{"title":"Cognitive control is task specific: Further evidence against the idea of domain-general conflict adaptation.","authors":"Daxun Zhu, Xiangpeng Wang, Enwei Zhao, Nazbanou Nozari, Wim Notebaert, Senne Braem","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001480","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Adaptive control refers to flexible adjustments in control settings in response to conflicting situations. There has been a long-standing debate as to whether this adaptation relies on a domain-general or domain-specific process. Recent models predict a U-shaped relation where only highly similar or highly dissimilar tasks show adaptation across tasks, because only those tasks can be represented or activated in parallel. While there has been an abundance of evidence for adaptation within and across highly similar tasks, only some recent studies have reported adaptation across highly dissimilar tasks, with some failures to replicate. In order to further investigate this, we interleaved two very different conflict tasks, a manual multisource interference task and a vocal picture-word interference task. We ran this experiment in Dutch (Experiment 1) and Mandarin (Experiment 2). Across the two experiments, results show no cross-task conflict adaptation. These results do not fit with the suggestion of domain-general adaptive processes nor with the hypothesis of a U-shaped model. Instead, our results are most compatible with a task-specific view on the mechanisms behind adaptive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143755595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soobin H Hong, Amy R Zou, Aspen H Yoo, Anne G E Collins
{"title":"Episodic memory contributions to working memory-supported reinforcement learning.","authors":"Soobin H Hong, Amy R Zou, Aspen H Yoo, Anne G E Collins","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001456","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks have been extremely successful at capturing how biological agents learn to make rewarding choices. However, there is also increasing evidence that multiple cognitive processes, including working memory (WM) and episodic memory (EM), support such learning in parallel with value-based mechanisms such as RL. Here, we investigate EM's role in a context where both RL and WM are known to strongly support learning. We develop two new experimental paradigms to isolate EM's contributions, using trial-unique signals (Experiment 1) and temporal context effects (Experiment 2) to tag EM. As predicted, our results across both experiments consistently showed a weak role of EM in learning alongside RL and WM. However, surprisingly, we showed that EM's contributions did not improve overall behavior; instead, participants appeared to primarily encode in or retrieve from the EM part of a past trial's information (the stimulus-action choice, without outcome), leading to characteristic error patterns. Across both experiments, computational modeling confirmed a small contribution of traces of past stimulus-action (association) events stored in EM to learning behavior. Our results shed light on the format of EM traces and how they support decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143755596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rational language comprehension depends on priors about both meaning and structure.","authors":"Moshe Poliak, Saima Malik-Moraleda, Edward Gibson","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001470","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Language comprehension relies on integrating the perceived utterance with prior expectations. Previous investigations of expectations about sentence structure (the structural prior) have found that comprehenders often interpret rare constructions nonliterally. However, this work has mostly relied on analytic languages like English, where word order is the main way to indicate syntactic relations in the sentence. This raises the possibility that the structural prior over word order is not a universal part of the sentence processing toolkit, but rather a tool acquired only by speakers of languages where word order has special importance as the main source of syntactic information in the sentence. Moving away from English to make conclusions about more general cognitive strategies (Blasi et al., 2022), we investigate whether the structural prior over word order is a part of language processing more universally using Hindi and Russian, synthetic languages with flexible word order. We conducted two studies in Hindi (<i>N</i>s = 50, 57, the latter preregistered) and three studies with the same materials, translated, in Russian (<i>N</i>s = 50, 100, 100, all preregistered), manipulating plausibility and structural frequency. Structural frequency was manipulated by comparing simple clauses with the canonical word order (subject-object-verb in Hindi, subject-verb-object in Russian) to ones with a noncanonical (low frequency) word order (object-subject-verb in Hindi, object-verb-subject in Russian). We found that noncanonical sentences were interpreted nonliterally more often than canonical sentences, even though we used flexible-word-order languages. We conclude that the structural prior over word order is always evaluated in language processing, regardless of language type. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143755598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The beneficial effect of time in simple and complex working memory span tasks.","authors":"Klaus Oberauer","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001484","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Performance in immediate serial recall of verbal lists-often referred to as simple span task-is improved by longer free time between presentation of successive items. Performance in complex span tasks, in which presentation of items is interleaved by work on a distractor task, is improved by reducing the cognitive load imposed by the distractor task. The cognitive load decreases as the proportion of free time between successive items is increased. The present experiments compare the beneficial effects of free time in simple and complex span tasks. Increasing free time between items improved memory in both task versions by the same time-accuracy function; the detrimental effect of processing distracting information in complex span is unrelated to that effect. Therefore, the effect of cognitive load in complex span can be explained by the combination of beneficial effects of free time and detrimental effects of distractor interference. An analysis of the free-time benefit by serial position reveals differences between simple and complex spans that suggest that free time additionally benefits complex but not simple spans through strengthening episodic memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143755599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The relative importance of language, gaze, and gesture in deictic reference.","authors":"Gozdem Arikan, Peter Boddy, Kenny R Coventry","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001465","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>When people communicate, they use a combination of modalities-speech, gesture, and eye gaze-to engage and transmit information to an addressee. Spatial deictic communication is a paradigmatic case, with spatial demonstratives (<i>this/that</i>) frequently co-occurring with eye gaze and pointing gestures to draw the attention of an addressee to an object location (e.g., <i>this cup, that chair</i>). Yet the effectiveness of these individual modalities in guiding attention has not been established. In two experiments, we manipulated pointing, gazing, and spatial demonstratives to establish their relative and combined effectiveness in directing attention to a specific referent. Participants saw an image (Experiments 1 and 2) or a short video clip (Experiment 2) with a person (agent) sitting behind a table, describing <i>(this, that),</i> gazing, and/or pointing at the items placed proximally or distally relative to the agent. All three modalities individually affected which of the two objects participants thought the person in the picture was referring to. However, pointing was the dominant cue to referent choice, with demonstratives on their own acting as a relatively weak spatial deictic cue. Overall, the effect of spatial demonstratives (Experiments 1 and 2) and gaze (Experiment 2) on attention to a referent was enhanced when coupled with pointing, both when targeting the distal and proximal positions. The results help to illuminate why spatial deictic communication is usually multimodal, with individual modalities contributing different communicative functions in the act of spatial deixis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143755601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christina Papoutsi, Elli N Tourtouri, Vitória Piai, Leonie F Lampe, Antje S Meyer
{"title":"Fast and slow errors: What naming latencies of errors reveal about the interplay of attentional control and word planning in speeded picture naming.","authors":"Christina Papoutsi, Elli N Tourtouri, Vitória Piai, Leonie F Lampe, Antje S Meyer","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001472","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001472","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Speakers sometimes produce lexical errors, such as saying \"salt\" instead of \"pepper.\" This study aimed to better understand the origin of lexical errors by assessing whether they arise from a hasty selection and premature decision to speak (<i>premature selection hypothesis</i>) or from momentary attentional disengagement from the task (<i>attentional lapse hypothesis</i>). We analyzed data from a speeded picture naming task (Lampe et al., 2023) and investigated whether lexical errors are produced as fast as target (i.e., correct) responses, thus arising from premature selection, or whether they are produced more slowly than target responses, thus arising from lapses of attention. Using ex-Gaussian analyses, we found that lexical errors were slower than targets in the tail, but not in the normal part of the response time distribution, with the tail effect primarily resulting from errors that were not coordinates, that is, members of the target's semantic category. Moreover, we compared the coordinate errors and target responses in terms of their word-intrinsic properties and found that they were overall more frequent, shorter, and acquired earlier than targets. Given the present findings, we conclude that coordinate errors occur due to a premature selection but in the context of intact attentional control, following the same lexical constraints as targets, while other errors, given the variability in their nature, may vary in their origin, with one potential source being lapses of attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143671575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Frequency effects in human category learning.","authors":"Dong-Yu Yang, Darrell A Worthy","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001474","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study investigated the assumptions of prototype and exemplar models of human category learning, with a particular focus on the impact of category frequency. We used baseline and recency-weighted variants of prototype and exemplar models to examine the computational mechanisms underlying categorization decisions when one category was presented more frequently than the other. We employed extensive sets of stimuli derived from bivariate normal distributions and manipulated category frequency during training across four experiments using different category structures. In the transfer phases, participants classified novel stimuli. Across all studies, the results revealed a significant frequency effect, with participants showing a preference for categorizing novel items as members of the more frequently encountered category. This preference extended to transfer stimuli outside the trained region of the stimulus space. Model-based analyses indicated that the recency-weighted generalized context model exemplar model, which computes summed similarity via a Decay reinforcement learning rule, consistently outperformed other models in fitting the data and accurately reproducing the observed classification patterns across all experiments. Both prototype models failed to account for the observed frequency effects. While the baseline generalized context model was able to account for frequency effects, it did not capture recency effects. These findings suggest that relative category frequency influences human behavior when categorizing novel items. The computational modeling results revealed that evidence for categorization decisions is recency-weighted and accumulative rather than averaged. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143671614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Implicit causality can affect pronoun use in fragment completion tasks.","authors":"Yining Ye, Jennifer E Arnold","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001435","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>An unresolved debate questions whether speakers tend to use less specific referential expressions, like pronouns, when the referent is predictable within the context. Numerous studies test this question with implicit causality (IC), which elicits a strong expectation for the implicit cause to be mentioned. Using fragment completion tasks, several studies found that speakers do not use more pronouns for the implicit cause (e.g., Fukumura & van Gompel, 2010; Rohde & Kehler, 2014). However, a recent study found an effect of implicit causality on pronoun use, using a verbal story retelling paradigm with a rich context (Weatherford & Arnold, 2021). What accounts for these different findings? Two major methodological differences are that the storytelling task engaged participants in social interaction and used more richly contextualized stimuli than the fragment completion task. The present study further tests whether fragment completion tasks are capable of detecting the effect of implicit causality on pronoun use with elaborated stimuli and when there is social interaction. We found that implicit causality did indeed guide pronoun use, but only in a context that is socially interactive. These findings suggest that predictability increases pronoun use, but observing this effect is more likely in tasks where the producer is engaged in the discourse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143671615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Zhiting Yin, Shuyuan Chen, Ni Wen, Bingsong Zhao, Zhican He, Yanping Liu
{"title":"Repeated previews elicit an inhibitory parafoveal-on-foveal effect in Chinese reading: Implications for attention allocation.","authors":"Zhiting Yin, Shuyuan Chen, Ni Wen, Bingsong Zhao, Zhican He, Yanping Liu","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001471","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The allocation of attention during reading has long been a central focus of research. A key question concerns the extent to which lexical processing is influenced solely by the difficulty of currently fixated words, as proposed by the serial attention hypothesis, or whether it is also influenced by the difficulty of upcoming words (i.e., parafoveal-on-foveal effects [PoF effects]), as proposed by the attention gradient hypothesis. The present study provides oculomotor and neural evidence for how mislocated fixation can influence PoF effects in Chinese reading. We manipulated preview words following the target words (repeated vs. original) and categorized the two-character target words into two fixation position groups (Character 1: no fixation error group vs. Character 2: potential mislocated fixations group). Experiment 1 used an eye-tracking technique, and Experiment 2 coregistered electroencephalogram and eye tracking with a larger character size to validate the findings. Overall, the results indicated that inhibitory repeated PoF effects were observed only at Character 2, as evidenced by fixation durations and fixation-related potentials. These findings provide novel eye-movement and neural evidence suggesting that inhibitory repeated PoF effects may, at least in part, be related to mislocated fixations caused by fixations on posttarget words that are mistakenly recorded as being at the end of target words due to measurement (or saccade) errors, while attention remains focused on repeated preview. Taken together, these findings suggest that the mislocated fixation account, situated within the serial attention hypothesis, provides a viable explanation for interpreting the PoF effect without requiring parallel processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143671621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Changes in learning strategies contribute to negative reactivity of immediate judgments of learning.","authors":"Franziska Ingendahl, Monika Undorf","doi":"10.1037/xlm0001475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001475","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is evidence that asking people to predict their own memory performance during learning (immediate judgments of learning, JOLs) can alter memory. Changes in the use of learning strategies have been proposed to contribute to these reactive effects of JOLs. This study addresses the impact of making JOLs on the use of learning strategies and the contribution of learning strategies to JOL reactivity. Across six experiments, participants studied related and unrelated word pairs and did or did not make JOLs during study, completed a cued-recall test, and reported the learning strategies they had used for each word pair. When we manipulated the requirement to make JOLs between participants, making JOLs enhanced memory for related pairs and impaired memory for unrelated pairs. Further, the learning strategies participants used differed across the JOL and no-JOL groups, and these differences mediated the detrimental effects of making JOLs on memory for unrelated pairs. In contrast, when we manipulated the requirement to make JOLs within participants, making JOLs enhanced recall performance for related pairs but did not impact recall for unrelated pairs or the use of learning strategies. Overall, our findings indicate that changes in the use of learning strategies underlie detrimental effects of making JOL on memory for unrelated pairs but only play a minor role in positive effects of making JOLs for related word pairs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":50194,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143544111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}