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

The human brain is fundamentally a social brain, with its perceptual and cognitive systems evolved to support a diverse set of processes aimed at enabling our complex social function. And while in the last decades the field has advanced considerably in understanding the mechanisms by which the perceptual and cognitive faculties support human social behaviour, there remains a lack of knowledge about how social information is communicated between individuals. In my work, I have studied nonverbal visual social signalling via faces and eyes. In this article, I summarize the results from three lines of my research which show that (a) limiting face visibility decreases its social value, (b) eyes transmit key social messages, and (c) group size modulates social messages. Together, these data show that visual signals from faces and eyes convey complex social messages and represent an important vehicle for the communication of social information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined the human ability to encode and utilize local and global uncertainty information during a navigational task. Participants were tasked with navigating a virtual maze in which wall locations were obscured. Local cues and a global direction provided guidance. The validities of the global and local cues were separately and jointly varied across the two experiments. The results demonstrated that participants effectively utilized both global and local cues for navigation with a stronger reliance on local cues and a heightened precision in estimating their reliability. Our findings suggest that the representation of uncertainty for proximate events can be dissociated from that of distal events. Furthermore, humans effectively integrate both forms of information when making decisions during navigation tasks. This research advances our understanding of uncertainty processing and its implications for decision making in complex environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans have a proclivity for storytelling and narration. Although a lot of attention in the field of episodic memory focuses on the mnemonic content of narratives, memory narratives are not just for conveying the past. Instead, narratives provide a vehicle for meaning-making, social connection, and other complex facets of human cognition and thinking. This short reflection piece discusses the importance of narratives in these diverse realms. In addition, it briefly touches on the role of memory narration in the modern digital era. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The conflict monitoring theory posits that the simultaneous activation of incompatible responses in the current trial leads to response conflict. Conflict occurrence signals to enhance attention to the target stimulus, reduce attention to distracting stimuli, and ultimately lead to conflict adaptation (i.e., reduced interference effect after conflict trials compared to nonconflict trials). However, this theory does not explicitly assume whether the involvement of response execution is necessary in the process of conflict occurrence. Research on the negative emotion theory suggests that even in the absence of response execution, incompatible response representations can induce conflict. Our present study aimed to provide direct behavioural evidence regarding whether conflict activated without response execution is sufficient to trigger conflict adaptation. In a word-colour Stroop task, this study employed the LOOK-to-DO transition design, in which participants refrained from responding in half of the trials (LOOK trials) and responded with key presses in the other half (DO trials). Across three experiments, we controlled for feature integration and contingency learning and manipulated the stimulus presentation duration in the previous trial. The results indicated a significant conflict adaptation effect in reaction time when the stimulus presentation duration was shorter in the previous trial. This finding suggested that in a confounding-minimal design with no response execution in the previous trial, conflict triggers control adjustments and leads to conflict adaptation. This finding aligns with and further elaborates on the original conflict monitoring theory by demonstrating that response execution is not a necessary condition for the generation of response conflict. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Experiential theories of cognition propose that the external environment shapes cognitive processing, shifting emphasis from internal mechanisms to the learning of environmental structure. Computational modelling, particularly distributional models of lexical semantics (e.g., Landauer & Dumais, 1997) and models of lexical organization (e.g., Johns, 2021a), exemplifies this, highlights the influence of language experience on cognitive representations. While these models have been successful, comparatively less attention has been paid to the training materials used to train these models. Recent research has explored the role of social/communicatively oriented training materials on models of lexical semantics and organization (Johns, 2021a, 2021b, 2023, 2024), introducing discourse- and user-centred text training materials. However, determining the optimal training materials for these two model types remains an open question. This article addresses this problem by using experiential optimization (Johns, Jones, & Mewhort, 2019), which selects the materials that maximize model performance. This study will use experiential optimization to compare user-based and discourse-based corpora in optimizing models of lexical organization and semantics, offering insight into pathways towards integrating cognitive models in these areas. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

In this article, I describe my academic journey as a Canadian researcher in the field of mathematical cognition. The article is a version of the talk I gave when I was presented with the Donald O. Hebb Award from the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science in July 2023 at the University of Guelph. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

There is an ongoing debate among visual attention researchers about whether top-down processes contribute to pop-out search. In the present study, we describe a new method to orthogonally manipulate top-down preparation and feature priming in a pop-out search task. On each trial, participants viewed a single-item (randomly blue or orange) followed by a pop-out search display (randomly blue target with orange distractors, or vice versa). Preparation was induced by instructing participants to respond to the single-item if it was a particular colour and to ignore it otherwise-but to respond to the odd-coloured target in all following pop-out search displays. This method allowed us to examine whether top-down preparation for the single-item influenced subsequent pop-out search. Our results revealed a large effect of preparation for the single-item on subsequent search response times. We discuss this result in relation to the interplay between top-down control and selection history effects in pop-out visual search. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Localisation of simple stimuli such as angle vertices may contribute to a plethora of illusory effects. We focus on the Müller-Lyer illusion in an attempt to measure and characterise a more elementary effect that may contribute to the magnitude of said illusion. Perceived location error of angle vertices (a single set of Müller-Lyer fins) and arcs in a 2D plane was measured with the aim to provide clarification of ambiguous results from studies of angle localisation and expand the results to other types of stimuli. In three experiments, we utilised the method of constant stimuli in order to determine perceived locations of angle vertices (Experiments 1 and 2) as well as circular and elliptical arcs (Experiment 3). The results show significant distortions of perceived compared to objective vertex locations (all effect sizes d > 1.01, p < .001). Experiment 2 revealed strong effects of angle size and fin length on localisation error. Mislocalization was larger for more acute angles and longer angle fins (both η_p² = .43, p < .001). In Experiment 3, localisation errors were larger for longer arcs (η_p² = .19, p = .001) irrespective of shape (circular or elliptical). We discuss the effect in the context of modern trends in research of the Müller-Lyer illusion as well as the widely popular centroid theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

One of the most fundamental distinctions in cognitive psychology is between processing that is "controlled" and processing that is "automatic." The widely held automatic processing account of visual word identification asserts that, among other characteristics, the presentation of a well-formed letter string triggers sublexical, lexical, and semantic activation in the absence of any intention to do so. Instead, the role of intention is seen as independent of stimulus identification and as restricted to selection for action using the products of identification (e.g., braking in response to a sign saying "BRIDGE OUT"). We consider four paradigms with respect to the role of an intention-defined here as a "task set" indicating how to perform in the current situation-when identifying single well-formed letter strings. Contrary to the received automaticity view, the literature regarding each of these paradigms demonstrates that the relation between an intention and stimulus identification is constrained in multiple ways, many of which are not well understood at present. One thing is clear: There is no simple relation between an intention, in the form of a task set, and stimulus identification. Automatic processing of words, if this indeed ever occurs, certainly is not a system default. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Ambiguity is ubiquitous in language; lexical ambiguity refers to instances where a single word has multiple meanings. The current investigation examined homonyms, words that have the same orthography and pronunciation in English but multiple meanings (e.g., BANK, meaning "financial institution" or "river's edge"). The processing of homonyms requires the engagement of executive control processes, for example, to select the appropriate meaning of the homonym while reducing interference from other meanings. Executive function processes are known to change over the lifespan and may be impacted by experiential factors such as bilingualism. The present study uses event-related brain potentials as an index of lexical access to examine whether bilingualism influences homonym processing in older adults. The results indicate that patterns of lexical access differ as a function of bilingual status in older adults and compared to young adults, suggesting that language experience may moderate language processing in both young and older adults, at least in situations where language processing is demanding on executive function, such as in the processing of homonyms. Importantly, we show that older bilinguals show a somewhat similar pattern of ambiguity processing as their younger counterparts, while age differences were observed in monolinguals when comparing across studies. This suggests that bilingual language experience may have a mitigating impact on age-related changes in ambiguity processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).