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

One of the most primitive biological motions is walking. Human vision constantly processes walking movements to anticipate social interactions and avert potential collisions. Counterintuitively, when processing multiple walking biological motions, the visual system optimizes the perception through reference repulsion within a single motion (a bias away from the category boundary direction) and repulsive adaptation in a prolonged time (a bias away from the direction of preceding stimuli). However, how we uniquely perceive walking biological motion across short-term movements remains unclear. Here, by asking participants to adjust the direction until it matches the one they just saw, we uncovered the serial dependence (a bias toward the direction of preceding stimuli) in walking biological motion perception (Experiment 1). We found a similar effect for nonbiological motion (a rotating sphere) but with a greater amplitude (Experiment 2). Furthermore, serial dependence in biological motion coexisted with reference repulsion, while nonbiological motion coexisted with reference attraction. An additional experiment demonstrated an asymmetric mutual influence between biological and nonbiological motion: the attractive serial dependence could transfer between them and was greater from biological to nonbiological motion (Experiment 3). This asymmetry was significantly greater than that observed between inverted biological motion and nonbiological motion, suggesting that the effect is largely driven by the unique social significance of biological motion (Experiment 4). The results suggest that vision implements serial dependence when processing biological motion to maintain a relatively steady representation across time but in a less biased way than nonbiological motion to avoid too much deviation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Social attention refers to a perceptual prioritization of social information and a tendency to quickly direct attention toward social stimuli. However, the extent to which social attention follows reflexive mechanisms rather than reflecting top-down control remains elusive. Here we examined the robustness of social orienting when challenged by competing top-down modulations of attention induced by motivationally relevant operant conditioning. We conducted two consecutive experiments (both N = 52) with data for Experiment 1 being collected in December 2023 and January 2024 and data for Experiment 2 from April to May 2024. Using a gaze-contingent paradigm, we explored whether humans could learn to suppress directing their overt visual attention toward specific stimuli when such behavior is associated with a negative outcome, such as an aversive electric shock (Experiment 1) or a loss of points (Experiment 2). We observed reflexive social attention characterized by faster and more frequent saccades only for positively conditioned faces but neither for stimuli that required avoidance nor for novel stimuli. Overall, these results suggest that bottom-up attentional mechanisms such as social prioritization or a novelty bias are less automatic and reflexive than previously assumed and can be suppressed through executive control to support goal-directed behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Human experimental psychology seems inextricably bound up with a notion of self, or individual mental life. The link between self and body has always been acknowledged, but psychologists have few ways to investigate, analyze, or understand this link. As 2025 marks the 50th birthday of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance and 20 years since the publication of our "Re-Visiting the Rubber Hand Illusion" article in the journal, we take this opportunity to reflect on the impact, reach, and major developments that followed its publication. In particular, we focus on how the methods and theoretical constructs from our article have extended the concepts of bodily self-awareness toward other fields beyond experimental psychology. Our article helped to develop experimental approaches to understanding the role of the body in self-awareness, and mental life more generally. The combination of rigorous experimental methods and a clear theoretical model has allowed psychologists to have a clearer view of the relation between body and self. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Two experiments compared morpho-syntactico-semantic parafoveal processing of five-letter words n + 1 (Experiment 1) with five-letter regions at the end of longer words n (Experiment 2), understudied cross-linguistically. Earlier boundary-change studies showed that subject/object case assignment in Russian can be extracted from a parafoveally presented but never directly fixated letter when the related preview is the most expected continuation (Stoops & Christianson, 2017, 2019). This study reversed the syntactic expectations for the identical and related previews (Cloze ratings: 94% grammatical identical object vs. 0% ungrammatical related subject). The related preview was read more slowly than the no-change preview in the later measures: go-past for the words n + 1 and n, according to both frequentist and Bayesian analyses. Additionally, the study clarifies the augmented allocation of attention hypothesis-skilled readers process parafoveally visible parts of a longer word faster than length-controlled upcoming word n + 1, yet the message-level contextual linguistic information affected the target words n and n + 1 similarly. The most intriguing finding is the delayed morpho-syntactico-semantic effect: even though the morphologically ungrammatical marking was parafoveally available, the syntactic fit only affected delayed processing, manifested as increased reading of previous text. More cross-linguistic work is needed to understand the role of higher level linguistic information beyond the predictability of individual lexical items on parafoveal processing during reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Identifying a stimulus feature (e.g., a musical note) via a response (e.g., pressing a piano key) leads to an event file that stores the feature-response association (often called a "binding"). Interestingly, identifying two stimulus features in rapid succession integrates the corresponding event files, thereby enabling the storage of abstract relationships between stimuli or responses in those files (e.g., the interval between two musical notes). The nature, generality, and duration of such abstract relationships, however, remain unclear. To fill these gaps, I employed prime-probe tasks wherein only retrieving one or more relationships between two stimuli or two responses from a prime trial can produce a relational sequence effect in a subsequent probe trial. Simultaneously varying perceptual and categorical relationships between two stimuli and spatial relationships between two nonhomologous finger responses on different hands (Experiment 1), only the second and third types of relationships (Experiment 2), or only the third type (Experiment 3), produced progressively smaller relational sequence effects, some of which lasted 5 s (Experiment 4). I conclude that bindings store multiple relationships, that retrieving such relationships can influence actions involving different effectors, and that such relationships are stored long enough to influence hierarchical representations of event and action sequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The self-prioritization effect (SPE) reflects the ability to efficiently discern self-relevant information. The self-voice emerges as a crucial identity marker because of its inherent self-relevance, and previous work has demonstrated the perceptual and cognitive advantages of the self-voice over other voices. Yet, the extent to which humans prioritize their self-voice when they hear it is because it is both self-similar ("That sounds like my voice") and self-generated ("I said that") remains understudied. Here, we examined the impacts of self-similarity and self-generation on the SPE through three experiments. In each experiment, participants learned associations between three voices and three identities (self, friend, and other), and then performed a task requiring them to perceptually match the heard voices with visual labels ("you," "friend," and "stranger"). Experiment 1 revealed an augmented SPE when the self-associated voice in the task was the participant's own self-similar and self-generated voice. In Experiment 2, the SPE was diminished when the self-voice was associated with the "stranger" label-here, the other-associated, but self-similar and self-generated, voice was similarly prioritized to a self-associated but unfamiliar voice. In Experiment 3, we investigated the role of self-generation, by associating the self with a self-similar but machine-generated audio clone of the participant. The SPE was again enhanced. In sum, we demonstrate that listeners show flexibility in their mental representation of self, where multiple sources of self-related information in the voice can be jointly and severally prioritized, independently of self-generation. These findings have implications for the application of self-voice cloning within voice-mediated technologies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This perspective considers the contribution of articles in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance to our understanding of mechanisms of control that coordinate component processes of perception and action into an effective task set. Foundations of this research lie in 20th-century debates about whether the fundamental challenge for control arises from capacity limits of serial, discrete processing stages or conflicts between parallel, continuous processes. Fortunes of the field have flourished in the 21st century with detailed studies of adaptive control supporting both flexible task switching and stable task performance in the face of distraction. Future directions are suggested regarding "macro" levels of control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In the present study, we tested the validity of an assumption of the guided search model that visual selection is a serial process. This assumption predicts that a top-down search, such as the distinct color search (DCS; e.g., finding a target color among a set of distractors each of a unique color), is a serial search. We examined the search mode of DCS with the multiple-target search paradigm, which uses target redundancy gains to distinguish parallel from serial searches. The data suggest that DCS is normally a parallel search (Experiment 1) but becomes a serial search if its start time is delayed (Experiment 2). One plausible account to reconcile these results is that visual selection is serial by default but, right after the presentation of the search array, there is a short-lived bottom-up mechanism that may enable parallel visual selection. Our data further show that this short-lived mechanism has a capacity limit between 4 and 8 (Experiment 3). The present findings suggest that the current mainstream theories of visual search need to be modified and the effect of temporal factors on the search mode should be taken into account. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Efficient behavior demands the ability to link multiple individual actions into coherent behavioral sequences, but the repetition of action sequences in the same context can result in behavior becoming inflexible and resistant to change. Proactive control and reward incentives exert beneficial effects on inhibitory control of single, isolated motor responses. However, it is unknown whether these factors can also enhance flexible switching of responses that are embedded within learned action sequences. In three experiments, I investigated the effects of proactive control and reward incentives on participants' ability to switch responses on a motor sequence learning task that elicits a high number of slips of action on sequence-change trials. Providing task-informative cues and reward incentives led to significant reductions in the number of action slips. However, slips of action continued to occur frequently despite the engagement of proactive control. Furthermore, there was no effect of cueing or reward incentives on the efficiency of response switching. These findings show that proactive control and reward incentives can enhance the participants' ability to make flexible adaptations to learned sequences of motor actions while also highlighting the limitations of such modulatory effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

For over a century, subjective timing judgement has been studied by timing events with respect to a rotating clock. Participants watched a rapidly rotating clock hand and reported the time of a designated event (e.g., a sound) by giving the clock hand position. However, the distribution of visual attention around the clock has been suggested as a key factor influencing the "time" report. Specifically, if visual attention is future oriented (ahead of the clock hand position at the time of event occurrence), the reported location is delayed relative to the actual location. Conversely, past-oriented visual attention will masquerade as an advance of subjective timing. Thus, a change in the distribution of visuospatial attention could contribute to the difference in timing reports as found in temporal binding. The present study experimentally manipulated the distribution of visuospatial attention to shift toward either past or future locations of the clock hand. Successful manipulations of attention shift indeed led to predicted directional changes in timing reports, which were associated with corresponding directional changes in temporal binding. Similar manipulations that did not lead to attention changes were not associated with any changes in temporal binding. Furthermore, the attention account was extended to causal binding by a machine action, without any human voluntary component, suggesting that the interaction between attention and timing judgement is domain general and independent of mechanisms specific of intentional action. Therefore, the current study demonstrated an attention component in timing reports. Attention should be considered when interpreting the timing results obtained with the clock method. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).