{"title":"The influence of perceptual load on behavioral interference of simultaneous positive and negative emotional distractors.","authors":"Yukta Thyagaraj, Srikanth Padmala","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02747-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02747-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Prioritized processing of emotional stimuli could be detrimental in contexts where the affective information is not goal relevant. To examine whether the behavioral interference of task-irrelevant emotional stimuli depends on the primary task demands, several past studies varied the perceptual load, thus manipulating the resources available for processing emotional distractors. In particular, some previous work reported valence asymmetry in the effects of high (vs. low) perceptual load where negative distraction was reduced but positive distraction was resistant to the perceptual load manipulation. However, previous studies have investigated the impact of perceptual load on attentional capture by positive and negative distractors in isolation. Given real-life scenarios where positive and negative emotional stimuli co-occur, it becomes essential to understand how perceptual load modulates the behavioral interference of simultaneous positive and negative distractors. To address this critical gap, we conducted three behavioral experiments using a letter-search task involving low and high perceptual load, during which simultaneous positive-negative, positive-positive, negative-negative, and neutral-neutral emotional scene distractors were presented. We tested several competing hypotheses regarding how high (relative to low) perceptual load could impact the attentional capture of simultaneous emotional distractors. Across three experiments, in the reaction time data, we consistently found evidence that during high (relative to low) perceptual load, the interference effects of simultaneous emotional distractors were diminished regardless of their valence combination. Our findings do not support the proposed special status of positive distractors under high perceptual load and instead indicate that the effects of perceptual load on simultaneous emotional distractors are valence insensitive.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144859556","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":"Attending to attention: Reverse correlation reveals subtle cues to attentiveness in others' faces.","authors":"Clara Colombatto, Brian J Scholl","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02739-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02739-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Some of the most foundational properties we can perceive from others' faces involve cognitive states, such as how attentive (vs. distracted) they seem - an important ability, since the likelihood of someone in our local environment affecting our fitness is enhanced when they are attentive. But how can we tell whether another person is attentive? This study reveals that the way in which we perceive attentiveness in others' faces is straightforward in some ways, but deeply counterintuitive in others. We explored this using reverse correlation, a data-driven approach that can reveal the nature of internal representations without prior assumptions. In two online studies (n = 200 each), observers viewed pairs of faces created by adding randomly generated noise (across many spatial frequencies) to a constant base face, and had to select which appeared to be most attentive. Analyses of automatically extracted facial landmarks from the resulting \"classification images\" revealed the determinants of perceived attentiveness. Some cues were straightforward: attentive faces indeed had more direct eye gaze, and larger pupils. But other novel and equally robust cues were subtle and surprising; for example, attentive faces reliably had darker (as if more flared, or retroussé) nostrils. These powerful and subtle effects of facial cues on impressions of attentiveness highlight the importance of attention not just as a perceptual process, but as an object of perception itself.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144848513","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":"Sentence processing by humans and machines: Large language models as a tool to better understand human reading.","authors":"Nikki G Kaye, Peter C Gordon","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02756-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02756-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Online measures of reading have been studied with the goal of understanding how humans process language incrementally as they progress through a text. A focus of this research has been on pinpointing how the context of a word influences its processing. Quantitatively measuring the effects of context has proven difficult but with advances in artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) are more capable of generating humanlike language, drawing solely on information about the probabilistic relationships of units of language (e.g., words) occurring together. LLMs can be used to estimate the probability of any word in the model's vocabulary occurring as the next word in a given context. These next-word probabilities can be used in the calculation of information theoretic metrics, such as entropy and surprisal, which can be assessed as measures of word-by-word processing load. This is done by analyzing whether entropy and surprisal derived from language models predict variance in online measures of human reading comprehension (e.g., eye-movement, self-paced reading, ERP data). The present review synthesizes empirical findings on this topic and evaluates their methodological and theoretical implications.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144848514","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}
Dave Kenneth Tayao Cayado, Samantha Wray, Marco Chia-Ho Lai, Adam J Chong, Linnaea Stockall
{"title":"Breaking down prefixed words is unaffected by morphological boundary opacity: Evidence from behavioral and MEG experiments.","authors":"Dave Kenneth Tayao Cayado, Samantha Wray, Marco Chia-Ho Lai, Adam J Chong, Linnaea Stockall","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02758-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02758-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Previous experiments support an initial stage of early, form-based visual word recognition, where morphologically complex words like adorable are segmented into morphemes {adore}+{-able}, despite an orthographic change in the stem. However, most experiments have focused on words with clear boundaries between the affix and stem, making decomposition more straightforward. We investigate whether obscured boundaries between the prefix and stem affect morphological decomposition. Using Tagalog as a test case, we compare the processing of prefixed words [1] without morphophonological changes (e.g., {mang}+{hila} becomes manghila \"to pull\"), [2] with nasal assimilation obscuring prefix identity (e.g., {mang}+{bulag} becomes mambulag \"to blind\"), and [3] with nasal substitution obscuring both prefix and stem identities and their morphological boundary at orthographic and phonological levels (e.g., {mang}+{tulak} becomes manulak \"to push\"). Crucially, these morphophonological changes exhibit variability: nasal substitution is more likely than assimilation for voiceless-initial stems, while the opposite holds for voiced-initial stems. Experiment 1 presents behavioral masked priming data that prefixed words are decomposed into morphemes, even with obscured {prefix}+{stem} boundaries. Experiment 2 further supports these results with data from magnetoencephalography showing neural activity is modulated by stem:whole word transition probability, which indicates morphological decomposition. Findings from both experiments unambiguously show that early, form-based decomposition is robust and flexible enough to recognize morphemes, despite morphophonological changes obscuring the {prefix}+{stem} boundary.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144837484","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}
Mingliang Gong, Bingzhe Huangfu, Jianan Yang, Shuanghong Chen, Jie Gao
{"title":"Visual cocktail party effect? Self-referencing facilitates object recognition in visual crowding.","authors":"Mingliang Gong, Bingzhe Huangfu, Jianan Yang, Shuanghong Chen, Jie Gao","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02759-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02759-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Visual crowding impedes the recognition of object identity. However, some studies have demonstrated that stimuli with significant meaning (e.g., threats) are processed preferentially under crowded conditions. Here we examined whether self-associated objects, which are personally significant, similarly facilitate object recognition in crowding. To this end, objects were rendered either self-related or other-related by an imagined ownership procedure. Subsequently, a memory test was conducted, along with an assessment of object recognition under crowding conditions. The results replicated the self-reference effect (SRE) in memory. More crucially, objects only transiently associated with self showed reduced crowding interference compared to other-related objects. This finding demonstrates that self-referencing enhances the recognition of objects in crowded scenarios. It supports the notion that personally significant stimuli are prioritized in processing under crowding, a phenomenon that can be conceptualized as a visual cocktail party effect.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144822381","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}
Manlu Liu, Veronica Dudarev, Anouk J de Brouwer, James T Enns
{"title":"Perceiving exertion in others: From interoception to exteroception.","authors":"Manlu Liu, Veronica Dudarev, Anouk J de Brouwer, James T Enns","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02753-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02753-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Physical activities are commonly associated with exertion. Yet most of the research to date has focused on the first-person, interoceptive questions of \"What are the internal signals associated with exertion?\" and \"How well do subjective reports correlate with objective measures of energy expenditure?\" Here we aim to broaden the scope of this research by asking \"How closely are observations of exertion in other people correlated with first-person reports of exertion and objective measures of energy expenditure?\" and \"What factors influence the accuracy of exertion perception in others?\" Although exertion often occurs in the company of other people, there is surprisingly little research on these questions. This is somewhat surprising, since the accurate perception of other people's exertion is often critical, whether that be to cooperate with them, to compete with them, or to encourage them to go on. In this review, we first briefly review the large background on perceived exertion in oneself before turning to our central question of the perception of exertion in others. The small literature we review in the second section offers some clues about the potential exteroceptive signals available from individuals undergoing exertion. A third section in the review considers potential behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying the social perception of exertion, by considering the broader literature on action perception and social perception. In a final section, we offer suggestions for future research in this area, with the goal of including the perception of exertion as but one of the many facets of social perception more broadly.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144800049","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":"Switching the motor response weakens confidence serial dependence.","authors":"Michaela Bocheva, Dobromir Rahnev","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02748-9","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13423-025-02748-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>\"Confidence leak\" (i.e., confidence serial dependence) is a phenomenon where confidence from a previous trial predicts confidence in a current trial independent of current choice or accuracy. Confidence leak has been shown to robustly occur across various cognitive domains and tasks. However, it remains unclear what factors, if any, modulate the strength of the confidence serial dependence. Here we investigate whether switching the motor response in a perceptual decision-making task influences the strength of the confidence leak effect. Subjects indicated the orientation of a Gabor patch using their left or right hand, with the response hand being randomly cued on each trial. We found that switching the response substantially weakened the confidence leak effect. We further replicated this finding in a second experiment in which left-hand responses were given using a keyboard and right-hand responses were given with a mouse. In both experiments, we also found that confidence leak was weaker whenever the left hand was used in the previous trial, suggesting that lack of motor fluency reduces the strength of confidence serial dependence. These results demonstrate that switching the motor response weakens serial dependencies and imply that the action required to make a choice can impact one's metacognitive evaluations.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144800050","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":"Human turn-taking development: A multi-faceted review of turn-taking comprehension and production in the first years of life.","authors":"Samuel H Cosper, Simone Pika","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02749-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02749-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Human communication builds on a highly cooperative and interactional infrastructure-conversational turn-taking. Turn-taking is characterized by reciprocal, alternating exchanges between two or more interactants, avoidance of overlap, and relatively short response times. Although the behavioral principles governing turn-taking in spoken interactions of human adults have been investigated for decades, relatively little is known about the acquisition of conversational turn-taking skills and the developmental trajectories of turn-taking comprehension and production. The aim of the present review was to provide a comprehensive overview of turn-taking development enabling the extrapolation of developmental milestones and investigations across species and taxa. it thus aims to serve as a crucial guide to our current understanding of turn-taking in childhood and instigate a better understanding of turn-taking phylogeny, its evolutionary roots, as well as systematic, quantitative applications across and between species, thereby possibly bridging the existing gap between linguistic and nonlinguistic species.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144800048","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}
Steffen Tietz, Marlene Müller, Jan Rummel, Lena Steindorf
{"title":"Demotivated, but still attentive: Text disfluency does not affect mind-wandering and reading comprehension, but reduces motivation.","authors":"Steffen Tietz, Marlene Müller, Jan Rummel, Lena Steindorf","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02735-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02735-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Studies on the relationship between text-processing difficulty, mind wandering, and reading comprehension achieved mixed results. Whereas most studies found mind-wandering frequency to be increased and reading comprehension to be decreased when text processing became more difficult, Faber et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 24(3), 914-919, 2017) reported an opposite effect when manipulating text difficulty via different font types (i.e., Arial vs. Comic Sans). This effect may reflect a potential of mildly disfluent fonts, such as Comic Sans, to introduce desirable difficulties during reading, thereby enhancing focus on the text. Strongly disfluent fonts, however, may contribute to the commonly observed disadvantages in text focus under conditions of increased text processing difficulty. To test this idea, we conducted a new study (N = 151, student sample) in which we manipulated disfluency in three levels (i.e., fluent, mildly disfluent, strongly disfluent) by using different font types, and compared mind-wandering frequency, reading comprehension, and reading motivation between conditions. The disfluency manipulation affected motivation but not mind wandering or reading comprehension. Additional Bayesian analyses strongly supported the null hypothesis for the latter two. These results suggest that the positive effects of reading disfluency may be less robust than previously assumed and that further research is needed to explore to which extent text-processing difficulty effects on mind wandering are reliant on sample and text characteristics.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144800047","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}
Yuejun Lawrance Cai, Kin Fai Ellick Wong, Jessica Y Y Kwong
{"title":"Does your surname undermine your research impact?","authors":"Yuejun Lawrance Cai, Kin Fai Ellick Wong, Jessica Y Y Kwong","doi":"10.3758/s13423-025-02727-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02727-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Citation frequency is widely recognized as a crucial metric for assessing academic impact. Previous studies analyzing data from citation databases have observed a surname order bias-a phenomenon where the alphabetical ordering of researchers' surnames negatively impacts their citation counts. However, the underlying mechanisms driving this bias, the causality behind it, and its implications for in-text citation practices remain poorly understood. Therefore, the present research aims to address these gaps through two preregistered studies. Study 1 replicates and extends the work of Stevens and Duque (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 1020-1026, 2019), using a larger sample of 446,755 articles and controlling for surname initial frequency and publication year. Study 2 is an experiment with 307 valid responses from academics holding doctoral degrees, manipulating both citation systems and surname alphabetical order. Consistent and robust findings emerged across both studies: articles authored by individuals with surnames appearing earlier in the alphabet were more likely to be cited. This effect was especially pronounced in the context of alphabetical citation systems, compared with numerical citation systems. The current research provides a testable, reliable explanation for the surname order bias and establishes a causal link between surname alphabetical order and citation frequency. Implications for theory and academic practice are discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144785127","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}