{"title":"We are talking about WM as a broad ability factor! Comment on Burgoyne, Frank, and Macnamara (2024).","authors":"Oliver Wilhelm, Jasmin Thelen, Florian Schmiedek","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02706-5","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02706-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Burgoyne, Frank, and Macnamara (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2024) argued for a separation of updating and working memory factors. We agree that understanding variance across multiple different task classes and measures for the assessment of working memory is crucial. It is a strength of their contribution to include many and diverse subjects and also to study the convergent relation with fluid intelligence. In our view, however, their analysis and interpretation of findings is partly flawed, and other conclusions ought to be drawn from their data. More specifically, we argue that 1) the disengagement hypothesis is hardly convincing to account for their results, and 2) a reanalysis of the data supports other models more than the models put forward by Burgoyne et al. (2024).</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"2420-2423"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12426122/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144027549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Temporal associations supporting repetitions in free recall.","authors":"Lynn J Lohnas","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02673-x","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02673-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The present studies use a novel approach to characterize how memory representations are updated with repetition. These studies use the free recall paradigm, which boasts greater memory advantages for spaced repetitions (Melton. Journal of Verbal Learning and Memory, 9, 596-606. 1970; Madigan. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8, 828-835. 1969). However, a single recall of a twice-presented item precludes inferring whether the item's first or second presentation support its recall. The present studies leverage that, in free recall, transitions reflect stronger associations and are more likely between items studied nearby in time (Healey et al., Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(3), 699-720. 2019). The critical analysis asks which transitions are more likely to a repeated item: temporal neighbors from its first presentation or from its second presentation? Transitions should be equally likely from neighbors of each presentation if the repeated item's presentations are stored independently. Transitions from second-presentation neighbors should be more likely if retrieval of item information from the first presentation strengthens the item representation during the second presentation, or if independent traces benefit from being studied more recently. Alternatively, retrieved context theory assumes that each studied item is associated with a slowly drifting temporal context, and repetition evokes study-phase retrieval of the context state from the first presentation (Howard & Kahana. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 46, 269-299. 2002a; Siegel & Kahana. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(3), 755-764. 2014). This context retrieval should strengthen the repeated item's associations to items with similar temporal contexts from its first presentation. As a result, retrieved context theory predicts more transitions to a repeated item from a first-presentation neighbor. Two studies provide support for the prediction of retrieved context theory, with implications for other theories.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"2211-2219"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12426128/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144036638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Omid Ghasemi, Onurcan Yilmaz, Ozan Isler, Jenny Terry, Robert M Ross
{"title":"Reflective thinking predicts disbelief in God across 19 countries.","authors":"Omid Ghasemi, Onurcan Yilmaz, Ozan Isler, Jenny Terry, Robert M Ross","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02691-9","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02691-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the present study, we tested three hypotheses about relationships between reflective thinking, intuitive thinking (both measured using the Cognitive Reflection Test; CRT), and belief in God or gods (BiG) in university students across 19 culturally and geographically diverse countries (n = 7,771). In support of our first hypothesis, we found a negative relationship between reflective thinking and BiG; and in support of our second hypothesis, we found a positive relationship between intuitive thinking and BiG. Contrary to our third hypothesis, we found no evidence that measuring CRT prior to measuring BiG decreased BiG. Given that this is the first large cross-cultural test of these hypotheses to have a preregistered analysis plan, the first to hold education constant across countries, and the first to use both Bayesian and frequentist methods, these results considerably bolster the evidence in support of the first two hypotheses and against the third hypothesis.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"2220-2229"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12425841/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144050719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michelle M Ramey, John M Henderson, Andrew P Yonelinas
{"title":"Episodic memory and semantic knowledge interact to guide eye movements during visual search in scenes: Distinct effects of conscious and unconscious memory.","authors":"Michelle M Ramey, John M Henderson, Andrew P Yonelinas","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02686-6","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02686-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Episodic memory and semantic knowledge can each exert strong influences on visual attention when we search through real-world scenes. However, there is debate surrounding how they interact when both are present; specifically, results conflict as to whether memory consistently improves visual search when semantic knowledge is available to guide search. These conflicting results could be driven by distinct effects of different types of episodic memory, but this possibility has not been examined. To test this, we tracked participants' eyes while they searched for objects in semantically congruent and incongruent locations within scenes during a study and test phase. In the test phase containing studied and new scenes, participants gave confidence-based recognition memory judgments that indexed different types of episodic memory (i.e., recollection, familiarity, unconscious memory) for the background scenes, then they searched for the target. We found that semantic knowledge consistently influenced both early and late eye movements, but the influence of memory depended on the type of memory involved. Recollection improved first saccade accuracy in terms of heading towards the target in both congruent and incongruent scenes. In contrast, unconscious memory gradually improved scanpath efficiency over the course of search, but only when semantic knowledge was relatively ineffective (i.e., incongruent scenes). Together, these findings indicate that episodic memory and semantic knowledge are rationally integrated to optimize attentional guidance, such that the most precise or effective forms of information available - which depends on the type of episodic memory available - are prioritized.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"2395-2409"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12273590/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144120721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sharing an automatic link is crucial in the congruency sequence effect between spatial conflict tasks.","authors":"Seokmin Kang, Yang Seok Cho","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02707-4","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02707-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>It has been proposed that the control mechanism underlying the congruent sequence effect (CSE) resolves spatial conflict by suppressing an automatic link between spatial stimulus and response codes. However, previous explanation for the inhibitory influence on the automatic link was based solely on demonstrating that the control mechanisms are specific to the task-irrelevant stimulus and response dimensions, rather than the automatic link itself. The present study investigated whether the occurrence of the cross-task CSE depends on the sharing of an automatic link between two tasks, when the two tasks share an irrelevant stimulus dimension and response mode. In the experiment, participants performed alternating trials of a horizontal Simon task and a vertical spatial Stroop task. The cross-task CSE was significant only when response keys for each task were spatially configured to correspond to the axes of possible target stimulus locations (H-V configuration of response sets), making the two tasks share an automatic link. However, no cross-task CSE was obtained when all response keys were aligned horizontally (H-H configuration of response sets). With the H-H configuration, there was no spatial correspondence between the stimulus and response locations in the vertical spatial Stroop task, whereas the horizontal task involved such a correspondence, preventing the two tasks from sharing an automatic link. These results indicate that sharing of an automatic link between spatial conflict tasks is crucial for the occurrence of the cross-task CSE.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"2311-2321"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144014371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"People are at least as good at optimizing reward rate under equivalent fixed-trial compared to fixed-time conditions.","authors":"Grant J Taylor, Scott D Brown, Nathan J Evans","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02680-y","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02680-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Finding an optimal decision-making strategy requires a careful balance between the competing demands of accuracy and urgency. In experimental settings, researchers are typically interested in whether people can optimise this trade-off, typically operationalised as reward rate, with evidence accumulation models serving as the key framework to determine whether people are performing optimally. However, recent studies have suggested that inferences about optimality can be highly dependent on the task design, meaning that inferences about whether people can achieve optimality may not generalise across contexts. Here, we investigate one typically overlooked design factor: whether participants spend a fixed amount of time on each block (fixed time) or have a fixed number of trials in each block (fixed trials). While fixed-time designs are typically thought to be the most appropriate for optimality studies, as to maximise the number of correct responses participants must optimise RR, our Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that people are at least as good at optimising reward rate under fixed-trial designs as fixed-time designs. However, Experiment 3 provides some evidence that fixed-trial designs with no instructions may not be at least as good as fixed-time designs with very specific instructions. Importantly, these findings challenge the idea that fixed-time designs are the most appropriate for reward rate optimality studies, and further emphasise the importance of carefully considering study design factors when making inferences about optimality in decision-making.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"2124-2135"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12426136/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143780996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Item-dependent cues in serial order are tracked by the magnitude (not the presence) of the fill-in tendency.","authors":"Dakota R B Lindsey, Tyler L Harrison","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02684-8","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02684-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In tasks that measure serial-order memory, it is common to observe a \"fill-in tendency\"-when a person skips an item, the next item they report is more likely to be the skipped item (a fill-in response) than the next list item (an infill response). They tend to \"fill in\" the blank they skipped. The fill-in tendency has informed the modeling of serial-order memory-it presents strong evidence against associative chaining accounts because they predict more infill responses than fill-in responses. Despite the failures of associative chaining theories, evidence grows for the use of chaining-like item-dependent cues in serial-order memory. In this paper, we analyzed fill-in and infill responses from nine serial learning experiments (one new experiment and eight previously published experiments) that used variants of the spin list procedure and found strong evidence of item-dependent retrieval cues in serial-order memory. The current analyses revealed a fill-in tendency in all lists-even in those in which item-dependent cues were suspected to have been used. However, in those lists the likelihood of infill responses was higher, and consequently, the fill-in tendency was weaker. Our results expose a flaw in the conventional understanding of fill-in and infill responses. That is, the presence (or absence) of the fill-in tendency is not a strong test of item-dependent cues. Instead, changes in the magnitude of the fill-in tendency-more specifically, an increase in the likelihood of infill responses-across task conditions seem to better indicate the use of item-dependent cues.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"2146-2157"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12426145/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143812130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aya Morshed-Sakran, Simone Shamay-Tsoory, Shai Gabay
{"title":"The role of subcortical regions in affective empathy.","authors":"Aya Morshed-Sakran, Simone Shamay-Tsoory, Shai Gabay","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02705-6","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02705-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Empathy, a cornerstone of human social cognition, has primarily been studied through the lens of cortical neural mechanisms, with limited attention given to the involvement of subcortical structures. This study investigates the evolutionary and functional role of subcortical pathways in empathic processing through a novel dichoptic presentation paradigm that leverages the unique properties of monocular visual processing. We hypothesized that subcortical visual pathways might play a crucial role in rapid emotional processing and subsequent empathic responses. Using a target discrimination task, we compared reaction times following empathy-eliciting versus neutral images under two conditions: same-eye presentation (where both stimulus and target were shown to one eye) and different-eye presentation (where stimulus and target were shown to separate eyes). Our findings revealed significant response delays following empathy-eliciting images only in the same-eye condition, suggesting that monocular, predominantly subcortical, pathways are integral to initial empathic reactions. These results challenge the traditional corticocentric view of empathy and social cognition, indicating instead that empathic processing emerges from the intricate interplay between subcortical and cortical networks. This research provides compelling evidence for the evolutionary foundations of empathy and suggests a fundamental reassessment of how we conceptualize the neural architecture underlying social cognitive processes.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"2353-2362"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143996212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ben A Steward, Paige Mewton, Romina Palermo, Amy Dawel
{"title":"Interactions between faces and visual context in emotion perception: A meta-analysis.","authors":"Ben A Steward, Paige Mewton, Romina Palermo, Amy Dawel","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02678-6","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02678-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Long-standing theories in emotion perception, such as basic emotion theory, argue that we primarily perceive others' emotions through facial expressions. However, compelling evidence shows that other visual contexts, such as body posture or scenes, significantly influence the emotions perceived from faces and vice versa. We used meta-analysis to synthesise and quantify these effects for the first time, testing if faces have primacy over context after accounting for key moderators. Namely, the emotional congruency and clarity of the stimuli. A total of 1,020 effect sizes from 37 articles and 3,198 participants were meta-analysed using three-level mixed-effects models with robust variance estimation. Both visual context and faces were found to have large effects on emotion labelling for the other (g<sub>av</sub> > 1.23). Effects were larger when visual context and faces signalled different (incongruent) rather than the same (congruent) emotions and congruent effects were moderated by how clearly stimuli signalled the target emotion. When these factors were accounted for, faces were no more influential in altering emotion labelling than body postures or body postures with scenes. The findings of this review clearly evidence the integrative nature of emotion perception. Importantly, however, they also highlight that the influence of different emotion signals depends on how clearly they signal an emotion. Future research needs to account for emotional congruency and signal clarity.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"1987-2003"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12426097/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143780994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Examining the impact of attentional focus and partner gaze on interpersonal coordination.","authors":"M C Macpherson, A J Brown, L K Miles","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02695-5","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02695-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>As a foundation of social interaction, interpersonal coordination is boosted in prosocial contexts but undermined by negative situations. Exactly how social factors shape coordination is, however, unknown. Previous literature demonstrates that for coordination to emerge people must attend to their interaction partners. This evidence, however, draws from sterile laboratory studies employing heavy-handed manipulations of little interpersonal relevance. By contrast, in more naturalistic contexts subtle differences in how people attend to themselves and others (e.g., a lingering glance vs. a suspicious side glance) can profoundly change the course of interaction. Understanding how social factors shape interpersonal coordination therefore requires consideration of aspects of attentional behaviour that better characterise everyday interaction. To this end, the current research employed virtual reality (VR) to explore how two core features of social attention, focus (self vs. other) and partner gaze (direct vs. averted), influence the spontaneous coordination of arm and head movements. The results indicated that: (i) coordination was enhanced in the other (cf. self) focus condition; and (ii) coordination was diminished in the averted (cf. direct) gaze condition. These findings provide novel evidence to indicate that the emergence of interpersonal coordination varies as a function of the everyday attentional behaviours that punctuate naturalistic social exchange. Of broad theoretical note, here we demonstrate that the among the factors constraining interpersonal coordination, the distribution of attention between self and other plays a meaningful role.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":"2201-2210"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12426095/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144009250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}