Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(2), Feb 2025, 171-189; doi:10.1037/xlm0001349

The congruency effect in Stroop-like tasks—a popular measure of distraction—is smaller after incongruent relative to congruent trials. However, it is unclear whether this congruency sequence effect (CSE)—a popular index of coping with distraction—reflects adjustments of control after congruent trials, incongruent trials, or both. The episodic retrieval account of the CSE posits adjustments of control after both congruent and incongruent trials. In this account, retrieving a memory of the previous trial’s congruency (i.e., congruent or incongruent) biases control processes to prepare for an upcoming trial with the same congruency (i.e., congruent or incongruent). In contrast, the default setting account posits adjustments of control after a single trial type. For example, control processes might increase inhibition of the response cued by the distractor after incongruent trials but make no adjustments after congruent trials. To distinguish between these accounts for the first time while (a) using long distractor–target intervals and (b) excluding prevalent feature integration and contingency learning confounds, we employed a confound-minimized prime–probe task with neutral trials. We usually observed adjustments of control after both trial types. Furthermore, whether the reduction of the congruency effect after incongruent trials indexed (a) inhibition of the distractor–congruent response or (b) activation of the distractor–incongruent response depended on whether the distractor and target were same-sized or different-sized, respectively. These findings favor the episodic retrieval account of the CSE over the default setting account. They also indicate that “low-level” stimulus properties may influence the nature of “high-level” control adjustments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(2), Feb 2025, 190-208; doi:10.1037/xlm0001359

Many working memory (WM) paradigms involve recalling multiple items from the same memory set. Participants rarely repeat items they have already recalled, avoiding repetition errors. To prevent these errors, WM models incorporate a response suppression mechanism that removes recalled items from the set of response options. Despite its importance for our understanding of WM, response suppression has received limited direct testing. To address this gap, we used computational models implementing two hypothetical mechanisms of response suppression to derive predictions and tested these predictions experimentally. Participants were asked to recall the same items multiple times during a single trial. If already recalled items are removed from the response set to prevent repetition errors, memory performance should be impaired when the same item is tested again. Contrary to this, we found that memory performance was unimpaired when the same item was tested a second time, and even displayed a recall advantage. Therefore, this study demonstrates the implausibility of response suppression to account for how people avoid repetition errors. We discuss alternative explanations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(2), Feb 2025, 209-217; doi:10.1037/xlm0001353

There is an ongoing debate about the cognitive mechanisms behind human contingency learning (CL). Although, in some studies, episodic retrieval of previous responses fully explained the observed CL effects (C. G. Giesen et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2020), other findings suggest that global contingencies have an additional effect on behavior (Xu & Mordkoff, 2020). In a high-powered (N = 500), preregistered study, we investigated CL effects after controlling for episodic retrieval of distractor–target (S–S) and distractor–response (S–R) bindings. Retrieval explained a large part of the CL effect. However, we still found a reliable residual CL effect even after controlling for retrieval. Notably, the residual CL effect depended on contingency awareness: The residual CL effect only occurred for trials for which participants correctly detected the respective color–word contingency, whereas for trials without contingency awareness, there was no residual CL effect. Collectively, our findings suggest that human CL is driven by two independent sources: (a) episodic retrieval of S–S and S–R bindings and (b) propositional knowledge of the contingencies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(2), Feb 2025, 218-237; doi:10.1037/xlm0001352

The dominant model of executive functions, which has held for over two decades, contends that various aspects of seemingly disparate forms of inhibitory control—for example, inhibiting a prepotent response, or inhibiting irrelevant thoughts and distractions—are in fact manifestations of a single latent executive function. Recent work, however, has cast doubt on this dominant model, as certain conditions can dissociate performance on tasks thought to index inhibitory control. Moreover, issues related to task reliability and latent estimation of inhibition processes have prompted questions about whether the structure of inhibitory control can even be reliably estimated at a latent level. We addressed these issues in two studies of healthy young adults (Study 1 N = 154, Study 2, N = 279), examining seven then 12 different tasks taken by prior research to assess inhibitory control. Contrary to the dominant model of executive functions, we found that, at a latent level, inhibitory control was best fit by a replicable two-factor solution, with response inhibition as a distinct executive function. Further, our data suggested that prior work on executive functions may not have observed a response inhibition factor due to task selections (i.e., including either one of two specific tasks was critical to identifying a separate response inhibition factor). Therefore, contrary to the current primary theoretical model of executive functions, these results suggest that response inhibition is, in fact, a distinct control process from the control process underpinning other forms of inhibition, which has important implications for designing interventions and assessing outcomes related to inhibitory control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(2), Feb 2025, 238-254; doi:10.1037/xlm0001369

The construct of mind wandering has notoriously been characterized as heterogenous which may mean that not all types of mind wandering produce the same pattern of results. One operationalization of mind wandering, task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs), can also itself vary in many dimensions, including the emotional valence of TUTs. The current study summarizes several years of work examining the impact that the emotional valence of TUTs has on different aspects of sustained attention. Participants in several studies reported whether their TUTs were negative, neutral, or positive in emotional valence during a sustained attention-to-response task (SART). The first major focus was a meta-analysis where we examined correlations between each TUT valence and SART performance measures. For the second major focus, we tested how different TUT valences changed over the course of the task. The results suggest that negative TUTs typically show stronger associations with SART performance measures, although all TUT valences have numerically similar correlations. Regarding time-on-task effects, across the studies, there was consistent evidence for a linear increase in negative TUTs across blocks. Evidence for this linear increase was not consistent for neutral and positive TUTs. The results of the current study suggest that the relationships between TUTs and performance, and their likelihood of occurring during a task, are not necessarily the same for every type of TUT. These results highlight the importance of continuing to investigate different types of TUTs and different forms of mind wandering, in general, to better understand how this phenomenon occurs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(2), Feb 2025, 255-284; doi:10.1037/xlm0001335

We use a computational model of memory search to study how people generate counterfactual outcomes in response to an established target outcome. Hierarchical Bayesian model fitting to data from six experiments reveals that counterfactual outcomes that are perceived as more desirable and more likely to occur are also more likely to come to mind and are generated earlier than other outcomes. Additionally, core memory mechanisms such as semantic clustering and word frequency biases have a strong influence on retrieval dynamics in counterfactual thinking. Finally, we find that the set of counterfactuals that come to mind can be manipulated by modifying the total number of counterfactuals that participants are prompted to generate, and our model can predict these effects. Overall, our findings demonstrate how computational memory search models can be integrated with current theories of counterfactual thinking to provide novel insights into the process of generating counterfactual thoughts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(2), Feb 2025, 285-300; doi:10.1037/xlm0001350

Remembering past events usually takes less time than their actual duration—their unfolding is temporally compressed in episodic memory. The rate of temporal compression (i.e., the ratio of the actual duration of an event to the duration of its remembering) is not constant but varies between individuals and as a function of the structure of events (e.g., how they can be divided into shorter subevents). However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying these variations remain poorly understood. Given its role in the encoding and retrieval of information in episodic memory, working memory (WM) capacity could be an important determinant of temporal compression rates. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments in which we asked participants to watch and then mentally replay short videos showing people engaged in daily life activities. We showed that temporal compression rates depend on an interplay between WM and the structure of the remembered events: participants’ WM capacity (assessed using complex span tasks) was negatively associated with temporal compression rates, but only when the remembered events contained few event boundaries (i.e., few subevents). This suggests that the temporal compression of events in episodic memory emerges when some of the subevents to be retained are too long to be fully represented in WM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(2), Feb 2025, 301-319; doi:10.1037/xlm0001336

Broad retrieval ability (Gr) posits an essential factor of human cognitive abilities. Previous literature indicates Gr is best modeled as a higher-order factor model with lower-level factors such as ideational fluency (IF), word fluency (WF), expressional fluency (EF), or figural fluency (FF). However, the dimensionality of Gr is not well studied. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether specific retrieval affordances such as differing retrieval time periods (e.g., short vs. long) can be psychometrically separated from more general retrieval affordances. Such a distinction would imply differential associations between specific retrieval, general retrieval, and other cognitive abilities, which, in turn, depict a vital part of explanatory models of individual differences in Gr. To test these assumptions, we conducted a multivariate study (N = 331) and evaluated competing latent variable measurement models for a variety of Gr tests. We then regressed the best measurement model onto working memory capacity, secondary memory, mental speed, and crystallized intelligence in order to evaluate the distinctiveness of Gr. Our results suggest that no specific retrieval affordances with regard to time periods can be distinguished. A higher-order model, with a second-order Gr factor above three first-order factors (IF, WF, EF, and FF) fitted the data best, extending previous literature by increasing construct coverage through the implementation of FF. All covariates show incremental predictive validity, beyond their communality. Summarizing, our results endorse a perspective on Gr as a strong and discriminant factor of cognitive abilities that is not affected by time constraints, and show that Gr is more than a linear combination of its parts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(2), Feb 2025, 320-335; doi:10.1037/xlm0001348

It has been repeatedly shown that individuals track speaker-specific language use during interaction. Most studies focused on how this facilitates meaning inference when interspeaker variation differentiates between two or more alternatives, or how it allows for successful lexical alignment. However, it has been unclear whether mapping interspeaker variation is stored actively, and if so, what purposes this storage serves. In a pseudointeractive experiment, we created interspeaker variation in naming preferences, such that one speaker (the common speaker) consistently produced favored words, and the other speaker consistently produced less-favored/disfavored words (the uncommon speaker), across two conditions—one where both speakers were relatively common, and one where one of the speakers was highly uncommon. Participants engaged in a picture selection task, at first as matchers (where they were instructed by one of the speakers—each in his/her turn—which image to choose), and then as directors (where they were the instructors). They were then tested on how well they mapped interspeaker variation and how they generalized it linguistically and socially. Participants were successful at directly mapping interspeaker variation in naming preferences. Furthermore, they used this information in (a) lexically aligning with their interlocutors, (b) hypothesizing about unexposed word choices by these speakers, and (c) creating social representations of the speakers as individuals. In line with surprisal-driven learning accounts, these effects were larger for a speaker that used highly uncommon words. Our results suggest that individuals store interspeaker variation explicitly, which in turn helps them to predict their interlocutors’ future linguistic and social behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 1-3; doi:10.1037/xlm0001457

One of my clearest memories from graduate school is a piece of advice offered by Dr. Janet McDonald, a wise and caring mentor who taught a rigorous first-year statistics course: “You really want to aim for the top-tier cognitive journals, like JEP: LMC.” That was my first introduction to what it means to publish in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (JEP:LMC). Over the ensuing 2 decades or so, I had the chance to learn more about what makes the journal unique as a contributing author, a reviewer on the Consulting Editor board, and a guest action editor. Based on these experiences, I came to see JEP:LMC as a premiere outlet for studies that employ careful methodology, produce informative results, and articulate a clear theoretical framework for interpreting these results and relating them to other phenomena. As editor in chief, I will seek to maintain this high standard and build on the journal’s strengths. This document describes the general approach that I plan to take as editor, and I hope to convey information that will be helpful for submitting authors, reviewers, and action editors. In general, I do not plan to make any sweeping changes. I am humbled by the accomplishments of my predecessor, Aaron Benjamin, and a long line of editors in chief before him. JEP: LMC has a consistent record of promoting the practices and values that support solid science, and my main focus will be to uphold this reputation and continue to make progress on research reforms. I see this editorship as a chance to play a small role in ushering in the future of cognitive psychology, a field that is currently in a transition period in terms of both methodological practices and theoretical perspective. I think JEP:LMC can play a leading role in this transition, and I hope to gently guide authors, reviewers, and editors in the direction of both more rigorous theorizing (ideally relying on formal models) and more sophisticated methodological practices that optimize the value of open science tools and modern approaches to statistical inference. I also hope to expand the pool of contributors by helping a diverse array of early-career scientists learn the keys to success in the journal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 4-13; doi:10.1037/xlm0001326

Visual working memory (VWM) is a store for temporary maintenance of visual information. It is often disregarded, though, that information is typically stored to enable actions. Therefore, the context of these actions is of great importance for how VWM is used. Here, we questioned whether the severity of the consequence of an action might affect how well information is memorized, and how cautiously it is utilized. We employed an (online) copying task, in which participants reproduced an example display comprised of six items in a grid, using a pool of items. Crucially, we manipulated the severity of penalties: participants had to wait 5 (high) or 0.5 (low error cost) s after an error. Additionally, we manipulated the accessibility of task-relevant information (a well-studied manipulation in this paradigm): participants had to wait 5 (high) or 0.5 (low sampling cost) s to inspect the example. Our results show that with higher error cost the number of inspections remained comparable, but the number of errors decreased. Furthermore, they show that with higher sampling cost the number of inspections halved, and the number of errors increased. Thus, more severe action consequences increase the reluctance to act on uncertain information in VWM, but do not lead to more attempts to store information in VWM. We conclude that, in contrast to the effect of the accessibility of information, action consequences do not affect how well information is memorized, but affect how cautiously this stored information is utilized. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 14-45; doi:10.1037/xlm0001337

The capacity for goal-directed behavior relies on the generation and implementation of task sets. While task sets are traditionally defined as mnemonic ensembles linking task goals to stimulus–response mappings, we here asked the question whether they may also entail information about task difficulty: does the level of focus required for performing a task become incorporated within the task set? We addressed this question by employing a cued task-switching protocol, wherein participants engaged in two intermixed tasks with trial-unique stimuli. Both tasks were equally challenging during a baseline and a transfer phase, while their difficulty was manipulated during an intermediate learning phase by varying the proportion of trials with congruent versus incongruent response mappings between the two tasks. Comparing congruency effects between the baseline and transfer phases, Experiment 1 showed that the task with a low (high) proportion of congruent trials in the learning phase displayed reduced (increased) cross-task interference effects in the transfer phase, indicating that the level of task focus required in the learning phase had become associated with each task set. Experiment 2 indicated that strengthening of task focus level in the task with a low proportion of congruent trials was the primary driver of this effect. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility of cue–control associations mediating this effect. Taken together, our results show that task sets can become associated with the focus level required to successfully implement them, thus significantly expanding our concept of the type of information that makes up a task set. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 46-67; doi:10.1037/xlm0001344

In sharp contrast to event-based prospective memory (PM), dynamics of (re)allocation of attention between the ongoing and PM tasks have been much less investigated in time-based PM tasks. We propose an in-depth examination of attention allocation in a time-based PM task by jointly analyzing multiple indicators of time-monitoring behavior, net and time-structured intraindividual variability (IIV) in ongoing-task reaction times (OT RTs), and task performance. Results from dynamic structural equation modeling in a lifespan sample of 198 adults (19–86 years) revealed that larger fluctuations in OT RTs (net IIV) predicted poorer OT performance, but fostered a more efficient pattern of time-monitoring behavior (i.e., checking a clock more frequently and strategically, and slowing OT RTs during the PM response window) that, in turn, enhanced PM. Conversely, greater inertia in OT RTs (time-structured IIV) led to fewer clock-checks and poorer PM performance. Focusing attention on time monitoring to enhance PM performance did not detrimentally affect OT accuracy. Instead, participants showed a speed–accuracy tradeoff to optimize both OT and PM accuracies by slowing their OT RTs during the PM response window. This study therefore shows that two concomitant aspects of IIV (net and time-structured IIV) not only predicted time-monitoring behavior, but also OT and PM accuracies differentially, hence advocating for the necessity to consider both aspects of IIV and time monitoring together to better understand attention allocation policies in time-based PM tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 68-81; doi:10.1037/xlm0001330

Visuospatial working memory (VSWM) helps track the identity and location of people during social interactions. Previous work showed better VSWM when all faces at encoding displayed a happy compared to an angry expression, reflecting a prosocial preference for monitoring who was where. However, social environments are not typically uniform, and certain expressions may more strongly compete for and bias face monitoring according to valence and/or arousal properties. Here, we used heterogeneous encoding displays in which two faces shared one emotion and two shared another, and asked participants to relocate a central neutral probe face after a blank delay. When considering the emotion of the probed face independently of the co-occurring emotion at encoding, an overall happy benefit was replicated. However, accuracy was modulated by the nonprobed emotion, with a relocation benefit for angry over sad, happy over fearful, and sad over happy faces. These effects did not depend on encoding fixation time, stimulus arousal, perceptual similarity, or response bias. Thus, emotional competition for faces in VSWM is complex and appears to rely on more than simple arousal- or valence-biased mechanisms. We propose a “social value (SV)” account to better explain when and why certain emotions may be prioritized in VSWM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 82-96; doi:10.1037/xlm0001339

Prior research has shown that visual working memory capacity is enhanced for meaningful stimuli (i.e., real-world objects) compared to abstract shapes (i.e., colored circles). Here, we hypothesized that the shape of meaningful objects would be better remembered incidentally than the shape of nonmeaningful objects in a color memory task where the shape of the objects is task-irrelevant. We used a surprise-trial paradigm in which participants performed a color memory task for several trials before being probed with a surprise trial that asked them about the shape of the last object they saw. Across three experiments, we found a memory advantage for recognizable shapes relative to scrambled versions of these shapes (Experiment 1) that was robust across different encoding times (Experiment 2), and the addition of a verbal suppression task (Experiment 3). Interestingly, this advantage disappeared when all objects were from the same category (Experiment 4), suggesting that people are incidentally encoding broad conceptual information about object identities, but not visual details. Finally, when we asked about the location of objects in a surprise trial, we did not observe any difference between the two stimulus types (Experiment 5). Overall, these results show that conceptual information about the categories of meaningful objects is incidentally encoded into working memory even when task-irrelevant. This privilege for meaningful information does not exhibit a trade-off with location memory, suggesting that meaningful features influence representations of visual working memory in higher-level visual regions without altering the use of spatial reference frames at the lower level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 97-105; doi:10.1037/xlm0001329

We examine whether information lying above and below a line of text being read can impact on reading fluency. We did so by placing length-matched flankers above and below each word in a sequence of words. We found that identical flankers facilitated sentence reading, compared with syntactically correct different text flankers, in both reading-for-meaning (Experiment 1) and grammatical decisions (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 replicated the same text facilitation in grammatical decisions and found no significant difference between different word and nonword distractors. Experiment 4 tested for an impact of case matching across targets and flankers and found a significantly greater same text facilitation when targets and flankers were in the same case. These results suggest that the same text facilitation effect might well be driven by crowding mechanisms that are more sensitive to vertically aligned information when reading horizontally aligned text. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 106-118; doi:10.1037/xlm0001347

Prediction during language processing has been hypothesized to lead to processing benefits. These possible benefits have led to several prominent theories that center around prediction as an essential mechanism in language processing. Such theories typically assume predicting is better than not predicting at all, but do not always account for the potential processing costs from failed predictions. Predicting wrongly can be costly, but the cost may depend on how wrong the prediction was. Across three experiments, we manipulate cloze probability, semantic relatedness, and language modality (production vs. comprehension) to determine whether predicting almost correctly is better than predicting completely incorrectly, and if so, if predicting almost correctly is better than not predicting at all. Results showed that when a predicted ending is replaced with a related term, it is processed faster than when it is replaced with an unrelated term, but that related term is not named more quickly than when it appears after a low constraint sentence. This pattern held regardless of whether participants were asked to produce the sentence-final term by naming a picture (Experiments 1 and 2), or if they were asked to perform a semantic classification of the sentence-final word (Experiment 3). Thus, predicting almost correctly is better than predicting completely incorrectly, but it’s not better than not predicting at all. This carries implications for current accounts that argue for processing benefits of prediction during language processing, and suggests that prediction may be used to fine-tune the language system rather than to speed language processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 119-132; doi:10.1037/xlm0001331

The mental time line (MTL) is a spatial continuum on which earlier events are generally associated with the left space and later events with the right space. Accordingly, past- and future-related words receive faster responses with, respectively, the left and the right hand. Yet, it is currently unclear whether the MTL is activated by the whole word or whether it can be triggered by more subtle sublexical cues, such as verb-endings, and whether the activation of this spatial continuum is an automatic phenomenon. The aim of this study is to test whether verb-endings do bring conceptual information that is in turn capable to activate the MTL and whether this activation holds also when the temporal information is not explicitly processed. We designed three experiments. In Experiment 1, consisting of a temporal categorization task, and in Experiment 2, consisting of a lexical decision task, we tested Italian tensed verbs (trov-avo “I found,” trov-erò “I will find”) and pseudo-verbs (trop-avo, trop-erò). Results of Experiment 1 showed that both tensed verbs and pseudo-verbs were spatially coded on the MTL. Results from Experiment 2 showed that the MTL is activated by the verb-endings also when temporal information was task-irrelevant (i.e., lexical decision task). Experiment 3 further clarified that the spatial–temporal congruency effect does not emerge during the evaluation of an inhomogeneous set of stimuli (i.e., when adding to the stimuli time-unrelated fillers). Overall, the present findings indicate that sublexical strings carry specific semantic information that comes into play in the generation of spatial–temporal associations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 133-151; doi:10.1037/xlm0001327

Strong versions of the embodied account of language processing propose that comprehension depends on the mental simulation of sensorimotor experiences conveyed by linguistic meaning. Primary support in favor of this view is based on demonstrations of processing advantages for compatibility between an action implied by sentence content and concurrent sensorimotor processing. Although these effects have been reported across a variety of contexts, various attempts to reproduce these results, both through direct replication and conceptual extension, have not been successful. We present a series of experiments that examine the viability of previous methods used to obtain compatibility effects and the validity of the typical interpretation of such effects as evidence for mental simulation of described actions. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence that compatibility between sentence content and sensorimotor processing does not produce robust compatibility effects. Further, our findings suggest the data obtained from some studies that have been successful in generating compatibility effects can be accounted for without appealing to the notion that these effects are due to the simulation of actions implied by the meaning of a sentence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol 51(1), Jan 2025, 152-169; doi:10.1037/xlm0001354

This article investigates people’s judgments of actual causation in the context of a previously neglected property of causal structures—their reversibility, that is, whether an effect persists or returns to its original state if its causes are removed. Causal reversibility, and its potential impact on causal judgment, was recently analyzed theoretically by Ross and Woodward (2022). They hypothesized that reversibility might affect people’s evaluation of causes in late-preemption scenarios. The typical finding in preemption scenarios is that events happening earlier are considered to be actual causes, while events happening later are regarded as noncauses. The hypothesis is that this robust intuition depends on causal reversibility and that in reversible structures later events are regarded as actual causes. Across three main experiments and one supplementary study (N = 590), it is shown that reversibility has the predicted effect: later causes are perceived to make an actual causal contribution to the effect. It is also shown that Henne et al. (2023), in a first study, did not find evidence for Ross and Woodward’s hypothesis because they did not test whether people regard later causes in preemption-like sequences of reversible structures as maintainers and not as triggers of their effect. Because they used test questions that asked explicitly for triggering rather than maintaining or were at least ambiguous, their results seemed to show that people think that later events have no causal impact. Maintaining is a relevant causal concept deserving more attention in both philosophical theories and psychological studies on causal cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)