Visual working memory and actions are closely intertwined. Memory can guide our actions, but actions also impact what we remember. Even during memory maintenance, actions such as saccadic eye movements select content in visual working memory, resulting in better memory at locations that are congruent with the action goal as compared to incongruent locations. Here, we further substantiate the claim

Difference-education is an intervention that addresses psychological barriers that can undermine the academic performance of first-generation college students (i.e., those who have parents without 4-year degrees). Difference-education interventions improve first-generation students' performance by empowering them to navigate higher education environments more effectively. They also improve students'

Prior research has shown that the lifetime age distribution of adults' personal memories peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, and that this reminiscence bump is apparent primarily for positive rather than negative events. Inspired by sociological research on the crime-age curve, four new studies tested the idea that adults' negative memories of moral transgressions and behavioral missteps

Across many species, a major function of vocal communication is to convey formidability, with low voice frequencies traditionally considered the main vehicle for projecting large size and aggression. Vocal loudness is often ignored, yet it might explain some puzzling exceptions to this frequency code. Here we demonstrate, through acoustic analyses of over 3,000 human vocalizations and four perceptual

In three experiments, I examined the role of emotions in arithmetic and investigated how this role changes with aging. I adopted a strategy approach and examined strategic aspects of participants' performance under emotionally neutral and negative conditions. The data showed that negative emotions led participants to (a) use fewer strategies and change how often they used each available strategy (Experiment

A majority of the world's population is multilingual, yet children's language-based preferences have largely been studied in Western monolingual contexts. The present research investigated language-based preferences in 4- to 8-year-old children living in Hyderabad, India, a multilingual region with languages such as Telugu (official language of the state, and the native language of many children in

Across all domains of human social life, positive perceptions of conversational listening (i.e., feeling heard) predict well-being, professional success, and interpersonal flourishing. However, a fundamental question remains: Are perceptions of listening accurate? Prior research has not empirically tested the extent to which humans can detect others' cognitive engagement (attentiveness) during live

Philosophers throughout history have debated the relations between the abstract geometry of formal mathematics and the physical geometry of the natural world. We provide evidence that abstract geometry reflects the geometry humans and nonhuman animals use for spatial navigation. Across two preregistered experiments, educated adults watched short videos of two points and two line segments forming an

Across two preregistered studies with children (3-12-year-olds; N = 356) and adults (N = 262) from the United States, we find robust expectations for intergroup empathic biases. Participants predicted that people would feel better about ingroup fortunes than outgroup fortunes and worse about ingroup misfortunes than outgroup misfortunes. Expectations of empathic bias were stronger when there was animosity

This study examined whether temporal crowding-the impaired object identification when distracting objects precede and succeed it-occurs at the fovea and if so whether its magnitude is reduced. We presented a central sequence of three oriented items separated by relatively long intervals (200/400 ms) and used an orientation estimation task with mixture-model analyses. We found clear evidence of temporal

Imagine a bowl of soup that never emptied, no matter how many spoonfuls you ate-when and how would you know to stop eating? Satiation can play a role in regulating eating behavior, but research suggests visual cues may be just as important. In a seminal study by Wansink et al. (2005), researchers used self-refilling bowls to assess how visual cues of portion size would influence intake. The study found

Theories of attention hypothesize the existence of an attentional template that contains target features in working or long-term memory. It is frequently assumed that the template contains a veridical copy of the target, but recent studies suggest that this is not true when the distractors are linearly separable from the target. In such cases, target representations shift "off-veridical" in response

The left ventral occipito-temporal (lvOT) cortex is considered to house the brain's representation of orthography (i.e., the spelling patterns of words). Because letter-sound coupling is crucial in reading, we investigated the engagement of the lvOT cortex in processing phonology (i.e., the sound patterns of words) as a function of reading acquisition. We tested 47 Polish children both at the beginning

Two universal strategies for attaining influence-dominance, or the use of intimidation and force to obtain power, and prestige, or garnering respect by demonstrating knowledge and expertise-are communicated through distinct nonverbal displays in North America. Given evidence for the emergence and effectiveness of these strategies across cultures, including non-Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich

In his commentary, Craik (see record 2023-42323-002) argued that while intentional remembering might be effective for some populations and memory tasks, these are the exception, and that intent will not benefit memory if incidental encoding induces optimal processing. While we agree on many points, we maintain that in most situations the processes induced by the intention to remember are more effective

Several theories of belief processing assume that processing another's false belief requires overcoming an egocentric bias toward one's current knowledge. The current evidence in support of this claim, however, is limited. In order to investigate the presence of egocentric bias in adult belief processing, computer mouse tracking was used across three experiments to measure attraction toward response

Research on color-emotion associations provides evidence that hue, chroma, and lightness relate to various emotional experiences. Most of this research has assessed these relationships via isolated color swatches while confounding color dimensions. We broadened the medium in which color-emotion associations were made by manipulating color in photographs varying in valence and/or arousal, and we solely

Cognitive flexibility refers to a mental state that allows efficient switching between tasks. While deciding to be flexible is often ascribed to a strategic resource-intensive executive process, people may also simply use their environment to trigger different states of cognitive flexibility. We developed a paradigm where participants were exposed to two environments with different task-switching probabilities

Infants sometimes differentially attend to faces of different races, but how this tendency develops across infancy and how it may vary for infants growing up with different exposure to racial diversity remain unclear. The present study examined the role of experiences with racial diversity on infants' visual attention to different racial groups (specifically own-race vs. other-race groups) in the first

How does the timing of a prediction influence how a forecaster is perceived? Many people believe that they will be seen as more competent if they make accurate predictions far in advance of an event. However, we find that forecasters are not seen as more competent-and are sometimes seen as less competent-when they make predictions far in advance of an event occurring. Furthermore, we find that this

Studying how intergroup prosociality evolves in war-torn societies is critical for gaining a better understanding of conflict perpetuation. Rwanda provides a unique example of how two groups must reconcile and manage their intergroup biases following a genocidal process. In this study, we employed a novel intended behavior task to measure intergroup prosociality among former genocide perpetrators,

Humans and animals form cognitive maps that allow them to navigate through large-scale environments. Here we address a central unresolved question about these maps: whether they exhibit similar characteristics across all environments, or-alternatively-whether different environments yield different types of maps. To investigate this question, we examined spatial learning in three virtual environments:

Young children, unlike adults, deny that improbable events can happen. We test two accounts explaining this developmental shift. The development = reflection account posits that this shift is driven by an emerging ability to reflect on modal intuitions. In contrast, the development = intuition account posits that this shift is driven by changes in modal intuitions themselves, due to age-related changes

There have been inconsistent reports about whether seeing small versus large numbers (e.g., 1 or 2 vs. 8 or 9) automatically shifts an observer's attention into left versus right hemispace. We report four visual detection experiments (N = 162) where centrally presented uninformative number cues were followed by lateralized targets that required go/no-go responses. Processing depth was manipulated by

Creativity is a driving force for human development and has fascinated scholars for centuries. Surprisingly little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of putting creative ideas into action, however. To shed light on this part of the creative process, we tracked how hand movements unfolded when choosing between either a traditional or a creative use of a given object. Participants could freely

In a conventional (Stroop) priming paradigm, it was well documented that objective prime-target incongruency delays response time (RT) to target compared to prime-target congruent condition. Recent evidence suggests that incongruency between the target and subjectively reported prime identity also delays RT over and above the classic congruency effect. When the prime is rendered invisible, the former

Girls and women are underrepresented in chess. Here, we explored the role of gender bias in this phenomenon. Specifically, we investigated whether parents and mentors (e.g., coaches) show bias against the female youth players in their lives. Parents and mentors (N = 286; 90.6% men) recruited through the U.S. Chess Federation reported their evaluations of and investment in youth players (N = 654). We

Black (compared to White) Americans endure worse healthcare and health outcomes, and discrimination perpetuates these disparities. However, many White Americans deny that racial injustice exists. Two studies (N = 1,853 White Americans) tested whether learning Critical Black History (history of injustice) in healthcare increased perspective-taking and its subsequent impact on racism recognition. When

Individuals often preferentially avoid information that contradicts and seek information that aligns with their prior beliefs-a tendency referred to as "selective exposure." Traditionally, prior research has focused on intrapersonal drivers of selective exposure, including avoidance of cognitive dissonance. We take a complementary approach by investigating the conditions under which interpersonal concerns

The understanding of eating disorders is hindered by the lack of integration between existing psychosocial and neurobiological approaches. We address this problem by developing a novel transdiagnostic and computational approach to eating restriction decisions. We first validated a novel paradigm which extends an established monetary risk task to involve body stimuli with psychosocial values. We used

Numerous organizations pledge to increase diversity, yet few publicly disclose how diverse they are. We suggest this reluctance to be transparent stems from an intuitive (albeit often misplaced) psychological calculation: that revealing struggles to increase diversity will undermine one's credibility and reputation. We evaluate the effects of transparency about lagging diversity numbers across four

We experience the world in terms of both (continuous) time and (discrete) events, but time seems especially primitive-since we cannot perceive events without an underlying temporal medium. It is all the more intriguing, then, to discover that event segmentation can itself influence how we perceive the passage of time. We demonstrated this using a novel "rhythmic reproduction" task, in which people

Historically, psychological models of how people make judgments of discrimination have relied on a binary conceptualization of intergroup relations, making it unclear how people make judgments of discrimination in diverse, multigroup contexts. We propose that groups can vary in the extent to which they fit the prototype for targets of discrimination and that this variation influences judgments of discrimination

The increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of contemporary societies has raised the importance of integration policies for people with a migrant background. Tools like the Migrant Integration Policy Index have been developed to evaluate different countries' integration approaches. If, on the one hand, focusing on what governments are doing to promote integration is necessary, on the other hand, it

People can predict their scores on the Implicit Association Test with remarkable accuracy, challenging the traditional notion that implicit attitudes are inaccessible to introspection and suggesting that people might be aware of these attitudes. Yet, major open questions about the mechanism and scope of these predictions remain, making their implications unclear. Notably, people may be inferring their

Ensemble coding (the brain's ability to rapidly extract summary statistics from groups of items) has been demonstrated across a range of low-level (e.g., average color) to high-level (e.g., average facial expression) visual features, and even on information that cannot be gleaned solely from retinal input (e.g., object lifelikeness). There is also evidence that ensemble coding can interact with other

It is generally accepted that a word's emotional valence (i.e., whether a word is perceived as positive, negative, or neutral) influences how it is accessed and remembered. There is also evidence that the affective content of some words is represented in nonarbitrary sound-meaning associations (i.e., emotional sound symbolism). We investigated whether more extensive statistical relationships exist

Recent behavioral and neural imaging studies revealed a rhythmic sampling in the theta-band (3-8 Hz) of attention. Such observation indicates that visual attention sequentially visits attended locations rapidly and periodically to cover multiple spatial locations, which is believed driven by a general sampling mechanism with a sampling rate invariant to the number of targets. However, a general sampling

The fundamental unit of visual working memory (WM) has been debated for decades. WM could be object-based, such that capacity is set by the number of individuated objects, or feature-based, such that capacity is determined by the total number of feature values stored. The present work examined whether object- or feature-based models would best explain how multifeature objects (i.e., color/orientation

Peer review is a core component of scientific practice. Although peer review ideally improves research and promotes rigor, it also has consequences for what types of research are published and cited and who wants to (and is able to) advance in research-focused careers. Despite these consequences, few reviewers or editors receive training or oversight to ensure their feedback is helpful, professional

Growth mindsets are beliefs that abilities, like intelligence, are mutable. Although most prior work has focused on people's personal mindset beliefs, a burgeoning literature has identified that organizations also vary in the extent to which they communicate and endorse growth mindsets. Organizational growth mindsets have powerful effects on belonging and interest in joining organizations, suggesting

Executive functions (EFs) are cognitive functions that help direct goal-related behavior. EFs are usually measured via behavioral tasks assessed in highly controlled laboratory settings under the supervision of a research assistant. Online versions of EF tasks are an increasingly popular alternative to in-lab testing. However, researchers do not have the same control over the testing environment during

Reports an error in "The role of memory in counterfactual valuation" by Natalie Biderman, Samuel J. Gershman and Daphna Shohamy (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2023[Jun], Vol 152[6], 1754-1767). In this article, several corrections have been made to two equations, the text, and Figure 3. First, there was an error in two equations of the policy gradient model depicted in the Model Description

Memories are not perfect recordings of the past and can be subject to systematic biases. Memory distortions are often caused by our experience of what typically happens in a given situation. However, it is unclear whether memory for events is biased by the knowledge that events usually have a predictable structure (a beginning, middle, and an end). Using video clips of everyday situations, we tested

Comparing a visual memory with new visual stimuli can bias memory content, especially when the new stimuli are perceived as similar. Perceptual comparisons of this kind may play a mechanistic role in memory updating and can explain how memories can become erroneous in daily life. To test this possibility, we investigated whether comparisons can produce other types of memory distortion beyond memory

Consistent evidence has established that people avoid cognitively effortful tasks. However, the features that make a task cognitively effortful are still not well understood. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed regarding which task demands underlie cognitive effort costs, such as time-on-task, error likelihood, and the general engagement of cognitive control. In this study, we test the novel hypothesis

Sensorimotor integration during speech has been investigated by altering the sound of a speaker's voice in real time; in response, the speaker learns to change their production of speech sounds in order to compensate (adaptation). This line of research has however been predominantly limited to very simple speaking contexts, typically involving (a) repetitive production of single words and (b) production

Recent work suggests that personality moderates the relationship between political ideology and the sharing of misinformation. Specifically, Lawson and Kakkar (2022) claimed that fake news sharing was driven mostly by low conscientiousness conservatives. We reanalyzed their data and conducted five new preregistered conceptual replications to reexamine their claims (N = 2,433; stopping rule determined

Distractibility determines the propensity to have one's attention captured by irrelevant information; it relies on a balance between voluntary and involuntary attention. We report a cross-sectional study that uses the competitive attention test to characterize patterns of attention across the adult life span from 21 to 86 years old. Several distractibility components were measured in 186 participants

Current models of second language (L2) acquisition focus on interactions with a first language (L1) at the level of speech sound targets. In multilinguals, the degree of interaction between the articulatory plans that guide speech in each language remains unclear. Here, we directly address this question in bilingual speakers. We use a sensorimotor adaptation paradigm to drive the acquisition of novel

Reports an error in "Computational signatures of inequity aversion in children across seven societies" by Dorsa Amir, David Melnikoff, Felix Warneken, Peter R. Blake, John Corbit, Tara C. Callaghan, Oumar Barry, Aleah Bowie, Lauren Kleutsch, Karen L. Kramer, Elizabeth Ross, Hurnan Vongsachang, Richard Wrangham and Katherine McAuliffe (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Advanced Online Publication

When reproducing the remembered location of dots within a circle, judgments are biased toward the center of imaginary quadrants formed by imaginary vertical and horizontal axes. This effect may result from the heightened precision in the visual system for these orientations in a retinotopic reference frame, or alternately on the internal representation of gravity. We dissociated reference frames defined

When people estimate the quantities of objects (e.g., country populations), are then presented with the objects' actual quantities, and subsequently asked to remember their initial estimates, responses are often distorted towards the actual quantities. This hindsight bias-traditionally considered to reflect a cognitive error-has more recently been proposed to result from adaptive knowledge updating

Researchers routinely infer learning and other unobservable psychological functions based on observable behavior. But what behavioral changes constitute evidence of learning? The standard approach is to infer learning based on a single behavior across individuals, including assumptions about the direction and magnitude of change (e.g., everyone should avoid falling repeatedly on a treacherous obstacle)

Reports an error in "Attention does not spread automatically along objects: Evidence from the pupillary light response" by Felipe Luzardo, Wolfgang Einhäuser, Monique Michl and Yaffa Yeshurun (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2023[Jul], Vol 152[7], 2040-2051). The target stimuli were missing from Figures 1 and 2 and have now been included. The online version of this article has been corrected

Bilingualism has been shown to modify infants' responses in a range of domains. In particular, early bilingual experience is associated with greater flexibility and openness in infant perception and learning. In this study, we investigated whether bilingual infants demonstrate more fundamental differences in how they explore their environment in ways that could contribute to greater openness. Specifically

A methodological problem in most reaction time (RT) tasks is that some measured RTs may be outliers, being either too fast or too slow to reflect the task-related processing of interest. Numerous ad hoc procedures have been used to identify these outliers for exclusion from further analyses, but the accuracies of these methods have not been systematically compared. The present study compared the performance

Essentialism is the belief that members of particular categories (e.g., social and cultural) are united by an innate underlying essence. While such beliefs have been associated with negative outcomes such as stereotyping, discrimination, and prejudice, minority group members can sometimes use essentialist beliefs to validate their identities. Here, we focus on people who identify as "neurodivergent"-individuals

Over the last decade, robots continue to infiltrate the workforce, permeating occupations that once seemed immune to automation. This process seems to be inevitable because robots have ever-expanding capabilities. However, drawing from theories of cultural evolution and social learning, we propose that robots may have limited influence in domains that require high degrees of "credibility"; here we

Adults in prior work often endorse explanations appealing to purposes (e.g., "pencils exist so people can write with them"), even when these "teleological" explanations are scientifically unwarranted (e.g., "water exists so life can survive on Earth"). We explore teleological endorsement in a novel domain-human purpose-and its relationship to moral judgments. Across studies conducted online with a