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

Attention is inherently drawn to distractors with salient physical features, yet it can also be proactively suppressed through top-down control, preventing attentional capture. However, this proactive suppression mechanism can fail under certain conditions. To explore the boundaries of proactive suppression, four experiments were conducted in the present study using the additional singleton paradigm, examining both top-down control and bottom-up factors. In Experiment 1, the singleton-search and feature-search modes were manipulated within subjects. The results revealed a singleton-presence cost in the singleton-search mode but no singleton-presence benefit in the feature-search mode, suggesting that proactive suppression becomes ineffective when search modes are inconsistent. Experiment 2 introduced trial-by-trial variation in targets and singleton distractors, demonstrating that proactive suppression remained effective, indicating its flexibility and rapid deployment. In Experiments 3 and 4, varying levels of singleton distractor salience were examined. The results revealed that proactive suppression was effective for highly salient distractors but failed for low-salience or dynamic distractors. This suggests that proactive suppression requires a certain level of salience and does not extend to dynamic distractors. In conclusion, this study validated the robustness of the proactive suppression mechanism while identifying the conditions under which it fails, shedding light on its operational boundaries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Human decision making often involves making a choice while concurrently moving. Prior studies showed that the dynamic body state biases choices, with deciders opting for choices associated with lower motor effort (motor cost bias) and spatial overlap with concurrent movement (cognitive crosstalk bias). In this study, we examined whether bodily movements (e.g., moving a limb) or resulting visual movements in the environment (e.g., a ball rolling in a specific direction due to the limb movement) give rise to the cognitive crosstalk bias. In a virtual embodied choice task, participants manually tracked a stimulus and concurrently made decisions to evade an obstacle and collect rewards. In two experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the motor costs for choices and spatial features of the body state during tracking. Importantly, we disentangled bodily movements during tracking and resulting visual movements on the computer screen to assess their relative contributions to the cognitive crosstalk bias. Both motor costs and cognitive crosstalk biased participants' choices. Cognitive crosstalk specifically was determined solely by the bodily movement direction in both experiments. This result pattern could not be attenuated by increasing the saliency of visual tracking movements on the computer screen in the second experiment. Our results suggest that bodily movements primarily cause cognitive crosstalk during embodied choices. These findings have implications for embodied choice models and dual-tasking research, as they show a potential divergence between findings from classical dual-task paradigms and more dynamic embodied choices that are influenced by motor costs and cognitive crosstalk resulting from the moving body. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Integrating prior semantic knowledge with environmental information is essential for everyday cognition, yet how this process affects ongoing perception and memory remains a vexing problem. We investigate this by studying how associative semantic knowledge interacts with perceptual constraints induced by brief encoding times, thereby supporting visual working memory (VWM) for real-world objects. Study 1 reanalyzed data from Quirk et al. (2020), involving 75 participants across 13,750 trials of a VWM task with randomly chosen objects and verbal distraction. We found that objects' semantic associations, estimated by a natural language processing model, predicted trial-level VWM accuracy under brief but not prolonged encoding times (0.2 s vs. 1-2 s). These results, unaffected by image similarity from computer vision models, were replicated in Study 2 with 50 participants across 11,880 trials. Combined, these findings suggest that semantic associations between arbitrary object pairs can facilitate effective grouping among VWM items to mitigate perceptual constraints, highlighting the broad influence of semantic knowledge in VWM formation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent work in our lab has shown that motor imagery is highly sensitive to tasks that interfere with executive resources, whereas physical actions are largely immune. This has been taken as support for the Motor-Cognitive model of motor imagery and in opposition to the theory of Functional Equivalence. Here, we examined another prediction of the Motor-Cognitive model, namely that an opposite pattern of effects would be observed when the information available for online control was reduced, with physical actions being affected but motor imagery being largely resistant. This was tested in four experiments in which participants performed either physical actions or motor imagery, and in a replication in which they performed both. The experiments manipulated the quality of information available during the online control of movement through: (a) comparing movements made with or without visual feedback (Experiments 1 and 1a); (b) comparing movements made using foveal versus peripheral vision (Experiment 2); and (c) comparing physical to mimed actions (Experiment 3). All four experiments found evidence in favor of the Motor-Cognitive model in that manipulations of online control affected physical action much more than they affected motor imagery. These results were, however, inconsistent with a Functional Equivalence view. We discuss these results in the broader context of other theoretical views of motor imagery. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous studies have shown that sensory information matching the content of visual working memory (VWM) gains prioritized access into awareness. While these studies primarily focused on a single stimulus, it remains unclear whether the prioritization persists when multiple items are memorized. Using a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm, the current study systematically investigated the time taken to detect a suppressed stimulus when two items were maintained in VWM. The results demonstrated that multiple items stored in VWM did not prioritize the matched stimuli into awareness, regardless of whether the stimuli presented during suppression were partially matched (Experiment 1) or fully matched (Experiment 2) to the memorized items. Furthermore, no prioritization was observed when the memorized items were either integrated into a single object (Experiment 3) or remembered with increased precision (Experiment 4). After confirming the validity of the current experimental paradigm (Experiments 5a and 5b), we found that the item assigned with a higher priority through a retro cue broke into awareness faster than the uncued and the new items (Experiment 6). These findings suggest that when multiple items are retained in VWM, only one single item stored in the active state can facilitate matched stimuli into awareness, indicating a limited capacity for the modulation of VWM on access to visual awareness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Robots are rapidly becoming a common aspect of our physical environments, but it is unclear under what conditions they can integrate into our social world. One prerequisite of such integration may be the perception that robots are agents that act with intention. In two experiments we used a temporal binding paradigm to explore how the implicit sense of agency might be vicariously induced by observing robot actions. In two experiments wherein participants interacted with a simple nonhumanoid toy robot, we found an underestimation of the temporal gap between observed robot action and outcome (i.e., temporal binding, an index of the implicit sense of agency; Experiments 1 and 2). Critically, however, this was only the case if participants had engaged previously with the robot in a "social" game (Experiment 2). In contrast, binding was weaker for participants who had interacted with the robot on a mechanistic basis. These results are consistent with the notion that even nonhumanoid social robots can evoke an implicit sense of vicarious agency, but only in restricted social contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The stop signal task requires people to inhibit an ongoing action when a signal tells them to stop. It measures the act of control people engage to inhibit actions, change goals, adjust to perturbations, and correct errors. It has become a gold standard measure of inhibitory control. This article provides a commentary on the article we published in 1984 that provided a model and a method for measuring the act of control engaged in the stop signal task. The commentary describes the genesis of the theory relating the task to cognitive control, summarizes the model and the method, and suggests reasons why the 1984 article had an impact that extends beyond experimental psychology to cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, clinical science, and developmental psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Reports an error in "Submentalizing: Clarifying how domain general processes explain spontaneous perspective-taking" by Mark R. Gardner and Lisa Thorn (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2025[Jan], Vol 51[1], 7-19; see record 2025-50561-001). The article (https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001250), had the incorrect open access license listed in the author note due to a processing error. The correct open access license for the article is CC BY 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. The online version of this article has been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2025-50561-001.) Demonstrations of spontaneous perspective-taking are thought to provide some of the best evidence to date for "implicit mentalizing"-the ability to track simple mental states in a fast and efficient manner. However, this evidence has been challenged by a "submentalizing" account proposing that these findings are merely attention-orienting effects. The present research aimed to clarify the cognitive processes responsible by measuring spontaneous perspective-taking while controlling for attention orienting. Four experiments employed the widely used dot perspective task, modified by changing the order that stimuli were presented so that responses would be less influenced by attention orienting. This modification had different effects on speed and accuracy of responding. For response times, it attenuated spontaneous perspective-taking effects for avatars as well as attention-orienting effects for arrows. For error rates, robust spontaneous perspective-taking effects remained that were unaffected by manipulations targeting attention orienting, but contingent upon there being two competing active task sets (self- and other perspectives). These results confirm that attention orienting explains response time effects revealed by the original version of the dot perspective task. Error rate results also reveal the crucial role played by domain-general executive processes in enabling selection between perspectives. The absence of independent evidence for implicit mentalizing lends support to a revised submentalizing account that incorporates executive functions alongside attention orienting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Effort is an important theoretical construct in several psychological disciplines, yet there is little consensus on how it manifests in behavior. Here, we operationalized effort as performance improvements beyond speed-accuracy tradeoffs and argue that oculomotor kinematics offer a novel conceptual lens on effort regulation. We investigated the efficiency and persistence of mere task instructions to induce transient effort. In a saccadic selection task, participants were instructed to look at targets as quickly and accurately as possible (standard instructions) or to mobilize all resources and respond even faster and more accurately ("to give 110%," effort instructions). We compared results to standard speeded performance (baseline block) and to a potential upper performance limit linking effort instructions to performance-contingent rewards (reward block). Eye movements were faster, more accurate, and initiated earlier when effort was instructed. Yet, these effects were more strongly pronounced and more persistent over time when effort was additionally rewarded. Importantly, a simultaneous improvement in speed and accuracy was only observed with reward. Altogether, the present findings show that instructions may spark effort, but reward sustains it, turning volatile engagement into lasting performance. This underscores that effort thrives when driven by purpose. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

There exists a bidirectional relationship between visual attention and visual working memory (VWM). Some argue that it is a voluntary process to encode an attended item into VWM. However, research has shown that attentional selection (defined as selection of one item from others) exclusively interferes with retained VWM information. The current study puts forth a selective-encoding hypothesis, that a selectively attended item is automatically encoded into VWM, which would clarify a critical link between selective attention and VWM. On Trial 1 (T₁) participants searched for a target item, either presented among nontarget items (selection) or in isolation to account for feature priming (target alone). On Trial 2 (T₂) participants continued to search for the same target among nontargets, however, a color distractor was now present that could either match the color of the T₁ target or was a neutral color. In Experiment 1, we showed that when a target item is selected on T₁ the magnitude of distraction (measured via eye movements and response times) from the matching distractor was greater than the neutral distractor, compared to the target-alone condition. This critical interaction was replicated in Experiments 2a and 2b, which varied different search parameters controlling for stimulus-driven confounds. Experiment 3 established a causal link between selection-driven capture and VWM. When VWM was at capacity, influence from the selectively attended T₁ target on T₂ distraction was eliminated, while performance across memory conditions was consistent for target-alone T₁ conditions. Together the three experiments show evidence for obligatory encoding of selectively attended items into VWM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).