception-action binding research. By using manipulable objects in more realistic contexts, their study has offered profound insights into the neurocognitive processes involved in our daily interactions with tools. They were the first to highlight the action potentiation effect. Subsequent research has specified the conditions under which the effect can be observed, evolved the paradigm, and adapted response devices to address other types of questions related to the motor dimension of cognition. Over the past 25 years, their contribution has significantly advanced research and ignited extensive debates on embodied, plastic, and proactive models of cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The attentional blink (AB) refers to the outcome where in a rapidly presented stream of stimuli observers are unable to successfully report the second of two previously defined targets relative to an otherwise identical control condition where the first target does not require report. The first AB article was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance in 1992 and in the ensuing 32 years has garnered the interest of many researchers spanning multiple disciplines and experimental approaches, both basic and applied. Moreover, it has attracted the attention of a variety of social media whose authors have appropriately and in some cases inappropriately used the AB to account for human behavior. Perhaps one of the most important outcomes of this research has been to shift the focus from the study of spatial attention to include that of attention over time, or temporal attention. Given the upcoming 50th anniversary of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, the journal has asked the original authors to reflect on the history of attentional blink research. We wish to acknowledge that such reflection must be bounded by space and time (pun intended) limitations so apologies to those authors whose undoubtedly important research we were unable to cover. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

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).