Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Readers of different ages and across different languages routinely process information of upcoming words in a sentence, before their eyes move to fixate them directly (parafoveal processing). However, there is inconsistent evidence of similar parafoveal processing in a reader's second language (L2). In this eye movement study, the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975a) was used to test whether parafoveal processing of orthographic information is an integral part of both beginning and proficient L2 reading...

Young children's prosodic fluency correlates with their reading ability, as children who are better early readers also produce more adult-like prosodic cues to syntactic and semantic structure. But less work has explored this question for high school readers, who are more proficient readers, but still exhibit wide variability in reading comprehension skill and prosodic fluency. In the current study, we investigated acoustic indices of prosodic production in high school students ( N = 40; ages 13-19) exhibiting a range of reading comprehension skill...

The congruency effect in Stroop-like tasks-a popular measure of distraction-is smaller after incongruent relative to congruent trials. However, it is unclear whether this congruency sequence effect (CSE)-a popular index of coping with distraction-reflects adjustments of control after congruent trials, incongruent trials, or both. The episodic retrieval account of the CSE posits adjustments of control after both congruent and incongruent trials. In this account, retrieving a memory of the previous trial's congruency (i...

A photo lineup, which is a cross between an old/new and a forced-choice recognition memory test, consists of one suspect, whose face was either seen before or not, and several physically similar fillers. First, the participant/witness must decide whether the person who was previously seen is present (old/new) and then, if present, choose the previously seen target (forced choice). Competing signal-detection models of eyewitness identification performance make different predictions about how certain variables will affect a witness's ability to discriminate previously seen (guilty) suspects from new (innocent) suspects...

Prior research has shown that visual working memory capacity is enhanced for meaningful stimuli (i.e., real-world objects) compared to abstract shapes (i.e., colored circles). Here, we hypothesized that the shape of meaningful objects would be better remembered incidentally than the shape of nonmeaningful objects in a color memory task where the shape of the objects is task-irrelevant. We used a surprise-trial paradigm in which participants performed a color memory task for several trials before being probed with a surprise trial that asked them about the shape of the last object they saw...

Perceptual span in reading, the spatial extent for effective information extraction during a single fixation, provides a critical foundation to all studies for sentence reading. However, it is not understood fully how the perceptual span is influenced by direction-specific reading experience. Traditional Chinese sentences can be written horizontally from left to right or vertically downward, offering the best opportunity to explore readers' perceptual span in different text directions, free of possible confounding with language proficiency and cross-participant differences...

We use a computational model of memory search to study how people generate counterfactual outcomes in response to an established target outcome. Hierarchical Bayesian model fitting to data from six experiments reveals that counterfactual outcomes that are perceived as more desirable and more likely to occur are also more likely to come to mind and are generated earlier than other outcomes. Additionally, core memory mechanisms such as semantic clustering and word frequency biases have a strong influence on retrieval dynamics in counterfactual thinking...

Participants in an eye-movement experiment performed a modified version of the Landolt-C paradigm (Williams & Pollatsek, 2007) to determine if there are preferred viewing locations when they searched for target squares embedded in linear arrays of spatially contiguous clusters of squares (i.e., sequences of one to four squares having missing segments of variable size and orientation). The results of this experiment indicate that, although the peaks of the single- and first-of-multiple-fixation landing-site distributions were respectively located near the centers and beginnings of the clusters, thereby replicating previous patterns that have been interpreted as evidence for the default saccadic-targeting hypothesis, the same dissociation was evident on nonclusters (i...

Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioral evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words' degree of social relevance, or socialness , influences lexical-semantic processing. In Study 1, across a series of item-level regression analyses, we found that (a) socialness can facilitate responses in lexical, semantic, and memory tasks, and (b) limited evidence for an interaction of socialness with concreteness...

Visuospatial working memory (VSWM) helps track the identity and location of people during social interactions. Previous work showed better VSWM when all faces at encoding displayed a happy compared to an angry expression, reflecting a prosocial preference for monitoring who was where. However, social environments are not typically uniform, and certain expressions may more strongly compete for and bias face monitoring according to valence and/or arousal properties. Here, we used heterogeneous encoding displays in which two faces shared one emotion and two shared another, and asked participants to relocate a central neutral probe face after a blank delay...

Broad retrieval ability (Gr) posits an essential factor of human cognitive abilities. Previous literature indicates Gr is best modeled as a higher-order factor model with lower-level factors such as ideational fluency (IF), word fluency (WF), expressional fluency (EF), or figural fluency (FF). However, the dimensionality of Gr is not well studied. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether specific retrieval affordances such as differing retrieval time periods (e.g., short vs. long) can be psychometrically separated from more general retrieval affordances...

The capacity for goal-directed behavior relies on the generation and implementation of task sets. While task sets are traditionally defined as mnemonic ensembles linking task goals to stimulus-response mappings, we here asked the question whether they may also entail information about task difficulty: does the level of focus required for performing a task become incorporated within the task set? We addressed this question by employing a cued task-switching protocol, wherein participants engaged in two intermixed tasks with trial-unique stimuli...

Speaking two or more languages shows bilingual flexibility, but flexible switching requires language control and often incurs performance costs. We examined inhibitory control assessing n -2 repetition costs when switching three languages (L1 [German], L2 [English], L3 [French]). These costs denote worse performance in n -2 repetitions (e.g., L2-L3-L2) than in n -2 nonrepetitions (e.g., L1-L3-L2), indicating persisting inhibition. In two experiments ( n = 28 in Experiment 1; n = 44 in Experiment 2), n -2 repetition costs were observed, but only for L2...

Strong versions of the embodied account of language processing propose that comprehension depends on the mental simulation of sensorimotor experiences conveyed by linguistic meaning. Primary support in favor of this view is based on demonstrations of processing advantages for compatibility between an action implied by sentence content and concurrent sensorimotor processing. Although these effects have been reported across a variety of contexts, various attempts to reproduce these results, both through direct replication and conceptual extension, have not been successful...

The mental time line (MTL) is a spatial continuum on which earlier events are generally associated with the left space and later events with the right space. Accordingly, past- and future-related words receive faster responses with, respectively, the left and the right hand. Yet, it is currently unclear whether the MTL is activated by the whole word or whether it can be triggered by more subtle sublexical cues, such as verb-endings, and whether the activation of this spatial continuum is an automatic phenomenon...

Visual working memory (VWM) is a store for temporary maintenance of visual information. It is often disregarded, though, that information is typically stored to enable actions. Therefore, the context of these actions is of great importance for how VWM is used. Here, we questioned whether the severity of the consequence of an action might affect how well information is memorized, and how cautiously it is utilized. We employed an (online) copying task, in which participants reproduced an example display comprised of six items in a grid, using a pool of items...

The biological motion refers to the continuous configuration movement of live agents in space. The perceptual processing of biological motion has the specificity of the dissociation between body form and body motion. However, there is limited evidence for whether such specificity continues when holding biological motion in working memory. We explored this question from the perspective of field dependence (FD) and field independence (FI) cognitive styles in the current study. Three categories of biological motion have been developed: intact movement, motion feature, and form feature...

We examine whether information lying above and below a line of text being read can impact on reading fluency. We did so by placing length-matched flankers above and below each word in a sequence of words. We found that identical flankers facilitated sentence reading, compared with syntactically correct different text flankers, in both reading-for-meaning (Experiment 1) and grammatical decisions (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 replicated the same text facilitation in grammatical decisions and found no significant difference between different word and nonword distractors...

Research on first language (L1) reading has long since established the link between the proficiency of the reader and their efficiency in oculomotor control. More proficient readers make longer saccades and land closer to the word's center, which is a word's optimal viewing position, and make fewer refixations. Eye-tracking studies of second language (L2) reading have so far provided little evidence in this regard. This study analyzes spatial oculomotor measures in the Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus, which contains data on English text reading and its component skills from 543 participants representing 12 different L1s...

How do we maintain a rich and stable perceptual experience across the entire visual scene, even when we are focusing on a subset of visual inputs? The current study explored this question by investigating whether the visual system processes summary statistics of multiple features regardless of task relevance, and how they interact with subsequent perception. To test the processing of multifeature summary statistics under different attentional requirements, we presented multiple Gabor patches with heterogeneous orientations/colors and asked participants to attend to a single feature dimension (Experiments 1 and 3) or a single item (Experiment 2) for the memory task...