Stefano Uccelli, Blanca Bacchini, Eraldo Paulesu, Lucia Maria Sacheli
{"title":"Effects of emergent and planned interpersonal synchronization on individual spatiotemporal variability.","authors":"Stefano Uccelli, Blanca Bacchini, Eraldo Paulesu, Lucia Maria Sacheli","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02754-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02754-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In real-life social exchanges, people synchronize movements via visuomotor information. How synchronizing voluntarily ('planned' synchronization) or involuntary ('emergent' synchronization) affects differently the variability of spatiotemporal movement parameters remains unclear. Here, we explored changes in the kinematics of pairs of participants performing a finger-tapping task in four full-within experimental conditions. In solo-pre and solo-post conditions, participants listened to a target tempo and individually reproduced it (unpaced) while blindfolded. In two social conditions, both participants had full vision of the partner's hand and concomitantly reproduced the target tempo while voluntarily synchronizing together (Synch condition) or resisting synchronization with the partner (Resist condition). Results revealed that participants co-adjusted taps and correlated finger movement peaks spatiotemporally in the social conditions and, crucially, individual variability lowered compared with the solo-pre condition. Moreover, the Synch condition revealed larger correlations and lower variability than the Resist one. Last, the partners' parameters no longer correlated in the solo-post condition and variability was similar to that of the solo-pre condition. This work unveils the importance of minimizing spatiotemporal variability for facilitating perception-action coupling during both emergent and planned interpersonal synchronization.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145138423","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":"Animacy effect in the mnemonic advantage: A three-level meta-analysis.","authors":"Shi Cheng, Xiaomei Zhao, Xiaohui Yang, Yaning Liu","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02737-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02737-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Over the last decade, the animacy effect has emerged as a significant advantage in the processing of adaptive memory, illustrating that individuals tend to have superior memory for animate over inanimate stimuli. Despite this, a systematic analysis of the effect remains absent. A quantitative review is needed to assess the stability of the animacy effect, and the reverse animacy effect observed in some studies also requires investigation. Employing a three-level meta-analytic approach, this study provides a comprehensive evaluation and synthesis of the animacy effect's influence on memory processing. Through the integration of 45 primary studies, we conclusively demonstrate the consistent presence of the animacy effect within the context of enhanced memory processing, characterized by a large effect size (η<sub>p</sub><sup>2</sup>= .19, 95% CI [.38, .55]). Our findings indicate that the impact of the animacy effect is robust across variations in study year and geographical location, confirming its stability across diverse cultural and temporal frameworks. Importantly, our analysis revealed that the animacy effect was moderated by the type of memory task. Specifically, the animacy effect was stronger in free recall compared to recognition and cued recall, with the latter two showing a less consistent animacy effect. This insight underscores the necessity of considering the memory task type in research on the animacy effect, particularly in experimental designs investigating the underlying mechanisms of its influence. In sum, although the magnitude of the animacy effect may vary across memory tasks, it represents a stable memory advantage shaped by evolutionary pressures. Continued research is needed to uncover its cognitive underpinnings and to translate these findings into practical domains such as education and marketing.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145138467","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}
Mirta Stantić, Zoë Pounder, Sarah Bate, Caroline Catmur, Geoffrey Bird
{"title":"Individuals who are 'super recognisers' show superior performance on independent measures of face perception, face memory, and face matching.","authors":"Mirta Stantić, Zoë Pounder, Sarah Bate, Caroline Catmur, Geoffrey Bird","doi":"10.3758/s13423-024-02627-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02627-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Individuals who are superior at face recognition are described as 'super recognisers' (SRs). On standard face recognition tasks SRs outperform individuals who have typical face recognition ability. However, high accuracy on face recognition tasks may be driven by superior ability in one or more of several component processes including face perception, face matching, and face memory. The present study utilised the Oxford Face Matching Test (OFMT) and a novel analysis strategy to derive independent measures of face perception, face matching, and face memory. Thirty-two SRs and the same number of matched controls with typical face recognition ability undertook three face processing tasks: the OFMT, the Glasgow Face Matching Test, and the Cambridge Face Memory Test. At the group level, SRs were more accurate than controls across all tasks, and they reported greater face recognition ability. Of most importance, however, was the finding that SRs exhibited superior face perception, face matching, and face memory. Collectively, these results suggest that SRs have superior ability across multiple independent face-related processes.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145034317","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":"Statistical learning prioritizes abstract over item-specific representations.","authors":"Mei Zhou, Shelley Xiuli Tong","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02757-8","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02757-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Statistical learning optimizes limited working memory by abstracting probabilistic associations among specific items. However, the cognitive mechanisms responsible for the working memory representation of abstract and item-specific information remain unclear. This study developed a learning-memory representation paradigm and tested three participant groups across three conditions: control (Experiment 1), item-specific encoding (Experiment 2), and abstract encoding (Experiment 3). All groups were first shown picture-artificial-character pairs that contained abstract semantic categories at high (100%), moderate (66.7%), and low (33.3%) probability levels and item-specific information (16.7%). Participants then completed an online visual search task that simultaneously assessed statistical learning and memory representation by examining how abstract or item-specific distractors influenced their speed for searching artificial characters. In the control condition, participants spent more time searching abstract than item-specific distractors across all probability levels, indicating abstract prioritization. In the item-specific condition, abstract prioritization was absent. In the abstract condition, enhanced prioritization of abstract information was observed for moderate and low, but not high, probability items. These findings suggest that statistical learning is central to the abstraction process, with input probabilities and encoding strategies jointly shaping the formation of abstract and item-specific representations. This process depends on a flexible working memory system that dynamically adjusts prioritization, particularly when inputs are uncertain.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144966434","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":"Bits of confidence: Metacognition as uncertainty reduction.","authors":"Daniel Fitousi","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02752-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02752-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How do people know when they are right? Confidence judgments - the ability to assess the correctness of one's own decisions - are a key aspect of human metacognition. This self-evaluative act plays a central role in learning, memory, consciousness, and group decision-making. In this paper, I reframe metacognition as a structured exchange of information between stimulus, decision-maker (the actor), and confidence judge (the rater), akin to a multi-agent communication system. Within this framework, the actor aims to resolve stimulus uncertainty, while the rater seeks to infer the accuracy of the actor's response. Applying techniques from information theory, I develop three novel measures of metacognitive efficiency: meta- <math><mi>U</mi></math> , meta- <math><mrow><mi>K</mi> <mi>L</mi></mrow> </math> , and meta- <math><mi>J</mi></math> . These indices are derived from entropy and divergence principles, and quantify how effectively confidence judgments transmit information about both external stimuli and internal decisions. Simulations show that these measures possess several advantages over traditional signal detection theory metrics such as meta- <math><msup><mi>d</mi> <mo>'</mo></msup> </math> and the M-ratio, including more interpretable scaling, robustness to performance imbalances, and sensitivity to structural constraints. By formalizing metacognitive sensitivity as an information-processing problem, this framework offers a unified, theoretically grounded approach to studying confidence and sheds light on the sources of metacognitive inefficiency across individuals and contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144966377","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":"Benefits from sketching for improving comprehension monitoring from illustrated texts.","authors":"Jennifer Wiley, Tim George, Thomas D Griffin","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02730-5","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02730-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although frequently used with instructional expository text, it has been suggested that illustrations can lead to illusions of understanding (beliefs that we understand better than we actually do). In this study using geoscience texts, relative metacomprehension accuracy (the ability to monitor one's own understanding across a set of topics) was found to be particularly poor when only some topics were illustrated. However, when readers were prompted to generate sketches while reading, relative accuracy was improved, and was more similar across illustration conditions. Consistent with the situation-model approach to metacognition, sketching activities may help readers to generate valid and diagnostic cues on which to base their judgments of understanding and avoid reliance on heuristic cues or superficial processing.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144966370","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":"Controlling unwanted memories: A conceptual review grounded in the process model of emotion regulation.","authors":"Agnieszka Bachfischer, Irina M Harris","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02745-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02745-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Autobiographical memories are a crucial source of emotional states in our daily lives. While remembering negative events in the past is important to guide future behaviours and steer us away from harm, being reminded of unpleasant events too often or too intensely can have a serious impact on our wellbeing. A solution that may reconcile these positive and negative effects of negative memories is memory control. Being able to control when, how, and which memories to remember, based on our current goals, is similar to being able to control our emotions, which taps into the well-established field of emotion regulation (ER) where the ER Process Model (Gross, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(1), 224-237 1998b, Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1-26 2015) has been extensively used as a theoretical framework. The memory control field is missing such an overarching model that would provide a guiding framework and new insights for emotional memory control research and practice. In this conceptual review, we bring together three lines of well-established research - on Emotion Regulation, Involuntary Autobiographical Memories, and Memory Control - to demonstrate how the Process Model of ER can be applied to memories. The application of the ER model to emotional memories enhances conceptual clarity of the field of memory control, helps to organise existing findings, reveals meaningful similarities and differences between various memory control strategies, identifies the most potentially effective strategies, and points to the most promising future research directions.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144966372","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":"Within-subject confidence intervals for pairwise differences in scatter plots.","authors":"Alexander C Schütz, Karl R Gegenfurtner","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02750-1","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02750-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Scatter plots are a standard tool to illustrate the covariation of bivariate data. For paired observations of the same variable, they can also be used to illustrate differences in the central tendency. For these differences, it would be useful to draw confidence intervals (CIs) that correctly align with statistical analyses. Here, we describe a method to compute and draw a diagonal CI for pairwise differences in scatter plots. This CI can be compared to the identity line that marks coordinates with identical values in both observations. Such CIs offer advantages for both authors and readers: for authors, the CI is simple to compute and to draw; for readers, the CI is less ambiguous and more informative than other types of illustrations, because the three CIs of the standalone effects of x, y and their pairwise differences can be plotted simultaneously along horizontal, vertical and diagonal axes, respectively. A survey testing the interpretation of standalone effects and pairwise differences in bar and scatter plots by scientists showed that such effects can be interpreted with high certainty and accuracy from scatter plots containing horizonal and vertical CIs for standalone effects and diagonal CIs for pairwise differences.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7618193/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144966348","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":"An investigation of the feeling that an inter-turn silence has lasted too long.","authors":"Anuja M Thomas, Michael P Kaschak","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02760-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02760-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>During conversations, there is often a short silence between the end of one turn and the beginning of the next. These silences tend to be brief. If a speaker waits too long before starting their turn it may trigger a negative interpretation (e.g., that the speaker is lying). We investigated whether the sense that a response took too long is related to the time it typically takes speakers in general to respond to a given question, participants' tendency to over- or underestimate temporal durations, and participants' level of general and social anxiety. Average response time for individual questions was related to variation in participants' sense that a response has taken too long, but biases in time perception, general anxiety, and social anxiety were not.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144966382","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":"Talker-specificity beyond the lexicon: Recognition memory for spoken sentences.","authors":"William Clapp, Meghan Sumner","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02751-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02751-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Over the past 35 years, it has been established that mental representations of language include fine-grained acoustic details stored in episodic memory. The empirical foundations of this fact were established through a series of word recognition experiments showing that participants were better at remembering words repeated by the same talker than words repeated by a different talker (talker-specificity effect). This effect has been widely replicated, but exclusively with isolated, generally monosyllabic, words as the object of study. Whether fine-grained acoustic detail plays a role in the encoding and retrieval of larger structures, such as spoken sentences, has important implications for theories of language understanding in natural communicative contexts. In this study, we extended traditional recognition memory methods to use full spoken sentences rather than individual words as stimuli. Additionally, we manipulated attention at the time of encoding in order to probe the automaticity of fine-grained acoustic encoding. Participants were more accurate for sentences repeated by the same talker than by a different talker. They were also faster and more accurate in the Full Attention than in the Divided Attention condition. The specificity effect was more pronounced for the Divided Attention than the Full Attention group. These findings provide evidence for specificity at the sentence level. They also highlight the implicit, automatic encoding of fine-grained acoustic detail and point to a central role for cognitive resource allocation in shaping memory-based language representations.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144966424","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}