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

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).