Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology-Revue Canadienne De Psychologie Experimentale最新文献

Elucidating the effects of negative emotion on eyewitness memory is an important part of understanding how witnesses remember and report criminal events. Extant research in this area has been inconsistent in its methodology and conclusions, thus warranting further empirical investigation. In the current experiment, participants (N = 204) viewed either a Negative or Neutral version of a video of a staged social interaction and had their memory assessed either immediately or 1 week later. Memory assessment consisted of both recall and recognition (lineup identification) components. The Negative video group showed enhanced recall for some aspects of the video compared to the Neutral group, but no enhancement (or impairment) of lineup identification performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

There is converging evidence that readers monitor text coherence and consistency by immediate, nonstrategic processes of validation. The literature also offers numerous instances of deficient validation. A prominent example of the latter is that understanders tend to overlook discourse anomalies that are embedded in given (presupposed) sentence information. However, we previously documented reading time "consistency effects" (O'Brien & Albrecht, 1992) that exposed readers' sensitivity to both given and new text discrepancies in numerous declarative syntactic constructions (Singer et al., 2017; Singer & Spear, 2020). Five new experiments addressed these phenomena with reference to constructions regularly shown to mask discourse inconsistencies: namely, interrogatives. In striking contrast with declaratives, five interrogative conditions in four experiments yielded no significant consistency effect. Experiments 2-4 documented coincident consistency effects with declarative but not interrogative constructions. A fifth experiment denied that the interrogative-construction findings resulted from readers' lack of knowledge about critical concepts. The cognitive-scientific linguistic construct of verb resolutivity offers a possible basis for these outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention allocation to positive and negative stimuli differs. For example, the flanker-interference asymmetry describes a pattern of results on flanker tasks using emotional stimuli, where a typical flanker-interference effect is observed for positive targets but not for negative targets. There are two dominant explanations for the flanker-interference asymmetry. According to the emotion-first explanation, negative targets are preferentially processed to facilitate the processing of potentially threatening stimuli. In contrast, feature-first explanations argue that the asymmetry results from differences in perceptual complexity between positive and negative stimuli. Three experiments used schematic emotional faces in a flanker task to directly compare these explanations. To manipulate the perceptual complexity of the stimuli, an enclosing circle was present on half of the trials. In all three experiments, reaction times showed the expected flanker-interference asymmetry, but the pattern was not influenced by the presence of the circle. However, event-related potentials showed that perceptual complexity influenced both the structural encoding and evaluative processing of the faces in the N170 and P3b time windows. These results suggest that both perceptual complexity and emotional valence play an important role in the processing of schematic emotional faces, but that emotional valence may have a stronger effect at evaluative stages of processing. Other findings show that the enclosing circle may alter the perceived emotional expression of neutral faces. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Healthy ageing is characterized by changes in several cognitive functions, including episodic memory and inhibition. While the age-related decrease in the ability to inhibit irrelevant stimuli is often associated with lower performance, especially in episodic memory, some studies have highlighted the boosting effect of distraction in several tasks in older adults, including episodic memory tasks related to recollection. The aim of this article is to review and compare previous studies according to specific study features and to consider the results in light of the dual-process model of recollection and familiarity that were used by the authors of the reviewed articles. This work led to the identification of two major points of comparison between the studies: the timeline of the distraction intervention and the implicit nature of the processes at play, which both allowed for different implications to the relationship with recollection. The use of distraction in memory tasks can enhance episodic memory, and especially recollective processes, due to specific actions at encoding and retrieval. These findings open the door to further investigations but also raise several questions concerning the role of implicit processes and the negative impact of distraction, for example. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Theories of multimorphemic word recognition generally posit that constituent representations are involved in accessing the whole multimorphemic word. Gagné et al. (2018) found that pseudoconstituents and constituents become available when processing pseudocompound and compound masked primes (e.g., sea is activated in season and seabird). Across four experiments, we examine whether readers access the semantic information of such pseudoconstituents and constituents. Experiments 1 and 2 show that masked pseudocompound and compound primes do not influence lexical decision responses to semantic associates of their pseudoconstituents or constituents (e.g., seabird and season do not influence processing of ocean, an associate of sea). Experiments 3 and 4 show that an associate of the first constituent does not influence processing of the pseudocompound but does facilitate processing of the compound (e.g., ocean facilitates processing of seabird but not of season). While compounds have been found to be sensitive to the activation of their constituents via semantic priming (e.g., El-Bialy et al., 2013; Sandra, 1990), our findings suggest that primarily morphological, rather than semantic, activation of the constituents occurs in a masked priming paradigm. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Same-Different task presents two stimuli in close succession and participants must indicate whether they are completely identical or if there are any attributes that differ. While the task is simple, its results have proven difficult to explain. Notably, response times are characterized by a fast-same effect whereby Same responses are faster than Different responses even though identical stimuli should be exhaustively processed to be accurate. Herein, we examine a little more than a quarter million response times (N = 255,744) obtained from 327 participants who participated in one of 14 variants of the task involving minor changes in the stimuli or their durations. We performed distribution fitting and analyzed estimated parameters stemming from the ex-Gaussian, lognormal, and Weibull distributions to infer the cognitive processing characteristics underlying this task. The results exclude serial processing of the stimuli and do not support dual-route processing. The fast-same effect appears only through a shift of the entire response time distributions, a feature impossible to detect solely with mean response time analyses. An attention-modulated process driven by entropy may be the most adequate model of the fast-same effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

In rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), accurate report of a critical item (C2) declines when an earlier critical item (C1) is identical rather than unrelated. The most prominent theories of this phenomenon of repetition blindness (RB) concern the effects of processing C1 on later processing of C2. However, characteristics of distractor items between C1 and C2 strongly moderate RB, suggesting that items may compete for registration as separate events. We investigated interitem competition by manipulating the word frequency of distractors and C2s, and introducing novel manipulations of C1 and distractor duration. The frequency manipulations affected overall performance but not the size of RB; C2 reporting accuracy improved when distractors were of higher frequency and, contrary to typical results in lexical tasks, when C2s were of lower frequency. These results align with a competition model in which lower frequency words have an advantage. C1 duration had no significant effects on performance. A new finding was that increasing distractor duration had no main effect on performance but did increase the size of RB. The difficulty of registering a repeated C2 in memory under time pressure is exacerbated by the competitive effects of a temporally adjacent word of longer duration. The findings add to other evidence that interitem competition is important in RB and in processing of rapid visual sequences more generally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology (CJEP) publishes rigorous experimental psychology research through a fair and constructive review process. CJEP is supported and managed by the Canadian Psychological Association, who partners with the American Psychological Association with respect to journal production. CJEP represents world class research communities that affiliate with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Sciences (CPA), and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences section of CPA. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigated young children's ability to draw psychological and nonpsychological inferences during reading comprehension. Whereas nonpsychological inferences require the retrieval of general background knowledge, psychological inferences rely on more contextualised knowledge relating to mental states. Based on several pretests, children, who were able to read fluently, aged 7-8 years (second graders; n = 42) and 8-9 years (third graders; n = 46) were assigned to either a skilled comprehenders group or a less skilled comprehenders group, based on their listening comprehension. They were then given short stories to read, followed by comprehension questions. Some questions required the drawing of psychological or nonpsychological inferences. Generalized linear mixed models revealed that (a) psychological inferences were more difficult to generate than nonpsychological inferences for all the children, skilled and less skilled comprehenders alike, (b) both types of inference skills (psychological and nonpsychological) were associated with similar improvements as grade level increased, and (c) less skilled comprehenders had greater difficulty than skilled comprehenders generating psychological and nonpsychological inferences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

In task selection, a verbal cue is interpreted as more meaningful, and thus, it can elicit a faster response than an arbitrary cue. To investigate the effect of verbal cues on activating target task information, we combined an eye-tracking technique with a task-switching paradigm using an arbitrary cue and a type of verbal cue-a word cue with a short cue-target interval (CTI) and long CTI. We measured stimulus-selection time (time to orienting a stimulus) and postselection response time (time to respond to a stimulus after orienting to the stimulus) and separately examined the differential effect of cue types on these divided response times. Consequently, we found that word cues reduced stimulus-selection time and postselection response time compared with arbitrary sign cues in both the long and short CTI conditions. The results suggest that verbal cues activate task information more quickly, including a stimulus dimension and stimulus-response rule, than arbitrary cues. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).