{"title":"Emerging adaptivity in probability learning: How young minds and the environment interact.","authors":"Anna I Thoma, Ben R Newell, Christin Schulze","doi":"10.1037/xge0001747","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001747","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Children often have to choose between two or more probabilistically rewarded options. How early in life do they learn to choose adaptively? Connecting research on ecologically rational probability matching in adulthood with research on the benefits of cognitive immaturity in childhood, we compared children's (3-11 years; <i>N</i> = 362) and adults' (<i>N</i> = 121) repeated choice behavior in a child-friendly probability learning task. We implemented two static and one ecologically plausible statistical environment as between-subjects conditions. Behavioral and computational modeling analyses provided converging evidence for perseveration tendencies in 3- to 4-year-olds and adaptive choice diversification from age 6 years onward. On average, school-aged children showed a stronger tendency for exploration, whereas adults were better able to overcome this tendency in favor of exploitation. Our findings emphasize the importance of implementing ecologically plausible task environments in research on cognitive development and contribute a novel repeated choice perspective to the discussion on the adaptive functions of wide exploration in childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1523-1544"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143752322","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}
Przemysław Marcowski, Wojciech Białaszek, Piotr Winkielman
{"title":"Effort can have positive, negative, and nonmonotonic impacts on outcome value in economic choice.","authors":"Przemysław Marcowski, Wojciech Białaszek, Piotr Winkielman","doi":"10.1037/xge0001738","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001738","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Every action demands some effort, and its level influences decision making. Existing data suggest that in some decision contexts, effort devalues outcomes, but in other contexts, effort enhances outcome valuation. Here, we describe an empirical study and propose a model that incorporates negative, positive, and mixed impacts of effort on outcomes in different decision contexts and different participants. Participants chose between money and an item associated with varying levels of stair-climbing effort. Some participants had previous direct experience with a real physical effort and made decisions about a physically present reward. For other participants, the effort and the associated reward were always purely hypothetical. Furthermore, the decisions were framed as prospective or retrospective-before or after effort exertion. The key behavioral finding was that in the \"real\" condition, greater effort decreased outcome value when considered prospectively, but increased outcome value when considered retrospectively. Interestingly, even within the same decision context, individuals showed diverse relationships between effort and outcome value. These relationships ranged from those where greater effort increased value and decreased value to nonlinear patterns, where small effort initially increased outcome value but higher effort decreased it, or the other way around (initial decrease followed by a decrease). When our model was applied to participants' individual choices, it was able to capture the monotonic and nonmonotonic relationships and outperformed previous solutions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1628-1642"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143753054","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}
Shuze Liu, Lucy Lai, Samuel J Gershman, Bilal A Bari
{"title":"Time and memory costs jointly determine a speed-accuracy trade-off and set-size effects.","authors":"Shuze Liu, Lucy Lai, Samuel J Gershman, Bilal A Bari","doi":"10.1037/xge0001760","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001760","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Policies, the mappings from states to actions, require memory. The amount of memory is dictated by the mutual information between states and actions or the <i>policy complexity</i>. High-complexity policies preserve state information and generally lead to greater rewards compared to low-complexity policies, which require less memory by discarding state information and exploiting environmental regularities. Under this theory, high-complexity policies incur a time cost: They take longer to decode than low-complexity policies. This naturally gives rise to a speed-accuracy trade-off, in which acting quickly necessitates inaccuracy (via low-complexity policies) and acting accurately necessitates acting slowly (via high-complexity policies). Furthermore, the relationship between policy complexity and decoding speed accounts for set-size effects: Response times grow as a function of the number of possible states because larger state sets encourage higher policy complexity. Across three experiments, we tested these predictions by manipulating intertrial intervals, environmental regularities, and state set sizes. In all cases, we found that humans are sensitive to both time and memory costs when modulating policy complexity. Altogether, our theory suggests that policy complexity constraints may underlie some speed-accuracy trade-offs and set-size effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1611-1627"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143803228","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}
Camille V Phaneuf-Hadd, Isabelle M Jacques, Catherine Insel, A Ross Otto, Leah H Somerville
{"title":"Characterizing age-related change in learning the value of cognitive effort.","authors":"Camille V Phaneuf-Hadd, Isabelle M Jacques, Catherine Insel, A Ross Otto, Leah H Somerville","doi":"10.1037/xge0001745","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001745","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Adults often titrate the degree of their cognitive effort in an economical manner: they \"think hard\" when the reward benefits of a task exceed its difficulty costs. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether and how children and adolescents adjust their cognitive effort according to multiple cues about its worthwhileness, including in novel environments where these cues must be learned through experience. Given that the processing of incentive and demand information changes with age, the present study examines participants' (primary experiment <i>N</i><sub>usable</sub> = 150, secondary experiment <i>N</i><sub>usable</sub> = 150, ages 10-20 years) performance across two task-switching paradigms that manipulated the rewards offered for, and the difficulty of, engaging cognitive effort. In the primary experiment, reward cues were instructed but difficulty cues were learnable. In the secondary experiment, the reward and difficulty cues were both instructed, eliminating learning demands and effectively making the task easier. The primary experiment revealed that although less difficult contexts promoted greater accuracy at the group level, the regulation of cognitive effort according to higher and lower incentives emerged with age. Especially early in the task, older participants achieved greater accuracy for higher incentives. Younger participants, unexpectedly, achieved greater accuracy for lower incentives and adolescents performed similarly for each reward level. Nonetheless, participants of all ages self-reported trying their hardest for higher incentives, but only adults translated this aim into action. The secondary experiment revealed that in an overall easier task environment, cognitive effort did not become increasingly economical with age. Taken together, this pattern of findings suggests that different sources and amounts of information, and the conditions they are presented in, shape learning the value of cognitive effort from late childhood to early adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1667-1680"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143730292","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}
Benedek Kurdi, Tessa E S Charlesworth, Patrick Mair
{"title":"International stability and change in explicit and implicit attitudes: An investigation spanning 33 countries, five social groups, and 11 years (2009-2019).","authors":"Benedek Kurdi, Tessa E S Charlesworth, Patrick Mair","doi":"10.1037/xge0001746","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001746","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (automatically revealed) social group attitudes can change has been a central topic of psychological inquiry over the past decades. Here, we take a novel approach to answering these longstanding questions by leveraging data collected via the Project Implicit International websites from 1.4 million participants across 33 countries, five social group targets (age, body weight, sexuality, skin tone, and race), and 11 years (2009-2019). Bayesian time-series modeling using Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation revealed changes toward less bias in all five explicit attitudes, ranging from a decrease of 18% for body weight to 43% for sexuality. By contrast, implicit attitudes showed more variation in trends: Implicit sexuality attitudes decreased by 36%; implicit race, age, and body weight attitudes remained stable; and implicit skin tone attitudes showed a curvilinear effect, first decreasing and then increasing in bias, with a 20% increase overall. These results suggest that cultural-level explicit attitude change is best explained by domain-general mechanisms (e.g., the adoption of egalitarian norms), whereas implicit attitude change is best explained by mechanisms specific to each social group target. Finally, exploratory analyses involving ecological correlates of change (e.g., population density and temperature) identified consistent patterns for all explicit attitudes, thus underscoring the domain-general nature of underlying mechanisms. Implicit attitudes again showed more variation, with body-related (age and body weight) and sociodemographic (sexuality, race, and skin tone) targets exhibiting opposite patterns. These insights facilitate novel theorizing about processes and mechanisms of cultural-level change in social group attitudes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1643-1666"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143752250","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":"Social identity shapes antecedents and functional outcomes of moral emotion expression.","authors":"William J Brady, Jay J Van Bavel","doi":"10.1037/xge0001753","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001753","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is increasing evidence that moral and emotional rhetoric spreads widely on social media and is associated with intergroup conflict, polarization, and the spread of misinformation. However, this literature is largely correlational, making it unclear why moral and emotional content drives sharing and conflict. In this research, we examine the causal impact of moral-emotional content on sharing decisions and how social identity shapes the antecedents and functional outcomes of decisions to share. Across five preregistered experiments (<i>N</i> = 2,498), we find robust evidence that the inclusion of moral-emotional expressions in political messages increases intentions to share the messages on social media. Moreover, individual differences in the strength of partisan identification and ideological extremity are robust predictors of sharing messages with moral-emotional expressions, even when accounting for attitude strength. However, we only found mixed evidence that brief manipulations of identity salience increased sharing. In terms of functional outcomes, when partisans choose to share messages with moral-emotional language, people perceive them as more strongly identified among their partisan ingroup but less open minded and less worthy of conversation with outgroup members. These experiments highlight the causal role of moral-emotional expression in online sharing intentions and how such expressions in online networks can serve ingroup reputation functions while hindering discourse between political groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1505-1522"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143803547","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}
Prachi Mahableshwarkar, Lindsay Houck, John Philbeck, Dwight Kravitz
{"title":"Distance perception in natural scene images generalize across individuals, tasks, and viewing time.","authors":"Prachi Mahableshwarkar, Lindsay Houck, John Philbeck, Dwight Kravitz","doi":"10.1037/xge0001741","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001741","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Natural scenes contain a multitude of cues that can support spatial perception, making it difficult to study. Here, in a series of preregistered behavioral studies, we quantify scene-specific spatial representations that generalize over tasks, stimulus durations, and participants. We presented 156 scene images at varying durations (125, 250, 1,000 ms) to independent groups of participants who either estimated or discriminated the egocentric distance to target objects. Not only were participants able to estimate distance in images seen once, they also showed scene-specific deviations that strongly predicted behavior in the other task being performed by different observers. Given the only commonality was the scenes, pictorial features must be driving the observed responses. In fact, we found one such feature, the size of the ground plane, explained the magnitude of the observed scene-specific deviations. Our results implicate a finely tuned, rapid mechanism for integrating pictorial information into percepts of distance in natural images. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1545-1570"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143730293","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}
India R Johnson, Evava S Pietri, Veronica S Derricks
{"title":"Cueing authenticity via curls, kinks, and coils: Natural hair as an identity-safety cue among Black women.","authors":"India R Johnson, Evava S Pietri, Veronica S Derricks","doi":"10.1037/xge0001731","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001731","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Black women professionals face pressure to alter their <i>natural hair</i> (i.e., naturally textured hair and/or styles associated with Black individuals), undermining their identity-safety in the workplace. An identity-safety cue can signal <i>social fit</i>, or an environment that values attributes associated with one's identity, and foster identity-safety among Black women. Integrating social identity threat theory and the state authenticity as fit to environment model, we exclusively recruited Black women (<i>N</i> = 1,693) and investigated whether identity-safety cues conveying that natural hair was valued in the workplace promoted general identity-safety beliefs, as well as aspects of identity-safety specific to natural hair. Exploring Black women's workplace experiences (i.e., Study 1) revealed that perceptions of their organization that favored natural hair (i.e., hair-based social fit) significantly predicted their authenticity and hair discrimination, even when controlling for the presence of Black employees and/or employees with natural hair. Our experimental studies found that exposure to a Black or white employee with a natural (vs. traditional) hairstyle promoted authenticity, while only viewing a Black employee with natural hair mitigated hair discrimination (i.e., Studies 2-4). At the same time, only a Black (vs. white) employee-regardless of hairstyle-encouraged belonging and trust (i.e., Studies 2 and 3). In Study 4, our direct manipulation of hair-based social fit promoted Black women's authenticity and alleviated hair discrimination, even in the absence of viewing a Black employee and/or employee with natural hair. Collectively, we demonstrated that conveying natural hair is valued cues social fit and cultivates identity-safe professional spaces for Black women. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1465-1484"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143670032","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":"How prevalent is \"other ethnicity blindness\"? Exploring the extremes of recognition performance across categories of faces.","authors":"Jeremy J Tree, Alex L Jones","doi":"10.1037/xge0001730","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001730","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The other ethnicity effect (OEE) refers to the common finding that individuals generally perform better in recognizing faces from their own ethnicity than from others. Wan et al. (2017) identified a subset of individuals with a marked difficulty in recognizing other ethnicity faces, termed other ethnicity blindness (OEB). This study further examines the prevalence of OEB in two large samples of Asian and Caucasian participants, using three analytical approaches to assess face recognition across different ethnic face categories. The first method, based on Wan's percentile-rank approach, additionally adjusted for regression to the mean (RTM), found a 1.9% OEB prevalence, lower than their earlier estimates (8.1% [7.5, 10.6]). Moreover, those identified often displayed generally poor face recognition skills. The second approach, akin to a single-case \"dissociation\" method (Crawford et al., 2003), classified just one individual (0.25%) as OEB. The third method defined OEB purely as an exaggeratedly large OEE, without using traditional \"cutoff\" scores, but adjusted for RTM, observed 1.33% of participants exhibited this profile. Bayesian simulations supported these OEB prevalence rates. Overall, the findings highlight the critical importance of accounting for factors like own-ethnicity performance, measurement error and RTM. We also advocate for more conservative classification methods in future OEB research and emphasize that while OEB is rare, it can be observed in some individuals. Specifically, adopting the classification of OEB as a \"hyper\" OEE profile may provide a valuable avenue for future research exploration both with respect to those interested in individual variability in OEE and more generally variability in within-class recognition performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1485-1504"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143730294","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":"https://doi.org/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":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-26","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}