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

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).

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).