Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Objects, faces, and spaces: Organizational principles of visual object perception as evidenced by individual differences in behavior.
What are the diagnostic dimensions on which objects differ visually? We constructed a two-dimensional object space based on such attributes captured by a deep convolutional neural network. These attributes can be approximated as stubby/spiky and animate-/inanimate-looking. If object space contributes to human visual cognition, this should have a measurable effect on object discrimination abilities. We administered an object foraging task to a large, diverse sample (N = 511). We focused on the stubby animate-looking “face quadrant” of object space given known variations in face discrimination abilities. Stimuli were picked out of tens of thousands of images to either match or not match with the coordinates of faces in object space. Results show that individual differences in face perception can to a large part be explained by variability in general object perception abilities (o-factor). However, additional variability in face processing can be attributed to visual similarity with faces as captured by dimensions of object space; people who struggle with telling apart faces also have difficulties with discriminating other objects with the same object space attributes. This study is consistent with a contribution of object space to human visual cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Does communicating measurable diversity goals attract or repel historically marginalized job applicants? Evidence from the lab and field.
Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment—for example, “We care about diversity” versus “We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority for every White man we hire”—impact application rates from women and racial minorities? Extant psychological theory offers competing predictions about how historically marginalized applicants might respond to such goals. On one hand, measurable diversity goals may raise belongingness concerns among marginalized group members who are uncomfortable with being recruited and hired based on their demographics. On the other, measurable goals might increase organizational attraction by signaling that marginalized group members are more likely to be hired. In a preregistered field experiment (n = 5,557), including measurable diversity goals in job advertisements increased application likelihood among marginalized group members—women and racial minorities—by 6.5%, without sacrifices to candidate quality. These field effects were primarily driven by White women, who were 10.5% more likely to apply after seeing a measurable diversity goal. Follow-up studies with women (total n = 893, preregistered) and racial minorities (total n = 865, preregistered) suggest that although measurable diversity goals signal a more instrumental approach to diversity, they also increase perceived strategic benefits and beliefs that the organization’s commitment is genuine among both groups, which in turn are tied to increased willingness to apply. We discuss the tensions marginalized group members face when evaluating organizational diversity initiatives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Goals bias face perception.
Faces—the most common and complex stimuli in our daily lives—contain multidimensional information used to infer social attributes that guide consequential behaviors, such as deciding who to trust. Decades of research illustrates that perceptual information from faces is processed holistically. An open question, however, is whether goals might impact this perceptual process, influencing the encoding and representation of the complex social information embedded in faces. If an individual were able to factorize information so that each dimension is separately represented, it might enable flexibility. Having a goal, for example, might mean that only goal-relevant dimensions are leveraged to inform behavior. Whether people are able to build such factorized representations remains unknown, largely due to natural correlations between social attributes. We overcome these confounds using a new statistical face model that orthogonalizes perceived facial attractiveness and trustworthiness. Across three experiments (N = 249), we observe that only in some contexts can humans successfully factorize multidimensional social information. When there is a clear goal of assessing another’s trustworthiness, people successfully decompose these social attributes. The more an individual factorizes, the more they entrust money to others in a subsequent trust game. However, when the goal is to assess attractiveness, irrelevant information about trustworthiness is so potent that it biases how attractive someone is perceived—a trustworthiness “halo effect.” In contrast, in goal-agnostic environments, we do not find any evidence of factorization; instead, people encode multidimensional social information in an entwined and holistic fashion that distorts their perceptions of social attributes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Erring on the side of caution: Two failures to replicate the derring effect.
It has been claimed that deliberately making errors while studying, even when the correct answers are provided, can enhance memory for the correct answers, a phenomenon termed the derring effect. Such deliberate erring has been shown to outperform other learning techniques, including copying and underlining, elaborative studying with concept mapping, and synonym generation. To date, however, the derring effect has only been demonstrated by a single group of researchers and in a single population of participants. This article presents two independent, preregistered replication attempts of the derring effect. In Experiment 1, participants studied 36 term–definition concepts in a within-subjects, laboratory study. On error-correction trials, participants were presented with a term–definition concept and were asked to generate an incorrect definition before correcting it. Error-correction trials were compared with copy trials, where participants simply copied the term–definition concepts and underlined the key concepts. Experiment 2 was an online study in which participants studied trivia facts using a similar protocol. Memory for the studied facts was then tested either immediately (Experiments 1 and 2) or after 2 days (Experiment 1). Unlike the original demonstrations of the derring effect, cued-recall performance did not significantly differ between the error-correction and copy conditions, and the Bayes factors provided moderate support for the null hypothesis in both experiments. We discuss potential explanations for our findings and consider them in relation to key theories and the broader literature on the role of errors in learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The “plus polar self”: A reinterpretation of the self-prioritization effect as a polarity correspondence effect.
We suggest that the polarity correspondence principle (PCP; Proctor & Cho, 2006) can explain the self-prioritization effect (SPE), that is, that matching responses for self-labels and self-assigned shapes are faster than matching responses for other labels and other-assigned shapes. According to PCP, one can argue that self-label, self-shape, and the “yes, match” responses are all + polar (hence full correspondence is given), whereas other label and other shape are both—polar, which does not correspond to the + polarity of the “yes” response. Our argument is based on a structural analogy of the self-matching task with an experiment by Seymour (1969)—a pillar of the PCP—who conducted an experiment where participants determined if the location of a dot (above or below a rectangle) matched the word (“above” or “below”) presented within the rectangle. Faster reactions occurred in above–above matching trials than in below–below or nonmatching trials. We replicated this finding (Experiment 1A) and showed the close analogy to the self-matching task by replicating the SPE with a single “other” category. In Experiment 2, we showed that the SPE disappears if participants are instructed to respond with “no” to matches. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 with two instead of one “other” category (which is more common in SPE research). Again, the SPE in the “yes” condition significantly exceeded the one in the “no” condition. However, the latter SPE was still significant, suggesting that part of the SPE might be due to the PCP, but a small self-related effect remains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Psychological mechanisms underlying the biased interpretation of numerical scientific evidence.
Do people use their statistical expertise selectively to reach preferred conclusions when evaluating scientific evidence, with those more expert showing more preferential bias? We investigated this motivated numeracy account of evidence evaluation but came to a different account for biased evaluation. Across three studies (N = 2,799), participants interpreted numerical data from gun control intervention studies. In Studies 1 and 2, participants reached accurate conclusions more frequently from scientific data when those data aligned with their political preferences than when they did not, an attitude congeniality effect. This bias was unrelated to numerical ability (i.e., numeracy) and cognitive effort, although each variable predicted correct reasoning independently. Probing further, we found that attitude congeniality did not prompt people to discover valid statistical rationales for their more frequent correct conclusions. Rather, people came to right conclusions more often but for wrong reasons, suggesting why numerical ability need not be related to the congeniality effect. In Study 2, we showed this pattern was not due to forced guessing. In Study 3, we showed that the rationales, whether right or wrong, carried some weight over multiple scenarios, indicating that participants were not just expressive responding—that is, simply stating preferred conclusion regardless of the data. Statistical training did not reduce attitude congeniality biases. We suggest that people engage in “expressive rationalization” rather than “rationality” to reach preferred conclusions, finding convenient rationales for preferred conclusions that need not be valid, even though they can lead to conclusions that are. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Let them eat ceke: An electrophysiological study of form-based prediction in rich naturalistic contexts.
It is well-established that people make predictions during language comprehension––the nature and specificity of these predictions, however, remain unclear. For example, do comprehenders routinely make predictions about which words (and phonological forms) might come next in a conversation, or do they simply make broad predictions about the gist of the unfolding context? Prior EEG studies using tightly controlled experimental designs have shown that form-based prediction can occur during comprehension, as N400s to unexpected words are reduced when they resemble the form of a predicted word (e.g., ceke when expecting cake). One limitation, however, is that these studies often create environments that are optimal for eliciting form-based prediction (e.g., highly constraining sentences, slower-than-natural rates of presentation). Thus, questions remain about whether form-based prediction can occur in settings that more closely resemble everyday comprehension. To address this, the present study explores form-based prediction during naturalistic spoken language comprehension. English-speaking adults listened to a story in which some of the words had been altered. Specifically, we experimentally manipulated whether participants heard the original word from the story (cake), a form-similar nonword (ceke), or a less-similar nonword (vake). Half of the target words were predictable given their context, and the other half were unpredictable. Consistent with the prior work, we found reduced N400s for form-similar nonwords (ceke) relative to less-similar nonwords (vake)—but only in predictable contexts. This study demonstrates that form-based prediction can emerge in naturalistic contexts, and therefore, it is likely to be a common aspect of language comprehension in the wild. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Partitioned prosociality: Why giving a large donation bit by bit makes people seem more committed to social causes.
Donating money to worthy social causes is one of the most impactful and efficient forms of altruism, but skepticism often clouds perceptions of donors’ motives for giving. We propose a solution that reduces this skepticism: Instead of giving a single large donation, donors can partition their donations into multiple, smaller ones. Ten preregistered studies with 3,816 participants supported this idea. The positive effect of partitioned giving was robust to the number and size of the partitions and the method of displaying the partitions. Moreover, this effect emerged when the actual effort to give in partitions was held constant and donors precommitted to giving in partitions. The effect arose because the number of donations seems to act as a heuristic, signaling that the donor has more frequent impulses to give and a greater desire to be connected to the social cause. Accordingly, the effect was enhanced when donors gave on nonconsecutive days rather than consecutive days and diminished when they gave their multiple donations on a single day compared with on different days. This effect emerged across both joint and separate evaluations of partitioned versus lump-sum giving, indicating that people think donors who give in partitions should be judged more positively than those who give in one lump sum. Overall, this work shows that how donors structure their donations affects judgments of their motives for giving, thereby providing new insights into how people evaluate prosocial behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Normative and informational confidence matching.
When performing tasks in a social context, individuals tend to report confidence judgments that increasingly align with those of others over time. However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, termed confidence matching, are not fully understood. This study explores two potential drivers of confidence matching behavior: informational factors that cause individuals to genuinely recalibrate their private sense of confidence based on their partner’s confidence; and normative factors that lead individuals to adapt the way in which they publicly express their confidence, without changing their private assessment of their own performance. To examine these influences, we conducted two experiments examining the effects of both informational and normative factors on private and public confidence. The results demonstrate that both factors can lead to confidence matching. In a setting devoid of feedback, participants matched their confidence reports with their partner’s and modified their information-seeking behavior—a proxy for private confidence—accordingly, pointing toward the role of informational factors. Conversely, in a scenario in which feedback was readily available and a joint decision-making rule was enforced, participants aligned their confidence reports with their partner’s but did not adjust their information-seeking behavior, hinting at normative factors influencing the public display of confidence matching. These findings highlight the flexibility and context-sensitivity of confidence, thereby underscoring the importance of factoring in social contexts and the adaptive nature of confidence when studying metacognitive processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Is personal identity intransitive?
There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here, we ask whether the intransitive judgments found in these studies truly reflect the operation of an intransitive concept of personal identity. We manipulate several factors that arbitrate between transitivity and intransitivity and find most support for transitivity: In contrast to the prior work, most participants do not make intransitive judgments when there is any reason to favor one individual over another. People change which single individual they personally identify with, depending on which individual competes more strongly or weakly for identity, rather than identifying with both individuals. Even when two individuals are identical and therefore both entitled to be the same person, we find that people make more transitive judgments once they understand the practical commitments of their responses (Experiment 4) and report not being able to actually imagine two perspectives simultaneously when reasoning about the scenario (Experiment 5). In short, we suggest that while people may make intransitive judgments, these do not reflect that they psychologically represent identity in an intransitive manner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
A perceptual cue-based mechanism for automatic assignment of thematic agent and patient roles.
Understanding social events requires assigning the participating entities to roles such as agent and patient, a mental operation that is reportedly effortless. We investigated whether, in processing visual scenes, role assignment is accomplished automatically (i.e., when the task does not require it), based on visuospatial information, without requiring semantic or linguistic encoding of the stimuli. Human adults saw a series of images featuring the same male and female actors next to each other, one in an agentlike (more dynamic/leaning forward) and the other in a patientlike (static/less dynamic) posture. Participants indicated the side (left/right) of a target actor (i.e., the woman). From trial to trial, body postures changed, but the roles, defined by the type of posture, sometimes changed, sometimes not. We predicted that if participants spontaneously saw the actors as agent and patient, they should be slower to respond when roles switched from trial n—1 to trial n, than when they stayed the same (role switch cost). Results confirmed this hypothesis (Experiments 1–3). A role switch cost was also found when roles were defined by another visual relational cue, the relative positioning (where one actor stands relative to another), but not when actors were presented in isolation (Experiments 4–6). These findings reveal a mechanism for automatic role assignment based on encoding of visual relational information in social (multiple-person) scenes. Since we found that roles in one trial affected the processing of the subsequent trial despite variations in postures and spatial relations, this mechanism must be one that assigns entities in a scene, to the abstract categories of agent and patient. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Probing the origins of subjective confidence in source memory decisions in young and older adults: A sequential sampling account.
Subjective confidence is an important factor in our decision making, but how confidence arises is a matter of debate. A number of computational models have been proposed that integrate confidence into sequential sampling models of decision making, in which evidence accumulates across time to a threshold. An influential example of this approach is the relative balance of evidence hypothesis, in which confidence is determined by the amount of evidence for the choice that was made compared to the evidence for all possible choices. Here, we modify this approach by mapping distance from a decision threshold to confidence via a sigmoid function. This allows for individual differences in bias toward lower or higher levels of confidence, as well as sensitivity to differences in evidence between choices. We apply several variants of the model to assess potential age differences between young and older adults in source memory decision making in an existing data set (Dodson, Bawa, & Slotnick, 2007). We compare our model to the relative balance of evidence approach, and the results indicate that the sigmoidal method substantially improves model fit. We also consider models in which memory errors can arise from a misrecollection process that involves associating items with the incorrect source, a process that has been proposed to account for age differences in source memory confidence and accuracy, but find no evidence that misrecollection is necessary to account for the results. This work provides a viable model of subjective confidence that is integrated with well-established models of decision making and provides insights into effects of aging on source memory decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Individual differences in the dynamics of attention control.
Individual differences in the dynamics of attention control were examined in two studies. Participants performed mouse tracker versions of Stroop (Studies 1 and 2) and flankers (Study 2), along with additional measures of attention control and working memory to better examine individual differences in how conflict resolution processes unfold over time. Attention control abilities were related to the amount of attraction to the incorrect response and the time to move toward the correct response on incongruent trials in the Stroop task. In the flanker task, attention control abilities were not related to the amount of attraction to the incorrect response but were related to the time to move toward the correct response on incongruent trials. Mouse tracker measures in both Stroop and flankers demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties and tended to load moderately on an attention control factor along with other attention control tasks. These results are consistent with the notion that conflict resolution processes in Stroop and flankers likely reflect both overlapping and distinct (i.e., restraining and constraining attention) processes that are related to broader attention control abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Adaptive curiosity about metacognitive ability.
Metacognition provides control and oversight to the process of acquiring and using knowledge. Efficient metacognition is essential to many aspects of daily life, from health care to finance and education. Across three experiments, we found a specific form of curiosity in humans about the quality of their own metacognition, using a novel approach that dissociates perceptual from metacognitive information searches. Observers displayed a strategic balance in their curiosity, alternating between a focus on perceptual accuracy and metacognitive performance. Depending on the context, this metacognitive curiosity was modulated by an internal evaluation of metacognition, leading to increased feedback requests when metacognition was likely to be inaccurate. Using an ideal observer model, we describe how this curiosity trade-off can arise naturally from a recursive evaluation and transformation of decisions’ evidence. These results show that individuals are inherently curious about their metacognitive abilities and can compare perceptual and metacognitive precision to fine-tune performance monitoring. We propose that this form of curiosity may reflect humans’ drive to refine their self-model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Boomerasking: Answering your own questions.
Humans spend much of their lives in conversation, where they tend to hold many simultaneous motives. We examine two fundamental desires: to be responsive to a partner and to disclose about oneself. We introduce one pervasive way people attempt to reconcile these competing goals—boomerasking—a sequence in which individuals first pose a question to their conversation partner (“How was your weekend?”), let their partner answer, and then answer the question themselves (“Mine was amazing!”). The boomerask starts with someone asking a question, but—like a boomerang—the question returns quickly to its source. We document three types of boomerasks: ask-bragging (asking a question followed by disclosing something positive, e.g., an amazing vacation); ask-complaining (asking a question followed by disclosing something negative, e.g., a family funeral); and ask-sharing (asking a question followed by disclosing something neutral, e.g., a weird dream). Though boomeraskers believe they leave positive impressions, in practice, their decision to share their own answer—rather than follow up on their partner’s—appears egocentric and disinterested in their partner’s perspective. As a result, people perceive boomeraskers as insincere and prefer conversation partners who straightforwardly self-disclose. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - Vol 154, Iss 3