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

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).

Traditionally, cognitive psychology has viewed attentional control-the process of selecting information for perception, cognition, and action-as a deliberate, resource-demanding process governed by immediate goals. However, significant advances over the past few decades have broadened our understanding of how attention is controlled. A particularly groundbreaking insight is that attentional control can be learned and once acquired can be automatically executed in response to environmental cues. Key studies contributing to this paradigm shift have been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. This article reviews several of these pivotal studies and discusses potential future directions for the field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Rubber hand illusion and tool-use paradigms have been extensively used to investigate body representation. Although both approaches rely on multisensory integration and external object incorporation, they are typically studied in isolation. Here, we introduce a novel paradigm that combines these methods to investigate whether perceptual modifications to body representation can induce motor changes, and vice versa. First, participants completed a tool-use task, actively using a short or long grabber tool to move cubes. When asked to point toward the forearm midpoint, only long tool users exhibited a distal shift, denoting an expansion in motor representation. Next, participants experienced the "rubber tool illusion" by passively holding the same tool while observing a rubber hand grasp an identical-looking tool. Notably, participants holding a short tool exhibited an expanded forearm representation when they observed a synchronously stroked long tool during illusion. Control experiments revealed that this effect depended on prior active tool use, embodiment of the observed rubber hand/tool, and a length mismatch between the held and observed tools. These findings reveal for the first time that motor representation of forearm length, a component of body schema, can be modulated by changes in body image. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention and eye movements often align in visual tasks, but they can also dissociate, as when people shift attention without moving their eyes. Most studies have examined these systems over short timescales, capturing momentary attention or eye movements. Here, we explored their interaction over a longer timescale using a location probability learning paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a target that frequently appeared in one quadrant, developing both an oculomotor habit (initial saccades toward the high-probability quadrant) and an attentional habit (faster search when the target appeared in the high-probability region). Both habits emerged simultaneously and persisted in a neutral testing phase with random target locations. This coupling broke down in Experiments 2 and 3, where participants were cued to saccade toward specific quadrants that aligned or misaligned with the high-probability target quadrant. In a spatially unbiased testing phase without the cue, the oculomotor habit persisted toward the previously saccaded quadrant, while search speed was fastest in the high-probability area, unaffected by prior cuing. Thus, while oculomotor and attentional habits are often coupled, they arise from distinct mechanisms: oculomotor habits are driven by eye movement history, and attentional habits by search success. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Information in working memory can have distracting effects on visual search. For instance, a color that is incidentally stored in memory may bias search toward items matching the stored color. We investigated whether attentional guidance by task-irrelevant colors is transient or sustained. To investigate this, we systematically varied the color match between memorized and target colors, as well as the set size of the search display. We found that the match between the task-irrelevant color in memory and the color of the subset with the search target resulted in equivalent reductions of search reaction times across varying set sizes, supporting the hypothesis of a transient effect on attentional guidance. A sustained effect would predict growing differences between matching and nonmatching colors as the number of scanned items increases. Using eye tracking, we ruled out postattentional target identification or decision making as potential explanations. Thus, the content of visual working memory guides attention to matching features even in case of task irrelevance, but this guidance is transient. Possibly, the activation of the irrelevant content is suppressed to avoid the prolonged distraction resulting from sustained guidance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).