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

We examined whether proactive suppression can be applied on demand. A prompt cue indicated the to-be-ignored distractor color for each trial. Participants needed to use this cue to know which of two target shapes to respond to. To assess proactive suppression of the cued distractor color, we presented a probe letter recall task on a minority (25%) of the trials. A letter appeared inside each of the six shapes of the search array and participants recalled as many letters as they could. When the to-be-ignored color was fixed in Experiment 1, probe recall accuracy was lower for probe letters inside to-be-ignored-color distractors than target-color distractors, known as the probe suppression effect. However, when the prompted to-be-ignored color varied from trial to trial, the probe suppression effect disappeared, regardless of whether the prompt was a colored circle (Experiment 2) or a colored word (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 tested the search and destroy hypothesis by shortening the search display duration from 200 to 50 ms. No capture effect by the to-be-ignored color was evident, suggesting that participants did not first search for the to-be-ignored color, prior to suppressing it. We conclude that when rejection of a distractor color is required on demand, one cannot accomplish such suppression proactively but instead must deal with the distractor reactively, incurring a large cost in performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Intentional binding refers to the subjective temporal compression between a voluntary action and its subsequent sensory outcome. Despite some studies challenging the link between temporal compression and intentional action, intentional binding is still widely used as an implicit measure for the sense of agency. The debate remains unsettled primarily because the experimental conditions used in previous studies were confounded with various alternative causes for temporal compression, and action intention has not yet been tested comprehensively against all potential alternative causes in a single study. Here, we solve this puzzle by jointly comparing participants' estimates of the interval between three types of triggering events with comparable predictability-voluntary movement, passive movement, and external sensory event-and an external sensory outcome (auditory or visual across experiments). The results failed to show intentional binding, that is, no shorter interval estimation for the voluntary than the passive movement conditions. Instead, we observed temporal (but not intentional) binding when comparing both movement conditions with the external sensory condition. Thus, temporal binding appears to originate from sensory integration and temporal prediction, not from action intention. As such, these findings underscore the need to reconsider the use of "intentional binding" as a reliable proxy of the sense of agency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A wealth of converging research lines has led support to the notion that specialized neural processes output a priori information about the expected effects of gravity to fine-tune motor and perceptual responses to dynamic events. Arguably, these putative internal models of gravity might modulate the efficiency in visual search for objects conforming or not to gravitationally coherent dynamics. In the present work, we explored this possibility with a visual search task involving arrays of two to eight objects moving periodically back and forth. The target could be an accelerating/decelerating ball (as if bouncing on earth's surface-1g) with distractors moving at a constant speed (0g) or the reverse. Moreover, the direction of the gravitational pull, as implied by the 1g motion patterns, could be aligned or misaligned with Earth's gravity. Overall, searches for 1g targets were more efficient than 0g targets except, notably, when stimuli displays were congruent with Earth's gravitational pull, in which case the visual search asymmetry is significantly reduced. Outcomes are interpreted as reflecting the joint and mutually cancelling contribution of low-level detection of acceleration patterns and higher level detection of unexpected violations of gravitational motion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic context effects in picture naming and categorization tasks are central to the development and evaluation of current models of word production. When pictures are named in a semantically blocked context, response latencies are delayed. Belke (2013) found that when the naming task was replaced with a semantic categorization task (natural vs. man-made), response latencies were facilitated. From this pattern, she concluded that semantic interference in blocked picture naming has its locus at the lexical level but its origin at the preceding semantic level. However, other studies using the blocking procedure have failed to find facilitation in semantic categorization tasks (Damian et al., 2001; Riley et al., 2015), calling this conclusion into question. In three blocked picture naming and categorization experiments, we investigated different variables that might account for the discrepant results in semantic categorization. We used different semantic categorization tasks, different response modalities, different response set sizes, and different blocking procedures. Semantic facilitation was reliably found in naturalness categorization, but there was no semantic effect in natural size categorization. We discuss the implications of these findings for appropriate task selection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Multitasking typically leads to interference. However, responding to attentionally demanding targets in a continuous task paradoxically enhances memory for concurrently presented images, known as the "attentional boost effect" (ABE). Previous research has attributed the ABE to a temporal orienting response induced by the release of norepinephrine from the locus coeruleus when a stimulus is classified as a target. In this study, we tested whether target classification and response decisions act in an all-or-none manner on the ABE, or whether the processes leading up to these decisions also modulate the ABE. Participants encoded objects into memory while monitoring a stream of letters and digits, pressing a key for target letters. To change the process leading to target classification, we asked participants to respond either to a specific target letter or an entire category of letters. To change the process leading to response, we asked participants to either respond immediately to the target or withhold the response until the appearance of the next stimulus. Despite successfully identifying the target and responding to it in all conditions, participants benefited less from target detection in category search than in exact search and less from delayed response than immediate response. These findings suggest that target and response decisions do not act in an all-or-none manner. Instead, the ABE and the temporal orienting response is sensitive to the speed of reaching a perceptual or response decision. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

How compound words are processed remains a central question in research on Chinese reading. The Chinese reading model assumes that all possible words sharing characters are activated during word processing and these activated words compete for a winner (Li & Pollatsek, 2020). The present studies aimed to examine whether embedded component words compete with whole compound words in Chinese reading. In Study 1, we analyzed two existing lexical decision databases and revealed inhibitory effects of component-word frequency and facilitative effects of character frequency on the first components. In Study 2, we conducted two factorial experiments to further examine the effects of first component-word frequency, with character frequencies controlled. The results consistently indicated significant inhibitory effects of component-word frequency. Collectively, these findings support the theoretical proposition that both component words and compound words are activated and engage in competition during word processing. This provides a new approach to compound word processing in Chinese reading and a possible solution to mixed results of character frequency effects reported in the literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Most visual-search theories assume that our attention is automatically allocated to the location with the highest priority at any given moment. The Priority Accumulation Framework (PAF) challenges this assumption. It suggests that the priority weight at each location accumulates across sequential events and that evidence for the presence of action-relevant information contributes to determining when attention is deployed to the location with the highest accumulated priority. Here, we tested these hypotheses for overt attention by recording first saccades in a free-viewing spatial-cueing task. We manipulated search difficulty (Experiments 1 and 2) and cue salience (Experiment 2). Standard theories posit that when oculomotor capture by the cue occurs, it is initiated before the search display appears; therefore, these theories predict that the cue's impact on the distribution of first saccades should be independent of search difficulty but influenced by the cue's saliency. By contrast, PAF posits that the cue can bias competition later, after processing of the search display has already started, and therefore predicts that such late impact should increase with both search difficulty and cue salience. The results fully supported PAF's predictions. Our account suggests a distinction between attentional capture and attentional-priority bias that resolves enduring inconsistencies in the attentional-capture literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory (WM) is a central cognitive bottleneck, which has primarily been attributed to its well-known storage limit. However, relatively little is known about the processing limit during the initial memory encoding stage, which may also constrain various cognitive processes. The present study introduces a novel method using dynamic stimulus presentation and hierarchical Bayesian modeling to quantitatively estimate visual WM encoding speed. Participants performed a delayed-estimation task with two memory items continuously changing color hues in perceptually unnoticeable steps. Across three experiments, the recall errors systematically shifted toward the direction of color change, providing a proxy measure of encoding speed. Importantly, the observed shifts were best characterized by a temporal lag during the encoding of different items, supported by a mixture of two distributions with credibly distinct encoding times. A supplementary model-free analysis further confirmed the discrete encoding component in visual WM for multiple items. These findings shed light on the temporal dynamics of WM encoding processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A nonsignificant result against an H0 of no effect does not distinguish evidence for no effect from no evidence at all one way or the other. Thus, a researcher engaged primarily in significance testing may decide to follow up just the nonsignificant results with a test from another system of inference, such as equivalence tests (more generally, inference by intervals) or Bayes factors. However, selectively using two systems of inference in this way, can lead to inferential inconsistency because different tests are based on different principles, and therefore a researcher can be tempted to select the way each system is used to get the results the researcher wants for just the tests that system is applied to. For a related set of tests, one system of inference should be consistently used. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined how bilinguals process language switches between their first (L1) and second language (L2). Language switching costs (slower responses to language switch than nonswitch trials) appear to arise more systematically in production than in comprehension, possibly because the latter context might sometimes elicit less language coactivation (Declerck et al., 2019). This might reduce language competition and in turn the need for bilinguals to apply language control when processing language switches. Yet even in comprehension, language coactivation may vary depending on variables such as the accent of the speaker (e.g., whether the L2 words are pronounced with an L1 or L2 accent) and input modality (spoken or written). In three experiments conducted during 2021-2022, we tested how unbalanced Mandarin-English bilinguals processed language switches during comprehension and the potential influence of a speaker's accent and input modality. Overall, across settings, participants experienced significant language switching costs. In some conditions, switching costs were larger to L1-Mandarin than to L2-English, an asymmetry consistent with the participants' dominance in L1-Mandarin and the application of language control. However, manipulating accent and input modality did not influence language switches, suggesting they did not impact language coactivation sufficiently to modulate language control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).