Miriam Aguilar, Josep Demestre, Pilar Ferré, José A Hinojosa
{"title":"On the Effects of Commas and Line Breaks in Relative Clause Attachment.","authors":"Miriam Aguilar, Josep Demestre, Pilar Ferré, José A Hinojosa","doi":"10.1177/17470218251406627","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218251406627","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study examines the influence of commas and line breaks on attachment preferences in Spanish preverbal relative clauses with two potential antecedents (e.g., <i>The colleague of the violinist who is a far-right supporter performed with the orchestra yesterday</i>). Previous research in Spanish, which focused on postverbal relative clauses, provided evidence that commas introduce an implicit prosodic boundary that encourages attachment to the higher determiner phrase (DP1, <i>the colleague</i>). Here, we assess the separate and combined effects of commas and line breaks in three offline studies in Spanish. First, we assess attachment preferences of sentences with relative clauses preceded by commas and without commas in the under-researched preverbal position. Then, we test whether line breaks could have the same effect as commas in determining attachment. Our findings suggest that only commas consistently and significantly impact attachment preferences, favoring high attachment, and that visual segmentation through line breaks is not enough to obtain the same effect.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"2103-2114"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13400812/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145655126","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}
Julius B Calvert, Nicholas P Maxwell, Kendal A Smith
{"title":"\"They All Look the Same?\" Participant Ethnicity Moderates the Cross-Race Effect on Judgments of Learning.","authors":"Julius B Calvert, Nicholas P Maxwell, Kendal A Smith","doi":"10.1177/17470218261425967","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218261425967","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Cross-Race Effect (CRE) refers to the repeated finding that individuals are better at recognizing faces belonging to members of their own racial or ethnic ingroup. While this effect has been widely studied on memory, fewer studies have explored whether judgments of learning (JOLs) are also sensitive to this pattern. In two experiments, Black and White participants made JOLs while studying high typicality same and other-race faces (Experiment 1) or a mix of high and low typicality faces (Experiment 2). We replicated the CRE on memory, as participants were better at recognizing and showed greater discriminability for same-race faces. Importantly, the CRE pattern extended to JOLs. However, this pattern was linked to participant ethnicity, as only Black participants' JOLs were sensitive to the CRE. For White participants, mean JOLs did not differ between same and other-race targets, regardless of typicality. Responses on racial attitude measures showed that White participants displayed stronger internal motivations to appear non-prejudiced; however, correlational and mediation analyses revealed that this JOL pattern was not driven by differences in racial attitudes or motivations. Thus, while JOLs can be sensitive to the CRE, this effect varies by participant ethnicity, underscoring the influence of social experience on metacognitive judgments.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"2211-2226"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146158066","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":"Relation Between Musicianship and Speech Perception: The Mediating Roles of Auditory Sensitivity and Executive Function.","authors":"Jiaqing Zu, William Choi","doi":"10.1177/17470218251404928","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218251404928","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Previous research found that musicians often outperform non-musicians in speech perception. However, the exact mechanism underlying the musicians' advantage is equivocal. This study aimed to investigate the pathway(s) between musicianship and speech perception. Specifically, the study examined the mediating role of auditory sensitivity and executive function in the relation between musicianship and speech perception. A total of 136 Cantonese-speaking adults were recruited. Participants completed a series of tests assessing their musicianship, auditory sensitivity, executive function, and speech perception. The findings showed that auditory sensitivity mediates the effect of musicianship on speech perception, whereas executive function does not serve as a significant mediator.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1945-1962"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145597184","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}
Jing Zhou, Feiyu Diao, Yunfei Gao, Jingjing Zhao, Yonghui Wang
{"title":"For Praise or Money: The Impact of Different Types of Symbolic Rewards on Selective Attention.","authors":"Jing Zhou, Feiyu Diao, Yunfei Gao, Jingjing Zhao, Yonghui Wang","doi":"10.1177/17470218261417302","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218261417302","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Previous research has confirmed the effect of monetary reward on selective attention, but the influence of social reward has yet to be fully investigated. To address this issue, we employed a modified two-rectangle paradigm paired with the monetary incentive delay task or social incentive delay task. In this paradigm, reward cues were implemented symbolically and were not linked to performance-based rewards. In Experiment 1, the relative value of monetary reward diminished object-based attention without affecting space-based attention (SBA). In Experiment 2, the stability of the SBA effect was confirmed, but the elimination of the object-based attention effect due to the relative value of non-verbal social reward was only observed in women. In Experiment 3, we found that verbal social reward resulted in similar effects as monetary reward in Experiment 1 when non-verbal information bias was controlled. The results contribute further evidence to the extended common currency schema and are consistent with the view from prospect theory that relative, context-dependent value can influence early attentional processing across different reward types.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"2169-2183"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145959909","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":"Associative Learning in a Conspiratorial Frame.","authors":"Tom Kelly, Michael Hattersley, Elliot A Ludvig","doi":"10.1177/17470218251396472","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218251396472","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Conspiracy beliefs are widespread and can lead to deleterious societal outcomes, yet little research has examined how they are learned. In associative learning, blocking occurs when people learn less about a novel cue in the presence of another causally predictive cue. Here, blocking was examined in a conspiratorial context. In the task, participants were told about a foreign politician and a possible conspiracy: This politician had allegedly been poisoned at a given location. Participants were then presented with a set of pairings between locations and illness; the conspiracy-congruent location was always presented together with a novel location. Learning about this novel location was blocked by the conspiracy-congruent location and, on aggregate, participants endorsed the conspiracy theory. There was, however, no evidence that conspiracy theorists were more likely to demonstrate blocking in general. Conspiracies can thus be acquired and maintained through similar associative-learning processes as other beliefs.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1985-1998"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13400819/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145422698","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}
Helge Schlüter, Ryan P M Hackländer, Christina Bermeitinger
{"title":"Revisiting Emotion-Induced Memory Effects in the Emotional Oddball Paradigm: A Replication Study.","authors":"Helge Schlüter, Ryan P M Hackländer, Christina Bermeitinger","doi":"10.1177/17470218251408811","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218251408811","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The emotional oddball paradigm involves sequences of frequently presented standard stimuli and rare (mostly emotional) deviant stimuli. Presenting a highly arousing, emotionally negative deviant in a stream of neutral standard information is usually associated with a weaker recall rate (in a subsequent memory task) for stimuli that had been presented directly before the negative deviant (i.e. retrograde amnesia). This effect has often been explained by the arousal-biased competition (ABC) theory, which states that arousal biases attention towards salient stimuli and away from less salient stimuli; therefore, the focus of the ABC theory is on the arousing effects of the deviant. However, there is also evidence showing that emotionally arousing positive deviants led to enhanced recall rates for stimuli preceding the deviant (Hurlemann et al., 2005; Experiment 1). In this study we replicated the methods used in the aforementioned study from Hurlemann et al. (2005), but did neither find enhanced nor decreased recall performances for stimuli preceding positive deviants. We did, however, find weak evidence of poorer recall rates for stimuli preceding a negative deviant. The implications of these results for the ABC theory and the role of positive valence on memory are discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"2157-2168"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145709032","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":"Enhanced Metacognition for Unexpected Action Outcomes.","authors":"Daniel Yon","doi":"10.1177/17470218261426195","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218261426195","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Metacognition allows us to explicitly represent the uncertainty in our perceptions and decisions. Recent theories suggest that we use predictive models of our environment to optimise these introspective processes, but extant accounts disagree about the role prediction plays: some accounts suggest that we should have more sensitive subjective insight for predictable events, while others stress that metacognition should be more sensitive for surprising prediction errors. Here, two experiments compare these accounts. Participants performed actions to generate visual outcomes that could move in expected or unexpected directions. Across both experiments, signal detection analyses revealed more sensitive metacognition for unexpected outcomes. A combination of reverse correlation and computational modelling suggested this advantage arose because of a specific enhancement of metacognitive (rather than perceptual) gain to unexpected information. These results are consistent with higher-order inference models of introspective awareness and point to a mechanism that may optimise diverse aspects of cognition and behaviour in an unstable world.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"2146-2156"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146157646","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":"Feedback on Mental State Inferences Improves Accuracy and Awareness.","authors":"Bryony Payne, Geoffrey Bird, Caroline Catmur","doi":"10.1177/17470218251404419","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218251404419","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Accurate inference of the mental states of others is essential for successful social interaction. Concerningly, previous work shows that humans are less accurate when inferring the views of out-group members relative to in-group members, but are unaware of this difference in accuracy. Across two studies (Experiment 1: <i>n</i> = 142; Experiment 2: <i>n</i> = 90), we asked whether feedback on the accuracy of mental state inferences could increase the accuracy of, and/or recalibrate participants' confidence in the accuracy of, mental state inferences for outgroup members. Feedback specific to individual targets significantly improved the accuracy of inferences when inferring those targets' views for both in-group and out-group members but did not generalise to other group members. Furthermore, participants were able to use feedback to calibrate their confidence in the accuracy of their out-group inferences. These results demonstrate that, with targeted feedback, people are more able to understand the minds of both in-group and out-group members and become more aware of their ability to do so.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"2058-2072"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13400811/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145597173","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":"Dyadic Person Similarity Predicts Similarity in Face Judgements.","authors":"Rochelle Williams, Lúcia Garrido","doi":"10.1177/17470218261420224","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218261420224","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Perceivers consistently extract information from faces to judge whether others are attractive, trustworthy, or dominant. However, there is also substantial variability among perceivers when making these face-judgements. Here, we investigated whether dyadic similarities in participants' personalities are related to similarities in their face-judgements. Three hundred and seven participants based in the United Kingdom rated 24 faces on 6 traits. Participants also rated themselves on social-traits and completed a personality questionnaire. We computed dissimilarities between pairs of participants for face-judgements, self-rated-social-traits, and personality-traits, resulting in three separate dissimilarity matrices. Using representational similarity analysis, we showed that both the self-rated-social-traits and personality-traits matrices were significantly correlated with the face-judgements matrix. Importantly, these associations were stable when controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and location. These findings show that people who are more similar to each other also perceive others in a similar manner, and could form the basis for how we gravitate towards others and build friendships.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"2199-2210"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13400793/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146041513","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":"People Can Adaptively Exploit Model-free and Model-based Reinforcement Learning in Competitive Games.","authors":"Brian C Howatt, Michael E Young","doi":"10.1177/17470218261437211","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17470218261437211","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A key goal for organisms in competitive social interactions is learning strategies that outperform opponents. Despite the ample literature on modeling strategic behaviors in games, little research has parametrically examined the degree to which individuals' performance and strategy depend on an opponent's predictability and how they change over time. To test these questions, we conducted two experiments investigating people's behavior in the competitive game Rock, Paper, Scissors against computerized opponents programmed using reinforcement learning algorithms. In Experiment 1, the RL algorithms were model-free, where only the values of selected actions were updated following feedback. In Experiment 2, the algorithms were model-based, where the values of unselected actions were also updated. Results from both experiments showed that subjects significantly outperformed both classes of RL opponents, but they implemented different strategies to do so. Specifically, participants tended to engage in a Win-Stay/Lose-Shift strategy in Experiment 1 but a Win-Shift/Lose-Shift strategy in Experiment 2, contrary to behaviors predicted by typical RL models and learning theories. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of shifting away from reinforced behaviors, reinforcement learning as a representative computational framework of strategic decision-making, and how future research can continue this investigation by testing additional models and competitive games.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"1999-2019"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147469219","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}