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

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).

One of the most popular tasks used to test statistical learning (SL) involves asking participants to identify which of two stimuli, a triplet presented during the previous familiarization phase versus a new sequence made of the same stimuli never presented together, is more familiar based on the stream presented before, that is, to perform a two-alternative forced-choice (2-AFC) task. Despite the widespread use of this task, it has come under increasing criticism in current cognitive research due to psychometric flaws. A common practice to improve SL measurement involves increasing the number of 2-AFC trials by presenting the same items (triplets and foils) several times during the test phase. This work aimed to directly analyze the effect that this practice entails by examining how the proportion of correct discriminations of three-syllable nonsense words presented during the familiarization phase of an auditory triplet embedded task changed as the number of 2-AFC item repetitions increased. We also tested whether this effect was modulated by the predictability of the "words" embedded in the auditory streams (high and low) and the conditions under which they were presented to participants (implicit and explicit). Results showed that 2-AFC item repetitions had indeed detrimental effects on SL measurement, as indexed by a significant decrease in the proportion of correct discriminations as the number of items repetitions increased, both in the 2-AFC task performed under implicit and explicit conditions, although, in the first case, only for low-predictable "words." These findings recommend caution when using this strategy to improve SL measurement. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The production effect refers to the finding that words read aloud are better remembered than those read silently. This pattern has most often been explained as arising from the incorporation of sensorimotor elements into the item representation at study, which could then be used to guide performance at later test. This theoretical framework views aloud items as being distinctive in relation to silent items, and thus the effect was thought to emerge only when production was manipulated within-subjects. This claim was later challenged, and a reliable (albeit smaller) between-subject production effect has since been shown in recognition memory. Across a series of meta-analyses, we extend this earlier work, replicating the between-subject production effect for recognition, and demonstrating no such effect for overall target recall. However, supporting recent theoretical claims, we further observed an interaction between the production effect and serial position within recall, such that a production effect was observed for late time points but not early time points (a similar, albeit smaller and noncredible trend was observed for recognition). Finally, we provide evidence that production reduces off-list intrusions. In summary, production has a reliable impact on recognition memory when manipulated between-subjects, but a more complex relationship with recall performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Research investigating how attentional demands impacts audiovisual (AV) integration has used a variety of multisensory tasks and procedures to manipulate attentional demands, leading to very differing results. Also, the secondary tasks used to increase attentional demands draw on the sensory modalities already being investigated; for example, a visual distracter task may be used to increase attentional demands in an audiovisual integration task. It is therefore not clear whether the additional task interfered with sensory processing or with audiovisual integration. We used a Colavita task where participants are asked to report the modality of auditory, visual, and audiovisual stimuli to investigate whether increasing attentional demands would impact audiovisual integration. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used a concurrent foot-tapping task to show that increasing attentional demands by having participants completing a secondary task in a different modality interfered with sensory processing but did not affect audiovisual integration. In Experiments 3 and 4, we manipulated attentional demands by having participants respond to all stimuli or only to target stimuli and showed that audiovisual integration was only impacted when targets were infrequent: When participants responded to specific targets amongst five different distracters, they no longer produced more "visual-only" responses than "auditory-only" responses. Whether attentional demands can impact audiovisual integration does not seem unitary and instead seems to depend on task-specific components. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Exposure to the natural, unsystematic within-person variability present across different encounters with a face (e.g., differences in emotion, makeup, and hairstyle) increases the likelihood the face will be recognized despite changes in appearance. In most studies, participants' memories are tested with a matching task administered shortly after exposure to a set of training images. In the real world, however, the time between when a face is first encountered and when it needs to be identified can be much longer. We hypothesized that in addition to facilitating acquisition of a representation of a face, unsystematic variability might also lead to better retention. To test this, in two experiments participants were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions: (a) no variability (still image), (b) systematic variability (changes in camera angle and pose in an otherwise constant setting), and (c) unsystematic variability (changes in hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and setting). Participants completed a sorting task 15 min and 5 days after viewing the target identity. Unsystematic variability led to better recognition than systematic variability, and this benefit was not reduced after a 5-day delay. Although participants expected their memory to be worse with a 5-day delay than with a 15-min delay, both overall accuracy and the advantage for training with unsystematic variability were virtually unaffected. The results suggest that exposure to unsystematic variability influences not only the initial acquisition of faces but also contributes to establishing a durable, flexible representation of faces in memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

To explore the strategy use in associative recognition, we constructed two word-triplet lists to represent the information networks in the real world featured by repetition, co-occurrence, and change. We predicted that word-triplet recognition would depend upon the co-occurrence of repeated context words and nonrepeated unique words within a list, and the word change between two lists. In Experiment 1, we compared the probability of accepting the triplet test trials that consisted of: (a) different numbers of word links between context words and unique words, and (b) context words from same or different lists, and we found that recognition judgments only relied on the retrieval of word links. In the follow-up experiments, we increased participants' awareness of list-membership cues by explicitly informing them of the word change between lists prior to triplet encoding (Experiment 2), and by using self-generated context words from two lifetime periods (Experiment 3). The results suggested that participants might use a strategy based on both the retrieval of word links and list-membership cues, but only if they perceived the between-list word change during encoding. The present research provides new evidence for Transition Theory using the approach of word-triplet recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Additive effects of Stimulus Quality and Word Frequency on RT in the context of lexical decision when the foils are orthographically legal were first reported more than 4 decades ago, and subsequently replicated numerous times. Two accounts are considered that make different a priori predictions when the foils are orthographically illegal. Yap and Balota's (2007) Familiarity Discrimination account predicts additive effects of these two factors on mean RT and across the RT distribution because it assumes a staged normalization process that deals with the effect of low Stimulus Quality; a subsequent process produces the effect of Word Frequency. In contrast, O'Malley and Besner's (2008) context-dependent thresholding/cascading account predicts an interaction because the use of illegal foils eliminates the need for thresholding at the letter level normally used to protect against lexical capture (identifying a nonword as a word) in experiments where Stimulus Quality is a factor, and hence the system reverts to processes in cascade. Critically, the present experiment yielded an interaction in which low-frequency words were more impaired by low Stimulus Quality than were high-frequency words. These data are inconsistent with the Familiarity Discrimination account as currently constituted, but consistent with a context-specific cascaded account. Further discussion considers how the Familiarity account may be modified so as to accommodate these data. Most generally, these data add to the view that processing is highly malleable (context dependent) rather than the received view, especially in regard to computational accounts, in which interactive-activation dynamics dominate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Corpus-based models of lexical strength have called into question the role of word frequency as an organizing principle of the lexicon, revealing that contextual and semantic diversity measures provide a closer fit to lexical behavior data (Adelman et al., 2006; Jones et al., 2012). Contextual diversity measures modify word frequency by ignoring word repetition in context, while semantic diversity measures consider the semantic consistency of contextual word occurrence. Recent research has shown that a better account of lexical organization data is provided by socially based measures of semantic diversity, which encode the communication patterns of individuals across discourses (Johns, 2021b). While most research on contextual diversity has focused on single words, recent corpus-based and experimental evidence suggests that an integral part of language use involves recurrent and more structurally complex units, such as multiword phrases and idioms. The aim of the present work was to determine if contextual and semantic diversity drive lexical organization at the level of multiword units (here, operationalized as idiomatic expressions), in addition to single words. To this end, we analyzed normative ratings of familiarity for 210 English idioms (Libben & Titone, 2008) using a set of contextual, semantic, and socially based diversity measures that were computed from a 55-billion word corpus of Reddit comments. The results confirm the superiority of diversity measures over frequency for multiword expressions, suggesting that multiword units, such as idiomatic phrases, show similar lexical organization dynamics as single words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Arousal affects our lives in a variety of ways; it can direct our attention to what is important in our environment and help us remember it more clearly. However, it remains unclear how arousal impacts short-term memory. Here we addressed this gap in our knowledge by contrasting four hypotheses: the Arousal Hypothesis, the Priority-Binding Hypothesis, the Rehearsal Hypothesis, and the Rapid-Processing Hypothesis. To distinguish between these competing accounts, we conducted two immediate serial recall experiments in which we manipulated arousal (low-arousal words vs. high-arousal words), list composition (pure vs. mixed), and presentation rate (200 ms vs. 1,000 ms). Overall, participants were better at recalling arousing information, regardless of list type or presentation rate. Our results provide clear evidence in favor of the arousal hypothesis which suggests that arousing information benefits from biologically induced enhancements at encoding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).