Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-15eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.422
Lars-Michael Schöpper, Christian Frings
{"title":"As Time Goes By: Event File Decay Does Not Unleash Inhibition of Return.","authors":"Lars-Michael Schöpper, Christian Frings","doi":"10.5334/joc.422","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.422","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a location repetition cost typically observed when signaling the detection of or localizing sequentially presented stimuli repeating or changing their location. In discrimination tasks, however, IOR is often reduced or even absent; here, effects of binding and retrieval are thought to take place. Information is bound into an event file, which upon feature repetition causes retrieval, leading to partial repetition costs. It is assumed that the presence of retrieval-based effects masks the observation of IOR. Yet, some evidence suggests that long intervals between stimuli can lead to IOR in tasks in which usually mostly binding effects are observed. We hypothesized that with an increasing interval between prime response and probe onset (response stimulus interval, RSI), event files will decay and decreasingly mask IOR. In turn, IOR should be strongest at longest intervals. In the current study, participants discriminated the color of stimuli repeating or changing their location. Crucially, we varied the RSI from 500 ms to 3000 ms, trial-wise (Experiment 1) and block-wise (Experiment 2). We observed overall binding effects that were reduced with increasing RSI; these effects were slightly stronger when presented block-wise. IOR was overall absent (Experiment 1) or weak (Experiment 2) and did not emerge with increasing RSI. While event file decay took place, it did not unleash IOR. Rather, these results suggest that retrieval-based effects do not simply mask but overwrite IOR when manually responding. The observations of IOR with long intervals are discussed in the context of overall fast responding.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11740711/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143013064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-10eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.424
Sergio Morra, Steven J Howard, Vanessa M Loaiza
{"title":"Working Memory and Executive Functions: Theoretical Advances.","authors":"Sergio Morra, Steven J Howard, Vanessa M Loaiza","doi":"10.5334/joc.424","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.424","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This editorial presents a special collection on working memory and executive functions. Six articles are presented and their contributions to current theoretical debates are briefly discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11720567/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142972420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-07eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.420
Simona Amenta, Francesca Foppolo, Linda Badan
{"title":"The Role of Morphological Information in Processing Pseudo-words in Italian L2 Learners: It's a Matter of Experience.","authors":"Simona Amenta, Francesca Foppolo, Linda Badan","doi":"10.5334/joc.420","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.420","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The productive use of morphological information is considered one of the possible ways in which speakers of a language understand and learn unknown words. In the present study we investigate if, and how, also adult L2 learners exploit morphological information to process unknown words by analyzing the impact of language proficiency in the processing of novel derivations. Italian L2 learners, divided into three proficiency groups, participated in a lexical decision where pseudo-words could embed existing stems (e.g., <i>sock</i>le), suffixes (e.g., hett<i>able</i>), or both (novel derivations, e.g., <i>quickify</i>). Participants with low proficiency exhibited reduced accuracy and longer reaction times when presented with pseudo-words embedding a stem compared to those embedding a suffix. Conversely, participants with high proficiency demonstrated comparable accuracy in rejecting pseudo-words with real stems or real suffixes but required more time to reject pseudo-words embedding a suffix. In the case of novel derivations, accuracy (i.e., correct rejection) decreased and reaction time increased for all proficiency groups. Our results show that L2 learners exploit morphological information to process novel words. Most importantly, the ability to extract and exploit morphological information is linked to language proficiency.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11720858/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142972416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-07eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.416
Margaret Kandel, Claudia Pañeda, Nasimeh Bahmanian, Mercedes Martinez Bruera, Colin Phillips, Sol Lago
{"title":"Number and Grammatical Gender Attraction in Spanish Pronouns: Evidence for a Syntactic Route to Their Features.","authors":"Margaret Kandel, Claudia Pañeda, Nasimeh Bahmanian, Mercedes Martinez Bruera, Colin Phillips, Sol Lago","doi":"10.5334/joc.416","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.416","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>When a speaker produces a pronoun, they must choose a form that carries the appropriate features. The current study investigates how speakers identify these features. We consider two possible routes: a conceptual-lexical route, whereby pronouns derive their features from the concept of the referent, and a syntactic route, whereby pronoun form is determined through a feature matching operation with the linguistic antecedent. We hypothesize that the use of these two routes should be differentially susceptible to interference from representations other than the pronoun's referent. We use agreement attraction to distinguish them. In two experiments, we test whether Spanish speakers produce number and grammatical gender attraction errors. We observe small but reliable attraction effects for both features, demonstrating that pronoun formulation can be disrupted by the linguistic representations of nearby nouns. These attraction effects suggest that speakers can use a syntactic route to pronoun form.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11720697/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142972412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-07eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.419
David Hernández-Gutiérrez, Miguel A Sorrel, David R Shanks, Miguel A Vadillo
{"title":"The Conscious Side of 'Subliminal' Linguistic Priming: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis and Reliability Analysis of Visibility Measures.","authors":"David Hernández-Gutiérrez, Miguel A Sorrel, David R Shanks, Miguel A Vadillo","doi":"10.5334/joc.419","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.419","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research on unconscious processing has been a valuable source of evidence in psycholinguistics for shedding light on the cognitive architecture of language. The automaticity of syntactic processing, in particular, has long been debated. One strategy to establish this automaticity involves detecting significant syntactic priming effects in tasks that limit conscious awareness of the stimuli. Criteria for assessing unconscious priming include the visibility (<i>d</i>') of masked words not differing significantly from zero and no positive correlation between visibility and priming. However, such outcomes could also arise for strictly methodological reasons, such as low statistical power in visibility tests or low reliability of dependent measures. In this study, we aimed to address these potential limitations. Through meta-analysis and Bayesian re-analysis, we find evidence of low statistical power and of participants having above-chance awareness of 'subliminal' words. Moreover, we conducted reliability analyses on a dataset from Berkovitch and Dehaene (2019), finding that low reliability in both syntactic priming and visibility tasks may better explain the absence of a significant correlation. Overall, these findings cast doubt on the validity of previous conclusions regarding the automaticity of syntactic processing based on masked priming effects. The results underscore the importance of revisiting the methods employed when exploring unconscious processing in future psycholinguistic research.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11720476/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142972414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-07eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.417
Luca Tarasi, Margherita Covelli, Chiara Tabarelli de Fatis, Vincenzo Romei
{"title":"Prior Information Shapes Perceptual Confidence.","authors":"Luca Tarasi, Margherita Covelli, Chiara Tabarelli de Fatis, Vincenzo Romei","doi":"10.5334/joc.417","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.417","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Decisional confidence refers to the subjective evaluation of the accuracy of a decision based on sensory information. While these judgments are typically grounded in the strength of evidence leading to a decision, they are also subjected to influence from top-down factors such as prior expectations. Previous research has highlighted the impact of prior information on decision parameters such as reaction times and decision criteria placement. However, a comprehensive understanding of how prior information shapes confidence ratings is still lacking. In this study, we manipulate prior knowledge by inducing varying levels of target probability expectation (low: 33%, random: 50%, high: 67%) in a perceptual detection task. In each trial both type-1 (detection) and type-2 (confidence) responses were recorded. First, we replicate previous findings, demonstrating that decisional priors impact decision criteria but not task sensitivity. Secondly, we reveal the strong effect that prior expectations exert on type-2 decisions, with this influence being moderated by a congruency effect between the given prior, the actual stimulus presented, and the provided response. Moreover, we find that confidence is higher in correct compared to incorrect responses, with low-probability trials leading to higher confidence judgments in correct choices compared to random and liberal trials. Finally, we unveil that prior-dependent modulation rates in criterion and confidence were positively associated. These results underscore the intricate interplay between prior expectations, decision-making, and confidence levels, demonstrating that what we perceive is not solely a data-driven phenomenon but can be already shaped by the available information about the state of the world.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"11"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11736391/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143013070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-07eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.415
Nanne Kukkonen, Senne Braem, Jens Allaert, Joshua O Eayrs, Nicoleta Prutean, S Tabitha Steendam, C Nico Boehler, Jan R Wiersema, Wim Notebaert, Ruth M Krebs
{"title":"The Cost of Regulating Effort: Reward and Difficulty Cues With Longer Prediction Horizons Have a Stronger Impact on Performance.","authors":"Nanne Kukkonen, Senne Braem, Jens Allaert, Joshua O Eayrs, Nicoleta Prutean, S Tabitha Steendam, C Nico Boehler, Jan R Wiersema, Wim Notebaert, Ruth M Krebs","doi":"10.5334/joc.415","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.415","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Many theories on cognitive effort start from the assumption that cognitive effort can be expended at will, and flexibly up- or down-regulated depending on expected task demand and rewards. However, while effort regulation has been investigated across a wide range of incentive conditions, few investigated the cost of effort regulation itself. Across four experiments, we studied the effects of reward expectancy and task difficulty on effort expenditure in a perceptual decision-making task (random-dot-motion) and a cognitive control task (colour-naming Stroop), and within each task comparted cues between short (cueing the next trial) and long (cueing the next six trials) prediction horizons. We found that participants used the cue information only when it was valid for multiple trials in a row. In the random-dot-motion task, a high reward expectancy resulted in better accuracy, especially in easy trials, but only with long prediction horizon. Similarly, in the Stroop task, the reward facilitation of reaction time was only observed after reward cues with a long prediction horizon. Together, our results indicate that people experience a cost to effort regulation, and that lower adjustment frequency can compensate for this cost.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"9"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11720864/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142972415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-07eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.418
Emiko J Muraki, Sydney Born, Penny M Pexman
{"title":"Grasping Variance in Word Norms: Individual Differences in Motor Imagery and Semantic Ratings.","authors":"Emiko J Muraki, Sydney Born, Penny M Pexman","doi":"10.5334/joc.418","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.418","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Word norming datasets have become an important resource for psycholinguistic research, and they are based on the underlying assumption that individual differences are inconsequential to the measurement of semantic dimensions. In this pre-registered study we tested this assumption by examining whether individual differences in motor imagery are related to variance in semantic ratings. We collected graspability ratings (i.e., how easily a word's referent can be grasped using one hand) for 350 words and also had each participant complete a series of motor imagery questionnaires. Using linear mixed effect models we tested whether measures of motor imagery ability (e.g., the Florida Praxis Imagery Questionnaire and the Test of Ability in Movement Imagery for Hands) and motor imagery vividness (e.g., the Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire 2) could account for variance (raw and absolute difference scores) in graspability ratings. We observed a significant relationship between motor imagery vividness and absolute rating difference scores, wherein people with more vivid motor imagery provided ratings that were further from the mean word ratings. However there was no relationship between motor imagery and raw rating difference scores. The results suggest that there are measurable systematic differences in how participants make sensorimotor semantic ratings, which has implications for how sensorimotor semantic word norms are used for investigations of lexical semantic processing.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11720573/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142972408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-06eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.407
Samuel Aeschbach, Rui Mata, Dirk U Wulff
{"title":"Mapping Mental Representations With Free Associations: A Tutorial Using the R Package associatoR.","authors":"Samuel Aeschbach, Rui Mata, Dirk U Wulff","doi":"10.5334/joc.407","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.407","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>People's understanding of topics and concepts such as risk, sustainability, and intelligence can be important for psychological researchers and policymakers alike. One underexplored way of accessing this information is to use free associations to map people's mental representations. In this tutorial, we describe how free association responses can be collected, processed, mapped, and compared across groups using the R package <i>associatoR</i>. We discuss study design choices and different approaches to uncovering the structure of mental representations using natural language processing, including the use of embeddings from large language models. We posit that free association analysis presents a powerful approach to revealing how people and machines represent key social and technological issues.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11720478/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142972411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal of CognitionPub Date : 2025-01-06eCollection Date: 2025-01-01DOI: 10.5334/joc.411
Antonio Prieto, Pedro R Montoro, Mikel Jimenez, José Antonio Hinojosa
{"title":"In Search of an Integrative Method to Study Unconscious Processing: An Application of Bayesian and General Recognition Theory Models to the Processing of Hierarchical Patterns in the Absence of Awareness.","authors":"Antonio Prieto, Pedro R Montoro, Mikel Jimenez, José Antonio Hinojosa","doi":"10.5334/joc.411","DOIUrl":"10.5334/joc.411","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The dissociation between conscious and unconscious perception is one of the most relevant issues in the study of human cognition. While there is evidence suggesting that some stimuli might be unconsciously processed up to its meaning (e.g., high-level stimulus processing), some authors claim that most results on the processing of subliminal stimuli can be explained by a mixture of methodological artefacts and questionable assumptions about what can be considered non-conscious. Particularly, one of the most controversial topics involves the method by which the awareness of the stimuli is assessed. To address this question, we introduced an integrative approach to assess the extent to which masked hierarchical stimuli (i.e., global shapes composed of local elements) can be processed in the absence of awareness. We combined a priming task where participants had to report global or local shapes, with the use of subjective and objective awareness measures collected either in a separate block (offline), or trial-by-trial during the main task (online). The unconscious processing of the masked primes was then evaluated through two different novel model-based methods: a Bayesian and a General Recognition Theory modeling approach. Despite the high correlation between awareness measures, our results show that the use of alternative approaches based on different theoretical assumptions leads to diverging conclusions about the extent of the unconscious processing of the masked primes.</p>","PeriodicalId":32728,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cognition","volume":"8 1","pages":"6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11720486/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142972410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}