{"title":"Restoring a top-down control assumption: Salience effects in working memory are overcome with time.","authors":"Nicholas Gaspelin,Nelson Cowan","doi":"10.1037/xge0001776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001776","url":null,"abstract":"Working memory is a short-term storage space for cognitive information with a highly limited capacity. Due to this limited capacity, many theories address the issue of how items compete in working memory. The present study assesses whether the relative salience of items is automatically important or whether the deployment of working memory is more flexible than that. Some recent studies have suggested that salient stimuli are automatically prioritized in visual working memory. If true, this would suggest a fundamental inflexibility in how information is stored and remembered. We critically evaluate this claim and provide evidence favoring a more flexible account, which allows for top-down control to mitigate the influence of salience on working memory representations. Across four experiments, we support this account by demonstrating that previously observed relative salience effects on recall are not fully automatic and can be greatly reduced by allowing sufficient time to find all task-relevant objects. These findings suggest that salient objects are not inflexibly prioritized in working memory; but rather low-salience objects are difficult to find and encode, especially in large displays at brief time limits. (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":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144065720","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}
Suraiya Allidina,Michael L Mack,William A Cunningham
{"title":"Experience shapes the granularity of social perception: Computational insights into individual and group-based representations.","authors":"Suraiya Allidina,Michael L Mack,William A Cunningham","doi":"10.1037/xge0001770","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001770","url":null,"abstract":"People are regularly conceptualized at varying levels of resolution, sometimes characterized by their idiosyncratic features while at other times seen as mere tokens of their social groups. Decades of research have sought to understand when perceivers will draw upon each of these types of representations, detailing the perceiver- and target-related features that may decrease reliance on stereotypes in favor of individuated knowledge. However, little work has examined how these representations might be formed in the first place: In order for individuated representations of others to be used, they must first be built through experience. Here, we offer a novel approach to characterizing the formation of social representations through the use of computational models of category learning. Across three experiments, participants learned about members of novel social groups who behaved positively or negatively toward them. Computational modeling of participants' task behavior revealed a critical interaction of perceiver motivations and learning context on representations. Participants who received selective feedback about targets only upon approaching them formed more categorical representations than those who received full feedback. Further, we found tentative evidence that this difference was most pronounced in those who held more racist attitudes, measured in an entirely separate context. Thus, more informative learning contexts could potentially act as a \"protective factor\" that shields perceivers' representations from their negative attitudes. The results shed light on the psychological underpinnings of prejudice, using a novel approach to reveal how social categorization is selectively employed in a manner that maintains negative stereotypes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144065722","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}
Candice M Mills,Judith H Danovitch,Natalie B Quintero
{"title":"Does intellectual humility transmit intergenerationally? Examining relations between parent and child measures.","authors":"Candice M Mills,Judith H Danovitch,Natalie B Quintero","doi":"10.1037/xge0001782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001782","url":null,"abstract":"People vary drastically in their intellectual humility (i.e., their ability to recognize gaps in their knowledge). Little is known about how intellectual humility develops or why some children might demonstrate more intellectual humility than others. The present study examines the possibility of parent-to-child transmission of intellectual humility. Parents (N = 108; 88% college graduates; 56% with household income over $100,000) of children ages 7-10 completed two primary measures of intellectual humility: a self-report measure (i.e., the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale; Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016) and a behavioral measure (i.e., the Prompted Explanation Task; Mills, Danovitch, Mugambi, Sands, & Monroe, 2022), which measured how often parents referenced knowledge limits or how to handle uncertainty. Separately, children (N = 108; M = 8.2 years; 51% girls, 49% boys; 70% White; 86% non-Hispanic) completed a knowledge estimation task where they rated their ability to answer explanatory questions about animals and vehicles. Contrary to expectations, self-report and behavioral measures of intellectual humility in parents were not correlated. Moreover, parents who self-reported higher levels of intellectual humility had children who were less humble in their knowledge ratings. That said, consistent with predictions, parents who were less humble in the way they indicated knowledge gaps had children who were less humble in the way they assessed their knowledge. These findings support that there are links between parent and child intellectual humility, but the pattern may depend on how parent intellectual humility is measured. Implications for understanding the development of intellectual humility are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144065718","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}
Ariana Orvell,Ella Simmons,Valerie Umscheid,Giulia Elli,Susan A Gelman
{"title":"From \"me\" to \"we\": How perspective shifts in language can shape children's judgments about kindness, caring, and inclusivity.","authors":"Ariana Orvell,Ella Simmons,Valerie Umscheid,Giulia Elli,Susan A Gelman","doi":"10.1037/xge0001777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001777","url":null,"abstract":"Core to kindness, compassion, or consideration of others is the ability to move beyond one's own perspective to imagine how someone else would think or feel. We reasoned that subtle shifts in language may facilitate this process, hypothesizing that speakers who adopted a generalized perspective (generic you, we) versus an individual (me) or specific (another's name) perspective would be viewed by children as more kind, compassionate, and generous. We conducted three experiments with children 6-9 years of age (N = 376) as well as adults (reported in the Supplemental Materials; N = 781) to test this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants inferred that an adult speaker was more kind, compassionate, and generous when they used generic pronouns to frame a child's mistake (e.g., \"Sometimes you/we drop things\"). In Experiment 2, participants inferred that a child speaker was generous when the speaker used generic pronouns to describe classroom norms. In Experiment 3, participants made judgments about the group to which a speaker belonged, inferring that a child speaker was part of a cooperative, inclusive class when they used generic pronouns. In Experiments 2 and 3, results were stronger for we than generic you, a finding we discuss. Altogether, these results suggest that children and adults are attentive to subtle linguistic signals that convey a general, shared perspective, using them to draw inferences about how kind, compassionate, and considerate other people are, and the groups to which they belong. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144065723","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":"Breaking boundaries: The effects of counter-stereotypical sources on ingroup persuasion and outgroup dissuasion.","authors":"Guilherme A Ramos,Yan Vieites,Eduardo B Andrade","doi":"10.1037/xge0001762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001762","url":null,"abstract":"People tend to align their policy attitudes with the stereotypical attitudes of their political group (e.g., conservatives supporting gun rights, liberals supporting abortion rights). However, ingroups sometimes adopt positions that contradict such stereotypes (e.g., some liberals endorse gun rights, some conservatives endorse abortion rights). How does learning about these counter-stereotypical endorsements influence people's attitudes toward the policy? Do such endorsements persuade the ingroups to support the policy, dissuade outgroups, or both? In the latter case, are these effects symmetric or asymmetric in magnitude? Five experiments conducted in a highly polarized society (Brazil; N = 3,380) demonstrate that policy endorsements made from counter-stereotypical sources (i.e., individuals who support a policy that most of their ingroups are perceived to oppose) systematically persuade the source's ingroups and, to a lesser extent, dissuade outgroups-a pattern that reduces intergroup differences in policy attitudes. This phenomenon generalizes across a variety of policies (e.g., abortion, gun rights, welfare programs) and types of endorsers (e.g., political elites, regular citizens). Attitude change occurs even if beliefs about the societal benefits of the policy remain relatively stable but disappear when people are prompted to question the source's ingroup status. Source credibility, perceived ingroup norms, and perceived policy extremity help explain the persuasive effects of counter-stereotypical sources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144065765","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}
Anna Corriveau, Anthony R James, Megan T deBettencourt, Monica D Rosenberg
{"title":"Sustained attentional state is a floodlight not a spotlight.","authors":"Anna Corriveau, Anthony R James, Megan T deBettencourt, Monica D Rosenberg","doi":"10.1037/xge0001769","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001769","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Maintaining attention to a task is essential for accomplishing it. However, attentional state fluctuates from moment to moment, and task-irrelevant information may compete for processing. What are the consequences of attentional fluctuations for what we remember? Do fluctuations in sustained attention vary the spotlight of selective attention, prioritizing task-relevant at the expense of task-irrelevant information? Or, are increases in a sustained attentional state akin to a floodlight, enhancing processing of all information, regardless of task relevance? In an online sample of 215 adults, participants were presented simultaneous streams of images and sounds and instructed to make responses based on only one modality. Afterward, recognition memory for both images and sounds was tested. Across individuals, we found no evidence of a trade-off between memory for task-relevant and task-irrelevant items. Within individuals, successful memory for a task-relevant item predicted successful memory for its task-irrelevant pair. Thus, the spotlight metaphor of attention does not extend to the dynamics of sustained attention. Rather, fluctuations in attention are more akin to a floodlight, affecting the processing of all task information, regardless of relevance. (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":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143999283","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}
Jan Nikadon, Caterina Suitner, Tomaso Erseghe, Lejla Džanko, Magdalena Formanowicz
{"title":"BERTAgent: The development of a novel tool to quantify agency in textual data.","authors":"Jan Nikadon, Caterina Suitner, Tomaso Erseghe, Lejla Džanko, Magdalena Formanowicz","doi":"10.1037/xge0001740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001740","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Pertaining to goal orientation and achievement, agency is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and behavior. Accordingly, detecting and quantifying linguistic encoding of agency are critical for the analysis of human actions, interactions, and social dynamics. Available agency-quantifying computational tools rely on word-counting methods, which typically are insensitive to the semantic context in which the words are used and consequently prone to miscoding, for example, in case of polysemy. Additionally, some currently available tools do not take into account differences in the intensity and directionality of agency. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we present BERTAgent, a novel tool to quantify semantic agency in text. BERTAgent is a computational language model that utilizes the transformers architecture, a popular deep learning approach to natural language processing. BERTAgent was fine-tuned using textual data that were evaluated by human coders with respect to the level of conveyed agency. In four validation studies, BERTAgent exhibits improved convergent and discriminant validity compared to previous solutions. Additionally, the detailed description of BERTAgent's development procedure serves as a tutorial for the advancement of similar tools, providing a blueprint for leveraging the existing lexicographical data sets in conjunction with the deep learning techniques in order to detect and quantify other psychological constructs in textual data. (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":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143983198","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":"Equitable burden-sharing in \"take-one-for-the-team\" situations: The role of coordination.","authors":"Yukari Jessica Tham,Yohsuke Ohtsubo,Takaaki Hashimoto,Kaori Karasawa","doi":"10.1037/xge0001781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001781","url":null,"abstract":"Groups frequently encounter situations where someone must \"take one for the team\"-that is, one member must undertake a task for the benefit of the group. When such tasks recur, how should the burdens be shared? This question becomes particularly complex when the cost of performing the task varies among members, creating a trade-off between efficiency and equity. For instance, always assigning the task to the member who can complete it at the lowest cost is efficient but inequitable. Our research examines how this trade-off is managed, using the framework of social dilemmas, specifically volunteer's dilemmas. Across three main experiments and three supplemental experiments (N = 1,789), we find that when participants imagine these situations, they prefer equitable (but inefficient) burden-sharing (Study 1). However, when they actually face these situations, their actions often deviate from this preference, with some members taking on more burdens than necessary to achieve equity (Study 2). Further investigation reveals that the main obstacle to equity is the difficulty of coordinating who takes on the task and when (Study 3). These findings contribute two key insights to research on fairness. First, they provide initial evidence that individuals tend to prefer equity when sharing indivisible burdens, contrasting with previous studies on distributive justice and social preferences, which have focused on divisible resources (e.g., money). Second, they highlight the critical role of coordination in achieving equitable burden-sharing-an aspect overlooked in prior research, which has focused on the role of coordination in group productivity rather than fairness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"129 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143992060","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":"Equitable burden-sharing in \"take-one-for-the-team\" situations: The role of coordination.","authors":"Yukari Jessica Tham, Yohsuke Ohtsubo, Takaaki Hashimoto, Kaori Karasawa","doi":"10.1037/xge0001781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001781","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Groups frequently encounter situations where someone must \"take one for the team\"-that is, one member must undertake a task for the benefit of the group. When such tasks recur, how should the burdens be shared? This question becomes particularly complex when the cost of performing the task varies among members, creating a trade-off between efficiency and equity. For instance, always assigning the task to the member who can complete it at the lowest cost is efficient but inequitable. Our research examines how this trade-off is managed, using the framework of social dilemmas, specifically volunteer's dilemmas. Across three main experiments and three supplemental experiments (<i>N</i> = 1,789), we find that when participants imagine these situations, they prefer equitable (but inefficient) burden-sharing (Study 1). However, when they actually face these situations, their actions often deviate from this preference, with some members taking on more burdens than necessary to achieve equity (Study 2). Further investigation reveals that the main obstacle to equity is the difficulty of coordinating who takes on the task and when (Study 3). These findings contribute two key insights to research on fairness. First, they provide initial evidence that individuals tend to prefer equity when sharing indivisible burdens, contrasting with previous studies on distributive justice and social preferences, which have focused on divisible resources (e.g., money). Second, they highlight the critical role of coordination in achieving equitable burden-sharing-an aspect overlooked in prior research, which has focused on the role of coordination in group productivity rather than fairness. (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":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144021069","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}
Anna Corriveau,Anthony R James,Megan T deBettencourt,Monica D Rosenberg
{"title":"Sustained attentional state is a floodlight not a spotlight.","authors":"Anna Corriveau,Anthony R James,Megan T deBettencourt,Monica D Rosenberg","doi":"10.1037/xge0001769","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001769","url":null,"abstract":"Maintaining attention to a task is essential for accomplishing it. However, attentional state fluctuates from moment to moment, and task-irrelevant information may compete for processing. What are the consequences of attentional fluctuations for what we remember? Do fluctuations in sustained attention vary the spotlight of selective attention, prioritizing task-relevant at the expense of task-irrelevant information? Or, are increases in a sustained attentional state akin to a floodlight, enhancing processing of all information, regardless of task relevance? In an online sample of 215 adults, participants were presented simultaneous streams of images and sounds and instructed to make responses based on only one modality. Afterward, recognition memory for both images and sounds was tested. Across individuals, we found no evidence of a trade-off between memory for task-relevant and task-irrelevant items. Within individuals, successful memory for a task-relevant item predicted successful memory for its task-irrelevant pair. Thus, the spotlight metaphor of attention does not extend to the dynamics of sustained attention. Rather, fluctuations in attention are more akin to a floodlight, affecting the processing of all task information, regardless of relevance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143992059","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}