Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology : QJEP

Working memory is an active system responsible for "the temporary maintenance and processing of information in the support of cognition and action" (Baddeley et al., 2021). In keeping with this, a growing body of research has explored the close links between working memory and attention, and how these might be harnessed to impact performance and possibly improve working memory efficiency. This is theoretically and practically important, given that working memory is a central hub in complex cognition yet is extremely capacity- and resource-limited...

Successful communication requires speakers and listeners to refer to information in their common ground. Shared history is one of the bases for common ground (Clark & Marshall, 1981), as information from a communicative episode in the past can be referred to in future communication. However, in order to draw upon shared history, communicative partners need to have an accurate memory record that they can refer to. The memory mechanism for shared history is poorly understood. The current study investigated the ways in which memory for shared history is prioritised...

Emoji symbols are widely used in online communication, particularly in instant messaging and on social media platforms. Existing research draws comparisons between the functions of emoji and those of gestures, with recent work extending a proposed typology of gestures to emoji, arguing that different emoji types can be distinguished by their placement within the modified text and by their semantic contribution (the linguistic inferences that they give rise to). In this paper, we present four experiments designed to test the predictions of this extended typology, the results of which suggest that emoji symbols indeed trigger the hypothesized linguistic inferences...

Kahneman and Tversky (1972) showed that when people make probability judgments, they tend to ignore relevant statistical information (e.g., sample size) and instead rely on a representativeness heuristic, whereby subjective probabilities are influenced by the degree to which a target is perceived as similar to (representative of) a typical example of the relevant population, class or category. Their paper has become a cornerstone in many lines of research and has been used to account for various biases in judgment and decision-making...

Task-switching experiments have shown that the 'switch cost' (poorer performance for task switches than for repetitions) is smaller when the probability of a switch is high (e.g., 0.75) than when it is low (e.g., 0.25). Some theoretical accounts explain this effect in terms of top-down control deployed in advance of the task cue ('pre-cue reconfiguration'). We tested such accounts by manipulating the time available before the onset of the cue (the response-cue interval, RCI), reasoning that top-down pre-cue reconfiguration requires time and therefore its effect should increase with RCI...

Studies investigating serial order in working memory have shown that participants from Western cultures are faster at responding to items presented at the beginning of a sequence using their left hand and faster at responding to items at the end with their right hand. This is known as the spatial positional association of response codes (SPoARC) effect. The SPoARC effect provides evidence that recently presented information is spatially organised in the cognitive system along a horizontal axis. This study investigated the flexibility of spatialisation by testing the effect that distance between items presented on a screen has on the magnitude of the SPoARC effect...

Visual categorisation relies on our ability to extract useful diagnostic information from complex stimuli. To do this, we can utilise both the 'high-level' and 'low-level' information in a stimulus, however the extent to which changes in these properties impact the decision-making process is less clear. We manipulated participants' access to high-level category features via gradated reductions to image resolution while exploring the impact of access to additional category features through a dual stimulus presentation when compared to single stimulus presentation...

Line bisection is a task widely used to assess lateral asymmetries of attention, in which participants are asked to mark the midpoint of a horizontal line. The Directional Bisection Error (DBE) from the objective midpoint of the line is the traditional measure of performance. However, an alternative method of studying bisection behaviour, the end-point weightings method, has been proposed. This method produces two measures of performance: end-point weightings bias (EWB) and end-point weightings sum (EWS). Whilst EWB measures attentional asymmetry, it has been suggested that EWS quantifies the total (non-lateralised) attention allocated to the task...

The current study investigates the Self Reference Effect (SRE) with an ownership memory task across several age groups, providing the first age exploration of implicit ownership memory biases from adolescence to older adulthood (N = 159). Using a well-established ownership task (Cunningham et al., 2008; Sparks et al., 2016; Clarkson et al., 2022), participants were required to sort images of grocery items as belonging to themselves or to a fictious unnamed Other. After sorting and a brief distractor task, participants completed a surprise one-step source memory test...

Schizotypy, a personality structure that resembles schizophrenia symptoms, is often associated with abnormal facial emotion perception. Based on the prevailing sense of threat in psychotic experiences, and the immediate perceptual history of seeing others' facial expressions, individuals with high schizotypal traits may exhibit a heightened tendency to anticipate anger. To test this, we used insights from Representational Momentum (RM), a perceptual phenomenon in which the endpoint of a dynamic event is systematically displaced forward, into the immediate future...

Deciding whether two face photographs depict the same person or not can be a challenging task, and there are substantial individual differences in face matching ability. Far less is known about differences in metacognitive ability; that is, how well people can estimate the quality of their own face matching judgements. The purpose of this Registered Report was to determine the relationship between first-order performance in a face matching task, and three metacognitive measures: metacognitive sensitivity (the information exploited by metacognition), metacognitive efficiency (the quality of metacognitive processing itself), and metacognitive bias (the overall tendency towards high or low confidence)...

Curiosity and intolerance of uncertainty (IU) are both thought to drive information seeking but may have different affective profiles; curiosity is often associated with positive affective responses to uncertainty and improved learning outcomes, whereas IU is associated with negative affective responses and anxiety. Curiosity and IU have not previously been examined together in children but may both play an important role in understanding how children respond to uncertainty. Our research aimed to examine how individual differences in parent-reported curiosity and IU were associated with behavioural and emotional responses to uncertainty...

Infants experience the world through their actions with objects and their interactions with other people, especially their parents. Prior research has shown that school-age children with hearing loss experience poorer quality interactions with typically hearing parents, yet little is known about parent-child interactions between toddlers with hearing loss and their parents early in life. In the current study, we used mobile eye-tracking to investigate parent-child interactions in toddlers with and without hearing loss (mean ages: 19...

Embodiment is a complex concept related with the subjective perception of an object as it belongs to the own body. In general, this construct has been evaluated by means of questionnaires but validation studies in other cultures and limitations related with barriers of language received little attention. The purpose of the present investigation was twofold: to validate the factorial structure of Embodiment Questionnaire (EQ) and to construct a pictographic scale (PAE) to measure embodiment without relapse verbal representations...

Seeing a face in motion can help subsequent face recognition. Several explanations have been proposed for this 'motion advantage', but other factors that might play a role have received less attention. For example, facial movement might enhance recognition by attracting attention to the internal facial features thereby facilitating identification. However, there is no direct evidence that motion increases attention to regions of the face that facilitate identification (i.e., internal features) compared to static faces...

Several studies have shown that parafoveal processing is essential in reading development. In this study, we explore the effect of transposing and substituting inner and outer letters in a flanker lexical decision task administered to 78 children and 65 adults. The results show a significant interaction between the Group factor and the Flanker factor, suggesting differences in the effects of flankers for children and adults. In the case of adults, transposed and substituted letters generated benefit of the same magnitude in comparison to the unrelated condition, but of lesser magnitude than the Identity condition...

Subjective time perception can change based on a stimulus's valence and expectancy. Yet, it is unclear how these two factors might interact to shape our sense of how long something lasts. Here, we conducted two experiments examining the effects of temporal and probabilistic expectancy on the perceived duration of images with varying emotional valence. In Experiment 1, we varied the temporal predictive cue with varying stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs), while in Experiment 2, we manipulated the cue-emotion probabilistic associations...

Congruency effects in conflict tasks are typically larger after congruent compared to incongruent trials. This congruency sequence effect (CSE) indicates that top-down adjustments of cognitive control transfer between processing episodes, at least when controlling for bottom-up memory processes by alternating between stimulus-response (S-R) sets in confound-minimised designs. According to the control-retrieval account, cognitive control is bound to task-irrelevant context features (e.g., stimulus position or modality) and retrieved upon subsequent context feature repetitions...

Action imagery is the ability to mentally simulate the execution of an action without physically performing it. Action imagery is assumed to rely at least partly on similar mechanisms as action execution. Therefore, we expected that imagery and execution durations are constrained by the number of folds in a Paper Folding Task. Analogously, individual differences in execution durations were expected to be reflected in imagery durations. 28 participants performed two imagery conditions (computer vs paper) and one execution condition (paper) where two-dimensional grids of a three-dimensional cube were (mentally) folded to determine whether two selected edges overlap or not...

The contribution of uncontrolled processes to evaluative learning has been examined in evaluative conditioning procedures by comparing evaluations of conditioned stimuli between tasks or within tasks but between learning instruction conditions. In the present research, we introduced a new procedure that keeps both tasks and instructions constant. In addition, we introduced ambivalence measures to address this uncontrollability question. The new procedure involves forming an impression of conditioned stimuli based on their pairing with one unconditioned stimulus while attending but discarding the influence of another unconditioned stimulus holding the same (congruent trials) vs...