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

Most infants learn their native language, or native languages, if they grow up in a multilingual environment, with amazing speed and apparent ease. Developmental research has taught us that many of these acquisitions begin in the first year of life and has started to specify early developmental trajectories across various languages. One issue that has caught early attention in the field is the question of when and how infants discriminate languages and start recognizing their native language. The present study reviews the literature on this issue, highlighting the influence of rhythm, pointing toward limitations and raising questions for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

When humans experience pain during a movement, they can develop fear and avoid this movement afterward; these responses likely play a role in chronic pain. Previous experiments have investigated the underlying learning mechanisms by pairing movements with painful stimuli but, usually, other visuospatial cues were concurrently presented during the learning context. Therefore, participants might have primarily avoided these visuospatial rather than the movement-related cues, potentially invalidating related interpretations of pain-induced movement avoidance. Here, we separated kinesthetic from visuospatial cues to investigate their respective contribution to avoidance. Participants used a hand-held robotic manipulandum and, during an acquisition phase, received painful stimuli during center-out movements. Pain stimuli could be avoided by choosing curved rather than direct movement trajectories. To distinguish the contribution of kinesthetic versus visuospatial cues we tested two generalization contexts: either participants executed novel movements that passed through the same location at which pain had previously been presented in the acquisition phase; or they were reseated and then executed identical movements as those that had been associated with pain, but without passing through the pain-associated spatial location. Avoidance generalization was comparable in both contexts, and remarkably, highly correlated between them. Our findings suggest that both visuospatial and kinesthetic cues available during acquisition were associated with pain and led to avoidance. Our research corroborates previous studies' findings that pain can become associated with movements. However, visuospatial cues also play a critical role for avoidance acquisition. Future studies should distinguish movement-related and space-related associations in pain-related avoidance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Investigating the efficacy of goal-setting strategies is critical in understanding how individuals regulate their behavior, particularly within cognitive tasks. The present study examines the impact of self-set versus experimenter-set goals and point incentives on performance across three experiments using two sustained attention tasks. In Experiment 1, we compared self-set and experimenter-set goals in the psychomotor vigilance task, hypothesizing that self-set goals would lead to better performance due to increased agency. No significant differences emerged in task performance between the two conditions. Participants who self-set their goals also set increasingly easier goal standards over time. Experiment 2 introduced a novel task paradigm "Green Means Go," modeled after the psychomotor vigilance task, and revealed faster reaction times in goal-setting conditions compared to a no-goal condition. Having a specific goal, either self-set or experimenter-set, was better for performance than having no goals. Experiment 3 allowed all participants to set their own goals and explored the influence of a points-based incentivization system on goal-setting tendencies. Those who received points set more difficult goals. Findings suggest that goal-setting mechanisms can enhance task performance and help reduce vigilance decrements, with potential implications for using goal-setting to elevate cognitive performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

People learn to associate external (predictive) cues (e.g., pictures; colors) with the attentional demands (e.g., the likelihood of conflict) that tend to accompany these cues. Such learning supports item-specific control, the reactive triggering of control settings associated with predictive cues (e.g., high level of focus triggered by a cue predicting high attentional demands). Item-specific control is assumed to operate with a degree of automaticity that allows for efficient processing even in the presence of competing demands. In three experiments, we investigated whether the unpredictable appearance of another salient stimulus (external distractor) presented along with the predictive cue would interfere with the triggering of item-specific control settings. The first two blocks of each experiment (i.e., acquisition phase) allowed participants to learn associations between different pictures and their likelihood of conflict in a picture-word Stroop task without external distraction. In the last two blocks (i.e., test phase), we introduced a random visual distractor (Experiments 1 and 2) or a combined visual and auditory distractor (i.e., multisensory; Experiment 3), with Experiment 2 additionally manipulating the timing of the distractor onset. Overall, the item-specific proportion congruence effect remained intact in both distractor-present and distractor-absent trials in all experiments, suggesting that item-specific control is robust to the presence of external distraction. We consider the theoretical implications of the results, with a focus on the automaticity of item-specific control and future investigations of potential boundary conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans are so sensitive to faces and face-like patterns in the environment that sometimes we mistakenly see a face where none exists-a common illusion called "face pareidolia." Examples of face pareidolia, "illusory faces," occur in everyday objects such as trees and food and contain two identities: an illusory face and an object. In this study, we studied illusory faces in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm over three experiments to explore the detectability of illusory faces under various task conditions and presentation speeds. The first experiment revealed the rapid and reliable detection of illusory faces even with only a glimpse, suggesting that face pareidolia arises from an error in rapidly detecting faces. Experiment 2 demonstrated that illusory facial structures within food items did not interfere with the recognition of the object's veridical identity, affirming that examples of face pareidolia maintain their objecthood. Experiment 3 directly compared behavioral responses to illusory faces under different task conditions. The data indicate that, with extended viewing time, the object identity dominates perception. From a behavioral perspective, the findings revealed that illusory faces have two distinct identities as both faces and objects that may be processed in parallel. Future research could explore the neural representation of these unique stimuli under varying circumstances and attentional demands, providing deeper insights into the encoding of visual stimuli for detection and recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The size adaptation aftereffect is a perceptual phenomenon in which a stimulus is perceived as smaller (or larger) after exposure to a larger (or smaller) stimulus. Given that size perception of body parts is computed with the highest accuracy for biological reasons, it is currently uncertain whether these are differently susceptible to illusory size misperceptions, such as those induced by adaptation paradigms. We induced the Uznadze illusion (i.e., a size-contrast adaptation aftereffect) to investigate its effect over stimuli depicting body parts (hands) or nonbody stimuli (i.e., abstract shapes). In three experiments, pairs of hands or nonhands were presented in separate sessions. After repeated exposure to two stimuli with different sizes, one larger and one smaller, participants judged the size of two new stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found a stronger effect for hands than nonhands. In Experiment 3, we enhanced the similarity between hand and nonhand stimuli, and we confirmed a stronger adaptation for hands, but only when participants performed the task with nonhand stimuli in the first session. These results indicate that visual hand stimuli would be more susceptible to size adaptation, suggesting that the identity and meaning attributed to the stimulus can influence the perceptual aftereffect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent empirical findings demonstrate that, in visual search for a target in an array of distractors, observers exploit information about object relations to increase search efficiency. We investigated how people searched for interacting people in a crowd, and how the eccentricity of the target affected this search (Experiments 1-3). Participants briefly viewed crowded arrays and had to search for an interacting dyad (two bodies face-to-face) among noninteracting dyads (back-to-back distractors), or vice versa, with the target presented in the attended central location or at a peripheral location. With central targets, we found a search asymmetry, whereby interacting people among noninteracting people were detected better than noninteracting people among interacting people. With peripheral targets, the advantage disappeared, or even tended to reverse in favor of noninteracting dyads. In Experiments 4-5, we asked whether the search asymmetry generalized to object pairs whose spatial relations did or did not form a functionally interacting set (a computer screen above a keyboard vs. a computer screen below a keyboard). We found no advantage for interacting over noninteracting sets either in central or peripheral locations for objects, but, if anything, evidence for the opposite effect. Thus, the effect of relational information on visual search is contingent on both stimulus category and attentional focus: The presentation of social interaction-but not of nonsocial interaction-at the attended (central) location readily captures an individual's attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

People integrate "what" and "where" information to recognize objects. Even when irrelevant or uninformative, location information can influence object identity judgments. When two sequential stationary objects occupy the same location, people are faster and more accurate to respond (sensitivity effects) and are more likely to judge the objects as identical (spatial congruency bias [SCB]). Other paradigms using moving objects highlight spatiotemporal contiguity's role in object processing. To bridge these gaps, we conducted two preregistered experiments asking how moving objects' locations (trajectories) affect identity judgments, both at fixation and across eye movements. In Experiment 1, subjects fixated a constant location and judged whether two sequentially presented moving stimuli were the same or different object identities. The first stimulus moved linearly from behind one occluder to another. The second stimulus reappeared (still moving) continuing along the same spatiotemporal trajectory (Predictable trajectory), or from the same initial location (Same Exact trajectory), or a different location (Different trajectory). We found the strongest sensitivity and SCB for Same Exact trajectory, with a smaller but significant SCB for Predictable trajectory. In Experiment 2, subjects performed a saccade during occlusion, revealing a robust SCB for Same Exact trajectory in retinotopic coordinates, with a smaller SCB for Predictable trajectory in both retinotopic and spatiotopic coordinates. Our findings strengthen prior reports that object-location binding is primarily retinotopic after both object and eye movements, but the presence of concurrent weak SCB effects along predictable and spatiotopic trajectories suggests more ecologically relevant information may also be incorporated when objects are moving more continuously. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

How do we find stuff that we are looking for? This question has been central to many a study in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. We describe how seminal studies in the journal eventually led to the hypothesis that top-down attentional guidance and visual working memory activation might be regarded as one and the same process. However, crucial tests revealed a more complex picture, raising important new questions about potential functional divisions within working memory, and how these should be characterized. This contributed to wider debates within the journal on what is the capacity of top-down attention, how we ignore stuff that is irrelevant, and how we switch between sensory and mnemonic representations-debates that still call for resolution. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Many studies have linked musical expertise with nonmusical abilities such as speech perception, memory, or executive functions. Far fewer have examined associations with basic auditory skills. Here, we asked whether psychoacoustic thresholds predict four aspects of musical expertise: music training, melody perception, rhythm perception, and self-reported musical abilities and behaviors (other than training). A total of 138 participants completed nine psychoacoustic tasks, as well as the Musical Ear Test (melody and rhythm subtests) and the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index. We also measured and controlled for demographics, general cognitive abilities, and personality traits. The psychoacoustic tasks assessed discrimination thresholds for pitch and temporal perception (both assessed with three tasks), and for timbre, intensity, and backward masking (each assessed with one task). Both music training and melody perception predicted better performance on the pitch-discrimination tasks. Rhythm perception was associated with better performance on several temporal and nontemporal tasks, although none had unique associations when the others were held constant. Self-reported musical abilities and behaviors were associated with performance on one of the temporal tasks: duration discrimination. The findings indicate that basic auditory skills correlate with individual differences in musical expertise, whether expertise is defined as music training or musical ability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).