Experiment 1a Research Articles

Working memory limitations constrain visual episodic long-term memory at both specific and gist levels of representation.

Limitations in one's capacity to encode information in working memory (WM) constrain later access to that information in long-term memory (LTM). The present study examined whether these WM constraints on episodic LTM are limited to specific representations of past episodes or also extend to gist representations. Across three experiments, young adult participants (n = 40 per experiment) studied objects in set sizes of two or six items, either sequentially (Experiments 1a and 1b) or simultaneously (Experiment 2). They then completed old/new recognition tests immediately after each sequence (WM tests). After a long study phase, participants completed LTM conjoint recognition tests, featuring old but untested items from the WM phase, lures that were similar to studied items at gist but not specific levels of representation, and new items unrelated to studied items at both specific and gist levels of representation. Results showed that LTM estimates of specific and gist memory representations from a multinomial-processing-tree model were reduced for items encoded under supra-capacity set sizes (six items) relative to within-capacity set sizes (two items). These results suggest that WM encoding capacity limitations constrain episodic LTM at both specific and gist levels of representation, at least for visual objects. The ability to retrieve from LTM each type of representation for a visual item is contingent on the degree to which the item could be encoded in WM.

No evidence for the influence of head-heart conceptual metaphor on moral decision making and personality

In English, head is associated with rationality and logic, whereas heart is related to feeling and emotionality. In Chinese, these head- and heart-related metaphors also exist. Could these head- and heart-related conceptual metaphors influence people’s moral decision-making and personality? This seems so based on the previous findings that (a) simply pointing an index finger to heart (versus head) position caused participants to produce more emotional responses in a moral decision task, and (b) participants who believed themselves to be heart locators, relative to those who regarded themselves as head locators, scored higher in affect intensity, femininity, and intimacy related activities. The current study attempted to replicate these findings, following the same design and procedure of previous work, with Chinese participants from Hong Kong and Chinese mainland. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 203 participants performed the moral decision task on dilemmas with their index fingers pointing to head or heart. In Experiments 2a and 2b, 304 participants completed the scales of self-location, affective intensity, femininity, and intimacy related activities. In these high-powered experiments, we failed to replicate the findings of previous work. Bayesian analyses further showed that no head- and heart-related conceptual metaphor effect was likely to occur. Potential reasons for our inconsistent results with those of previous studies and the implications of our current findings were discussed.

Multisensory processing impacts memory for objects and their sources.

Multisensory object processing improves recognition memory for individual objects, but its impact on memory for neighboring visual objects and scene context remains largely unknown. It is therefore unclear how multisensory processing impacts episodic memory for information outside of the object itself. We conducted three experiments to test the prediction that the presence of audiovisual objects at encoding would improve memory for nearby visual objects, and improve memory for the environmental context in which they occurred. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants viewed audiovisual-visual object pairs or visual-visual object pairs with a control sound during encoding and were subsequently tested on their memory for each object individually. In Experiment 2, objects were paired with semantically congruent or meaningless control sounds and appeared within four different scene environments. Memory for the environment was tested. Results from Experiments 1a and 1b showed that encoding a congruent audiovisual object did not significantly benefit memory for neighboring visual objects, but Experiment 2 showed that encoding a congruent audiovisual object did improve memory for the environments in which those objects were encoded. These findings suggest that multisensory processing can influence memory beyond the objects themselves and that it has a unique role in episodic memory formation. This is particularly important for understanding how memories and associations are formed in real-world situations, in which objects and their surroundings are often multimodal.

Noisy speech impairs retention of previously heard information only at short time scales.

When speech is presented in noise, listeners must recruit cognitive resources to resolve the mismatch between the noisy input and representations in memory. A consequence of this effortful listening is impaired memory for content presented earlier. In the first study on effortful listening, Rabbitt, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 241-248 (1968; Experiment 2) found that recall for a list of digits was poorer when subsequent digits were presented with masking noise than without. Experiment 3 of that study extended this effect to more naturalistic, passage-length materials. Although the findings of Rabbitt's Experiment 2 have been replicated multiple times, no work has assessed the robustness of Experiment 3. We conducted a replication attempt of Rabbitt's Experiment 3 at three signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Results at one of the SNRs (Experiment 1a of the current study) were in the opposite direction from what Rabbitt, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 241-248, (1968) reported - that is, speech was recalled more accurately when it was followed by speech presented in noise rather than in the clear - and results at the other two SNRs showed no effect of noise (Experiments 1b and 1c). In addition, reanalysis of a replication of Rabbitt's seminal finding in his second experiment showed that the effect of effortful listening on previously presented information is transient. Thus, effortful listening caused by noise appears to only impair memory for information presented immediately before the noise, which may account for our finding that noise in the second-half of a long passage did not impair recall of information presented in the first half of the passage.

Information perseveration in recognition memory: Examining the scope of sequential dependencies.

Models of recognition memory often assume that decisions are made independently from each other. Yet there is growing evidence that consecutive recognition responses show sequential dependencies, whereby making one response increases the probability of repeating that response from one trial to the next trial. Across six experiments, we replicated this response-related carryover effect using word and nonword stimuli and further demonstrated that the content of the previous trial-both perceptual and conceptual-can also bias the response to the current test probe, with both perceptual (orthographic) and conceptual (semantic) similarity boosting the probability of consecutive "old" responses. Finally, a manipulation of attentional engagement in Experiments 3a and 3b provided little evidence these carryover effects on recognition decisions are merely a product of lapses in attention. Taken together, the current study reinforces prior findings that recognition decisions are not made independently, and that multiple forms of information perseverate across consecutive trials.

The effect of target detection task on memory encoding varies in different stimulus onset asynchronies.

The attentional boost effect (ABE) and action-induced memory enhancement (AIME) suggest that memory performance for target-paired items is superior to that for distractor-paired items when participants performed a target detection task and a memory encoding task simultaneously. Though the memory enhancement has been well established, the temporal dynamics of how the target detection task influenced memory encoding remains unclear. To investigate this, we manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between detection stimuli and the words to be memorized using a remember/know study-test paradigm, and we focused primarily on memory performance for the words that appeared after the detection response. The results showed that target-paired memory enhancement was robust from SOA = 0 s to SOA = 0.75 s, but was not significant when examined by itself in Experiment 1A or weakened in Experiment 2 and the conjoint analysis when SOA = 1 s, which were only observed in R responses. The post-response memory enhancement still existed when there was no temporal overlap between the word and target, similar to the magnitude of memory enhancement observed with temporal overlap. These results supported the view that target-paired memory enhancement (recollection rather than familiarity) occurred irrespective of whether the items appeared simultaneously with the targets or within a short period after the response, and the temporal overlap of the word and target was not necessary for post-response memory enhancement.

Social identity threat attenuates own-race bias in face recognition under the “Asian-Caucasian” context

People typically remember faces of their own race better than the faces of other races, which is known as the own-race bias. Social-cognitive theories on the own-race bias debate if motivation plays a role in racial face recognition under the “Asian-Caucasian” context. We investigated the effect of social-identity-threat based motivation on own-race bias. In Experiment 1, Chinese participants were primed with a negative image of own-race by associating Chinese (i.e., own-race) faces with negative personality traits. Results showed that such social identity threat marginally affect the own-race bias in face recognition sensitivity (Experiment 1a), and it did not influence participants' implicit positive attitudes toward their ethnicity (Experiment 1b). In Experiments 2, 3 and 4, the social identity threat was manipulated by reading an article before the face recognition task. Experiment 2 found that the social identity threat significantly affected the own-race bias in face recognition false alarm. Although we did not find the modulation effect of group on ORB with ANOVA in Experiments 3 and 4, we observed the significant indirect effect of group on ORB through the mediator of generalized threat. Together, the current study provides evidence of social motivation in the own-race bias in the “Asian-Caucasian” setting.

Visual Preference for Socially Relevant Spatial Relations in Humans and Monkeys.

As a powerful social signal, a body, face, or gaze facing toward oneself holds an individual's attention. We asked whether, going beyond an egocentric stance, facingness between others has a similar effect and why. In a preferential-looking time paradigm, human adults showed spontaneous preference to look at two bodies facing toward (vs. away from) each other (Experiment 1a, N = 24). Moreover, facing dyads were rated higher on social semantic dimensions, showing that facingness adds social value to stimuli (Experiment 1b, N = 138). The same visual preference was found in juvenile macaque monkeys (Experiment 2, N = 21). Finally, on the human development timescale, this preference emerged by 5 years, although young infants by 7 months of age already discriminate visual scenes on the basis of body positioning (Experiment 3, N = 120). We discuss how the preference for facing dyads-shared by human adults, young children, and macaques-can signal a new milestone in social cognition development, supporting processing and learning from third-party social interactions.

Explainability does not mitigate the negative impact of incorrect AI advice in a personnel selection task

Despite the rise of decision support systems enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) in personnel selection, their impact on decision-making processes is largely unknown. Consequently, we conducted five experiments (N = 1403 students and Human Resource Management (HRM) employees) investigating how people interact with AI-generated advice in a personnel selection task. In all pre-registered experiments, we presented correct and incorrect advice. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we manipulated the source of the advice (human vs. AI). In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c, we further manipulated the type of explainability of AI advice (2a and 2b: heatmaps and 2c: charts). We hypothesized that accurate and explainable advice improves decision-making. The independent variables were regressed on task performance, perceived advice quality and confidence ratings. The results consistently showed that incorrect advice negatively impacted performance, as people failed to dismiss it (i.e., overreliance). Additionally, we found that the effects of source and explainability of advice on the dependent variables were limited. The lack of reduction in participants’ overreliance on inaccurate advice when the systems’ predictions were made more explainable highlights the complexity of human-AI interaction and the need for regulation and quality standards in HRM.

When stimulus variability accelerates the learning of task knowledge in adults and school-aged children.

Experience with instances that vary in their surface features helps individuals to form abstract task knowledge, leading to transfer of that knowledge to novel contexts. The current study sought to examine the role of this variability effect in how adults and school-aged children learn to engage cognitive control. We focused on the engagement of cognitive control in advance (proactive control) and in response to conflicts (reactive control) in a cued task-switching paradigm, and conducted four preregistered online experiments with adults (Experiment 1A: N = 100, Experiment 1B: N = 105) and 9- to 10-year-olds (Experiment 2A: N = 98, Experiment 2B: N = 97). It was shown that prior task experience of engaging reactive control makes both adults and 9- to 10-year-olds respond more slowly in a subsequent similar-structured condition with different stimuli in which proactive control could have been engaged. 9- to 10-year-olds (Experiment 2B) exhibited more negative transfer of a reactive control mode when uninformative cue and pre-target stimuli, which do not convey task-relevant information, were changed in each block, compared with when they were fixed. Furthermore, adults showed suggestive evidence of the variability effect both when cue and target stimuli were varied (Experiment 1A) and when uninformative cue and pre-target stimuli were varied (Experiment 1B). The collective findings of these experiments provide important insights into the contribution of stimulus variability to the engagement of cognitive control.

Joint contributions of preview and task instructions on visual search strategy selection

People tend to employ suboptimal attention control strategies during visual search. Here we question why people are suboptimal, specifically investigating how knowledge of the optimal strategies and the time available to apply such strategies affect strategy use. We used the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (ACVS), a task designed to assess attentional control optimality. We used explicit strategy instructions to manipulate explicit strategy knowledge, and we used display previews to manipulate time to apply the strategies. In the first two experiments, the strategy instructions increased optimality. However, the preview manipulation did not significantly boost optimality for participants who did not receive strategy instruction. Finally, in Experiments 3A and 3B, we jointly manipulated preview and instruction with a larger sample size. Preview and instruction both produced significant main effects; furthermore, they interacted significantly, such that the beneficial effect of instructions emerged with greater preview time. Taken together, these results have important implications for understanding the strategic use of attentional control. Individuals with explicit knowledge of the optimal strategy are more likely to exploit relevant information in their visual environment, but only to the extent that they have the time to do so.

The Poor Are Perceived to Be Dirty and a Disease Risk

Many studies investigating stereotypes about the poor overlook the historical fact that the poor have been viewed with disgust due to unsanitary working and living conditions. In four experiments using three different methods, we showed that the poor were viewed as dirty and disgusting, and were avoided in close contact. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that attributes related to disease and uncleanliness were ascribed to the poor compared to the nonpoor and to the rich. Experiment 2 showed that the poor were avoided in close contact, regardless of their race. Experiment 3 revealed a strong implicit poor-dirty/disease and rich-clean/healthy bias. Our results emphasize that disease avoidance is an important dimension in the social perception of the poor.

The Motion-Silencing Illusion Depends on Object-Centered Representation.

Motion silencing is a striking and unexplained visual illusion wherein changes that are otherwise salient become difficult to perceive when the changing elements also move. We develop a new method for quantifying illusion strength (Experiments 1a and 1b), and we demonstrate a privileged role for rotational motion on illusion strength compared with highly controlled stimuli that lack rotation (Experiments 2a to 3b). These contrasts make it difficult to explain the illusion in terms of lower-level detection limits. Instead, we explain the illusion as a failure to attribute changes to locations. Rotation exacerbates the illusion because its perception relies upon structured object representations. This aggravates the difficulty of attributing changes by demanding that locations are referenced relative to both an object-internal frame and an external frame. Two final experiments (4a and 4b) add support to this account by employing a synchronously rotating external frame of reference that diminishes otherwise strong motion silencing. All participants were Johns Hopkins University undergraduates.

Understanding Social Media Information Sharing in Individuals with Depression: Insights from the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Schema Activation Theory.

How individuals engage with social media can significantly impact their psychological well-being. This study examines the impact of social media interactions on mental health, grounded in the frameworks of the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Schema Activation Theory. It aims to uncover behavioral differences in information sharing between the general population and individuals with depression, while also elucidating the psychological mechanisms underlying these disparities. A pre-experiment (N=30) and three experiments (Experiment 1a N=200, Experiment 1b N=180, Experiment 2 N=128) were executed online. These experiments investigated the joint effects of information quality, content valence, self-referential processing, and depression level on the intention to share information. The research design incorporated within-subject and between-subject methods, utilizing SPSS and SPSS Process to conduct independent sample t-tests, two-factor ANOVA analyses, mediation analyses, and moderated mediation analyses to test our hypotheses. Information quality and content valence significantly influence sharing intention. In scenarios involving low-quality information, individuals with depression are more inclined to share negative emotional content compared to the general population, and this tendency intensifies with the severity of depression. Moreover, self-referential processing acts as a mediator between emotional content and intention to share, yet this mediation effect weakens as the severity of depression rises. Our study highlights the importance of promoting viewpoint diversity and breaking the echo chamber effect in social media to improve the mental health of individuals with depression. To achieve this goal, tailoring emotional content on social media could be a practical starting point for practice.

Semantic Stroop interference is modulated by the availability of executive resources: Insights from delta-plot analyses and cognitive load manipulation

We investigated whether, during visual word recognition, semantic processing is modulated by attentional control mechanisms directed at matching semantic information with task-relevant goals. In previous research, we analyzed the semantic Stroop interference as a function of response latency (delta-plot analyses) and found that this phenomenon mainly occurs in the slowest responses. Here, we investigated whether this pattern is due to reduced ability to proactively maintain the task goal in these slowest trials. In two pairs of experiments, participants completed two semantic Stroop tasks: a classic semantic Stroop task (Experiment 1A and 2A) and a semantic Stroop task combined with an n-back task (Experiment 1B and 2B). The two pairs of experiments only differed in the trial pace, which was slightly faster in Experiments 2A and 2B than in Experiments 1A and 1B. By taxing the executive control system, the n-back task was expected to hinder proactive control. Delta-plot analyses of the semantic Stroop task replicated the enhanced effect in the slowest responses, but only under sufficient time pressure. Combining the semantic Stroop task with the n-back task produced a change in the distributional profile of semantic Stroop interference, which we ascribe to a general difficulty in the use of proactive control. Our findings suggest that semantic Stroop interference is, to some extent, dependent on the available executive resources, while also being sensitive to subtle variations in task conditions.

An exploration of the influence of animal and object categories on recall of item location following an incidental learning task.

The current study explores the role of attention in location memory for animals and objects. Participants completed an incidental learning task where they rated animals and objects with regard to either their ease of collection to win a scavenger hunt (Experiments 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. In the location memory recall task, items were shown in the centre of the screen and participants used the mouse to indicate the position the item had been shown during the incidental encoding task. The results of both experiments show that location memory for objects was more accurate than for animals. While we cannot definitively identify the mechanism responsible for the difference in the location memory of objects and animals, we propose that differences in the influence of object-based attention at encoding affect location memory when tested at recall.

The visual familiarity effect on attentional working memory maintenance.

Attentional refreshing has been described as an attention-based, domain-general maintenance mechanism in working memory. It is thought to operate via focusing executive attention on information held in working memory, protecting it from temporal decay and interference. Although attentional refreshing has attracted a lot of research, its functioning is still debated. At least one conception of refreshing supposes that it relies on semantic long-term memory representations to reconstruct working memory traces. Although investigations in the verbal domain found evidence against this hypothesis, a different pattern could emerge in visuospatial working memory in which absence of refreshing evidence has been observed for stimuli with minimal associated long-term knowledge. In a series of four experiments, the current study investigated the hypothesis of an involvement of semantic long-term representations in the functioning of attentional refreshing in the visuospatial domain. Both cognitive and memory load effects have been proposed as indexes of attentional refreshing. Therefore, we investigated the interaction between the effects of visual familiarity (a long-term memory effect) and cognitive load on recall performance (Experiments 1A and 1B), as well as the interaction between the effects of visual familiarity and memory load on the response times in a concurrent processing task (Experiments 2A and 2B). Results were consistent across experiments and go against the hypothesis of the involvement of semantic long-term memory in the functioning of attentional refreshing in visuospatial working memory. As such, this study corroborates the results found in the verbal domain. Implications for attentional refreshing and working memory are discussed.

The limited memory of value following value directed encoding.

Items associated with higher values during encoding are later recognized and recalled better than are lower valued items. During recall paradigms, these value directed encoding (VDE) effects heavily depend upon learned strategies acquired during repeated testing with earnings feedback. However, because VDE effects also occur in single test recognition designs, precluding such learning, it has been suggested that high value may automatically induce good encoding. We tested this by manipulating encoding instructions (Experiments 1a and 1b) and manipulating concurrent levels of processing (LOP) requirements during encoding (Experiment 2a and 2b). Two main findings emerged. First, subject initiated strategies played a dominant role in VDE effects with little evidence for automaticity. This was demonstrated in Experiment 1 by a more than three-fold increase in the VDE recognition effect when instructions specifically encouraged selective elaboration of high-value items. It was also shown by the complete elimination of VDE recognition effects in Experiment 2 when LOP tasks were concurrently performed during encoding. Critically, the blocking of VDE effects occurred even though a catch trial procedure verified that value was being processed during encoding and remained even when subjects had unlimited time to process the materials during encoding. Second, the data showed, for the first time, that when subjects attempted to specify the value of recognized items, they heavily depended upon a recognition heuristic in which increases in recognition strength, even when nondiagnostic, were inferred to reflect high encoding value. The tendency for subjects to conflate recognition strength and value may have important implications for behavioral economics.

Effects of outcome revaluation on attentional prioritisation of reward-related stimuli.

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. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we found that prioritisation of high- and low-value stimuli was insensitive to devaluation of a previously high-value outcome, and super-valuation of a previously low-value outcome, even when participants were provided with further experience of receiving that outcome. In Experiment 2, following a value-switch manipulation, we found that prioritisation of a high-value stimulus could not be overcome with knowledge of the new values of outcomes alone. Only when provided with further experience of receiving the outcomes did patterns of attentional prioritisation of high- and low-value stimuli switch, in line with the updated values of the outcomes they signalled. To reconcile these findings, we suggest that participants were motivated to engage in effortful updating of attentional control settings when there was a relative difference between reward values at test (Experiment 2) but that previous settings were allowed to persist when both outcomes had the same value at test (Experiments 1a and 1b). These findings provide a novel framework to further understand the role of cognitive control in driving reward-modulated attention and behaviour.

The effect of part-list cuing on associative recognition.

The modulation of part-list cuing on item memory has been well-documented, whereas its impact on associative memory remains largely unknown. The present study explored the effect of part-list cuing on associative recognition and, more specifically, whether this forgetting effect caused by part-list cuing is more sensitive to recollection or familiarity in recognition memory. Experiments 1a and 1b combined the intact/rearranged/new judgement task of associative recognition with the classical part-list cuing paradigm, and the result showed that part-list cuing impaired the recognition accuracy of "intact" and "rearranged" face-scene pairs. Moreover, the discriminability score of relational recognition and item recognition was significantly decreased in the part-list cuing condition compared to the no-part-list cuing condition. Experiments 2a and 2b further used the Remember/Know/Guess task to explore which recognition processes (recollection vs. familiarity) were sensitive to the presentation of part-list cuing. The results showed that part-list cuing reduced the familiarity of relational recognition and the recollection and familiarity of item recognition. These findings suggest that part-list cuing was harmful to the recognition of relationships (familiarity) and items (recollection and familiarity) in associative memory.