Anna-Lena Schubert, Christoph Löffler, Henrike M Jungeblut, Mareike J Hülsemann
{"title":"Trait characteristics of midfrontal theta connectivity as a neurocognitive measure of cognitive control and its relation to general cognitive abilities.","authors":"Anna-Lena Schubert, Christoph Löffler, Henrike M Jungeblut, Mareike J Hülsemann","doi":"10.1037/xge0001780","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001780","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Understanding the neurocognitive basis of cognitive control and its relationship with general cognitive ability is a key challenge in individual differences research. This study investigates midfrontal theta connectivity as a neurocognitive marker for individual differences in cognitive control. Using electroencephalography, we examined midfrontal global theta connectivity across three distinct cognitive control tasks in 148 participants. Our findings reveal that midfrontal theta connectivity can be modeled as a trait-like latent variable, indicating its consistency across tasks and stability over time. However, the reliability of the observed measures was found to be low to moderate, suggesting substantial measurement error. We also replicated previous results, finding a strong correlation (<i>r</i> = 0.64) between midfrontal theta connectivity and cognitive abilities, especially during higher order stages of information processing. We disentangled the specific cognitive processes contributing to this relationship by employing a task-cueing paradigm with distinct cue and target intervals. The results indicated that only theta connectivity during response-related processes, not during cue-evoked task-set reconfiguration, correlated with cognitive abilities. These insights significantly advance theoretical models of intelligence, highlighting the critical role of specific aspects of cognitive control in cognitive abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2201-2219"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144127877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, M Asher Lawson, Shai Davidai, Richard P Larrick, B Keith Payne
{"title":"Income inequality depresses support for higher minimum wages.","authors":"Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, M Asher Lawson, Shai Davidai, Richard P Larrick, B Keith Payne","doi":"10.1037/xge0001772","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001772","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The minimum wage can be an effective policy tool for mitigating economic inequality, but public demand for higher minimum wages has not kept up with rising levels of income disparities. In our first study using protest attendance data over a six-and-a-half-year period in the United States (<i>N</i> = 130,562), we find evidence that higher economic inequality was associated with fewer and less well-attended protests targeted at changing economic conditions and raising minimum wages. We corroborate this finding across eight laboratory experiments (<i>N</i> = 7,286)-including a U.S. nationally representative sample-finding causal evidence that higher levels of income inequality decrease support for higher minimum wages. We propose that this decreased support results from a psychological tendency to engage in \"is-to-ought\" reasoning, where individuals use information about how much people actually earn to determine how much they <i>should</i> earn. We conclude by introducing an intervention to mitigate the effects of this phenomenon and discuss implications for policy communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2138-2157"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144181126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gabriela Fernández-Miranda, Matthew Stanley, Samuel Murray, Leonard Faul, Felipe De Brigard
{"title":"The emotional impact of forgiveness on autobiographical memories of past wrongdoings.","authors":"Gabriela Fernández-Miranda, Matthew Stanley, Samuel Murray, Leonard Faul, Felipe De Brigard","doi":"10.1037/xge0001787","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001787","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Victims of wrongdoing sometimes forgive to repair relationships with the wrongdoer. But how does forgiveness do this? Some have argued that forgiveness changes the way the wrongdoing is remembered. We empirically adjudicate two competing accounts of how forgiveness is related to memory. The <i>episodic fading</i> account states that forgiveness alters both the episodic <i>and</i> the affective characteristics of autobiographical memories of being wronged. By contrast, the <i>emotional fading</i> account states that forgiveness mainly alters the affective characteristics of autobiographical memories of being wronged. While the episodic fading account predicts that forgiveness is associated with less vivid and detailed memories of being wronged, the emotional fading account predicts that forgiveness need not be associated with diminished episodic characteristics. Across four studies (<i>N</i> = 1,479, after exclusions), we found consistent support for the emotional fading account but not for the episodic fading account. In a pilot study and in Study 1, we found that forgiven wrongs were rated as less affectively intense and less negatively valenced compared to unforgiven wrongs, while there was no difference in the episodic characteristics of the memories. We replicated this finding in Study 2 and additionally found that the valence and intensity of forgiven wrongs are different for the victims of wrongdoings compared to perpetrators. Finally, in Study 3, we found once again different ratings of intensity and valence for forgiven relative to not forgiven wrongs and, additionally, we found that the affective characteristics of remembered forgiven wrongs were associated with diminished tendencies toward seeking revenge and avoiding the wrongdoer along with amplified benevolence toward the wrongdoer. In sum, memories of forgiven wrongs consistently differed in their affective, but not their episodic, characteristics relative to memories of wrongdoings that were not forgiven. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2179-2200"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144127870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daria Goriachun, Kristof Strijkers, Núria Gala, Johannes C Ziegler
{"title":"The role of social and emotional experience in representing abstract words.","authors":"Daria Goriachun, Kristof Strijkers, Núria Gala, Johannes C Ziegler","doi":"10.1037/xge0001771","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001771","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>words challenge embodied cognition theories due to their lack of direct connections to the sensory and bodily world. To address this, some theories propose that abstract words are represented through emotional and social information. We tested these theories across seven experiments using semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks in two languages. In Experiment 1, we investigated the effects of emotional valence, socialness and sensory experience in a large-scale study using a lexical decision task. We found that positive valence and socialness facilitates word recognition. In Experiment 2, we explored socialness and its interaction with concreteness in two semantic categorization tasks in English and French. While concreteness consistently facilitated word recognition, the effects of socialness varied across languages. In Experiment 3, we used the same tasks to investigate the effects of emotional valence, showing that valence facilitated abstract word recognition in both languages, but only if the task required decisions about valence. In Experiments 4-7, we primed lexical decision and semantic categorization of target words by social or affective primes. Affective priming enhanced the valence effect, whereas socialness priming did not enhance the socialness effects. Overall, our data provide evidence that emotional valence plays a strategic role in the processing of abstract words, while socialness does not seem to influence the processing of abstract words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2076-2104"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144127874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resource bounds on mental simulations: Evidence from a liquid-reasoning task.","authors":"YingQiao Wang, Tomer D Ullman","doi":"10.1037/xge0001792","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001792","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>People are able to reason about the physical dynamics of everyday objects. Bute there are theoretical disagreements about the computations that underlie this ability. One proposal is that people are running an approximate mental simulation of their environment. However, such a simulation must be limited in its resources. We applied the notion of a resource-bound simulation to a task of reasoning about liquids and showed that people's changing behavior can be explained by an approximate simulation that hits a resource limit after some time elapses. In Experiments 1 and 2, people performed well on tasks that asked them to estimate the time-to-fill and water level of different containers when filled over short periods of time (1-7 s). Experiment 3 shows systematic biases in visual volume estimation, which further strengthens the proposal that people are using a simulation to solve the first two experiments. Experiment 4 extends the reasoning time for the time-to-fill task and shows the existence of a \"switch point,\" as expected from a resource-bound simulation model. The model also accounts for individual differences: People who perform worse on a digit-span task have an earlier switch point. Our work argues for the theoretical proposal that people are using mental simulations to reason about intuitive physics but further informs the suggestion that these simulations are limited in resources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2105-2124"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144248171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Greta Tuckute, Kyle Mahowald, Phillip Isola, Aude Oliva, Edward Gibson, Evelina Fedorenko
{"title":"Intrinsically memorable words have unique associations with their meanings.","authors":"Greta Tuckute, Kyle Mahowald, Phillip Isola, Aude Oliva, Edward Gibson, Evelina Fedorenko","doi":"10.1037/xge0001742","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001742","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>What makes a word memorable? An important claim from past work is that words are encoded by their meanings and not their forms. If true, then, following rational analysis, memorable words should uniquely pick out a particular meaning, which means they should have few or no synonyms, and they should be unambiguous. Across two large-scale recognition-memory experiments (2,222 target words and > 600 participants each, plus 3,780 participants for the norming experiments), we found that memory performance is overall high, and some words are consistently remembered better than others. Critically, the most memorable words indeed have a one-to-one relationship with their meanings-with number of synonyms being a stronger contributor than number of meanings-and number of synonyms outperforms other predictors (such as imageability, frequency, or contextual diversity) of memorability that have been proposed in the past. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2059-2075"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143752805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The role of emotional content in segmenting naturalistic videos into events.","authors":"Ruiyi Chen, Khena M Swallow","doi":"10.1037/xge0001783","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001783","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The human mind automatically divides continuous experience into meaningful events <i>(event segmentation</i>). Despite abundant evidence that some kinds of situation changes (e.g., action, goal, or location changes) contribute to event segmentation, a component of experience that is critical for understanding and predicting others' behavior, emotion, is rarely investigated. In two experiments, we sought to establish that viewers can track emotion changes while viewing naturalistic videos and that these changes contribute to event segmentation. Participants watched commercial film excerpts while identifying either emotion changes or <i>event boundaries</i> (moments that separate two events) of different grains (Experiment 1: neutral grain; Experiment 2: fine grain or coarse grain). We found that participants agreed with each other about when emotion changes occurred in the videos, demonstrating that viewers are able to track changes in the emotional content of dynamic naturalistic videos as they are experienced. Moreover, the emotion changes participants identified were temporally aligned with the event boundaries identified by other groups. In addition, valence and arousal changes rated by a separate group of participants uniquely predicted the likelihood of identifying emotion changes and event boundaries, even after accounting for other types of change. However, emotion changes were more strongly tied to valence changes than arousal changes while coarse boundaries were more strongly associated with affective changes than were fine boundaries. These novel findings suggest that emotional information plays a substantial role in structuring ongoing experiences into meaningful events, providing a stronger basis for understanding how emotion shapes the perception and memory of everyday experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2158-2178"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144159634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eitan Hemed, Shirel Bakbani-Elkayam, Andrei Teodorescu, Lilach Yona, Baruch Eitam
{"title":"Attention probes may inflate real effects and create pseudoeffects: A rerun and reassessment of Hemed et al. (2020).","authors":"Eitan Hemed, Shirel Bakbani-Elkayam, Andrei Teodorescu, Lilach Yona, Baruch Eitam","doi":"10.1037/xge0001779","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001779","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study documents the potential influence of attention probes in experimental paradigms by addressing their unintended effects on response time measurements. Attention probes, which are commonly used to assess participant engagement, may introduce task-switch costs that can confound experimental results. We show how probe-induced biases inflated findings related to reinforcement from sensorimotor predictability and generate a fictitious behavioral response to sensory prediction error. We show that by excluding task trials immediately after attention probes, these biases can be corrected. We validate this approach in two new experiments devoid of probes. The results confirm that response reinforcement from predictable action effects only accumulates as long as predictions hold. These findings challenge traditional (reward-based) reinforcement models by suggesting a distinct mechanism for reinforcement from sensorimotor predictability. The validated corrective method provides a practical tool for mitigating similar confounds in past and future studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2346-2360"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144248170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Supplemental Material for Working Memory Prioritization Changes Bidirectional Interactions With Visual Inputs","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/xge0001813.supp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001813.supp","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144701670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A systematic reexamination of the list-length effect in recognition memory.","authors":"Hyungwook Yim,Simon J Dennis,Adam F Osth","doi":"10.1037/xge0001802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001802","url":null,"abstract":"The list-length effect has been crucial in understanding the sources of forgetting in recognition memory, especially whether forgetting stems from interference generated by other items in the study list. However, there has been inconsistent evidence for the effect, and recent studies have found various confounds in the experimental design. The present study reexamined the list-length effect by controlling confounds that have been reported. We also systematically manipulated various factors such as the list length, study time, delay, and stimulus type and tested a large sample to examine the robustness of the effect (i.e., radical randomization). Results showed evidence for a list-length effect across the conditions, and we find that the square root function best describes the list-length effect. By utilizing a computational model, we also show that although the list-length effect exists, there is, in general, a greater amount of interference stemming from other sources in recognition memory (e.g., previous contexts). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144669572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}