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

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).

Common daily tasks require us to estimate surface area. Yet, area judgments are substantially and consistently biased: For example, triangles appear larger than same-area squares and disks. Previous work has explored small subsets of shapes and related biases in area perception to one or two geometric features, such as height or compactness. However, a broader understanding of shape-related biases is lacking. Here, we quantify biases in area perception for a wide variety of shapes and explain them in terms of geometric features. In four online experiments (each N = 35), typical adult observers made two-alternative forced choice judgments ("which stimulus has larger area?") for pairs of stimuli of different shape, orientation, and/or area. We found clear shape-related biases that replicate known biases and extend them to novel shapes. We provide a multipredictor model (R² = .96) that quantitatively predicts biases in perceived area across 22 shape/orientation combinations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The world around us is inherently structured and often repetitive. Research has shown that we can implicitly learn to prioritize relevant objects and locations while filtering out distracting information, creating an integrated priority map for attention allocation. The current study examines whether providing an object-like reference frame would induce an object-centered attentional bias or whether the bias would remain in egocentric (viewpoint-centered) coordinates. The search display consisted of six stimuli that were surrounded by a wheel and square frame. In two experiments, either a distractor or a target appeared more frequently in one location, leading to the suppression or enhancement of that location, respectively. Learning blocks were followed by test blocks, where the frame rotated, creating egocentric-matching and object-centered locations. These experiments showed that both target and distractor learning relied on an egocentric reference frame only. In follow-up experiments, the likely target and distractor location rotated dynamically with the frame during learning. This revealed that participants can learn to enhance a likely target location in an object-centered manner. We hypothesized that while space-based learning feeds into a priority map reliant on an egocentric reference frame, object-based learning allows for implicit prioritization of subparts of objects independent of their spatial orientation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Precrastination is the choice to complete or begin a behavior unnecessarily early and at some cost. In Experiment 1, we investigated if trait-level impulsive choice (delay discounting) was predictive of precrastination. In Experiment 2, we tested the boundaries of precrastination behavior by systematically manipulating task effort. We found, that trait-level impulsivity was not predictive of precrastination behavior. We also found that as the physical effort required to complete a task increased, participants tended to precrastinate less, until finally, participants chose more optimally. These results suggest that precrastination is not related to trait-level impulsive choice in the form of delay discounting behavior, though it may still be related to other types of impulsivity. The results also show that there are limits to precrastination behavior and that the tendency to complete a task, or parts of a task, unnecessarily early and at some cost may be limited to tasks in which there is little effort involved. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Task switching requires flexibly engaging in one of two task sets in each trial. Curiously, when one task suddenly becomes irrelevant (fade out), performance in the remaining task is worse than when performed as a single task. This fade-out cost demonstrates that the mental task model of task switching has to be reconfigured to a single-task representation (Mayr & Liebscher, 2001). This study implemented list-wide proportion manipulations during task switching to investigate how global processing adjustments affect fade-out costs. Experiment 1 manipulated the proportion of task switches at the level of task representation: High switch frequency was expected to increase the accessibility of both task sets in working memory, predicting increased fade-out costs. Experiment 2 varied the proportion of task-rule congruency at the level of response selection, predicting no significant effect. Results from 160 German University students showed larger fade-out costs for the high switch frequency group, whereas the proportion of task-rule congruency did not affect fade-out costs. These findings suggest that global adjustments at the task representation level uniquely influence fade-out costs and hereby the reconfiguration of the task model, whereas adjustments at the response level do not. Implications for the mental representation of task models are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Observers can learn to resist distraction in visual search when feature singletons or luminance transients are repeatedly presented across trials at a given location. In this study, we investigated whether the same repetition benefit would be observed when luminance transients are repeatedly shown at the same location within the same trial, and how this effect relates to across-trials habituation of attentional capture. The results showed that interference was reduced when four luminance transients were presented at the same location before target appearance, compared to when a single transient was presented, replicating the feature singleton findings. Furthermore, the magnitude of this repetition effect did not depend on the local and global across-trials probability of repeated and single transients, supporting the hypothesis that two relatively independent within-trial and across-trials habituation mechanisms coexist. Finally, in Experiment 4, we demonstrated that the repetition effect was largely reduced when the first three transients appeared at a different location, ruling out the possibility that the repetition benefit was simply because of a warning effect and/or the spatial predictability of the last visual transient. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The audiovisual rabbit illusion is a cross-modal postdictive phenomenon where an illusory flash is perceived between two spatially displaced real flashes when accompanied by three auditory beeps. This study investigates how attentional cues influence the perceived location of the illusory flash. We used four small red dots as placeholders for exogenous cues, positioned near potential flash locations in the upper and lower visual hemifields. One dot changed to yellow either 200 ms before (Experiment 1) or after (Experiment 2) the flashes to direct attention. Results showed that a 200-ms precue attracted the illusory flash (Experiment 1), underscoring the role of early attentional selection in localizing cross-modal illusions. In contrast, a 200-ms postcue had no effect (Experiment 2), whereas a 50-ms postcue repelled the illusory flash location (Experiment 3), suggesting that late sensory reactivation through postcues remaps stimulus localization. These findings demonstrate distinct mechanisms through which precues and postcues influence the perception of cross-modal illusory stimuli, offering new insights into attention, postdiction, and multisensory integration. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).