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

The tendency to automatically imitate others' behavior is well documented. Successful interactions with others require some control of automatic imitation, but the nature of these control mechanisms remains unclear. The present study investigated whether the regulation of automatic imitation involves domain-specific versus domain-general control processes. Automatic imitation was assessed using the imitation-inhibition task, in which participants responded to an imperative stimulus with finger movements while seeing imitatively congruent versus incongruent, task-irrelevant movements. In Experiment 1, the imitatively congruent/incongruent trials ratio was manipulated, and increasing the amount of incongruent trials reduced the imitative congruency effect-as typically observed in "nonsocial" conflict tasks. In Experiment 2a, the imitation-inhibition task was intermixed with the Simon (spatial congruency) task. The ratio of spatially congruent/incongruent trials in the Simon task was varied while keeping the ratio of imitatively congruent/incongruent trials constant. Results indicate that increasing the amount of Simon conflict reduced both Simon and imitative congruency effects. Thus, control adaptations related to Simon congruency transferred to automatic imitation. In Experiments 2b and 3, the manipulation of the proportion of incongruent trials in the imitation-inhibition task did not exert an influence on the Simon effect. We discuss the domain-specific versus domain-general nature of the mechanisms regulating imitation in the light of these conflicting findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Task-irrelevant sounds that are semantically congruent with the target can facilitate performance in visual search tasks, resulting in faster search times. In three experiments, we tested the underlying processes of this effect. Participants were presented with auditory primes that were semantically congruent, neutral, or incongruent to the visual search target, and importantly, we varied the set size of the search displays. According to seminal accounts of semantic priming, priming effects can be explained by processes not related to search (i.e., facilitation of target encoding; McNamara, 2013), which would predict a priming effect that is independent of set size. Alternatively, we tested if auditory priming can serve as a source of guidance for visual attention toward the primed target (i.e., in terms of altering attention-directing priorities; Wolfe, 2021), as indexed by higher search efficiency with congruent priming. Experiment 1 found that auditory color word primes resulted in faster responses and, importantly, flatter search slopes for congruent compared to incongruent color targets, indicating a more efficient search. As with many naturalistic search behaviors, we used multiple-target search. Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 with a reduced target set. Experiment 3 extended these findings to complex audiovisual objects. Our results provide direct evidence that cross-modal priming can guide visual selective attention, as reflected by enhanced visual search efficiency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Level-2 visuo-spatial perspective-taking (VPT) helps us to understand how the world appears for another person. The process has been linked to conceptual forms of perspective-taking, such as empathic perspective-taking. The present study tested whether similarity to the target of the process, as indicated by gender (in)congruency, affects its embodiment and conclusively answers the question whether there are gender differences in VPT performance. To address these questions, data of N = 2,226 female and male participants, completing K = 107,535 trials of a Level-2 VPT task involving female and male targets, were subjected to an independent participant meta-analysis. Confirmatory analyses revealed that gender (in)congruency did not affect Level-2 VPT performance, speaking against an effect of perceived similarity on the embodiment of Level-2 VPT. Additionally, we observed a significant performance advantage for female participants. Exploratory analyses showed gender-congruency effects can be detected if attentional task demands are low, likely making it easier for participants to process target features such as their gender. These findings clarify the disputed nature of gender differences in Level-2 VPT performance and inform theorizing about embodied and nonembodied strategies used to solve Level-2 VPT tasks, as well as process models of Level-2 VPT performance more generally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The present author was honored to serve as editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (JEP:HPP) for the 2000-2005 volumes, carrying on the work of his predecessors. Along with the happiness and pride he felt during his time as editor, he also experienced disquiet. He captures the source of the unease with an anecdote from when he was an independent researcher. These comments are not the mournful expressions of an-about-to-become dinosaur. Rather, they are motivated by the conviction that approaches which have proven useful should continue to be supported. Others have argued this point as well vis à vis the simultaneous pursuit of neural and behavioral science. Pursuing both paths is an imperative for the community at large. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The 50th birthday of the JEP: Human Perception and Performance is an appropriate occasion to salute its influence in the field. In this celebratory article, the author tries to trace some of the work reported in Volume 1 to current research. He hopes that this might be inspirational to some of its readers. His selection was guided by his familiarity with some areas of research, but almost all of the articles can be related to current trends. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Binding accounts propose that action planning involves temporarily binding codes of the action's unique features, such as its location and duration. Such binding becomes evident when another action (B) is initiated while maintaining the Action Plan A. Action B is usually impaired if it partially overlaps with the planned Action A (as opposed to full or no feature overlap). In Experiment 1, in which participants bimanually operated two keys, we replicated these partial overlap costs. In Experiment 2, two participants sat side by side, each handling one key. We tested whether Action B would be affected by duration overlap with the planned Action A of another person similarly as by duration overlap with a planned Action A of the participant's other hand. Here, we found no partial overlap costs. However, in Experiment 3, proposing a common reward yielded partial overlap costs. This suggests that in joint action planning, another person's action plan can impact own actions through feature binding, but only with sufficient incentives to corepresent the other's actions (i.e., when goal achievement depends on both participants' performance). This furthers the understanding of how we represent other people's yet-to-be-executed action plans alongside our own. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Comprehensive understanding of visual scenes necessitates grasping the relations among visual objects. Given the potentially pivotal role of visual working memory (VWM) in processing visual relations, it is important to investigate the representation of relations in VWM. In our previous study, we proposed the integrated storage hypothesis, postulating that relations and objects are stored together as an integrated structured representation in VWM. The present study aimed to test this hypothesis against the alternative separate encoding hypothesis by probing the irrelevant-distracting effect. Across three experiments, where participants memorized object shapes/colors while disregarding relations, an irrelevant-distracting effect was consistently observed across varying types of changes in relation and set sizes. Critically, recombining the probe with irrelevant relation from another memory item (Experiment 2) or reversing the relational roles of probed objects relative to the memory item (Experiment 3) were perceived as inconsistency with stored representations and impaired change detection. These findings supported the integrated storage hypothesis, indicating that the dynamic relations between the objects are automatically encoded alongside object identities to form an integrated structured representation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent research on duration perception suggests that duration encoding is not a single general process but involves several separate processes, some of which are specific to visual modality. Moreover, different functional aspects of visual processing can influence duration perception in distinct ways. One of the most important functions of the visual system is to identify and recognize features, shapes, and objects. However, it is still unclear whether and how computations related to these processes affect duration perception. To clarify this issue, we used a spatial crowding phenomenon, which allows the dissociation of low-level feature extraction from high-level processes such as object recognition. We created letter and vernier stimuli matched for their low-level properties but different in their discriminability due to spatial crowding. Here, we show that stimuli that became more difficult to discriminate appeared shorter in duration (data collected in 2019-2023). This difference in perceived duration could not be explained by low-level stimulus properties, cognitive bias due to discriminability, or perceived stimulus onsets or offsets. These results suggest the existence of time-sensitive structures specific to visual processing of features, shapes, and objects that is affected by crowding. These findings support the notion of distributed timing mechanisms in the visual system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

People prioritize diagnostic features in classification tasks. However, it is not clear whether this priority is fixed or is flexibly applied depending on the specific classification decision, or how feature use behavior contributes to individual differences in performance. Here we examined whether flexibility in features used in a face identification task supports face recognition ability. In Experiment 1, we show that the facial features most useful for identification vary-to a surprising degree-depending on the specific face identity comparison at hand. While the ears and eyes were the most diagnostic for face identification in general, they were the most diagnostic feature for just 22% and 14% of identity decisions, respectively. In three subsequent experiments, we find that flexibility in feature use contributes to an individual's face identity matching ability. Higher face identification accuracy was associated with being aware of (Experiments 2 and 4) and attending to (Experiments 3 and 4) the most diagnostic features for a specific facial comparison. This conferred an enhanced benefit relative to focusing on features that were diagnostic of face identity decisions in general (Experiment 4). We conclude that adaptability in information sampling supports face recognition ability and discuss theoretical and applied implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

In the literature on human action control, the binding and retrieval of responses are assumed to shape the coordination of more complex actions. Specifically, the consecutive execution of two responses is assumed to result in their integration into cognitive representations (so-called event files) and can be retrieved from that upon later response repetition, thereby influencing behavior. Against the background of ideomotor theory and more recent theorizing in the binding and retrieval in action control framework (Frings et al., 2020), we investigated whether response execution is necessary for binding and retrieval of responses. We manipulated whether the retrieving response (Experiment 1), as well as the to-be-bound response (Experiment 2), is executed or omitted. The results showed that responses do not need to be executed to retrieve other responses or to be bound to other responses. Apparently, activating the cognitive representation of a response sufficed for this response to trigger event file binding and retrieval. Our results are the first to show that response-response binding is not dependent on executing responses. Together, the results support the core assumptions of ideomotor theory and the binding and retrieval in action control framework, namely a common coding of action and perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).