{"title":"Equity rewards the true self: True-self attributions drive perceptions of equity-based justice.","authors":"Charles Chu","doi":"10.1037/xge0001999","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001999","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article proposes that true-self attributions drive equity judgments. I hypothesize that attributing an individual's input (e.g., their individual work performance) to their true self makes that input seem more informative about the person, which, in turn, leads to higher perceived equity-based justice and support for proportionally rewarding that input (e.g., a pay-for-performance policy). Four studies in the main article and three studies in the Supplemental Material (<i>N</i> = 5,972) tested this claim. Studies 1 and 2 found that true-self attributions for individuals' inputs had a causal effect on perceived equity-based justice of and support for a proportional distribution policy and that perceived informativeness of those inputs mediated this effect. Study 3 next manipulated the informativeness of individuals' inputs and found a direct causal effect on equity-based justice and support for proportional distribution policies, even while holding constant related attributional dimensions such as controllability. Study 4 then provided ecologically valid evidence for the hypothesis using a nationally representative correlational survey. Implications for research on the true self, essentialism, equity-based distributive justice, and merit are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149012313","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":"Adaptive regulation of confidence following metacognitive conflict: Evidence from behavior and computational modeling.","authors":"Jintao Xing, Stef Herregods, Luc Vermeylen, Kobe Desender","doi":"10.1037/xge0001997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001997","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>It is well established that external feedback is effective not only for enhancing cognitive performance but also for regulating metacognitive monitoring. However, external feedback could be detrimental when it conflicts with one's internal feedback signal (i.e., the level of confidence we have in our decisions). Currently, however, it is unknown how discrepancies between internal and external feedback (\"metacognitive conflict\") influence cognitive and metacognitive performance. Here, we examined this question in a series of perceptual decision-making experiments in which participants reported both their level of confidence and received performance feedback. Metacognitive conflict occurs if participants have high confidence in their decision, but external feedback indicates that the decision was erroneous, or vice versa. Results revealed that metacognitive conflict triggers next-trial behavioral adjustments: Participants exhibit significantly lower confidence following metacognitive conflict. Furthermore, this behavioral adjustment was smaller in blocks with a high versus low proportion of metacognitive conflict trials, and confidence was generally reduced in blocks with a high proportion of metacognitive conflict. To better characterize the computational mechanisms underlying this effect, we deployed an evidence accumulation model with additional postdecision accumulation to quantify confidence. Model fits revealed that participants become more conservative in reporting confidence after experiencing metacognitive conflict, as evidenced by biased postdecision starting points. Jointly, our findings provide much-needed insight into the metacognitive consequences of metacognitive conflict. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148969135","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":"Joint perception biases subjective awareness reports.","authors":"Benjy Barnett, Daniel Yon","doi":"10.1037/xge0002001","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0002001","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Humans are fundamentally social creatures, yet how our social context modulates perceptual decision making remains unknown. In a joint decision-making paradigm, we examined whether participants' subjective awareness reports in a perceptual detection task are influenced by the awareness reports of a computerized partner. Across multiple experiments, we reveal that participants match their awareness reports to those of their partner-irrespective of whether the partner was prone to detecting the stimulus more or less often than themselves. Critically, \"matched\" awareness reports continued once the social interactions ended, suggesting that this effect outstripped public reports of awareness and penetrated participants' private cognition. Social and nonsocial tasks revealed this effect to be a combination of social-specific and domain-general mechanisms. These results point to a mechanism that could enable sociocultural learning to alter awareness-with possible implications for understanding how extraordinary beliefs and visual experiences vary across cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148930033","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":"Whoever is not with me is against me: The \"moderate as out-group\" effect.","authors":"Giulia Maimone, Craig R M McKenzie","doi":"10.1037/xge0001957","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001957","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Common intuition suggests that expressing moderate views would allow people to appeal to the broadest audience possible. But is that really the case? Do moderates please all sides or please no side? Across five preregistered studies (<i>N</i> = 3,272), we show that people holding a partisan view on a sociopolitical issue perceive moderates (i.e., people disclosing a genuinely nonextreme position) as belonging to the out-group ideology. We find that the \"moderate as out-group\" effect occurs when sociopolitical issues are moralized and, at the same time, the opposing side is perceived to be a threat to oneself, close ones, or society at large. We also present evidence that the effect is due to partisans' perception that moderates lack out-group hate, rather than lack in-group love. In other words, partisans perceive that moderates agree with-or simply do not condemn-the opposing (immoral and threatening) ideology, rather than disagree with their own. Consistent with this, the \"moderate as out-group\" effect occurs when the moderate view is framed as pro-both sides, but it is attenuated when it is framed as pro-neither side. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2264-2284"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148591814","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}
Joan Danielle K Ongchoco, Kimberly W Wong, Brian J Scholl
{"title":"Correction to \"The spontaneous prioritization of 'unfinishedness' in perception: A visual Zeigarnik effect\" by Ongchoco et al. (2026).","authors":"Joan Danielle K Ongchoco, Kimberly W Wong, Brian J Scholl","doi":"10.1037/xge0001989","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001989","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Reports an error in \"The spontaneous prioritization of \"unfinishedness\" in perception: A visual Zeigarnik effect\" by Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco, Kimberly W. Wong and Brian J. Scholl (<i>Journal of Experimental Psychology: General</i>, 2026[Mar], Vol 155[3], 649-655; see record 2027-10096-001). In the article \"The Spontaneous Prioritization of 'Unfinishedness' in Perception: A Visual Zeigarnik Effect\" by Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco, Kimberly W. Wong, and Brian J. Scholl (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2026, Vol. 155, No. 3, pp. 649-655. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001884), there was a coding bug in the shuffling function. As a result,the individual mazes were not randomly ordered or counterbalanced across conditions, as was stated in the paper. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2027-10096-001.) The events that occupy our thoughts in an especially persistent way are often those that are unfinished-from half-written papers to unfolded laundry. These events seem to also be privileged in memory, as in the \"Zeigarnik effect\": When people carry out various tasks, but some are never finished due to extrinsic interruptions, memory tends to be better for those tasks that were unfinished. But just how foundational is this sort of \"unfinishedness\" in mental life? The Zeigarnik effect is often explained by appeal to the salience of goals or the weight of obligation, but might unfinishedness also be spontaneously prioritized even in visual processing-independent of these high-level social/motivational factors? Across four experiments (<i>N</i> = 120), observers viewed paths that gradually unfolded through mazes, from a start point to an end point. Probes briefly appeared along the path, and observers later simply reproduced their positions. Critically, each path either reached its end point or stopped shortly before-remaining visually unfinished. Although this manipulation was entirely task-irrelevant, it greatly influenced performance-with more precise reproductions on unfinished trials. This same pattern held across multiple experiments, even while carefully controlling for various lower level visual properties, and it generalized across different types of displays. This new <i>visual Zeigarnik effect</i> shows how vision extracts an unexpectedly rich property that is usually associated with higher level thought, and how the unfinishedness of events is privileged in the mind at a deep level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"155 9","pages":"2160"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148840489","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":"Task similarity increases difficulty in maintaining but not in switching between tasks.","authors":"Marlene Poncet","doi":"10.1037/xge0001978","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001978","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Switching tasks and adapting to new situations by appropriately allocating mental resources is crucial for interacting with the world around us. This ability requires cognitive control and includes several operations such as maintaining and modifying task goals, allocating attention to the relevant stimulus, and selecting the appropriate motor command. Surprisingly, although we know that switching between tasks incurs costs, whether the type of activity itself makes any difference has rarely been investigated. This study uses an innovative, well-controlled paradigm that keeps response rules and stimulus set constant across tasks to specifically test how efficiently humans switch between tasks sharing similar versus dissimilar neural processes. We assessed the efficiency of transient and global cognitive control by comparing participants' switch costs, the efficiency of task reconfiguration, and mixing costs, the efficiency of task maintenance. In four experiments, employing different stimuli and tasks, the results consistently show that increased similarity between pairs of tasks increased the difficulty in maintaining the tasks but not in switching between them. This dissociation confirms that switch and mixing costs are independent processes. Importantly, the overlap in neural processing between tasks appears to be detrimental in simultaneously maintaining tasks, potentially due to competition or interference. Distinct task sets are more efficient to maintain than similar ones. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"155 9","pages":"2235-2249"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148840491","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":"Generalizing perception-action coupling depends on context: Spatial updating is nonobligatory in virtual but not mixed reality.","authors":"Zijian Zhang, Weimin Mou","doi":"10.1037/xge0001968","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001968","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>People learn perception-action coupling through repeated interactions with environments. With extensive practice, perception-action coupling becomes automatic, and instructions that contradict such coupling are often ignored, suggesting that the coupling becomes obligatory. One theoretical question is how perception-action coupling in learning contexts generalizes to other contexts. Spatial updating, the process by which people revise their spatial relationship to objects during locomotion, is considered both automatic and obligatory in physical environments, making it ideal for studying coupling generalization. This study examined whether spatial updating remains obligatory in immersive virtual and mixed-reality environments. Participants learned an object array from one orientation and performed judgments of relative direction from two imagined and two actual headings, same as or opposite to the learning heading. Spatial updating was indexed by superior pointing performance when imagined and actual headings were aligned rather than when they were misaligned, an aligned-imagined effect. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants learned virtual objects in immersive virtual environments, with the virtual room either removed or retained during testing. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants learned a mixed layout of real and virtual objects. In Experiment 5, participants learned real objects in a physical environment. Despite instructions to suppress spatial updating, sensorimotor alignment effects appeared in Experiments 3, 4, and 5, but not in Experiments 1 and 2. These findings suggest that spatial updating is not obligatory in immersive virtual environments but remains obligatory in mixed-reality and physical environments. More broadly, obligatory coupling may become less obligatory in transfer contexts, depending on context similarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2216-2234"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148630681","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":"Correction to \"does affective processing require awareness? On the use of the perceptual awareness scale in response priming research\" by wentura et al. (2025).","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/xge0001996","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001996","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Reports an error in \"Does affective processing require awareness? On the use of the Perceptual Awareness Scale in response priming research\" by Dirk Wentura, Michaela Rohr and Markus Kiefer (<i>Journal of Experimental Psychology: General</i>, 2025[Jan], Vol 154[1], 128-151; see record 2025-42197-001). follow up analysis of the data showed the original was incorrect. The data has been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2025-42197-001.) Masked priming paradigms are frequently used to shine light on the processes of nonconscious cognition. Introducing a new method to this field, Lähteenmäki et al. (2015) claimed that affective priming requires awareness. Specifically, they administered a subjective rating task after the priming task in each trial to directly assess awareness of the prime. Their main result was a lack of priming for subjectively unaware primes. In four experiments, we compared their method with the traditional paradigm, that is, a single-task priming phase followed by a direct test of prime recognition. We used faces with anger versus sadness expressions as primes and targets; emotion categorization was the task. In contrast to Lähteenmäki et al., primes and targets were drawn from different sets, such that priming effects can be unequivocally attributed to the processing of evaluative features. In Experiments 1a, b, we followed their approach of using different prime durations to produce variance in awareness ratings. With a duration of 40 ms, significant priming effects for subjectively unaware primes were found. This duration was also associated with priming effects in the traditional paradigm with near-zero objective prime categorization, suggesting that priming does not require awareness. In Experiment 2a, employing a constant 40-ms duration, we replicated the traditional effect. However, the parallel Experiment 2b with subjective awareness ratings produced a null result at a sharply increased response time level. We conclude that the claim that affective processing requires awareness is not justified. Subjective trial-by-trial visibility ratings can severely alter processing strategies in response priming paradigms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"155 9","pages":"2198"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148840502","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}
Angelle Antoun, Jacqueline Zhang, Fei Xu, Benjamin Wilson
{"title":"Verbal recoding underlies visual ambiguity resolution, even in a nonlinguistic context.","authors":"Angelle Antoun, Jacqueline Zhang, Fei Xu, Benjamin Wilson","doi":"10.1037/xge0001979","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001979","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In language, word order can be used to help disambiguate the grammatical category (noun, verb, etc.) to which an unfamiliar or ambiguous word belongs. We have recently demonstrated that the order of stimuli impacts how ambiguous stimuli are subsequently categorized, even in a nonlinguistic context. However, it remains possible that participants may linguistically recode these stimuli (i.e., giving abstract shapes \"names\"), such that this effect is still based in the language system. Here, we adapted our previous nonlinguistic paradigm assessing the impact of sequence order on categorization but with the addition of two interference conditions: one interfering with phonological systems of linguistic recoding and the other with visuospatial memory. We found that while the nonlinguistic, visuospatial interference task had no impact on the sequence categorization effect, the linguistic interference task substantially reduced this effect. These results suggest that even though the task uses nonlinguistic stimuli, participants appeared to recode this information linguistically and, thus, that this effect may be a feature of language, rather than a more domain-general cognitive process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"155 9","pages":"2151-2160"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13523025/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148840546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yingyan Chen, Phillip M Newman, Sydney Hicks, Yedege Serik, Jonathan W Kelly, Timothy P McNamara, Xiaoli Chen
{"title":"A two-dimensional framework for prior knowledge in goal-directed navigation.","authors":"Yingyan Chen, Phillip M Newman, Sydney Hicks, Yedege Serik, Jonathan W Kelly, Timothy P McNamara, Xiaoli Chen","doi":"10.1037/xge0001950","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001950","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Spatial navigation involves integrating spatial cues with prior spatial knowledge to remember locations and maintain orientation. This study examined the influence of spatial priors (preexisting knowledge about spatial parameters) using a spatial memory task in desktop virtual reality. We proposed a novel two-dimensional framework for categorizing spatial priors based on spatial reference frame (allocentric vs. egocentric) and temporal scale (global vs. local). Participants memorized and later reproduced target locations. The spatial compactness of the target distribution was manipulated to vary the precision of the allocentric global prior. A central tendency effect, where responses were biased toward the target distribution centroid, indicated reliance on the allocentric global prior. Bias was stronger with more precise distributions, indicating greater reliance on the more precise allocentric global prior. Bidimensional regression analysis revealed additional influences from the egocentric global and egocentric local priors, but not from the allocentric local prior. These findings support the proposed framework and demonstrate that multiple forms of prior knowledge simultaneously guide navigation behavior. This work provides a foundation for future studies linking prior knowledge to spatial navigation and broader cognitive processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2285-2319"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148436885","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}