Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Ensemble memory of a scene interacts with current perception regardless of attentional requirements.
How do we maintain a rich and stable perceptual experience across the entire visual scene, even when we are focusing on a subset of visual inputs? The current study explored this question by investigating whether the visual system processes summary statistics of multiple features regardless of task relevance, and how they interact with subsequent perception. To test the processing of multifeature summary statistics under different attentional requirements, we presented multiple Gabor patches with heterogeneous orientations/colors and asked participants to attend to a single feature dimension (Experiments 1 and 3) or a single item (Experiment 2) for the memory task. During the memory maintenance period (before memory response), we asked the participants to perform a discrimination task (Experiments 1 and 2) or a boundary localization task (Experiment 3) to test how the memory of the ensemble representation alters the subsequent perceptual experience. We found evidence for obligatory processing of scene summary statistics presented for the memory task, which interacted with the subsequent perceptual sensitivity. Specifically, not only summary statistics relevant but also those of task-irrelevant feature (Experiments 1 and 3) and outside the focus of attention (Experiment 2) were encoded and bidirectionally interacted with subsequent perception. These results suggest obligatory processing of summary statistics of a scene, which may allow rich and stable visual experience by integrating temporally adjacent visual inputs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Human cognitive system privileges processing over short-term storage: Asymmetry in working memory limitations.
The continuous flow of information in which we are immersed obliges our cognitive system to maintain accessible the relevant elements for the time necessary for their processing. The present study investigated how working memory balances the resource demands of this necessary storage in the face of demanding processing. In four experiments using a complex span task, we examined the residual performance in memory and processing of individuals who performed at their best in the other component. Reciprocal dual-task costs pointed toward a resource sharing between the two functions. However, whereas prioritizing processing almost abolished participants’ memory performance, more than 60% of their processing capacities were preserved while maintaining memory performance at span. We argue that this asymmetry might be adaptive in nature. Working memory might have evolved as an action-oriented system in which short-term memory capacity is structurally limited to spare the resources needed for processing the information it holds. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
The task-switch cost is still absent after selectively stopping a response in cued task switching.
The task-switch cost is one of the most robust phenomena in human task performance, but it can disappear after nogo trials where the actors decide not to respond to the target. According to the response-selection account, it is the occurrence of response selection that generates a task-switch cost on the subsequent trial, and the absence of a switch cost after nogo trials has been attributed to a nonoccurrence of response selection on nogo trials. However, an alternative account is that a task-switch cost is generated but is abolished on nogo trials because of the interference from the nogo signal with the activated task set, suggesting that the absence of a task-switch cost does not necessarily imply the nonoccurrence of response selection. The present study tested these competing accounts by using selective go/nogo procedures for which withholding a response would require selecting a response and inhibiting the selected response. Bayes factors in five experiments provided evidence for the absence of a task-switch cost after selective nogo trials, indicating that the occurrence of response selection does not necessarily result in a task-switch cost on the subsequent trial. The present results are consistent with the task-set interference account that a task-switch cost could be generated on nogo trials but is abolished because a nogo signal interferes with the activated task-set. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Access to inner language enhances memory for events.
Events are temporally bounded experiences involving people, objects, and actions that can be segmented into sequences of smaller, meaningful events (e.g., steps involved in constructing a piece of furniture), but the role of inner language in remembering such events has been unclear. We investigated whether inner language enhances memory for events in a naturalistic, nonverbal task where participants constructed simple models from memory. Across three experiments, we used linguistic suppression in a dual-task paradigm to test whether inner language improved overall memory performance and completion time, additionally exploring the number of events that could be recalled. We found that access to inner language at encoding consistently affected memory performance: when inner language was disrupted at encoding, participants were poorer at recalling the models and remembered fewer events. This effect was present whether or not the number of events to be recalled exceed event memory capacity (estimated as approximately seven to eight events). Critically, linguistic suppression impaired memory performance to a greater extent than a control secondary task that did not affect access to language; that is, impairment was not solely due to dual-task interference. The results support the proposal that inner language enhances event memory via a mechanism of linguistic bootstrapping, which makes event representation more efficient by allowing more information to be encoded in an event model even when language is not being used in the task. These findings therefore extend theories of event memory and add to a growing body of evidence that inner language is a highly valuable cognitive tool. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Better source memory for remembered to-be-forgotten items than for remembered to-be-remembered items.
When participants study items one-by-one and are directed to either remember or forget the respective item directly after its presentation, retention of to-be-forgotten items is regularly worse than of to-be-remembered items. We tested whether this directed forgetting effect which is regularly observed for item memory generalizes to source memory. In three experiments, participants studied items in two different source colors (N = 101) or at two different source locations (N = 64; N = 81). Sources were manipulated orthogonally to item type (remember vs. forget). At test, we asked participants to recognize all studied items and also to identify their source. We used a multinomial processing tree model to disentangle item memory, source memory, and guessing. In all three experiments, we replicated the directed forgetting effect in item memory. Source memory for to-be-forgotten items that were recognized despite the intention to forget, however, tended to be even better than source memory for to-be-remembered items that were recognized. These results suggest that the directed forgetting effect does not simply translate from item to source memory. Rather source memory seems to be disproportionally increased in to-be-forgotten items that are remembered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Mental effort during mindless reading? Pupil fluctuations indicate internal processing during levels of inattention.
Mind wandering, an experience characterized by a reduced external focus of attention and an increased internal focus, has seen significant theoretical advancement in understanding its underlying cognitive processes. The levels-of-inattention hypothesis posits that in mind wandering, external attention is reduced in a graded fashion, reflecting different levels of weak versus deep attentional decoupling. However, it has remained unclear whether internal processing during mind wandering, and mindless reading in particular, requires effort and, if so, whether it is graded or distinct. To address this, we analyzed pupil size as a measure of cognitive load in the sustained-attention-to-stimulus task during text reading. We examined whether decoupled external attention is linked to an overall reduction in workload and whether internal focus of attention is graded or represents a distinct cognitive process. Overall, overlooking errors in the text was associated with a small pupil size, indicating reduced effortful processing. However, this effect varied with error type: overlooking high- or medium-level errors (weak decoupling) resulted in reduced pupil size, while overlooking low-level errors (deep decoupling) had no effect on pupil size. Moreover, detecting an error (at any processing level) elicited a task-evoked pupillary response, which was absent when it was overlooked. These findings suggest that weak decoupling reduces internal resource-demanding processing and are in line with the hypothesis that large pupils during deep decoupling may be associated with distinct states of effortful internal processing. They further support both the levels-of-inattention hypothesis and the notion that internal focus is a distinct mode of deeply decoupled processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Mouse cursor trajectories capture the flexible adaptivity of predictive sentence processing.
Recent psycholinguistic findings raise fundamental questions about comprehenders’ ability to rationally adapt their predictions during sentence processing. Two mouse cursor tracking experiments (each N = 85) assessed this adaptivity by manipulating the reliability of verb-based semantic cues. In Experiment 1, predictive mouse cursor movements to targets (e.g., bike) versus distractors (e.g., kite) were measured while participants heard equal proportions of nonpredictive (e.g., “spot … the bike”), predictive (e.g., “ride … the bike”), and antipredictive (e.g., “fly … the bike”) sentences. In Experiment 2, participants heard equal proportions of nonpredictive and antipredictive sentences. Participants were observed to flexibly adapt their predictions, such that they disengaged prediction in Experiment 1 when verb-based cues were unreliable and as likely to be disconfirmed as confirmed, while they generated adapted predictions in Experiment 2 when verb-based cues were reliably disconfirmed. However, links to individual differences in cognitive control were not observed. These results are interpreted as supporting rational theoretical approaches. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Prosodic features in production reflect reading comprehension skill in high school students.
Young children’s prosodic fluency correlates with their reading ability, as children who are better early readers also produce more adult-like prosodic cues to syntactic and semantic structure. But less work has explored this question for high school readers, who are more proficient readers, but still exhibit wide variability in reading comprehension skill and prosodic fluency. In the current study, we investigated acoustic indices of prosodic production in high school students (N = 40; ages 13–19) exhibiting a range of reading comprehension skill. Participants read aloud a series of 12 short stories which included simple statements, wh-questions, yes–no questions, quotatives, and ambiguous and unambiguous multiclausal sentences. In addition, to assess the contribution of discourse coherence, sentences were read in either canonical or randomized order. Acoustic cues known to index prosodic phenomena—duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity—were extracted and compared across structures and participants. Results demonstrated that high school readers as a group consistently signal syntactic and semantic structure with prosody, and that reading comprehension skill, above and beyond lower-level skills, correlates with prosodic fluency, as better comprehenders produced stronger prosodic cues. However, discourse coherence did not produce consistent effects. These results strengthen the finding that prosodic fluency and reading comprehension are linked, even for older, proficient readers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Letter identity and position coding in the parafovea.
Letter position coding has been extensively examined in studies of isolated word identification, spurring the development of computational models. However, these models are largely restricted to explaining word identification in foveal vision, despite the fact that early lexical processing during reading occurs in the parafovea. We report four experiments that examined the flexibility of parafoveal letter identity and position coding using a variant of the same–different match task. Participants matched transposed- and substituted-letter strings to reference words, with the former being displayed at various retinal eccentricities for 100 ms versus 300 ms to respectively preclude or allow eye movements. The first pair of experiments demonstrated the relative difficulty of coding parafoveal letter positions as compared to their identities, as well as the standard benefit in identifying words displayed in the right visual field. The second pair of experiments further demonstrated that the location of letter-position uncertainty (i.e., transposed letters) interacts with both eccentricity and visual field. Initial letter transpositions were more easily detected in the left visual field, whereas transpositions of the final letters were more accurately detected in the right visual field. As discussed, these results are challenging for existing models of reading, which can individually account for some of our findings but not the results in their entirety. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition - Vol 50, Iss 10