Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology : QJEP

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The influences of shared orthography, semantics, and phonology on bilingual cognate processing have been investigated extensively. However, mixed results have been found regarding the effects of phonological similarity on L2 cognate processing. In addition, most existing studies examining the influence of phonological similarity on cognate processing have been conducted on alphabetic scripts, in which phonology and orthography are always associated. Hence, in this study, we recruited Cantonese-Japanese bilinguals who used two logographic scripts, traditional Chinese and Japanese Kanji, to examine the influence of phonological similarity on L2 cognate lexical decision...

Visual-spatial contextual cueing learning underpins the daily lives of older adults, enabling them to navigate their surroundings, perform daily activities, and maintain cognitive function. While the contextual cueing effect has received increasing attention from researchers, the relationship between this cognitive ability and healthy aging remains controversial. To investigate whether visual-spatial contextual cueing learning declines with age, we examined the contextual learning patterns of older (60-71 years old) and younger adults (18-26 years old) using a contextual-guided visual search paradigm and response variability measurements...

Knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of effortful listening could help to reduce cases of social withdrawal and mitigate fatigue, especially in older adults. However, the relationship between transient effort and longer-term fatigue is likely to be more complex than originally thought. Here, we manipulated the presence/absence of monetary reward to examine the role of motivation and mood state in governing changes in perceived effort and fatigue from listening. In an online study, 185 participants were randomly assigned to either a 'reward' (n = 91) or 'no-reward' (n = 94) group and completed a dichotic listening task along with a series of questionnaires assessing changes over time in perceived effort, mood, and fatigue...

Previous studies have shown that choices about how to configure stepping-stones to be used as playground or exercise equipment reflect a person's action capabilities. In two experiments, we investigated whether choices about how to configure stepping-stones to be used as a path for locomotion additionally reflect the goals for which or the constraints under which the path is to be used. In Experiment 1, participants created stepping-stone configurations (with rubber mats) that would allow them to cross a given space quickly, comfortably, or carefully...

People often learn of new scientific findings from brief news reports, and may discount or ignore prior research, potentially contributing to misunderstanding of findings. In this preregistered study, we investigated how people interpret a brief news report on a new drug for weight loss. Participants read an article that either highlighted the importance of prior research when judging the drug's effectiveness, or made no mention of this issue. For articles describing no prior research, mean confidence in the drug was 62%...

Combined action observation and motor imagery (AO+MI) can improve movement execution (ME) in healthy adults and certain patient populations. However, it is unclear how the specificity of the observation component during AO+MI influences ME. As generalised observation could result in more flexible AO+MI rehabilitation programs, this study investigated whether observing typing of target words (specific condition) or non-matching words (general condition) during AO+MI would have different effects on keyboard typing in healthy young adults...

Previous work has investigated the information-based mechanism for learning and transfer of learning in coordinated rhythmic movement (Leach, Kolokotroni & Wilson, 2021a, b). In those papers, we trained young adults to produce either 90° or 60° and showed in both cases that learning entailed learning to use relative position as the information for relative phase. This variable then supported transfer of learning to untrained coordinations +/30° on either side. In this paper, we replicate the 90° study with younger adults and extend it by training older adults (aged between 55 and 65)...

Attention can be covertly shifted to peripheral stimuli in order to improve their processing. However, attention is also then inhibited against returning to the previously attended location; thus, both detection and discrimination of a stimulus presented at that location decrease (the inhibition of return effect; IOR). The after-effect of the covert orienting hypothesis (ACOH) postulates a close link between attention shifting, IOR, and oculomotor control. The fixation offset, which improves the generation of saccades, decreases IOR in detection tasks, suggesting a close link between IOR and oculomotor control...

There are conflicting findings regarding the accuracy of metamemory for scene pictures. Judgments of stimulus memorability in general (memorability judgments, MJs) have been reported to be unpredictive of actual image memorability. However, other studies have found that judgments of learning (JOLs) - predictions of one's own later memory performance for recently studied items - are moderately predictive of people's own actual recognition memory for pictures. The current study directly compared the relative accuracy and cue basis of JOLs and MJs for scene pictures...

The word association task has been used extensively in psychological and linguistic research as a way of measuring connections between words in the mental lexicon. Interpretation of word association data has assumed that responses represent the strongest association between cue word and response, but there is evidence that participant behaviour can be affected by task instructions and design. The current study investigated whether word association responses can be primed by the participants' own response to the preceding cue - that is, whether the order in which cues are presented alters the responses that are generated...

Delay discounting occurs when a reward loses value as a function of delay. Episodic future thinking (EFT) reliably decreases delay discounting. EFT may share cognitive features with recalling episodic memories such as constructive episodic simulation. We therefore explored whether recalling episodic memories also reduces delay discounting. In Experiment 1, participants wrote about episodic memories and recalled those memories before completing a delay discounting task. Episodic memories reduced delay discounting according to one commonly used delay discounting measure (Area Under the Curve) but not another (using the hyperbolic model)...

The Post-Reinforcement Pause (PRP) is an operant effect in which response latencies increase on trials following the receipt and consumption of reward. Human studies demonstrate analogous effects in electronic gambling machines that utilise variable ratio reinforcement schedules. We sought to identify moderators of the human PRP effect, hypothesizing that the magnitude of gamblers' PRPs is moderated by the type of reinforcing outcome (genuine wins vs. losses-disguised-as-wins vs. free-spin bonus features), and individuals' level of gambling immersion, a cognitive state linked to problem gambling...

The current study explores the role of attention in location memory for animals and objects. Participants completed an incidental learning task where they either rated animals and objects with regards to either their ease of collection to win a scavenger hunt (Experiment 1a and b) or their distance from the centre of the computer screen (Experiment 2). The images of animals and objects were pseudo-randomly positioned on the screen in both experiments. After completing the incidental learning task (and a reverse counting distractor task), participants were then given a surprise location memory recall task...

The hippocampus is thought to support episodic memory by pattern separation, thereby supporting the ability to discriminate high similarity items. Past research evaluating whether acute exercise can improve mnemonic discrimination of high similarity items is mixed. The present experiment attempts to extend these prior mixed findings by evaluating the effects of multiple exercise intensities on hippocampal-dependent, mnemonic discrimination and memory performance. Fifty-seven young adults completed a three-condition (control, moderate-intensity, and vigorous-intensity), within-subjects crossover pretest-posttest comparison...

Many accounts of instruction-based learning assume that initial declarative representations are transformed into executable procedural ones, so to enable instruction implementation. We tested the hypothesis that declarative-procedural transformation should be bound to a specific response modality and not transferable across different modalities. In Experiment 1, novel stimulus-response instructions had to be implemented either verbally or manually either once or three times. Modality-specific procedural encoding was probed via a subsequent implicit priming test...

Voluntary running in activity wheels by rats leads to a Pavlovian conditioned aversion to the flavour consumed immediately before the running, causing the rats to avoid that flavour. This learning process, known as running-based flavour avoidance learning (FAL), is weakened when the rats have had repeated exposure to the wheels before. According to the associative account, the association between the background context and running established during the preexposure phase blocks the conditioning of the target flavour because the running is highly predictable by the background context from the outset of the FAL phase...

A redundancy gain occurs when perceptually identical stimuli are presented together, resulting in quicker categorization of these paired stimuli compared to lone stimuli. Similar effects have been reported for paired stimuli within the same conceptual category, particularly if the category is self-related. We recruited 528 individuals across three related studies to investigate whether, during perceptual and conceptual redundancy, such self-bias effects on foreground stimuli are modulated by natural versus urban backgrounds...

We investigated the predictability effects of pitch accent on word recognition using the sandhi rule in Kansai Japanese (KJ). Native KJ speakers and native Tokyo Japanese (TJ) speakers (control group) saw four objects while hearing modifier + noun phrases in a speeded image-selection task. The register tone of the noun's initial mora was predictable or unpredictable based on the tone of the modifier's final mora in KJ but not in TJ. Experiment 1 found faster reaction times in the predictable vs. unpredictable condition in KJ speakers but only when the modifier had an all-low tone...

Stimuli associated with rewards can acquire the ability to capture our attention independently of our goals and intentions. Here, we examined whether attentional prioritisation of reward-related cues is sensitive to changes in the value of the reward itself. To this end, we incorporated an instructed outcome devaluation (Experiment 1a), 'super-valuation' (Experiment 1b), or value switch (Experiment 2) into a visual search task, using eye-tracking to examine attentional prioritisation of stimuli signalling high- and low-value rewards...