Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Fifty years of hindsight bias research—Reflection on Fischhoff (1975).
Hindsight bias arises when people do not realize how extensively observing an event has changed their perception of the world. As a result, the event appears more likely than it actually was, in foresight. Underestimating how much one has to learn is a form of overconfidence that could, in the extreme, lead to a seemingly surprise-free past portending a surprise-full future. Fischhoff (1975) introduced tasks for studying the extent, causes, and consequences of the bias, along with initial evidence using historical vignettes. Subsequent studies have found the bias in a wide variety of experimental and real-world settings. Psychologists have linked the bias to research on cognitive, social, perceptual, and emotional processes. Other disciplines have implicated it in practical problems including clinical diagnosis, patent evaluation, legal adjudication, historical analysis, and safety engineering. Warning people about the bias has no discernible effect. Helping people to reconstruct past perspectives might help. After describing how the research program came about, the article briefly summarizes studies that the author especially likes and which have abundant references to studies in the diverse research areas that either study hindsight bias or use it to study other phenomena. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The birth of flow: Why Coles et al. (1985) is important.
This perspective article explains why the article of Coles et al. (1985) must be considered a milestone in research on human cognition: Because it was the first convincing demonstration that Eriksen’s theoretical flow idea can be tested and confirmed, because it foreshadowed systematic modeling attempts to capture the dynamics of decision making and response conflicts, and because its findings provided one of the strongest arguments against the back then dominating stage-analytical approach, which opened the door for more dynamic, interactive models of human cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Persistent effects of salience in visual working memory: Limits of cue-driven guidance.
Visual working memory (VWM) is a core cognitive system enabling us to select and briefly store relevant visual information. We recently observed that more salient items were recalled more precisely from VWM and demonstrated that these effects of salience resisted manipulations of reward, probability, and selection history. Here, we investigated whether and how salience interacts with shifts of attention induced by pre- and retrocueing. Across four experiments, we consistently found the effects of salience on the accuracy of VWM. Spatial and feature cues presented before the memory display improved accuracy when they validly indicated the target, but valid cues failed to eliminate the salience effect. A similar pattern was observed with retrocues. Overall, there was little evidence that the lower accuracy for less salient stimuli could be compensated by increasing their attentional priority through cueing procedures. This suggests that salience plays a critical role in how items are initially encoded into VWM and that once representations are formed, their relative priority based on salience appears difficult to fully override via top-down priority. These findings highlight bottom-up and top-down processes in the interplay of visual attention and working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Latent memory traces for prospective items in visual working memory.
Visual working memory (VWM) is a capacity-limited cognitive system that is utilized for enabling goal-directed actions. When sampling items for VWM storage, however, observers are often exposed to other items that are not selected for imminent action (hereafter: “prospective items”). Here, we asked whether such exposure leads to memory buildup of these prospective items, facilitating subsequent VWM encoding for imminent action. In a series of experiments, we addressed this question using a copying task, in which participants attempted to reproduce a model display by placing items in an adjacent empty grid. To investigate whether a memory is formed for prospective items, we swapped the position of unplaced items in the model and compared copying task performance to a condition in which items remained stable. The results show that, when prospective items remained stable, participants took less time inspecting the model when encoding these items later (compared to when they were swapped). This reduced inspection duration was not accompanied by a higher number of inspections or an increase in errors. We conclude that the memory system gradually builds up latent memory traces of items that are not selected for imminent action, thus increasing the efficiency of subsequent VWM encoding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The influence of origin and valence of words on the social judgments of unknown people.
When we assess unknown people, we tend to be positively biased: we give them rather good assessments. However, can this positivity bias be limited or moderated? How would emotions of different origins (i.e., type of mechanisms involved in the formation of emotion: automatic vs. reflective) influence social judgments? We predicted that automatic emotions (of fast and effortless origin) would enhance the presence of positivity bias compared to reflective emotions (slow and effortful). Participants were asked to read and react to emotional words (differing in their origin: automatic, mixed, or reflective and in valence: positive and negative), process them in tasks (eliciting automatic or reflective processing), and assess the personality traits of unknown people in pictures. Participants tended to assess negative traits as less intense than positive traits; they assessed all traits as less intense in the automatic manipulation compared to the reflective task. Our results further explore the role of different emotional dimensions in the diffusion of incidental affect and show the role of the origin of emotion and the mode of processing in this phenomenon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The contribution of motor identity prediction to temporal binding.
Temporal binding describes an illusory compression of time between voluntary actions and their effects. In two experiments, using stable, preexisting action–effect associations, we investigated whether motor identity prediction (prediction of the effect’s identity) enhances temporal binding. Touch-typists performed keystrokes and were presented with congruent (corresponding letter) or incongruent (noncorresponding letter) effects after different intervals. Touch-typists estimated the interval between keystrokes and effects. In both experiments, interval estimates were shorter with congruent than with incongruent effects, indicating that motor identity prediction contributes to temporal binding when using stable, preexisting action–effect associations. The congruency effect disappeared over the time course of Experiment 1 (in which incongruent effects were three times more likely than congruent effects), whereas it remained stable in Experiment 2 (in which congruent and incongruent effects were equally likely). Thus, the impact of motor identity prediction on temporal binding is context-sensitive. Even with highly overlearned action–effect associations, participants seem very flexible in adapting their internal predictions about an effect’s identity. They may cease to use previously acquired action–effect associations in contexts in which their predictions are less reliable, thereby diminishing the influence of motor identity prediction on temporal binding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
How do people perceive the variability of multifeature objects?
Humans can judge the summary statistics of various feature dimensions from multiple objects, but it remains unclear whether and how ensemble perception occurs for multifeature objects. The present study investigates how people perceive the overall variability of multifeature objects. Participants estimated the overall variability of a set of stimuli having various orientations and colors, with each feature’s variability randomly determined in each trial. Across three experiments, we found that most people considered both dimensions when estimating variability. To explore how people consider both features, we manipulated the interfeature correlation to examine whether perceived variability relies on the combination of marginal distributions or a joint distribution. The interfeature correlation does not influence the marginal variability of each feature but does reduce the overall variability of a multidimensional joint distribution. Our results showed that the interfeature correlation did not influence the perceived variability, consistent with the prediction based on marginal distributions. When similar features were spatially adjacent, however, interfeature correlation reduced perceived variability, and the contribution of orientation diminished, suggesting that spatial regularity modulates how different features are combined for variability judgments. These results indicate that multiple feature information contributes to variability perception, supporting the idea of a domain-general variance processor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Reviewing evidence for the perception–action model from Garner interference.
It is a widely accepted notion that visual information in the brain is processed via two parallel but separate cortical pathways, the ventral stream for visual perception and the dorsal stream for visuomotor actions. Perception–action dissociations from behavioral experiments are often cited as supportive evidence and one such example is Garner interference: It is assumed that perceptual/ventrally processed tasks suffer Garner interference, while visuomotor/dorsally processed tasks are immune to it (Ganel & Goodale, 2003). Ideally, this dissociation is demonstrated by comparing manual size estimation (assumed ventrally processed) with grasping (assumed dorsally processed). However, few studies actually made this comparison. We addressed this empirical shortage with two improved replications, yielding smaller effects of Garner interference in manual estimation than previous studies reported. In two subsequent experiments, we attempted to modulate Garner interference by manipulating the temporal profile of participants’ responses, building on previous work (Hesse & Schenk, 2013) and extending it to manual estimation. We conclude with a literature review covering all relevant studies on Garner interference. Contrary to previous claims, the currently available evidence for a perception–action dissociation from Garner interference is insufficient to support a ventral–dorsal dissociation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Individual differences in attention capture, control, and working memory.
Attention capture is an important mechanism that can be important for alerting one to danger, but other times, it is expedient to block distracting information from intrusion. In this experiment, we used an additional singleton paradigm to measure attention capture. Rather than solely using the subtraction method to measure the capture effect, we incorporated eye tracking to provide potentially more reliable measures of overt attention. We calculated multiple dependent variables based on the scan path and estimated a capture effect for each participant using linear mixed effects modeling, which yielded a more reliable measure than the subtraction method. The eye-tracking measures were in fact more reliable than other reaction time indicators of capture. Surprisingly, the reaction time effect was not correlated with dwell time on the distractor, distraction probability, or probability of the first saccade landing on the distractor, but the more reliable mixed model capture effect correlated with dwell time. Finally, we measured individual differences in working memory capacity and attention control with an independent set of measures. Neither working memory capacity nor attention control correlated with either reaction time capture effect, but dwell time on the distractor and verification time were negatively correlated with both. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The effect of distance on the overestimation of gaze direction.
A widely known result from gaze perception research is the overestimation effect where gaze direction—or more precisely gaze endpoints—is seen farther to the side than they actually are. A common gain factor reported in the literature is 1.5, that is, an overestimation of gaze endpoint by 50%. Gaze endpoint, however, must be a joint function of gaze angle and distance. Results from data collected between 2022 and 2024 show that a strong overestimation for photographed models at short distances turns into almost perfect perception at larger distances. This was equally true when gazing was done with the eyes only (head straight relative to observer) and with the head only (eyes straight relative to head). A new method measures gaze angle by triangulation from fixation points at varying distances and separates two components: (a) a slope and (b) an intercept. This triangulation indicates that the overestimation of gaze angle (slope) is very moderate and that the strong effects in gaze endpoints are mainly due to the intercept. Further experiments indicate that the intercept effects are confined to two-dimensional pictures of lookers and are not observed in physical three-dimensional lookers. The results are interpreted with reference to the distinction between picture space and physical space. Moreover, the present results do not fully comply with the classic partial-occlusion explanation for the overestimation effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance - Vol 51, Iss 2