Experimental Psychology

<b/>The production effect is the finding that, relative to silent reading, producing information at study (e.g., reading aloud) leads to a benefit in memory. In most studies of this effect, individuals are presented with a set of unique items, and they produce a subset of these items (e.g., they are presented with the to-be-remembered target item TABLE and produce table ) such that the production is both unique and representative of the target. Across two preregistered experiments, we examined the influence of a production that is unique but that does not match the target (e...

<b/>In this study, we re-examined the facilitation that occurs when auditorily presented monosyllabic primes and targets share their final phonemes, and in particular the rime (e.g., /vɔʀd/-/kɔʀd/). More specifically, we asked whether this rime facilitation effect is also observed when the two last consonants of the rime are transposed (e.g., /vɔʀd/-/kɔʀd/). In comparison to a control condition in which the primes and the targets were unrelated (e.g., /pylt/-/kɔʀd/), we found significant priming effects in both the rime (/vɔʀd/-/kɔʀd/) and the transposed-phoneme "rime" /vɔdʀ/-/kɔʀd/ conditions...

<b/>Recent changes in environments from in-person to remote present several issues for work, education, and research, particularly related to cognitive performance. Increased distraction in remote environments may lead to increases in mind-wandering and disengagement with tasks at hand, whether virtual meetings, online lectures, or psychological experiments. The present study investigated mind-wandering and multitasking effects during working memory tasks in remote and in-person environments. In two experiments, participants completed a working memory task with varied cognitive load during a secondary task...

<b/>A conditioned response to a stimulus can be transferred to an associated stimulus, as seen in sensory preconditioning. In this research paper, we aimed to explore this phenomenon using a stimulus-response contingency learning paradigm using voluntary actions as responses. We conducted two preregistered experiments that explored whether a learned response can be indirectly activated by a stimulus (S1) that was never directly paired with the response itself. Importantly, S1 was previously associated with another stimulus (S2) that was then directly and contingently paired with a response (S2-R contingency)...

<b/>We investigated effects of emotions on arithmetic problem-solving and age-related differences in these effects. Young and older adults verified addition problems displayed superimposed on emotionally negative, positive, or neutral pictures. Participants obtained poorer performance in emotion than in neutral conditions, with stronger interference by negative than positive emotions. Also, participants were more impaired by negative emotions while solving true problems than false problems, whereas they were influenced by positive emotions similarly on true and false problems...

<b/>An object appears to move at higher speed than another equally fast object when brief nonspatial tones coincide with its changes in motion direction. We refer to this phenomenon as the beep-speed illusion (Meyerhoff et al., 2022, Cognition , 219 , 104978). The origin of this illusion is unclear; however, attentional explanations and potential biases in the response behavior appear to be plausible candidates. In this report, we test a simple bias explanation that emerges from the way the dependent variable is assessed...

<b/>Dual tasks requiring sustained visual attention and upright stance are common, yet their impact on standing balance is not well understood. We investigated the role of visual attention in the maintenance of postural control, using the multiple-object tracking (MOT) task. Healthy young adults ( n = 12) performed the MOT task at three object movement speeds while seated or standing. MOT performance was assessed using tracking capacity ( k ). Metrics calculated to assess mediolateral (ML) and anterior-posterior (AP) postural control included: maximum difference between CoM and CoP position (CoM-CoP Max), root mean square distance for center of pressure and center of mass position (CoP and CoM RMS distance), and correlation between CoM and CoP time series signals (CoM/CoP correlation)...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

<b/>Gaze directed at the observer (direct gaze) is a highly salient social signal. Despite the existence of a preferential orientation toward direct gaze, none of the studies carried out so far seem to have explicitly studied the time course of information processing during gaze direction judgment. In an eye direction judgment task, participants were presented with a sketch of a face. A temporal asynchrony was introduced between the presentation of the eyes and that of the rest of the face. Indeed, the face could be presented before the eyes, the eyes could be presented before the face, or the face and the eyes could be presented simultaneously...

<b/>While performing two actions at the same time has mostly been associated with reduced performance, several recent studies have observed the opposite effect, that is, dual-action benefits . Previous evidence suggests that dual-action benefits result from single-action inhibitory costs - more specifically, it appears that under certain circumstances, single-action representations are derived from dual-action representations by removing (i.e., inhibiting) one of the component actions. In the present paper, we investigated if this is tied to the presence of multi-modal response demands (i...

<b/>Research has shown that people automatically imitate others and that this tendency is stronger when the other person is a human compared with a nonhuman agent. However, a controversial question is whether automatic imitation is also modulated by whether people believe the other person is a human. Although early research supported this hypothesis, not all studies reached the same conclusion and a recent meta-analysis found that there is currently neither evidence in favor nor against an influence of animacy beliefs on automatic imitation...

<b/>When we look at a picture, we tend to remember it by enriching the constructed mental representation with elements not present but probable outside the current view. The tendency to remember the perceived view with a broader scope is known as boundary extension (BE). Does BE benefit from paying reduced attention to the picture? While attention plays a central role in memory, only a few studies to date have investigated this question in the field of BE. In this research, participants completed a BE task in single- and dual-task conditions...

<b/>Noun-verb phrases are more efficiently remembered when they are enacted during learning than when they are only verbally studied, a phenomenon known as the enactment effect . While studies have debated whether motor information is key to this effect, our study explores whether the organization of motor information can support the enactment effect. We used the retrieval-practice paradigm to induce retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). In Experiment 1, we found an RIF effect of categorization into physical motor properties (e...

<b/>Research has shown engaging in retrieval practice can reduce the frequency of mind-wandering. However, no prior research has examined how engaging in collaborative (as compared to individual) retrieval practice impacts mind-wandering during learning. In the current experiment, participants were asked to study a list of words, followed by retrieval practice that either occurred collaboratively (as a dyad) or individually. During retrieval practice, participants provided self-reports as to whether they were on task or off task...

<b/>Acute social stress has been shown to influence social decision-making. This study aimed to examine how social distance modulates the influence of acute social stress on young male moral decision-making. Sixty healthy male college students were randomly divided to be exposed to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) or a placebo version of the TSST (P-TSST) before they performed moral decision-making tasks. The results showed that participants under acute social stress showed obvious increases in subjective stress perception, negative affect, salivary cortisol, and alpha-amylase and made more altruistic choices for others compared to the control group...

<b/>When responding to stimuli, response and stimulus' features are thought to be integrated into a short episodic memory trace, an event file. Repeating any of its components causes retrieval of the whole event file leading to benefits for full repetitions and changes but interference for partial repetitions. These binding effects are especially pronounced if attention is allocated to certain features. We used attentional biases caused by spider stimuli, aiming to modulate the impact of attention on retrieval...

<b/>Our visual system is inundated with distracting objects that vie for our attention. While visual attention selects relevant information, inhibitory mechanisms might be useful to suppress the locations occupied by irrelevant distractors. Yet, there is a dearth of behavioral evidence for the active suppression of a distractor's location (ASDL) using central cues that provide preliminary information about a distractor's location. In the first two experiments, we attempt to conceptually replicate, using an online platform, experiments that provide evidence of the ASDL...

<b/>This study investigated the effects of semantic overlap from multiple sources on false memories. Participants were presented with paired study lists comprising items highly associated with one nonstudied critical item. There were three types of list pairs: (1) the sharing condition, in which the words in both lists were classified into different semantic groups that converged on the same critical word (semantic overlap), (2) the repetition condition, in which the two lists comprised identical words, and (3) the single condition, in which the paired lists were attributed to different semantic groups that did not share a critical item...

<b/>Behavior has short-term (proximal) and long-term (distal) consequences, and these consequences often involve different commodities. In particular, a commonly encountered distal consequence involves running out of resources - energy to respond, available food, ammunition, or money in the bank - that must be replenished before continuing a rewarding task. The current project examines proximal behavioral consequences in a video game (the amount of damage done to a clicked-on target as a function of waiting) and distal behavioral consequences (running out of the resources that allow the player to click on a target)...

<b/>Existing studies have shown that direct exposure to a real nature environment has a restorative effect on attentional resources after a mentally fatiguing task. However, it remains unclear whether virtual nature simulations can serve as a substitute for real nature experienced in the outdoors to restore executive attention. Given the mixed findings in the literature, the present study sought to examine if viewing videos with natural scenery (vs. a control with urban scenery) restores participants' working memory capacity - measured by an operation span task - in a high-powered pre-registered within-subject experimental study...