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

Recent research on voluntary task switching indicates that people use different strategies to manage multitasking constraints. In this study, we conducted two experiments to investigate individual task selection behavior and provide empirical evidence for two theoretically derived strategies-local and global-aimed at balancing time-related costs in a self-organized task switching paradigm. We implemented a delay for the stimulus required for task repetition (i.e., stimulus-onset asynchrony [SOA]), which increased with each consecutive repetition until a task switch reset the SOA. Thus, repeating a task required waiting, while switching incurred performance costs. We examined individual waiting times at which participants chose to switch tasks (switch SOA) and their task performance (switch costs) across conditions. Results revealed that some participants had switch SOAs similar to their switch costs, consistent with a local strategy. Others showed considerably smaller switch SOAs compared to their switch costs, aligning with the global strategy. These individuals likely accounted for the fact that task switching in this paradigm reduces waiting times in subsequent trials. Importantly, our visual observations of behavioral patterns were confirmed using the expectation-maximization method, a technique sometimes applied in machine learning, providing statistical support for the existence of these two strategies. Overall, the findings suggest that individuals differ in their preferred task selection strategies, with preferences remaining relatively stable across varying experimental conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Although the experiments and findings of Lidji et al. (2007) and Rusconi et al. (2006) are very similar, there is a detail in Lidji and colleagues' work with important implications for embodied cognition research. Specifically, Lidji et al. suggest that the vertical Spatial-Pitch Association of Response Codes effect is modulated by hand position and is stronger in musicians, particularly pianists. As the authors proposed, this is likely due to the influence of the keyboard structure, hence the article's title, "A Piano in the Head." In my view, this is a key finding of Lidji et al.'s study that is worth further investigation and discussion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Effective behavior requires that we respond to the environment rapidly and appropriately. Our visual system can extract a range of information from scenes within tens of milliseconds. The timing of the first eye movement, therefore, may reveal key aspects of the mechanisms underlying rapid extraction and utilization of information during this essential, initial processing, yet we lack theoretical understanding of these mechanisms. Across several data sets, this study shows differences in the timing of the first saccade. Modeling individual data sets, we tested whether the decision mechanism for the first saccade is different from that for subsequent saccades. We found that when viewing started from the scene center, the time course of the first saccadic decision was influenced by low-level features in peripheral vision. However, when viewing started noncentrally, and was aligned more predictably with informative content, low- and high-level information in both foveal and peripheral vision was accumulated and evaluated in the decision process. These findings suggest a common mechanism for initial and later processing of the scene, but with priorities for weighting the input that depend on expectations about foveal content at scene onset. This study extends existing theoretical frameworks for decision making in scene viewing to encompass initial scene processing and expectation-based flexibility in information weighting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Face familiarity is thought to alter distances between representations in psychological "face space," resulting in substantial improvements in recognition. However, the underlying changes are not well understood. In Experiment 1 (n = 192), we investigated the effect of familiarity based on everyday exposure to celebrities. Participants judged the similarity of pairs of face photographs, and we found that greater familiarity increased perceived similarity for two images of the same person, while decreasing similarity for two images depicting different people. In Experiment 2 (n = 157), familiarity was manipulated through the learning of new identities by watching 5-min video clips. Again, when judging the similarity of image pairs, familiarity increased the perceived similarity of images of the same person, while having the opposite effect on images depicting different people. In Experiment 3, we trained a computational model with images of 333 different identities (totaling 3,949 photographs) and manipulated its familiarity with two new identities. The changes in distances between novel images of these identities (a proxy for similarity) replicated our behavioral findings. Overall, we build upon recent evidence by demonstrating two transformations through which familiarity alters representational space to likely benefit face perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Abrupt onsets are commonly assumed to be a class of stimuli with high physical salience. This high salience has been used to explain past findings showing abrupt onsets captured attention more strongly compared to other types of distractors, such as color singletons. However, there has been a lack of consensus about the definition and measurement of physical salience. As a result, it is unclear if abrupt onsets capture attention more strongly simply because they are more salient than other types of stimuli. Using a psychophysical technique recently developed by Stilwell et al. (2023), we explicitly quantified the level of physical salience of abrupt onsets, color singletons, and color singleton onsets. Surprisingly, abrupt onsets were the least salient among the three types of items examined. Despite this, only abrupt onsets captured attention in a subsequent visual search task, whereas color singletons and color singleton onsets were both suppressed. Thus, abrupt onsets tend to capture attention more strongly than color singletons, but this is not apparently because of high physical salience. Indeed, high physical salience may make an object easier to suppress during visual search. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This perspective article highlights a few landmark music priming studies published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance over the past 4 decades. Together, these studies explore the potential mechanisms responsible for melodic and harmonic priming effects (sensory vs. cognitive), the hierarchical depth of the music processor (facilitation vs. inhibition), and the type of priming effects obtained (semantic vs. discourse). I then argue that the priming paradigm still has the potential to address some of the field's most longstanding questions, particularly as pertains to musical traditions and/or participant populations from beyond the west. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Standard investigations of contextual facilitation typically use invariant distractor arrangements predicting a fixed target location. In the real world, however, invariant spatial contexts are not always predictive. We examined how facilitation is influenced by uncertainty in target location prediction: comparing conditions where old contexts were 100% versus minimally (3%) predictive (Experiment 1), 80% predictive (20% nonpredictive) versus 20% predictive (Experiment 2), or a trial-wise mixed condition where 80% predicted a fixed location and 20% a random location (Experiment 3). New-context displays with matching target-location probabilities served as baselines. The results revealed both fully predictive and minimally predictive old contexts to expedite the search, but facilitation was larger for the former (Experiment 1). This held even when the display types were randomly intermixed at an 80:20 cross-trial uncertainty ratio (Experiment 3). However, when old displays predicted the target location in 80% of trials (Experiment 2), facilitation dropped to the level of minimally predictive displays. This indicates only fully predictive old displays support acquiring contextual cues that guide attention. The facilitation seen with 80% predictive contexts likely involves a less efficient process: singling out the target by context suppression. These findings can be incorporated into a neural-network model of context effects: When distractor representations are suppressed, the formation of facilitative links between distractor representations and the target location on the priority map becomes unlikely. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Research on multitasking has adopted a diverse range of simple paradigms covering concurrent multitasking and task-switching scenarios, alongside more complex paradigms simulating real-life situations more closely. Investigating the relationships among them is essential for uncovering shared cognitive mechanisms, advancing a unified theory of multitasking, and exploring the link of multitasking to other cognitive functions. We adopted an individual-difference approach to examine the unity and separability of multitasking ability. Nine paradigms were completed by 224 university students, with three paradigms each for concurrent multitasking, task switching, and complex multitasking. Confirmatory factor analyses showed both general and specific factors required to capture individual differences in performance. Specifically, individual differences in task switching performance can be explained by a general ability shared with the other two types of paradigms, whereas both general and specific abilities were involved in concurrent multitasking and complex multitasking. These results help reconcile conflicting findings in previous studies of group differences in multitasking and highlight the limitation in the generalizability of claims based solely on performance in a single paradigm. Given the multifaceted nature of multitasking, it is recommended that assessment and intervention of multitasking encompass a comprehensive array of paradigm types to cover both general and specific abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

When looking for a specific object in the environment, the visual system guides attention toward objects in the scene that contain features that are similar to those of the object in mind, also known as the target template. However, the precise relation between search performance and perceptual similarity (between objects in the scene and the target template) has not been properly characterized. Recently, target-contrast signal theory proposed an explicit relationship linking search performance to the concept of top-down "target-distractor contrast," with contrast being a measure of the amount of perceptual evidence that allows peripheral processing to differentiate target from distractors. We used a well-characterized color space to investigate the relationship between target-distractor similarity and search efficiency. We compared three different models relating color distance to search performance: the universal law of generalization, and two implementations of target-contrast signal theory. In the first, target-distractor distance indexes the target-distractor contrast, while the second uses the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) between the neuronal responses to the attended color and the distractor color to index target-distractor contrast. When the target color is known but the distractor color cannot be anticipated, perceptual distance best predicts performance (Experiments 1, 2A, and 2B). When target and distractor colors repeat from trial to trial, the SNR measure best captures performance (Experiments 3A and 3B). Finally, when neither the target nor the distractor color is known to observers, performance deteriorates significantly and is no longer indexed by either of these two measures of target-distractor contrast (Experiment 4). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Oddball paradigms involve the presentation of sequences of repeated events that are broken by a novel "oddball." These have been used to examine the neural and perceptual consequences of predictive processes in the brain. Two intriguing perceptual findings are that people are more sensitive to visual content embedded in oddballs and that people perceive oddballs as longer lasting-relative to repeated events. Recent investigations have looked at the possibility that fluctuations in attention during presentation sequences might impact perception though. Because the number of repeated "standards" (that do not require a behavioral judgment) seen before a "test" (which can require a behavioral judgment) is often circumscribed, as more standards are encountered, the probability of a further standard decreases, whereas the probability of a test increases. So, later tests can be anticipated, whereas early tests are improbable. It has been shown that when all tests can be anticipated, and all tests are equally likely to be a further repeated standard or an oddball, oddballs still seem longer lasting than repeats. Here we show that the same conditions undermine the visual acuity advantage for oddball content. Our experiment clarifies that this increase in acuity for oddballs results from a degradation of acuity to repeat tests that cannot be anticipated. We found that people's pupils tended to dilate as they expected a test, consistent with top-down attention scaling with test probability. In a second experiment, we replicated the time perception difference and the lack of visual acuity difference under the same experimental conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).