Auditory alarms conveying hospital patient information face extensive criticism regarding their effectiveness. Previous research indicates that changing the amplitude envelope of alarms from temporally invariant flat to decaying percussive improves detectability and lowers annoyance. Here we complement and extend this research by exploring masking - when simultaneous signals obscure one another. The experiment consists of a three-alternative forced choice task in which participants decide which of 3 presented white-noise 'masker' tones contain a target tone. We manipulated masker amplitude envelope and the target timing (relative to the masker) within-subjects. We determined masking thresholds (the volume at which the masker completely obscures the target through a 2-down 1-up adaptive staircase. We find percussive maskers produce substantially lower thresholds than flat maskers, regardless of target timing. These may reflect (1) the asymmetrical energy distribution of percussive sounds creating opportunities for detecting overlapping alarms, and (2) a reduction in synaptic inhibition for percussive relative to flat sounds. This offers foundational evidence in favour of percussive envelopes reducing alarm tone masking - findings with implications both for our theoretical understanding of masking, and as potential direct application in auditory alarms.
Previous research in time perception has predominantly focused on how cognitive and emotional factors influence subjective time perception. However, investigations into whether subjective time perception, in turn, affects emotional and cognitive outcomes remain limited. To address this, the current study systematically examined how external clocks, rigged to run faster or slower, impact cognitive performance and subjective experience across tasks varying in complexity and attentional demand. Our findings challenge previous findings of enhanced cognitive performance under accelerated clocks and suggest that task demands may have superseded clock speed effects. This study highlights the complexities of subjective time perception, suggesting that effective clock speed manipulations require a more active engagement with temporal cues and tasks of moderate cognitive load. Future research should explore the interaction of attention allocation, task difficulty, and subjective time in shaping cognitive and emotional outcomes.
Motor experience related to writing influences reading performance, from letter recognition to word recognition. In our study, we tested the hypothesis that knowledge of the keyboard layout associated to typing promotes the retrieval of the order of the sequence of letters composing a word. We ran an online experiment with 100 adults. Two tasks were designed: anagram solution (main task) and pseudoletter identification (control task). The visual presentation of the letters was either congruent or incongruent with the keyboard layout. Results indicate that anagrams were solved faster in the congruent than in the incongruent condition, while the congruency with the keyboard layout had no effect in the pseudoletter identification task. These results suggest that keyboard practice could play a role in the retrieval of orthographic information.
Many middle school students struggle to recognize the structure of arithmetic problems, which often leads to mathematical errors. This study investigated the effects of operator positions and perceptual supports (e.g., color, spacing) on the performance and mathematical errors of U.S. middle school students (N = 578) when solving online arithmetic problems with one higher-order operator (multiplication) and two lower-order operators (addition, subtraction). The results of mixed-effect models revealed that students' accuracy decreased as the location of the multiplication moved from left to middle or right, while their response time increased. Furthermore, the types and rates of errors students made significantly differed by perceptual cue. Students provided with color cues were less likely to make "left-to-right operation" errors compared to those without perceptual cues. However, students who received the color cue were more likely to make "performing multiplication-only" errors than those without perceptual cues. These findings suggest that although providing perceptual cues like color can reduce "left-to-right" errors, they may introduce new types of errors to some students. Therefore, clear instructions and examples need to accompany the use of perceptual cues in problem-solving tasks.
Adult readers form inferences while they read, including those corresponding to expectations about the stereotypical gender associated with particular occupations (e.g., Duffy & Keir, 2004). For example, when reading "The surgeon reminded herself to check on the patient," adult readers experience a "mismatch effect" when they encounter the unexpected mismatching female pronoun. The current study aimed to explore whether or not children, ages 8-12 years old, draw gendered inferences about occupations while they are reading sentences. The eye-movement record indicated that developing readers do show a gender mismatch effect. Readers had longer total reading times, longer second pass reading times, and made more regressions out of the pronoun in the mismatch condition compared to the match condition. Pronoun mismatch also affected skipping rates, total times, go-past times, and regressions out of the two-word post-pronoun region. Overall differences as a function of pronoun type, reader's age, occupation gender, and occupation familiarity are also reported.
How people process nonliteral language has long been studied in the context of metaphorical expressions. Conventional metaphors seem to be processed differently than novel metaphors. In this study, we first created novel spatial metaphors of time in Turkish and standardized them for aptness, conventionality, metaphoricity, ease of interpretation, imageability, and number of possible interpretations. Then, we asked participants to explain these metaphors to an experimenter and rate them on the standardized dimensions after the explanation task. We coded participants' gestures for frequency and relation to temporal concepts. The results showed that our participants rated novel metaphors higher on metaphoricity and number of possible interpretations (which signal complexity) and lower on the other meaning criteria that signal simplicity, compared to the conventional metaphors. They produced more total or temporal gestures for novel metaphors depending on the condition. These results suggest that creating novel spatial metaphors of time was possible, and that they were different than conventional metaphors on various meaning dimensions. Moreover, conventionality could be a factor related to the processing demands of metaphors. These demands elicit gestures from people to process spatial metaphors of time as they use spatial information to make sense of time.
Previous studies suggest that obstacles encountered during the manual transport of objects affect the way people grasp these objects. The present study used computer vision techniques to analyse the hand movements of 19 participants who were asked to pick up a bowl to which a pointer was attached so the bowl could be moved from a start position (an initial location and orientation) to a target position (a specified location but with the orientation left to the participants' discretion). Ten participants were asked to move the bowl around an obstacle, whereas the rest performed the task without the obstacle. No significant effects of the obstacle were found on the selected target orientation of the bowl or on the initial grasp position on the rim. Nevertheless, the automated computer vision method proved highly robust, offering a promising framework for future studies with larger sample sizes and varied task conditions.
Word associations generated by humans and large language models (LLMs) were analyzed using a network science approach to provide insights into their semantic organization. Human data consisted of word associations from the "Small World of Words" project and from native speakers of Singapore English. LLM data were obtained from the "LLM World of Words" project where three LLMs (Haiku, Llama3, Mistral) were probed to produce word associations to a large set of cue words. Bipartite network projections onto a subset of cue word nodes enabled a comparison of identical-sized networks that also captured higher order associative patterns. Human and LLM networks had significantly different global network properties; specifically, human networks appeared to have more well-connected semantic organization than LLM networks, which were more sparsely connected. At the local node-level of the network, the two human networks were more similar to each other than to the LLM networks. Overall, the analyses indicate that latent semantic representations of human word associations are better integrated than that of the LLMs, illustrating how cross-comparisons with LLM-generated data can provide insights into the nature of human semantic representations.
In previous studies (Finnegan, 2014; Finnegan et al., 2015a, 2015b, 2023) we investigated effects of training on the reduction of occupational stereotypes indicated by responses to the question of whether two words (e.g., uncle/builder or aunt/builder) could refer to the same person. In each study we also collected individual difference measures of sexism, sexist language, sex typing and fear of negative evaluation. Considering the individual studies, the relations between the individual difference measures and measures of stereotyping were either absent or not consistent and were not reported in the published versions of the studies. In this paper we analyse data from 299 participants across eight studies in an attempt to identify consistent patterns. We looked at five individual difference measures (ASI, ISANL-G, BSRI, EthicsQ, BFoNE) and four measures of performance: initial differences in speed and accuracy of responding to stereotypically congruent (nurse-aunt) and incongruent (nurse-uncle) word pairs and changes in those differences with training. We found that one individual difference measure, the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI; Glick & Fiske, 1996), predicted differences on both initial performance and response to training, though unexpectedly people with high sexism scores were more, not less, susceptible to training. Scores on a second measure, The Inventory of Attitudes towards Sexist and Non-sexist Language General (IASNL-G; Parks & Roberton, 2000) was also predictive, but made no contribution to either speed or accuracy in addition to that of ASI scores. We discuss the implications of these results and their relation to previous literature.
The present study examined how the degree of emotional arousal of positive and negative valence words influences lexical processing and whether this effect varies across the adult lifespan. We analyzed lexical decision latencies for 1,544 emotionally salient words using data from the Korean Lexicon Project 2 (Kang et al., in preparation), which includes web-based lexical decision performance from 2,473 native Korean speakers aged 20 to 69 years. Because the Korean emotion-rating dataset exhibited a bimodal valence distribution with relatively few neutral words, age-by-arousal interactions were examined for positive and negative words separately. The patterns of arousal effects were different, depending on emotional valence: arousal facilitated word recognition for negative emotion words, whereas no such effect was observed for positive emotion words. Moreover, the arousal effect for negative emotion words was modulated by age: for participants in their 20s through 50s, higher-arousal negative words elicited faster responses than lower-arousal words, whereas this facilitative effect was absent among participants in their 60s, who showed relatively stable response times regardless of arousal level. This study represents the first large-scale investigation of affective word recognition in Korean using an age continuous sample of adult participants.
As we navigate everyday environments, we perform complex actions that are typically directed at objects, not entire scenes. While actions are strong predictors of scene category, it remains unclear whether scene function understanding depends more on object-level or scene-level information. We investigate if these actions drive the hierarchical structure of scenes by testing if anchor objects (i.e., the sink), which predict the location of local objects (i.e., the toothbrush), impact scene function understanding. In Experiment 1, participants explicitly matched action words and scenes in which the action-related anchor (REL), the action-unrelated anchor (UNREL) or a random, non-anchor object (RAND) were masked. Matching performance was significantly worse in REL scenes than in UNREL and RAND scenes. In Experiment 2, we measured scene function understanding by using the stimuli as primes in a lexical decision task on action words. Here, the REL condition elicited significantly slower response times than the RAND condition, suggesting that scene function understanding relies primarily on action-related, object-level information. A control experiment showed that these results could not solely be attributed to impaired scene categorization due to anchor-absence. We further showed that stimulus features such as visual realism and object clutter modulated task performance but did not alter the overall pattern of results. Together, our results suggest that scene function understanding depends mainly on the action-related anchor objects, whereas scene context is not always sufficient to understand a scene's functions.
Understanding how children spontaneously use cognitive strategies during working memory (WM) training is essential for optimizing training outcomes. This study investigated spontaneous strategy use among children participating in a computerized WM training program and examined whether strategy use influenced training performance. Forty children aged 6 to 10 years from public schools were assigned to either an experimental group that completed 8 weeks of computerized WM training or an active control group. Performance data were collected throughout training, and after the intervention, children completed a structured interview assessing spontaneous strategy use during training tasks. Results showed that 60% of children reported using at least 1 cognitive strategy, such as rehearsal, categorization, or mental imagery. A binary logistic multilevel model indicated that children in the experimental group were significantly more likely to perceive the strategies as helpful compared to the control group (Odds ratio = 5.04, 95% Confidence interval [1.54, 16.47], z = 2.67, p = .008). These findings suggest that spontaneous strategy use may partially explain individual differences in WM training outcomes and highlight the importance of fostering metacognitive awareness during cognitive interventions. Future studies should explore how strategy use can be supported and enhanced during training to maximize cognitive benefits.
Our perceptual/cognitive mechanisms effectively use multisensory information to recognize the external world. In the memory domain, visual memory performance is reported to be improved when target images are presented with semantically congruent sounds. Multisensory interactions are demonstrated to be more evident when less clear/effective sensory inputs are presented (the principle of inverse effectiveness). It remained unclear whether audiovisual interactions in visual memory performance could differ depending on the visibility of the stimuli. The current study examined whether the visibility of target visual stimuli could modulate the enhancement effect of semantically congruent sounds on visual memory performance. In an encoding session, we asked participants to memorize pictures presented with semantically congruent or meaningless sounds. In the following recognition session, participants were asked to judge whether a series of pictures, which were always unblurred, had been presented in the previous session without hearing any sounds. The first experiment showed that the semantically congruent sounds did not enhance visual memory performance when unblurred pictures were presented during the encoding session. In the second experiment, we presented blurred pictures during the encoding session and found better recognition performance for the pictures with the semantically congruent sounds. The third experiment revealed no enhancement effect when the semantic congruencies were violated between the sounds and blurred visual images during the encoding session, suggesting that response or decisional biases were not critical factors. Our findings suggest that our perceptual/cognitive mechanisms utilize audiovisual information for visual memory, especially when available visual information is less effective.
Humans often struggle to accurately determine whether two different unfamiliar voice samples or face images belong to the same person. One method shown to boost face-matching performance is to have participants perform the task in pairs, which results in subsequent improvements for the poorer performers. This is a phenomenon known as 'the pairs training effect'. Previous studies have explored the pairs training effect using simultaneous face matching tasks whereby the two face images are presented side by side at the same time. Here we tested the efficacy of the pairs paradigm in unfamiliar voice matching (Experiment 1) which requires sequential presentation of the voices. We also tested sequential face matching (Experiment 2) to align the face task with the temporal demands of the voice task. In both experiments, participants completed one third of trials individually, one third in a pair, and a final third individually again. Across both tasks, we found that participants who initially performed poorly in the first individual task improved when completing the task in a pair and, importantly, retained this improvement in the final individual phase. Our findings show that the pairs training effect extends to identity matching of unfamiliar voices and remains even when stimuli are presented sequentially.
Readers often fail to notice the presence of two adjacent instances of a short, high-frequency function word (e.g., Amanda jumped off the the swing and landed on her feet). In the present study, six online experiments investigated the effects of word length, word class (content vs. function word), predictability, and frequency on the rate at which readers fail to notice repetitions. No credible effects of word length, word class, or predictability were in evidence when other variables were controlled. On the other hand, the experiments revealed a very pronounced, but non-linear, effect of word frequency: Repetitions of words with a Zipf frequency up to about 6 were rarely missed (~10%), while repetitions of very high frequency (VHF) words, with a Zipf frequency above 6, were missed much more often, over 40% of the time in some conditions. Most of the words in this frequency range are short function words, but repetitions of VHF, four-letter content words (e.g., make, time) are also frequently missed. Theoretical implications of these results are considered.
Preference research has shown that humans have a bias towards items located in the middle of the visual field and a number of theories have been suggested to explain the phenomenon. The conjuring trick known as the placement force not only exploits this central bias but also shows that the preference is subtly biased to the right of centre. We used the force, together with eye tracking, to test the different theories. In a single experiment, four face-down playing cards were presented on a table in a horizontal row. Participants (n = 137) were asked to select one by pushing it forward. Results replicated the basic force effect, showing that 52% of participants chose the middle right card. Eye-tracking measures revealed that when participants fixated the cards, more time was spent looking at the two centrally located cards. However, this attentional bias did not predict the card they chose. Furthermore, individuals who were more reflective decision makers (as measured with the Cognitive Reflection Test) were no less susceptible to the force, nor were individuals who spent more time deliberating about their decision or those who examined more alternatives. The results do not support the view that central bias effects result from cognitive decision heuristics or attentional biases. Instead, participants chose options that required the least physical effort. This supports the reachability hypothesis.
In the vanishing ball illusion (VBI), a magician feigns throwing a ball, and spectators report seeing it rise into the air, even though it never leaves the performer's hand. Although many studies have investigated factors that can modulate this illusion, none have examined the extent to which participants can detect this anticipatory error, or whether susceptibility to the illusion and this potential detection depend on available executive resources. In the present study, error detection was assessed by comparing the confidence in the perceptual experience of participants susceptible to the VBI (N = 64) with that of participants exposed to a real throw (N = 64). Moreover, working memory resources were manipulated by asking participants to memorize either two (low load) or four (high load) cross positions presented in a 3 × 3 grid. Contrary to our hypothesis, working memory resource availability did not significantly affect susceptibility to the VBI. Moreover, participants' confidence in detecting an error did not differ between those experiencing the VBI and those observing a real throw, and this lack of error detection was independent of available working memory resources. Our findings suggest that the illusory ball is interpreted and trusted as if it were genuine bottom-up information (i.e., a real throw). We discuss the mechanisms underlying this illusion that may account for the absence of error detection, focusing in particular on the roles of source monitoring and the automatization of perceptual simplification processes.
The self is typically perceived to be located in its body, but perceived locations for the self, which generally favor head and heart regions, also vary. Although previous research has emphasized individual differences in self-location, recent research has discovered that there is considerable malleability in perceived self-locations within individuals across time, implicating possible contingencies related to situational factors. Four experiments using within-subject designs (total N = 625) sought to investigate whether these migrations of perceived self-location operate in a manner consistent with conceptual metaphors and folk theories concerning the head and the heart. In support of metaphor-linked predictions, Studies 1 and 2 found that thinking about activities that were more relationship-oriented, relative to activities that were less relationship-oriented, shifted perceived self-locations downward, toward the heart. Study 3 found that similar, though weaker, results occurred in a perspective-taking task and Study 4 found that drawing attention to the heart led many individuals to view activities as more relationship-oriented. The results highlight dynamic relations involving body perception, the self, and processes related to conceptual metaphor.
IIn visual crowding, perception of an element deteriorates in the presence of clutter. The mechanism(s) underlying crowding have been controversially discussed for decades. Whereas it is well established that grouping determines which elements are prone to interference, it is unclear what causes interference, e.g., feature pooling, lateral inhibition, or substitution. To address this question, we presented an array of lines of which the central line was offset (vernier offset). Observers were asked to report this offset. The flanking lines were straight or had the same (pro-vernier) or opposite (anti-vernier) offset direction compared to the target vernier. Participants' performance was hardly influenced by a single pro-vernier contrary to what is expected both from pooling and substitution mechanisms, which predict increased performance. When the number of pro- as well as anti-verniers increased, performance significantly increased or decreased, respectively. When the flankers were presented closer to the fovea, the influence of the flankers was larger than when presented further away, contrary to the well-known in-out anisotropy. We show that there are processes at work, which can hardly be captured by any existing model of crowding.
