Journal of memory and language最新文献

{"title":"Individual differences in mental imagery do not moderate the animacy advantage in memory","authors":"Michael J. Serra ,&nbsp;Julia N. Keiner ,&nbsp;Nicolasa C. Villalobos ,&nbsp;Abigail Kortenhoeven ,&nbsp;Miranda Scolari","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104638","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104638","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The “animacy effect” occurs when participants recall more animate (living) items than inanimate (nonliving) items in various memory tasks. Prior studies have suggested that the effect could stem from participants experiencing greater mental imagery while encoding animate than inanimate words. We examined whether individual differences in mental imagery alter the occurrence of this effect in a free-recall task. In three studies, participants encoded animate and inanimate words under intentional (Study 1) or incidental (Studies 2 and 3) conditions for a free-recall test. Studies 1 (n = 90) and 2 (n = 147) included groups that received or did not receive mental-imagery instructions; no participants in Study 3 (n = 325) received imagery instructions. Participants consistently reported more mental imagery while encoding animate than inanimate words and consistently demonstrated an animacy advantage in recall. This advantage was not moderated by mental-imagery instructions under purposeful encoding conditions (Study 1) but was reduced under incidental conditions where imagery instructions increased the recall of inanimate words (Study 2). None of the studies, however, provided strong evidence that individual differences in mental imagery—whether at the trait level as measured by the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) or during the task as measured by post-task self-report—contributed to or altered the animacy effect. The findings indicate that although greater mental imagery associated with animate than inanimate words can contribute to the animacy effect in free-recall, individual differences in mental-imagery experience do not seem to moderate this effect.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104638"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143686555","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":"Measurement and sampling noise undermine inferences about awareness in location probability learning: A modeling approach","authors":"Alicia Franco-Martínez ,&nbsp;Francisco Vicente-Conesa ,&nbsp;David R. Shanks ,&nbsp;Miguel A. Vadillo","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104621","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104621","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Occasionally, experimental psychologists enter into the realm of psychometrics without being fully aware of the risks involved in the study of individual differences. Here we re-assess the many studies on the interaction between memory and attention in location probability learning that suggest that people can unconsciously learn to suppress salient but irrelevant distractors frequently presented in a certain location. In the additional singleton task, one of the arguments to support this claim is that suppression in memory-guided visual search does not significantly differ between “aware” and “unaware” participants. Although rarely acknowledged, this null interaction could also result if the data are contaminated by measurement and/or sampling noise. Unfortunately, the reliability of the awareness measure cannot be assessed with standard methods, since it is a single-trial test. In the present study we offer model-based estimations of measurement and sampling noise in empirical data. Our goal is to determine how often researchers would mistakenly conclude that learning is unconscious, given data from a model based on the opposite claim (i.e., that learning is conscious) but including noise in participants’ search times and awareness responses. To do so, we fitted this noisy conscious model to a dataset involving 159 participants who performed the additional singleton task. Estimated parameters from this model were used, first, to predict the observed pattern of results and, second, to simulate new responses and participants. Results suggest that, under reasonable measurement noise and sample sizes, simulated evidence from the model can paradoxically but falsely support arguments used to defend the unconscious learning hypothesis. This study serves as an illustration to experimental psychologists – particularly those investigating memory and learning – of the risks of neglecting basic psychometric requirements in individual differences research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104621"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143621261","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":"Interference in the formation of filler-gap dependencies: Evidence from Hebrew relative clauses","authors":"Niki Saul ,&nbsp;Maayan Keshev ,&nbsp;Aya Meltzer-Asscher","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104626","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104626","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Much research in sentence processing has shown that the formation of syntactic dependencies is susceptible to interference from structurally irrelevant distractors. Interference may occur during encoding of a dependent, or during its retrieval. Filler phrases participating in filler-gap dependencies were argued to be encoded robustly and maintained actively in memory, raising the possibility that fillers are immune to interference. In two self-paced reading and two offline comprehension experiments, we look for online and offline evidence for interference in Hebrew relative clauses, using the gender feature to manipulate similarity between the filler and a distractor. In the self-paced reading experiments, we find weak evidence for facilitatory interference in ungrammatical sentences, but no evidence for inhibitory interference in grammatical sentences. In the offline comprehension experiments, we find robust evidence for interference in grammatical sentences, reflected in low comprehension accuracy. The results demonstrate that fillers are prone to interference similarly to other items in memory. We further show that interference is unaffected by the use of gender as a retrieval cue, in contrast to predictions made by cue-based retrieval models, and propose a novel account for so-called “encoding interference” effects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104626"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143561850","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}

{"title":"Only case-syncretic nouns attract: Czech and Slovak gender agreement","authors":"Radim Lacina ,&nbsp;Anna Laurinavichyute ,&nbsp;Jan Chromý","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104623","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104623","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Attraction effects in the comprehension of ungrammatical sentences have long been observed for number and gender agreement across many languages. These prolific findings have led researchers to claim that attraction effects are universal. However, recent evidence from Czech has shown that number agreement attraction is either non-existent in the language or negligible in size. We aimed to test whether this is also the case for gender agreement and to explore the role of case syncretism in the emergence of attraction effects. Crucially, we evaluated the predictions of the cue-based retrieval model in light of the resulting estimates. Across three self-paced reading experiments, two on Czech (<span><math><msub><mrow><mi>N</mi></mrow><mrow><mn>1</mn></mrow></msub></math></span> = 172, <span><math><msub><mrow><mi>N</mi></mrow><mrow><mn>3</mn></mrow></msub></math></span> = 255) and the other on the closely related Slovak (<span><math><msub><mrow><mi>N</mi></mrow><mrow><mn>2</mn></mrow></msub></math></span> = 119), gender attraction in ungrammatical sentences was attested only with case-syncretic attractors. No differences between grammatical conditions were found. Based on computational modelling estimates, we argue that these empirical results contradict the predictions of the classic cue-based retrieval model but are compatible with the repair-by-retrieval account.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104623"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143547842","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}

{"title":"A distributional model of concepts grounded in the spatial organization of objects","authors":"Andrea Gregor de Varda ,&nbsp;Marco Petilli,&nbsp;Marco Marelli","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104624","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104624","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Data-driven models of concepts are gaining popularity in Psychology and Cognitive Science. Distributional semantic models represent word meanings as abstract word co-occurrence patterns, and excel at capturing human meaning intuitions about conceptual relationships; however, they lack the explicit links to the physical world that humans acquire through perception. Computer vision neural networks, on the other hand, can produce representations of visually-grounded concepts, but they do not support the extraction of information about the relationships between objects. To bridge the gap between distributional semantic models and computer vision networks, we introduce SemanticScape, a model of semantic concepts grounded in the visual relationships between objects in natural images. The model captures the latent statistics of the spatial organization of objects in the visual environment. Its implementation is based on the calculation of the summed Euclidean distances between all object pairs in visual scenes, which are then abstracted by means of dimensionality reduction. We validate our model against human explicit intuitions on semantic and visual similarity, relatedness, analogical reasoning, and several semantic and visual implicit processing measurements. Our results show that SemanticScape explains variance in human responses in the semantic tasks above and beyond what can be accounted for by standard distributional semantic models and convolutional neural networks; however, it is not predictive of human performance in implicit perceptual tasks. Our findings highlight that implicit information about the objects’ spatial distribution in the environment has a specific impact on semantic processing, demonstrating the importance of this often neglected experiential source.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"142 ","pages":"Article 104624"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143463974","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}

{"title":"Shared mechanisms in pragmatic enrichment with contextual and lexical alternatives","authors":"Nadine Bade ,&nbsp;WooJin Chung ,&nbsp;Léo Picat ,&nbsp;Rachel Dudley ,&nbsp;Salvador Mascarenhas","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104607","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104607","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We explore the role of contextual versus lexical alternatives in pragmatic strengthening using a novel training-with-feedback paradigm. In two experiments, we investigate whether training with inferences over contextual alternatives affects pragmatic strengthening with lexical alternatives, and the other way around. In both Experiments, we find that training that encouraged (or discouraged) pragmatic strengthening of simple disjunctions carried over to complex disjunctions of an unfamiliar kind to our experimental participants. This shows that our novel methodology is effective in training general mechanisms for activating alternatives. In Experiment 2, we showed that this methodology can be made to work <em>across</em> different kinds of alternatives, if certain salience conditions are met.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"142 ","pages":"Article 104607"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143453124","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":"Investigating the cognitive correlates of semantic and perceptual false memory in older and younger adults: A multi-group latent variable approach","authors":"John T. West ,&nbsp;Rebecca L. Wagner ,&nbsp;Ashley Steinkrauss ,&nbsp;Nancy A. Dennis","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104625","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104625","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Falsely remembering information can have negative consequences for day-to-day functioning and can be especially problematic for older adults who often experience higher rates of false memory. Because there is considerable variability between older adults in memory and cognition, it is essential that we understand the factors that place older individuals at risk for developing false memories. Whereas lower frontal functioning has previously been related to false memory in general, prior research suggests that there may also be domain-specificity in the factors associated with false memory. To test this possibility, 211 young adults and 152 older adults completed tasks measuring semantic false memory, perceptual false memory, frontal functioning, semantic discrimination, and perceptual discrimination. Factor analyses revealed that – contrary to predictions – individual differences in semantic and perceptual false memory were best represented by a single, overarching false memory factor. Although cognitive abilities were generally not related to false memory when assessed together, semantic discrimination, perceptual discrimination, and frontal functioning were all negatively associated with false memory in isolation, and jointly predicted 37% of the variance in younger adults and 40% in older adults. Importantly, the extent to which these cognitive abilities protected against false memory did not differ between older and younger adults. Results suggest that for both older and younger adults, individual differences in the tendency to falsely remember information are captured by a single overarching construct that has negative (yet redundant) associations with various cognitive abilities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"142 ","pages":"Article 104625"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143419137","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":"Sample size and its justification in the Journal of Memory and Language","authors":"Adrian Staub","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104622","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104622","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"142 ","pages":"Article 104622"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143548491","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":"Larger lexicons enable representation of fine-grained phonological similarity structure: Evidence from English L2 speakers’ sound similarity judgments of word pairs","authors":"Cynthia S.Q. Siew ,&nbsp;Nichol Castro","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104619","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104619","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Native English speakers are sensitive to the small-world structure and community structure of the phonological similarity network of English words. In this study we investigated whether L2 speakers of English are sensitive to the overall similarity structure of the phonological lexicon, and whether this sensitivity is modulated by the size of their L2 vocabulary. Participants with diverse L1s (with English as their L2) completed a phonological similarity rating task where they listened to pairs of English words and provided similarity judgments for word pairs of varying path lengths and community membership. Path length in the phonological network represented the number of steps needed to traverse from one word to another word in the network. Word pairs were either from the same phonological community or different communities. English vocabulary knowledge was assessed using the LexTALE (Lemhöfer &amp; Broersma, 2012). Results indicated that participants with higher LexTALE scores showed greater sensitivity to both community membership of word pairs as well as phonological distance between words at shorter path lengths. Computational simulations of the task with phonological networks depicting various levels of L2 proficiency qualitatively align with the observed behavioral results. The simulations suggest that larger network sizes provide more degrees of freedom for representing subtle patterns of similarity relations among word-forms. These findings have implications for understanding how expansion of the phonological mental lexicon enables learners to represent fine-grained, internal structure of phonological similarity relations among words.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"142 ","pages":"Article 104619"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143140374","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}

{"title":"Animacy outweighs topichood when choosing pronouns and word order","authors":"Markus Bader,&nbsp;Yvonne Portele","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104615","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104615","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper presents three picture description experiments investigating grammatical encoding and reference production in German. Participants described pictures showing transitive events with an animate agent and an inanimate patient. A preceding context established one of the referents as topic. The results show that animacy outranks topichood with regard to pronoun choice and choice of word order. Animate entities were pronominalized and produced sentence-initially more often than inanimate ones — independent of their topic status. The use of demonstratives, on the other hand, was mainly driven by topichood, with more demonstratives for non-topics. In addition, the choice of word order depended on the choice of referential expressions. Our findings extend existing evidence against a unified accessibility scale that simultaneously accounts for different types of referential expressions and for word order. We show how the consensus model of language production can be refined to account for our findings without invoking the problematic notion of accessibility.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"142 ","pages":"Article 104615"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143140375","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}