Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

{"title":"Switching between cognitive control states? No, thank you.","authors":"Merve Ileri-Tayar, Julie M Bugg, Wouter Kool","doi":"10.1037/xge0001940","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001940","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Cognitive control enables adaptive behavior by flexibly adjusting information processing to meet changing environmental demands. While extensive research has examined the costs of switching between different tasks, it remains unclear whether switching between different control states (relaxed and focused) within a single task carries intrinsic costs. We hypothesized that internally switching between control states while performing a single task incurs a subjective effort cost and, therefore, that people avoid such demands. Additionally, we examined the trade-off between this cost and interference demands. We conducted a series of experiments using the Demand Selection Task, where participants chose between different options that yielded lists of Stroop trials. Participants consistently avoided options with high demands for internal control-state switching (Experiment 1, <i>N</i> = 64) or interference (Experiment 2, N = 86). Regarding the potential trade-off, Experiment 3 (<i>N</i> = 120) tested whether internal control-state switching demands modulate interference costs when both are present. There was no evidence for this modulation, but this could be because the structure of the Stroop task only allowed for relatively weak manipulations of control-state switching and interference. To address this limitation, we developed a novel parametric flanker task (Experiment 4, <i>N</i> = 50) that enables strong simultaneous manipulation of both demands. With these stronger manipulations, both control-state switching and interference costs influenced selections, revealing trade-offs between these competing demands (Experiment 5, <i>N</i> = 130). Our findings refine models of control regulation, highlighting that not only exerting but also adjusting control carries intrinsic costs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1726-1747"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148163361","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":"Is interpersonal wisdom individual or collective? Distinguishing the effects of ideal-partner consistency and normative desirability on relationship outcomes.","authors":"Sierra D Peters, Andrea L Meltzer, Juliana E French, Emma E Altgelt, James K McNulty, Lindsey L Hicks","doi":"10.1037/xge0001929","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001929","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Social-cognitive and evolutionary perspectives suggest people should experience better relationship outcomes when their romantic partners better match their stated partner preferences or ideals. Nevertheless, recent work has questioned the strength of these effects by suggesting they are primarily driven by metrics of ideal-partner consistency that confound the partner qualities people uniquely value with those that are normatively more desirable (i.e., normative desirability) or common (i.e., normative commonality). The present research used six different metrics of ideal-partner consistency-some of which controlled for normativity and some of which modeled it directly-to precisely estimate the effects of ideal-partner consistency and normativity on relationship satisfaction and behavior across five different studies, some of which included longitudinal data and observations of behavior. Consistent with theoretical perspectives, higher ideal-partner consistency was associated with elevated relationship satisfaction and more constructive relationship behavior, both concurrently and over time. Nevertheless, these associations were significantly weaker when normative desirability was controlled. Perhaps most novel, the extent to which people's partners matched the normative ideals (i.e., ideals preferred by the sample) was a stronger predictor of relationship outcomes in most cases than the extent to which people's partners matched their own idiosyncratic ideals. Taken together, these studies (a) offer novel evidence that even the most conservative measures of ideal-partner consistency predict both observed relationship behavior and <i>changes</i> in relationship satisfaction and (b) further suggest that \"collective wisdom\" in what qualities comprise a good romantic partner may predict relationship outcomes better than the qualities that people uniquely value in a partner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1748-1767"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147987780","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":"Noisy variability does not benefit face learning.","authors":"Truong H A Nguyen, Kristen A Baker, Molly A L Nullmeyer, Kaitlyn L Damaso, Catherine J Mondloch","doi":"10.1037/xge0001948","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001948","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Previous research provides abundant evidence that variability plays a key role in the process by which a newly encountered face becomes familiar. Theoretical models propose that exposure to variable images improves recognition because such variability is diagnostic (i.e., predicts idiosyncratic within-person variability in appearance). We sought disconfirmatory evidence for such models by examining whether noisy variability also benefits learning. The present study provides compelling evidence that two sources of noisy variability-contextual variability and augmentation (visual noise)-do not improve generalization of learning. Across five preregistered experiments and a total sample of over 1,000 participants, Bayesian statistics revealed no benefit of noisy variability, even when the study phase required active retrieval and even among child participants (i.e., participants with less expertise). These findings support current models of face learning and pave a path toward a deeper understanding of how variability operates. These findings also contribute to recent calls to identify core principles of variability across domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1648-1667"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148199005","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":"Executive function and social behavior: Causal evidence from loading working memory and inhibitory control.","authors":"Mahsa Barzy,Yicheng Qiu,Heather J Ferguson","doi":"10.1037/xge0001949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001949","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates how domain-specific executive functions contribute to perspective-taking and prosocial behavior. Across two preregistered experiments, we independently manipulated working memory (WM) and inhibitory control to assess their effects on social cognition. In Experiment 1 (N = 128), WM load was varied using a dual-task paradigm, and participants completed behavioral and eye-tracking measures of perspective-taking and prosociality. WM load impaired perspective-taking, and this effect was larger under nonsocial than social load. Conversely, individual differences in prosocial behavior were associated with higher social (but not nonsocial) WM capacity and larger support cliques, suggesting that dissociable cognitive mechanisms underpin different social outcomes. Notably, WM performance did not vary across social versus nonsocial conditions, indicating that increased social complexity did not impair WM and that the relationship is not bidirectional. In Experiment 2 (N = 122), inhibitory control was manipulated using an ego-depletion task, but no significant effects of load emerged. We discuss the challenges of isolating inhibitory control from WM and highlight the need for improved methods in future research. Overall, these findings provide causal evidence linking WM to social skills, underscore the importance of distinguishing between social and nonsocial domains of executive functioning, and point to key conceptual and methodological priorities for the field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148342432","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":"Conveying (discrete) emotionality with novel words.","authors":"Celia Martínez-Tomás,Fritz Günther,José A Hinojosa,Daniele Gatti","doi":"10.1037/xge0001960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001960","url":null,"abstract":"Affective dimensions (i.e., valence and arousal) and discrete basic emotions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) are the main affective sources of information that explain the semantic features of words. Recent studies suggest that humans are able to assign emotionality even to pseudowords, plausible verbal stimuli that do not belong to a given language which serve as proxies for never encountered, real words (i.e., novel words). So far, evidence at our disposal is mainly limited to valence (i.e., the hedonic tone of a word's reference, from pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (i.e., the degree of activation/excitation elicited by stimuli), while investigating discrete emotionality may facilitate a more refined understanding of the processes at hand. Here, across three experiments, we probed (a) humans' ability to convey discrete emotions when generating novel word stimuli to express the meanings of given emotional words and (b) humans' ability to decode or understand such emotionality when processing these human-generated novel words. Leveraging estimates from a word embedding model, results showed that individuals can reliably and equally encode novel conceptual information carrying affective information for all categories of emotions. However, a better performance for anger, fear, and happiness stimuli was found when implicitly decoding affective meaning in novel words. Theoretically, these processes can be interpreted from an evolutionary perspective, and more broadly, they can be traced back to humans' ability to process systematic, nonarbitrary form-meaning information. We discuss the implications of these findings for language and emotional models dealing with the representation of affective conceptual features. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148313855","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 Conveying (Discrete) Emotionality With Novel Words","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/xge0001960.supp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001960.supp","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"185 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148385867","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 Physical Actions Shape Moral Choices: Environment-Directed Movements Reduce Cheating in Young Children","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/xge0001943.supp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001943.supp","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148385870","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 Intrusions Into Script-Like Action Sequences: A Behavioral Investigation","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/xge0001937.supp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001937.supp","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148287263","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 Human Children, Chimpanzees, and Orangutans Act Rationally in an Adaptive Collaborative Choice Task","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/xge0001923.supp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001923.supp","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148287265","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":"Bridging Bayesian and representational theories of memory to predict memory bias.","authors":"Anxin Miao, Timothy F Brady, Maria M Robinson","doi":"10.1037/xge0001945","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001945","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Understanding how people integrate gist and item-specific information is central to explaining how memory changes over time. We examined how these representations interact in visual memory by integrating a Bayesian framework with representational models of individual item and gist memory and tested the model on its capacity to predict people's gist-based memory distortions. To this end, participants completed separate tasks designed to measure gist and item-specific memory. We used data from both tasks and independent measures of people's stimulus representations to quantify memory fidelity for individual items and gist. We then substituted these parameters into our model to generate predictions of people's memory errors in a third task where people's memory for individual items was biased by category-level structure. Our model predicted entire distributions of people's memory errors, including the magnitude and direction of memory biases, as well as fine-grained individual differences in people's error distributions, such as their skew and variance, at different offsets. Our findings highlight the power of combining normative Bayesian with algorithmic representational modeling approaches to understand how people integrate noisy memory representations at different levels of abstraction. (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":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148199067","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}