Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Jan 16, 2025, No Pagination Specified; doi:10.1037/xhp0001273

Collaborative motor interactions (joint actions) require relating to another person (social dimension) whose contribution is needed to achieve a shared goal (goal-related dimension). We explored if and how these dimensions modulate interactive behavior by exploring posterror interpersonal adaptations. In two experiments carried out in 2022 (N₁ = 23; N₂ = 24, preregistered), participants played sequences of notes in turn-taking with a coactor either described as another participant or the computer (human vs. nonhuman coactor, social manipulation) while pursuing shared or individual goals (goal-related manipulation). The coactor was programmed to make a mistake in 50% of the trials. We found that, only in the shared goal condition, participants were slower when interacting with a human than a nonhuman coactor depending on how strongly they believed the human coactor was a real participant. Moreover, the general slowdown following a partner’s error was absent when the action required from the participant corresponded to what the coactor should have done (correction tendency effect). This effect was found only in the shared goal condition without differences between coactors, suggesting it was driven by goal-related representations. The social and goal-related dimensions thus independently but significantly shape interpersonal adaptations during joint action. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Jan 13, 2025, No Pagination Specified; doi:10.1037/xhp0001270

Multi-item retro-cueing effects refer to better working memory performance for multiple items when they are cued after their offset compared to a neutral condition in which all items are cued. However, several studies have reported boundary conditions, and findings have also sometimes failed to replicate. We hypothesized that a strategy to focus on only one of the cued items could possibly yield these inconsistent patterns. In Study 1, a Monte Carlo simulation showed that randomly selecting one of the cued items as the focus in each trial increased the chance of obtaining significant “multi-item retro-cueing effects” on the mean accuracy over the trials, providing an incorrect conclusion if interpreted as evidence for attending all the cued items. These high rates to obtain such data fit with inconsistent patterns in the literature. To try and circumvent this situation, we conducted two new experiments (Studies 2A and 2B) where participants were explicitly instructed to fixate their gaze on all the cued positions, verified through eye tracking (Study 2B). These produced robust multi-item retro-cueing effects regardless of previously identified boundary conditions. Notably, gazes were clearly fixated to multiple cued positions within each trial. Nevertheless, simulation revealed that our accuracy patterns could also in principle be produced by single-item enhancement on each trial. The present study forms the first step to disentangle overt gaze-based allocation of attention from single-item focusing strategies while also highlighting the need for improved methodologies to probe genuine multiplicity in working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Jan 06, 2025, No Pagination Specified; doi:10.1037/xhp0001265

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)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Jan 06, 2025, No Pagination Specified; doi:10.1037/xhp0001259

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)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Jan 06, 2025, No Pagination Specified; doi:10.1037/xhp0001255

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)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Jan 06, 2025, No Pagination Specified; doi:10.1037/xhp0001257

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)