Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology

Forty years of research on mathematical cognition: Summing it up.
In this article, I describe my academic journey as a Canadian researcher in the field of mathematical cognition. The article is a version of the talk I gave when I was presented with the Donald O. Hebb Award from the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science in July 2023 at the University of Guelph. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Glimpses into the social mind: Decoding messages from faces and eyes.
The human brain is fundamentally a social brain, with its perceptual and cognitive systems evolved to support a diverse set of processes aimed at enabling our complex social function. And while in the last decades the field has advanced considerably in understanding the mechanisms by which the perceptual and cognitive faculties support human social behaviour, there remains a lack of knowledge about how social information is communicated between individuals. In my work, I have studied nonverbal visual social signalling via faces and eyes. In this article, I summarize the results from three lines of my research which show that (a) limiting face visibility decreases its social value, (b) eyes transmit key social messages, and (c) group size modulates social messages. Together, these data show that visual signals from faces and eyes convey complex social messages and represent an important vehicle for the communication of social information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Beyond memory: The transcendence of episodic narratives.
Humans have a proclivity for storytelling and narration. Although a lot of attention in the field of episodic memory focuses on the mnemonic content of narratives, memory narratives are not just for conveying the past. Instead, narratives provide a vehicle for meaning-making, social connection, and other complex facets of human cognition and thinking. This short reflection piece discusses the importance of narratives in these diverse realms. In addition, it briefly touches on the role of memory narration in the modern digital era. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Determining the optimal environmental information for training computational models of lexical semantics and lexical organization.
Experiential theories of cognition propose that the external environment shapes cognitive processing, shifting emphasis from internal mechanisms to the learning of environmental structure. Computational modelling, particularly distributional models of lexical semantics (e.g., Landauer & Dumais, 1997) and models of lexical organization (e.g., Johns, 2021a), exemplifies this, highlights the influence of language experience on cognitive representations. While these models have been successful, comparatively less attention has been paid to the training materials used to train these models. Recent research has explored the role of social/communicatively oriented training materials on models of lexical semantics and organization (Johns, 2021a, 2021b, 2023, 2024), introducing discourse- and user-centred text training materials. However, determining the optimal training materials for these two model types remains an open question. This article addresses this problem by using experiential optimization (Johns, Jones, & Mewhort, 2019), which selects the materials that maximize model performance. This study will use experiential optimization to compare user-based and discourse-based corpora in optimizing models of lexical organization and semantics, offering insight into pathways towards integrating cognitive models in these areas. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Updating local and global probabilities during maze navigation.
We examined the human ability to encode and utilize local and global uncertainty information during a navigational task. Participants were tasked with navigating a virtual maze in which wall locations were obscured. Local cues and a global direction provided guidance. The validities of the global and local cues were separately and jointly varied across the two experiments. The results demonstrated that participants effectively utilized both global and local cues for navigation with a stronger reliance on local cues and a heightened precision in estimating their reliability. Our findings suggest that the representation of uncertainty for proximate events can be dissociated from that of distal events. Furthermore, humans effectively integrate both forms of information when making decisions during navigation tasks. This research advances our understanding of uncertainty processing and its implications for decision making in complex environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Observation of conflict triggers conflict adaptation.
The conflict monitoring theory posits that the simultaneous activation of incompatible responses in the current trial leads to response conflict. Conflict occurrence signals to enhance attention to the target stimulus, reduce attention to distracting stimuli, and ultimately lead to conflict adaptation (i.e., reduced interference effect after conflict trials compared to nonconflict trials). However, this theory does not explicitly assume whether the involvement of response execution is necessary in the process of conflict occurrence. Research on the negative emotion theory suggests that even in the absence of response execution, incompatible response representations can induce conflict. Our present study aimed to provide direct behavioural evidence regarding whether conflict activated without response execution is sufficient to trigger conflict adaptation. In a word–colour Stroop task, this study employed the LOOK-to-DO transition design, in which participants refrained from responding in half of the trials (LOOK trials) and responded with key presses in the other half (DO trials). Across three experiments, we controlled for feature integration and contingency learning and manipulated the stimulus presentation duration in the previous trial. The results indicated a significant conflict adaptation effect in reaction time when the stimulus presentation duration was shorter in the previous trial. This finding suggested that in a confounding-minimal design with no response execution in the previous trial, conflict triggers control adjustments and leads to conflict adaptation. This finding aligns with and further elaborates on the original conflict monitoring theory by demonstrating that response execution is not a necessary condition for the generation of response conflict. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale - Vol 78, Iss 3