Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Categorization is the foundation of many cognitive functions. Importantly, the categories we use to structure the world are informed by the language we speak. For example, whether we perceive dark blue, light blue, and green to be shades of one, two, or three different colors depends on whether we speak Berinmo, English, or Russian, respectively. Different languages, then, differ by how granular their categories are, but the source of these differences is still poorly understood. Understanding the source of cross-linguistic differences in linguistic categorization is important because categorization influences communicative efficiency and cognitive performance...

Foraging refers to behavior that exploits the current environment for resources and induces exploration for a better environment. Visual foraging tasks have been used to study human behavior during visual searches. Participants searched for target stimuli among the distractors and either acquired or lost points when they clicked on a target or distractor. In the current study, we investigated the influence of blocking feature learning in visual foraging. For this purpose, we divided participants into control and blocking groups...

Collocations are understood to be integral building blocks of language processing, alongside individual words, but thus far evidence for the psychological reality of collocations has tended to be confined to English. In contrast to English, Turkish is an agglutinating language, utilizing productive morphology to convey complex meanings using a single word. Given this, we expected Turkish speakers to be less sensitive to phrasal frequencies than English speakers. In Study 1, we conducted a corpus analysis of translation-equivalent adjective-noun collocations (e...

Adaptive models of word production hold that lexical processing is shaped by recent production episodes. In particular, the models proposed by Howard et al. (2006) and Oppenheim et al. (2010) assume that the connection strength between semantic and lexical representations is updated continuously, on each use of a word. These changes make semantically related competitor words to a selected target word (e.g., "cherry" or "grape" for the target word "apple") less accessible for future retrieval. We put this assumption to a novel test in two picture-word interference experiments...

Experiences occur in a continual succession, and the temporal structure of those experiences is often preserved in memory. The temporal contiguity effect of free recall reveals the temporal structure of memory: when a particular item is remembered, the next response is likely to come from a nearby list position. This effect is remarkably robust, appearing across a wide variety of methodological variations of the task. The temporal contiguity effect is also central to retrieved-context models, which propose temporal organization arises from the interaction of a temporal context representation with the contents of memory...

Past work has shown that eye movements are affected by long-term memory across different tasks and instructional manipulations. In the current study, we tested whether these memory-based eye movements persist when memory retrieval is under intentional control. Participants encoded multiple scenes with six objects (three faces; three tools). Next, they completed a memory regulation and visual search task, while undergoing eye tracking. Here, scene cues were presented and participants either retrieved the encoded associate, suppressed it, or substituted it with a specific object from the other encoded category...

There is growing recognition that working memory and selective attention are highly related. However, a key function of selective attention-ignoring distractors-is much less understood in the domain of working memory. In the attention domain, it is now clear that distractors' task relevance and stimulation of multiple senses at a time (i.e., being multisensory), affect how much such information can distract from the main task, and that load modulates these effects. Here, we examined the effects of the task relevance and multisensory nature of distractors on working memory performance under high and low memory load, aiming to clarify whether distracting information similarly affects selective attention performance and working memory performance...

Free time in a working memory task often improves the recall performances of the to-be-remembered items. It is still debated whether the free-time effect in working memory is purely proactive, purely retroactive, or both proactive and retroactive. In the present study, we used the single-gap paradigm to explore this question. In Experiment 1, we measured the gap-length effect (i.e., the difference in memory performance elicited by the gap-length difference) under three long-short-gap combinations (i.e., 2,500 ms/100 ms, 2,500 ms/500 ms, 2,500 ms/1,000 ms)...

Spatial memory is important for supporting the successful completion of everyday activities and is a particularly vulnerable domain in late life. Grouping items together in memory, or chunking, can improve spatial memory performance. In memory for desktop scale spaces and well-learned large-scale environments, error patterns suggest that information is chunked in memory. However, the chunking mechanisms involved in learning new large-scale, navigable environments are poorly understood. In five experiments, two of which included young and older adult samples, participants watched movies depicting routes through building-sized environments while attempting to remember the locations of cued objects...

Negation is usually considered as a linguistic operator reversing the truth value of a proposition. However, there are various ways to express negation in a multimodal manner. It still remains an unresolved issue whether nonverbal expressions of negation can influence linguistic negation comprehension. Based on extensive evidence demonstrating that language comprehenders are able to instantly integrate extralinguistic information such as a speaker's identity, we expected that nonverbal cues of negation and affirmation might similarly affect sentence comprehension...

Many bilinguals switch languages in daily-life conversations. Although this usually happens within sentence context and with another speaker, most research on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production of language switches has studied individual words. Here, we examined how context influences both switching frequency and the temporal cost associated with it. Sixty Bulgarian-English bilinguals named pictures in their language of choice without any context, in a sentence context, and in interaction with another (recorded) bilingual...

Responses are slower in two-choice tasks when either a previous stimulus feature or the previous response repeats than when all features repeat or all features change. Current views of action control posit that such partial repetition costs (PRCs) index the time to update a prior "binding" between a stimulus feature and the response or to resolve processing conflicts between retrieved and current features. However, violating a heuristic that stimulus feature repetitions and changes "signal" repetitions or changes of the previous response, respectively, may also contribute to such costs...

Our mental representation of the infinite has received little research attention in cognitive psychology. In countably infinite sets, the infinity symbol (∞) is presumed to be perceived as larger than any finite natural number. The present study sought to explore if the infinity symbol is processed as "larger than" natural numbers, and, if so, whether it is associated with the special status of "the largest." In a series of four experiments ( N = 40, 20, 20, and 40, respectively), participants performed numerical and physical comparisons of the infinity symbol against single- and multidigit numbers...

Despite the worldwide prevalence of multilingualism, the knowledge of the relationship between domain-general cognitive control and multilingual language control remains scant. Here we provide new insights into this issue by examining systematically how different components of inhibitory control (i.e., response inhibition and interference suppression) contribute to language control in multilingual populations with high L2 proficiency. To this end, 65 Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals highly proficient in L2 were recruited to complete three tasks: a picture-naming task measuring the performance of online trilingual speech production, and two nonlinguistic tasks, a go/no-go task and a Simon task, as proxies for measuring response inhibition and interference suppression abilities, respectively...

In a series of sentence-picture verification studies we contrasted, for example, "… choose the balloon with "… inflate the balloon" and "… the inflated balloon" to examine the degree to which different representational components of event representation (specifically, the different object states entailed by the inflating event; minimally, the balloon in its uninflated and inflated states) are jointly activated after state-change verbs and past participles derived from them. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the initial and end states are both activated after state-change verbs, but that the initial state is considerably less accessible after participles...

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms are interpreted when they appear as sentence subjects in structures that are temporarily syntactically ambiguous versus unambiguous (e.g., "The hospital [that was] requested by the doctor…")...

People often rely on the covariation between events to infer causality. However, covariation between cues and outcomes may change over time. In the associative learning literature, extinction provides a model to study updating of causal beliefs when a previously established relationship no longer holds. Prediction error theories can explain both extinction and protection from extinction when an inhibitory (preventive) cue is present during extinction. In three experiments using the allergist causal learning task, we found that protection could also be achieved by a hidden cause that was inferred but not physically present, so long as that cause was a plausible preventer of the outcome...

Throughout prolonged tasks, visual attention fluctuates temporally in response to the present stimuli, task demands, and changes in available attentional resources. This temporal fluctuation has downstream effects on memory for stimuli presented during the task. Researchers have established that detection of a target (e.g., a square of a color to which participants are instructed to respond with a button press) within a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream leads to better memory for concurrently presented stimuli than for stimuli presented along with an RSVP distractor (e...

Typing slows at the middle of the word. The exact nature of the slowdown is still disputed. Research on attentional and motoric effects in typing suggests that the slowdown is purely a function of chunking of letters in creating the motor output; this approach posits no further influence of linguistic information during output. Research from a psycholinguistic perspective does posit lexical and sublexical effects during output and explains the midword slowing as a function of slowdowns at the boundaries of sublexical units...

Languages differ in the importance of acoustic dimensions for speech categorization. This poses a potential challenge for second language (L2) learners, and the extent to which adult L2 learners can acquire new perceptual strategies for speech categorization remains unclear. This study investigated the effects of extensive English L2 immersion on speech perception strategies and dimension-selective-attention ability in native Mandarin speakers. Experienced first language (L1) Mandarin speakers (length of U...