Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Alarcón, Daniel E; Bonardi, Charlotte

doi: 10.1177/1747021819887725pmid: 31658885

Using a human Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) task, Alarcón and Bonardi showed that the selective elevation of instrumental responding produced by excitatory transfer cues was reduced when these cues were presented with a conditioned inhibitor (CI), relative to a control cue that was simply preexposed. However, previous research has shown that preexposed cues might also acquire inhibitor-like properties. This study aimed to contrast the inhibitory properties of CIs and preexposed cues, using novel stimuli as controls, in summation and PIT tests. Participants were trained to perform two actions, each reinforced with a distinct outcome (O1 or O2). Two images were trained as CIs, each signalling the absence of one of the outcomes, by presenting them with a cue that was otherwise followed by that outcome (e.g., A→O1, AI→no O1). In contrast, the preexposed cues were simply presented in the absence of the outcomes. In the summation test, participants rated the likelihood of the outcomes in the presence of two independently trained excitatory cues, each presented with a CI, a preexposed cue, or a novel stimulus. Similarly, in the PIT test, participants performed both actions in the presence and absence of these compounds. In the summation test, the CIs and the preexposed cues reduced participants’ expectations of the outcomes more than the novel stimuli. However, in the PIT test, only the CIs reduced the selective elevation of responding produced by the transfer cues. These results might reflect distinct properties of stimuli trained as CIs and those simply preexposed.

Velasco, Carlos; Pathak, Abhishek; Woods, Andy T; Corredor, Andres; Elliot, Andrew J

doi: 10.1177/1747021819887172pmid: 31625811

Research on aesthetic science has demonstrated that people generally prefer symmetrical over asymmetrical compositions. However, it remains unclear whether and how such compositions relate to the concepts of approach and avoidance motivation, especially in consumer contexts. In addition, it is not known how symmetry may influence such concepts in contexts where objects can differ in terms of their hedonic values (symmetry/product taste congruency). In the present research, we evaluated the relation between visual symmetry of the packaging of products with different hedonic value (sweet, non-sweet, non-food) and approach and avoidance words. In two experiments, we found evidence that people associate symmetrical designs with approach words more often than asymmetrical designs. Importantly, however, we did not find evidence that such an effect is influenced by the hedonic value of the products. Our results have value for scholars and practitioners interested in the effect of aesthetic features of brand elements (such as a product’s packaging) on consumer motivation.

Creer, Sarah D; Cook, Anne E; O’Brien, Edward J

doi: 10.1177/1747021819891407pmid: 31713472

Despite the centrality of the protagonist during narrative comprehension, evidence indicates that readers do not typically approach the text from the protagonist’s point of view. Experiments 1a–1c demonstrated that both explicit task instructions and the first-person point of view resulted in comprehension being influenced by perspective-relevant information; this indicated that readers were adopting the perspective of the protagonist. However, Experiments 2a–3b showed that even when readers adopt the protagonist’s perspective, they cannot do so to the exclusion of related perspective-irrelevant information. Results are discussed in the context of the RI-Val model of comprehension in which perspective-relevant information and perspective-irrelevant information are both available and compete for influence during comprehension.

Makovski, Tal; Michael, Shiran; Chajut, Eran

doi: 10.1177/1747021820905735pmid: 31986981

Ample research has suggested that visual attention is biased towards threat and it was argued that this bias is an essential component of survival and implicated in anxiety. However, it is less clear how this bias is translated into memory, and specifically into the memory of items presented near a threatening stimulus. Here, we investigated this issue by testing how well people remember neutral and threatening images presented under various task demands. On each trial, observers saw two images before performing a dot-probe task (Experiment 1), a colour discrimination task (Experiment 2), a global or local attention task (Experiment 3), or no task at all (Experiment 4). A recognition memory test was performed at the end of each experiment to assess how the presence of a threatening image influences the memory of both images presented in the display. In all experiments, overall memory was enhanced as more threatening images were presented in the display. However, this enhancement did not occur at the expense of the processing of the surroundings. That is, with the exception of the dot-probe task, memory performance was not affected by an adjacent threatening image. Together, these findings challenge trade-off accounts, which predict that the processing of a threatening stimulus should take place at the expense of the processing of nearby items. Instead, these findings suggest that any effect of threat on the visual processing of the display is short-lived and more limited than previously thought.

Qian, Haoyue; Wang, Zhiguo; Li, Chao; Gao, Xiangping

doi: 10.1177/1747021819892158pmid: 31747826

Stimuli related to the self are processed more efficiently in a variety of cognitive tasks. Recent studies have shown that this self-referential processing bias is modulated by emotion. However, a clear understanding of how emotional valence and arousal affect self-referential processing is still lacking. With a label–shape matching task, Experiment 1 measured a self-prioritisation effect in four different mood states. The results revealed stronger self-prioritisation effects in moods with higher arousal levels and a reliable correlation between the self-prioritisation effect and the arousal level reported by the participants; however, the effect of emotional valence was not statistically reliable. Experiment 2 further showed that alerting cues, known to raise arousal level, effectively increased the self-prioritisation effect in the same label–shape matching task. Experiment 3 clarified that alerting cues do not affect reward processing in a similar label–shape matching task, suggesting that arousal may selectively modulate self-referential processing. These observations provide clear evidence that emotional arousal modulates self-referential processing.

Pekár, Judit; Kinder, Annette

doi: 10.1177/1747021819891068pmid: 31713471

In the last few years, the existence of a pure number sense has been challenged. Recent studies suggest that numerosity processing is influenced not only by the number of elements in a display but also by continuous magnitudes, such as the size of the elements. The aim of our study was to replicate and extend the findings by Gebuis and Reynvoet, who systematically manipulated different continuous magnitudes either congruently or incongruently with discrete numerosity. We were particularly interested in finding the same pattern of congruency effects and assess its stability and robustness as this pattern indicates a complex influence of continuous magnitudes on numerosity judgements. We did so by showing stimuli of different conditions either in separate blocks or mixed together while participants solved a dot comparison task. Our results are in line with the notion that discrete number and continuous magnitudes are integrated in numerosity judgements by means of a weighing process. Moreover, our findings suggest that this integration is modified by the mode of presentation (blocked vs. mixed).

Broitman, Adam Wood; Swallow, Khena Marie

doi: 10.1177/1747021819893676pmid: 31747827

How does attending to a brief, behaviourally relevant stimulus affect episodic memory encoding? In the attentional boost effect, increasing attention to a brief target in a detection task boosts memory for items that are presented at the same time (relative to distractor-paired items). Although the memory advantage for target-paired items is well established, the effects of attending to targets on other aspects of episodic memory encoding are unclear. This study examined the effects of target detection and goal-directed attention on memory for task-irrelevant information from a single event, focusing on the contributions of recollection and familiarity during recognition. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a series of briefly presented faces as they performed a detection task on unrelated squares, pressing the space bar only when the square was a target colour (e.g., blue) rather than a distractor colour (e.g., orange). Half of the participants were told to memorise the faces, and half were told to ignore them. Results indicated that both recollection and familiarity were greater for target-paired faces than for distractor-paired faces, regardless of whether the faces were intentionally encoded. Experiment 2 examined whether these effects are present for single events, replicating the recollection benefit when encoding time is sufficient. Attending to behaviourally relevant targets appears to facilitate both intentional and incidental memory for the background item and the context in which it occurred, boosting subsequent recollection as well as familiarity.

Poncin, Alexandre; Van Rinsveld, Amandine; Schiltz, Christine

doi: 10.1177/1747021819892165pmid: 31747829

The linguistic structure of number words can influence performance in basic numerical tasks such as mental calculation, magnitude comparison, and transcoding. Especially the presence of ten-unit inversion in number words seems to affect number processing. Thus, at the beginning of formal math education, young children speaking inverted languages tend to make relatively more errors in transcoding. However, it remains unknown whether and how inversion affects transcoding in older children and adults. Here we addressed this question by assessing two-digit number transcoding in adults and fourth graders speaking French and German, that is, using non-inverted and inverted number words, respectively. We developed a novel transcoding paradigm during which participants listened to two-digit numbers and identified the heard number among four Arabic numbers. Critically, the order of appearance of units and tens in Arabic numbers was manipulated mimicking the “units-first” and “tens-first” order of German and French. In a third “simultaneous” condition, tens and units appeared at the same time in an ecological manner. Although language did not affect overall transcoding speed in adults, we observed that German-speaking fourth graders were globally slower than their French-speaking peers, including in the “simultaneous” condition. Moreover, French-speaking children were faster in transcoding when the order of digit appearance was congruent with their number-word system (i.e., “tens-first” condition) while German-speaking children appeared to be similarly fast in the “units-first” and “tens-first” conditions. These findings indicate that inverted languages still impose a cognitive cost on number transcoding in fourth graders, which seems to disappear by adulthood. They underline the importance of language in numerical cognition and suggest that language should be taken into account during mathematics education.

Schmidt, James R; Giesen, Carina G; Rothermund, Klaus

doi: 10.1177/1747021820906397pmid: 31986984

The learning of contingent regularities between events is fundamental for interacting with our world. We are also heavily influenced by recent experiences, as frequently studied in the stimulus-response binding literature. According to one view (“unitary view”), the learning of regularities across many events and the influence of recent events on current performance can coherently be explained with one high-learning rate memory mechanism. That is, contingency learning effects and binding effects are essentially the same thing, only studied at different timescales. On the other hand, there may be more to a contingency effect than just the summation of the influence of past events (e.g., an additional impact of learned regularities). To test these possibilities, the current report reanalyses a number of datasets from the colour-word contingency learning paradigm. It is shown that the weighted sum of binding effects accumulated across many previous trials (with especially strong influence of very recent events) does explain a large chunk of the contingency effect, but not all of it. In particular, the asymptote towards which the contingency effect decreases by accounting for an increasing number of previous-trial binding effects is robustly above zero. On the other hand, we also observe evidence for higher-order interactions between binding effects at differing lags, suggesting that a mere linear accumulation of binding episodes might underestimate their influence on contingency learning. Accordingly, focusing only on episodic stimulus-response binding effects that are due to the last occurrence of a stimulus rendered contingency learning effects non-significant. Implications for memory models are discussed.

Luque, David; Molinero, Sara; Jevtović, Mina; Beesley, Tom

doi: 10.1177/1747021819897590pmid: 31826714

It is well established that associative learning, such as learning new cue–outcome pairings, produces changes in attention: cues that are good predictors of relevant outcomes become prioritised compared with those that are non-predictive or redundant. However, there is controversy about whether such a learnt attentional bias results from a controlled orientation of attention, or whether it can be involuntary in nature. In three experiments, participants learned that cues of certain colours were predictive or non-predictive, and we assessed attention to cues using a dot-probe task. On dot-probe trials, participants were instructed to control attention by orienting towards a cue of a certain shape (target), while trying to ignore another cue (distractor). Although the colours of the cues were critical for the associative learning task, they were irrelevant for the dot-probe task. The results show that, even though participants’ controlled attention was focused on the target shape (as evident in response times and accuracy data), response times to the probe were slower (Experiments 1 and 2) and error rates were higher (Experiments 2 and 3) when the distractor was of a (previously) predictive colour. These data suggest that attention was captured involuntarily by the predictive value of the distractor, despite this being counterproductive to the task goal.