Experimental psychology最新文献

How confident a student is about how they answer a question has important education implications. Participants answered 10 mathematics questions and provided their estimates of how likely they got each individual item correct and how many, in total, they answered correctly. They were overconfident in these metacognitive judgments. Some of the participants were asked to justify why their answers were either correct or incorrect prior to making these judgments. This lowered their confidence ratings. They were still overconfident, but less than those in the control group. The instruction also affected the association between the confidence ratings and accuracy. No differences were observed between those asked to justify why their responses were correct versus those asked to justify why their responses were incorrect. Those asked to think about the accuracy of a response had lower confidence. This has important implications for understanding how we construct confidence judgments and within education how student confidence can be affected during assessments.

Using two executive tasks, we explored how body posture influences mind wandering, a universal internally self-generated activity. Specifically, participants were instructed to perform the Sustained Attention Response Task (SART) and the Flanker task under three postural conditions: lying supine, sitting, and standing upright. These tasks reflect the proactive and reactive modes of executive control, respectively. To measure the frequency of mind wandering, we employed the probe-caught technique, presenting prompts at irregular intervals. The results indicate that, compared to standing and sitting positions, lying supine significantly increased mind wandering, while posture had no effect on either measure of executive control. We suggest that changes in posture alter cognitive activity related to self-generated thoughts and external tasks, whereas the relationship between mind wandering and executive control requires further research.

Online experiments offer several advantages over traditional laboratory experiments. However, for reaction time experiments, precise stimulus presentation and response detection is crucial. The precision of online experiments could be compromised due to increased variance arising from varying hardware configurations among participants, lack of control over experimental conditions, and the absence of an examiner. In this study, we conducted an online experiment using the avatar-Simon task to investigate whether small differences in reaction times could be examined using online experiments conducted with the experimental toolkit PsyToolkit. In the avatar-Simon task, participants respond to the color of vertically presented stimuli in front of avatars by pressing a left or right button. Reactions are faster when the position of the stimulus, defined from the avatar's point of view, matches the position of the response. Compared to the previous laboratory experiment, we observed lower effect sizes and more timeouts but were able to replicate the avatar-Simon effect overall. Based on further distributional and reliability analyses, PsyToolkit appears to be suitable tool to detect behavioral effects in the range of tens of milliseconds. We discuss differences and similarities with the original laboratory study and suggest how to address potential problems associated with online experiments.

Most cognitive psychological studies assume that participants in lab-based tasks maintain a single goal based on task instructions. However, people can be motivated by other factors, such as curiosity. We examined if people attend to seemingly task-irrelevant information out of curiosity by manipulating stimulus uncertainty in a cueing paradigm. Participants were presented with an abrupt-onset cue followed by a letter target (E or H). Next, a mask either at the target location (low uncertainty) or at all four locations (high uncertainty) was shown. We expected high uncertainty to induce a state of curiosity that in turn influences the processing of the cue. Cueing effects were greater in the high-uncertainty condition compared to the low-uncertainty condition. In Experiment 2, we additionally elicited self-report ratings on curiosity. In sum, target-specific uncertainty leads to greater processing of task-irrelevant peripheral cues across two experiments. We tentatively conclude that uncertainty modulates attention control and further research is necessary to examine if this is indeed due to curiosity induced by uncertainty.

Prior evidence has indicated that the act of producing a word aloud is more effortful than reading a word silently, and this effort is related to the subsequent memory advantage for produced words. In the current study, we further examined the contributions of reading effort to the overall production effect by making silent reading more effortful. To do this, participants studied words that were presented in standard lowercase font format and words that were presented in an aLtErNaTiNg CaSe font format (which should be more effortful to read). Half of the words in each font condition were read aloud, and half were read silently. Participants completed an old/new recognition test. Experiment 1 was conducted online; Experiment 2 was conducted in-lab and recorded reading times at study to confirm that alternating case font slows reading. In both experiments, we found a production effect in recognition that was uninfluenced by font type. We also found that alternating case font selectively increased recollection (but not familiarity) relative to lowercase font. Thus, the additional time to read words in a disfluent font does not appear to interact with memory benefit of producing words aloud.

Learning information may benefit from movement: Items that are spoken aloud are more accurately remembered than items that are silently read (the production effect). Candidate mechanisms for this phenomenon suggest that speaking may enrich or improve the feature content of memory traces, yet research suggests that prior language skill also plays a role. Recent work showed a larger production effect in bilinguals for words in their second language (L2) compared to their first language (L1), potentially suggesting that bilinguals engage different or additional linguistic features when speaking L2 compared to L1 words. The current study examined whether the increased L2 production effect reduces for L2 and L1 pseudowords, which may similarly engage mainly phonological features. German (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals first read (out loud or silently) and subsequently recognized German or English words or pseudowords following German or English phonology. The production effect increased for L2 compared to L1 items and for words compared to pseudowords. Modest evidence suggested L2-L1 similarity in production effect scores for pseudowords, but different L2-L1 scores for words. Integrating feature models of memory with models of bilingual language production, we propose that speaking an L2 may engage more extensive and diverse linguistic features than an L1.

Previous work suggests that similar cognitive processes contribute to memory and comprehension. This is unsurprising as both begin with a common process: encoding. Despite this, the investigation of techniques that benefit memory and comprehension has proceeded separately. In the current study, we compared the robust memory techniques of production and drawing to a similarly effective comprehension strategy known as paraphrasing. Depending on the group, participants were asked to either engage in one of the encoding types (read aloud, draw, or paraphrase) or to silently read 20 term-definition pairs (randomly intermixed and counterbalanced). The encoding techniques of drawing and paraphrasing resulted in better performance on a multiple-choice test of concept comprehension, relative to silently reading. By contrast, reading aloud at encoding did not lead to any benefit relative to silently reading. The results suggest that techniques that invoke transformation of the to-be-remembered text into another format, be it into a picture (drawing) or personally relevant summary (paraphrasing), are particularly effective at improving comprehension. By contrast, encoding techniques that mainly provide a perceptual repetition (production and silent reading) are less effective.

The current study examined whether the benefit of mixed-list production could extend to memory for background contexts using word-background context pairs. Participants studied words presented on background images; words were read aloud or silently. In Experiment 1a, half of the studied items were tested on their studied background image and half were tested on a new image using old-new recognition. Although a production effect in word recognition was observed, context reinstatement had no effect on sensitivity and only a marginal effect on hit rates; it did not interact with production. In Experiment 1b, whether participants encoded the backgrounds and whether that encoding was affected by production was tested using separate recognition tests. A production effect was found in word recognition, but there was no effect in image recognition. Experiment 2 used a cued-recall test, with the studied background images as the cues to directly test whether associations were formed between words and backgrounds at study. A production effect was found but did not interact with the presence of cues during recall. Both the benefit of production and the benefit of context reinstatement appear to be independent of one another, with production not aiding memory for the associations between items nor the context.

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. After each working memory trial, participants reported their mind-wandering during that trial. Some participants completed the procedures in-person, while others completed the procedures remotely. Overall, remote participants reported significantly more mind-wandering and poorer secondary task performance than in-person participants, but this pattern was not reflected in working memory accuracy. Both groups exhibited similar multitasking effects on performance. Additional analyses found that for remote participants, task engagement better predicted working memory performance than either cognitive load or mind-wandering rates but did not indicate a tradeoff in resources between tasks. Together, these results demonstrate the importance of considering multiple metrics when assessing performance and illustrate that making assumptions about the equivalence of remote and in-person work is a risky proposition.