This paper provides a comprehensive review of the Type B effect (TBE), a phenomenon reflected in the observation that discrimination sensitivity varies with the order of stimuli in comparative judgment tasks, such as the two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigm. Specifically, when the difference threshold is lower (higher) with the constant standard preceding rather than following the variable comparison, one speaks of a negative (positive) TBE. Importantly, prominent psychophysical difference models such as signal detection theory (Green & Swets, 1966) cannot easily account for the TBE, and are hence challenged by it. The present meta-analysis provides substantial evidence for the TBE across various stimulus attributes, suggesting that the TBE is a general feature of discrimination experiments when standard and comparison are presented successively. Thus, inconsistent with psychophysical difference models, subjective differences between stimuli are not merely a function of their physical differences but rather also depend on their temporal order. From the literature, we identify four classes of potential candidate theories explaining the origin of the TBE, namely (1) differential weighting of the stimulus magnitudes at the two positions (e.g., Hellström, Psychological Research, 39, 345-388 1977), (2) internal reference formation (e.g., Dyjas, Bausenhart, & Ulrich, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 74, 1819-1841 2012), (3) Bayesian updating (e.g., de Jong, Akyürek, & van Rijn, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 28, 1183-1190 2021), and (4) biased threshold estimation (García-Pérez & Alcalá-Quintana, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 72, 1155-1178 2010). As these models, to some extent, make differential predictions about the direction of the TBE, investigating the respective boundary conditions of positive and negative TBEs might be a valuable perspective for diagnostic future research.
Jacoby et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 638-644, 2003) reported that, in Stroop tasks, stimuli that more frequently involve targets combined with a congruent distractor (e.g., the word RED in the color red) produce larger Stroop effects than stimuli that more frequently involve targets combined with an incongruent distractor (e.g., RED in green). This pattern suggests that adaptive control can be item-specific in addition to item-nonspecific, and reactive in addition to proactive (although this conclusion has been challenged). This adaptive-control process has often been assumed to be driven by the conflict associated with incongruent stimuli; however, the typical experimental manipulations investigating this issue allow the facilitation associated with congruent stimuli to also play a role. Here, we modified those manipulations in order to focus exclusively on conflict, removing any impact of congruency facilitation, by contrasting targets presented with either neutral (letter strings) or incongruent distractors. Neutral stimuli were presented more frequently than incongruent ones in the Mostly-Neutral (MN) condition and vice versa in the Mostly-Incongruent (MI) condition. Paralleling the original pattern, Stroop interference was larger in the MN condition, suggesting that item-specific conflict frequency can be used to adapt attention accordingly. Importantly, this effect was replicated after experimentally controlling for stimulus frequency, a confound that was found to explain part, but not all, of the general pattern. These results support Jacoby et al.'s claims that (a) control can be adapted in an item-specific fashion and (b) conflict plays a key role in that process.
Devraj et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02448-2 ,  2024) argued that findings which suggest that memories for items become less accessible over time conflict with categorisation findings where exemplar performance improves across training. To reconcile this, they highlighted that under real-world conditions items tend to reappear less frequently over time, thus preferentially maintaining new items can improve performance. Typical categorisation experiments instead distribute exemplars uniformly across trials. However, under a power-law stimulus distribution, Devraj et al. showed worsening fit for exemplar classification models across trials. They used this as evidence that forgetting behaviour adapted to task demands, reducing exemplar accessibility and encouraging prototype use for classification decisions. By re-analysing the same data, we argue instead that this pattern can be produced with exemplar-forgetting in both conditions. By systematically increasing in the delays across which stimuli were tested, their Experimental condition exaggerated the effects of forgetting on performance in later trials compared to the Control condition. This resulted in a reversal of performance growth across trials - instead leading to a steady decline in performance. As exemplar model-fit advantage is expected to vary with performance, we suggest that trends in this advantage are not diagnostic of a shift in classification strategy. We found that a forgetting-function improved exemplar model fit to Devraj et al.'s data, and under reasonable parameters could predict the observed patterns of performance and model-fit a priori. Compared with a strategy-shifting mixture model, exemplar-forgetting provided equivalent fits despite being more theoretically parsimonious. We suggest power-law memory decay does not produce a tension between categorisation and memory findings, as increased forgetting is found across longer retention intervals, whereas the delay between exemplar learning and classification remains constant across typical categorisation experiments.
In the absence of inter-word spaces, Chinese readers rely on other available information for word segmentation. An earlier study demonstrated that the valence of words influences word segmentation (Huang et al., Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 31 (4), 1548-1557, 2024). The current study further investigated the influence of arousal, another key dimension of emotion, on Chinese word segmentation. We first re-analyzed the segmentation results from Huang et al.'s study and found that arousal had an independent effect on Chinese word segmentation. In the experimental study, we manipulated the arousal levels of words while keeping valence at a neutral level. The results provide evidence that the arousal of words can affect Chinese word segmentation, with higher-arousal words being more likely to be segmented than low-arousal words. Moreover, our findings are also essential for understanding the impact of arousal on word processing and suggest that it impacts the early stage of activating a word's representation.
Output interference in recognition refers to a decrease in performance over the course of a test. The goal of the current study was to determine whether experimentally shifting the decision criterion changes the form of output interference and to identify a process account of any interaction. In two experiments, we manipulated the decision criterion via changes in the base rate of the old items at test (80%, 50%, 20%). Experiment 1 implemented this manipulation within-subjects and failed to induce criterion shifts. In contrast, when the base rate was manipulated between-subjects in Experiment 2, decision criteria differed across conditions. Qualitative patterns suggested that liberal criteria attenuated the hit rate (HR) decline and increased the false alarm rate (FAR) across blocks, whereas conservative criteria yielded steeper HR declines with relatively stable FAR. To further examine this effect, Experiment 3 employed longer test lists and a larger sample. The criterion was manipulated only via prior information about the base rates, while the actual base rate was 50% in all conditions. Experiment 3 revealed a significant interaction between response bias and output interference in HR and FAR. When we used an independent data set (Layher et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46(11), 2075-2105, 2020), we demonstrated the same patterns. To account for these findings, we conducted simulations with the Retrieving Effectively from Memory (Shiffrin & Steyvers, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4(2), 145-166, 1997) model. The results were best captured by a learning-during-test mechanism in which every test item is encoded as a new memory trace.
Past studies have shown that pigeons can learn complex categories and can also remember large numbers of individual objects. In recent work, Cook et al. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28, 548-555, (2021) provided evidence that pigeons may use a dynamic combination of both category-based information and item-specific memorization to solve a categorical variation of the mid-session reversal (MSR) task, which is an influential task for exploring the nature of temporally organized behaviors in animals. To provide greater insight into these pigeons' behaviors, in this article we developed and investigated different computational models and their variations to account for these data. Of these, two models emerged as good candidates. One was a multinomial-processing-tree categorization/memory model, formalizing the two-process mechanism initially proposed by Cook et al. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28, 548-555, (2021). The second was a new object/time-coding model, which posits the storage of object-specific memories with an additional within-session time code and assumes that a basic stimulus generalization process underlies the pigeons' choice behavior. Both provided high-quality fits to the published sets of training and transfer data collected in the categorical MSR task. These computational efforts give deeper insights into the theoretical mechanisms underlying the temporal and sequential structure of behavior in animals and stimulate future empirical research further revealing the organization of the pigeons' cognitive processes.
According to existing theories of simple decision-making, decisions are initiated by continuously sampling and accumulating perceptual evidence until a threshold value has been reached. Many models, such as the diffusion decision model, assume a noisy accumulation process, described mathematically as a stochastic Wiener process with Gaussian distributed noise. Recently, an alternative account of decision-making has been proposed in the Lévy Flights (LF) model, in which accumulation noise is characterized by a heavy-tailed power-law distribution, controlled by a parameter, [Formula: see text]. The LF model produces sudden large "jumps" in evidence accumulation that are not produced by the standard Wiener diffusion model, which some have argued provide better fits to data. It remains unclear, however, whether jumps in evidence accumulation have any real psychological meaning. Here, we investigate the conjecture by Voss et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(3), 813-832, 2019) that jumps might reflect sudden shifts in the source of evidence people rely on to make decisions. We reason that if jumps are psychologically real, we should observe systematic reductions in jumps as people become more practiced with a task (i.e., as people converge on a stable decision strategy with experience). We fitted five versions of the LF model to behavioral data from a study by Evans and Brown (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(2), 597-606, 2017), using a five-layer deep inference neural network for parameter estimation. The analysis revealed systematic reductions in jumps as a function of practice, such that the LF model more closely approximated the standard Wiener model over time. This trend could not be attributed to other sources of parameter variability, speaking against the possibility of trade-offs with other model parameters. Our analysis suggests that jumps in the LF model might be capturing strategy instability exhibited by relatively inexperienced observers early on in task performance. We conclude that further investigation of a potential psychological interpretation of jumps in evidence accumulation is warranted.
Huisman (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1-10. 2022) argued that a valid measure of evidence should indicate more support in favor of a true alternative hypothesis when sample size is large than when it is small. Bayes factors may violate this pattern and hence Huisman concluded that Bayes factors are invalid as a measure of evidence. In this brief comment we call attention to the following: (1) Huisman's purported anomaly is in fact dictated by probability theory; (2) Huisman's anomaly has been discussed and explained in the statistical literature since 1939; the anomaly was also highlighted in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review article by Rouder et al. (2009), who interpreted the anomaly as "ideal": an interpretation diametrically opposed to that of Huisman. We conclude that when intuition clashes with probability theory, chances are that it is intuition that needs schooling.
Studies on the relationship between text-processing difficulty, mind wandering, and reading comprehension achieved mixed results. Whereas most studies found mind-wandering frequency to be increased and reading comprehension to be decreased when text processing became more difficult, Faber et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 24(3), 914-919, 2017) reported an opposite effect when manipulating text difficulty via different font types (i.e., Arial vs. Comic Sans). This effect may reflect a potential of mildly disfluent fonts, such as Comic Sans, to introduce desirable difficulties during reading, thereby enhancing focus on the text. Strongly disfluent fonts, however, may contribute to the commonly observed disadvantages in text focus under conditions of increased text processing difficulty. To test this idea, we conducted a new study (N = 151, student sample) in which we manipulated disfluency in three levels (i.e., fluent, mildly disfluent, strongly disfluent) by using different font types, and compared mind-wandering frequency, reading comprehension, and reading motivation between conditions. The disfluency manipulation affected motivation but not mind wandering or reading comprehension. Additional Bayesian analyses strongly supported the null hypothesis for the latter two. These results suggest that the positive effects of reading disfluency may be less robust than previously assumed and that further research is needed to explore to which extent text-processing difficulty effects on mind wandering are reliant on sample and text characteristics.
In cognitive psychology, research on attention is shifting from focusing primarily on how people orient toward stimuli in the environment toward instead examining how people orient internally toward memory representations. With this new shift the question arises: What factors in the environment send attention inward? A recent proposal is that one factor is cue familiarity-detection (Cleary, Irving & Mills, Cognitive Science, 47, e13274, 2023). Within this theoretical framework, we reinterpret a decades-old empirical pattern-a primacy effect in memory for repetitions-in a novel way. The effect is the finding that altered repetitions of an image were remembered as re-occurrences of the first presentation despite having a changed left-right orientation; participants better retained the first orientation while incorrectly remembering changed instantiations as repetitions of the first orientation (DiGirolamo & Hintzman, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 121-124, 1997). We argue that this pattern, which has never been fully explained, is an existing empirical test of the newly proposed mechanism of cue familiarity-detection flipping attention inward toward memory. Specifically, an image's first appearance is novel so draws attention outward toward encoding the stimulus' attributes like orientation; subsequent mirror-reversed appearances are detected as familiar so flip attention inward toward memory search, which leads to 1) inattentional blindness for the changed orientation due to the familiarity-driven shift of attention inward and 2) memory retrieval of the first instance and its orientation, thereby enhancing memory for the first instance and its previously encoded attributes like orientation.
Proper data visualization helps researchers draw correct conclusions from their data and facilitates a more complete and transparent report of the results. In factorial designs, so-called raincloud plots have recently attracted attention as a particularly informative data visualization technique; raincloud plots can simultaneously show summary statistics (i.e., a box plot), a density estimate (i.e., the cloud), and the individual data points (i.e., the raindrops). Here we first present a 'raincloud quartet' that underscores the added value of raincloud plots over the traditional presentation of means and confidence intervals. The added value of raincloud plots appears to be increasingly recognized: a focused literature review of plots in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review shows that 9% of plots in 2023 were raincloud plots. Another 29% of plots (vs. 2% in 2013) contained individual data points (i.e., raindrops), indicating a strong trend towards transparent and informative data visualization. To further encourage this trend and make raincloud plotting easy and practical for a broader group of researchers and students, we implemented a comprehensive suite of raincloud plots in JASP, an open-source statistics program with an intuitive graphical user interface. Examples from two factorial research designs illustrate how the JASP raincloud plots support a correct and comprehensive interpretation of the data.
The ability to reduce the distraction associated with repetitive irrelevant stimuli is critical to goal-directed navigation of the visual environment. Research has supported the existence of such an ability, which has often been referred to as learned distractor rejection (Vatterott & Vecera Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19, 871-878, 2012). However, despite being theoretically relevant to many prominent accounts of distractor ignoring, few studies have directly tested learned distractor rejection since its conception. In the current study we present three direct replications of Vatterott and Vecera's method that were separately conducted by two independent groups of researchers. Using the conventional split-block analysis, all three replications produce nearly identical results that fail to replicate the original study's finding. However, using analyses on a finer-grained timescale we found compelling evidence for the existence of a learned ignoring of salient distractors. Critically, this learning occurred much more rapidly than has been previously assumed, taking only two or three encounters with the distracting item before efficient rejection emerged.
In conflict tasks, such as the Simon, Eriksen flanker, or Stroop task, a relevant and an irrelevant feature indicate the same or different responses in congruent and incongruent trials, respectively. The congruency effect refers to faster and less error-prone responses in congruent relative to incongruent trials. Distributional analyses reveal that the congruency effect in the Simon task becomes smaller with increasing RTs, reflected by a negative-going delta function. In contrast, for other tasks, the delta function is typically positive-going, meaning that congruency effects become larger with increasing RTs. The Diffusion Model for Conflict tasks (DMC; Ulrich et al., Cognitive Psychology, 78, 148-174, 2015) accounts for this by explicitly modeling the information accumulated from the relevant and the irrelevant features and attributes negatively- versus positively-sloped delta functions to different peak times of a pulse-like activation resulting from the task-irrelevant feature. Because the underlying function implies negative drift rates, Lee and Sewell (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 31(5), 1-31, 2024) recently questioned this assumption and suggested their Revised Diffusion Model for Conflict tasks (RDMC). We address three issues regarding RDMC compared to DMC: (1) The pulse-like function is not as implausible as Lee and Sewell suggest. (2) RDMC itself comes with a questionable assumption that different parameters are required for congruent and incongruent trials. (3) Moreover, we present data from a new parameter recovery study, suggesting that RDMC lacks acceptable recovery of several parameters (in particular compared to DMC). In this light, we discuss RDMC as not (yet) a revised version of DMC.
The present studies use a novel approach to characterize how memory representations are updated with repetition. These studies use the free recall paradigm, which boasts greater memory advantages for spaced repetitions (Melton. Journal of Verbal Learning and Memory, 9, 596-606. 1970; Madigan. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8, 828-835. 1969). However, a single recall of a twice-presented item precludes inferring whether the item's first or second presentation support its recall. The present studies leverage that, in free recall, transitions reflect stronger associations and are more likely between items studied nearby in time (Healey et al., Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(3), 699-720. 2019). The critical analysis asks which transitions are more likely to a repeated item: temporal neighbors from its first presentation or from its second presentation? Transitions should be equally likely from neighbors of each presentation if the repeated item's presentations are stored independently. Transitions from second-presentation neighbors should be more likely if retrieval of item information from the first presentation strengthens the item representation during the second presentation, or if independent traces benefit from being studied more recently. Alternatively, retrieved context theory assumes that each studied item is associated with a slowly drifting temporal context, and repetition evokes study-phase retrieval of the context state from the first presentation (Howard & Kahana. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 46, 269-299. 2002a; Siegel & Kahana. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(3), 755-764. 2014). This context retrieval should strengthen the repeated item's associations to items with similar temporal contexts from its first presentation. As a result, retrieved context theory predicts more transitions to a repeated item from a first-presentation neighbor. Two studies provide support for the prediction of retrieved context theory, with implications for other theories.
Metaphors, such as lawyers are sharks, are seemingly incomprehensible when reversed (i.e. sharks are lawyers). For this reason, Kintsch (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7(2), 257-266, 2000) argued that computational models of metaphor processing need to account for the non-reversibility of metaphors, and demonstrated success with his computational model, the "predication algorithm," in simulating metaphor comprehension in a way that is consistent with human cognition. Predication is an ostensibly directional algorithm because its equation is asymmetric such that semantic properties of the vehicle (e.g., sharks) are added to the topic (e.g., lawyers) rather than vice versa. Although predication has been accepted as a viable algorithm for simulating metaphor processing, one of its core assumptions - that the semantic processing of metaphor is directional - has not been systematically tested, nor has it been systematically tested against multiple rival algorithms in simulating metaphor comprehension. To that end, we tested the predication algorithm's performance and that of a set of rival algorithms in simulating metaphor comprehension and distinguishing between canonical (e.g., lawyers are sharks) and reversed (e.g., sharks are lawyers) metaphors. Our findings indicate (1) the predication algorithm is comparable to simpler, rival algorithms in simulating metaphor comprehension, and (2) despite the beliefs about the directionality of the predication algorithm, it produces surprisingly similar simulations for canonical metaphors and their topic-vehicle reversals. These findings argue against predication, at least as implemented in Kintsch's (2000) algorithm, as a viable model of metaphor processing. Implications for computational and psycholinguistic approaches to metaphor are discussed.
Burgoyne, Frank, and Macnamara (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2024) argued for a separation of updating and working memory factors. We agree that understanding variance across multiple different task classes and measures for the assessment of working memory is crucial. It is a strength of their contribution to include many and diverse subjects and also to study the convergent relation with fluid intelligence. In our view, however, their analysis and interpretation of findings is partly flawed, and other conclusions ought to be drawn from their data. More specifically, we argue that 1) the disengagement hypothesis is hardly convincing to account for their results, and 2) a reanalysis of the data supports other models more than the models put forward by Burgoyne et al. (2024).
Repetition increases the perceived truth of information. This illusory truth effect is a well-documented and robust phenomenon. Although research has primarily focused on trivia statements, the effects of repetition on belief have also been identified for consequential statements such as fake news headlines. Moreover, research reveals repetition increases accuracy ratings for conspiracy statements. However, in past work, the illusory truth effect was smaller for conspiracy statements than trivia statements. This result raises the intriguing possibility that there is something unique about conspiracy statements relative to trivia statements that makes them more resistant to the effects of repetition. However, this difference in the illusory truth effect between conspiracy and trivia statements may be due to differences in baseline plausibility rather than anything specific about conspiracy statements. Overall, the conspiracy statements were seen as less plausible than the trivia statements (both true and false trivia statements) in the prior experiment. In this registered report, we examined the illusory truth effect for conspiracy and trivia statements using the same procedure as in previous research, but we matched the statements on baseline plausibility. In line with our hypothesis, the effect of repetition on perceived truth was similar for conspiracy and trivia statements when they were equally implausible (or plausible). Results from this study replicate the generality of the illusory truth effect to statements that can cause harm and suggest that the psychological effect of repetition on truth ratings is equivalent for equally implausible (or plausible) conspiracy and trivia statements.
People judge repeated statements as more true than new ones. This repetition-based truth effect is a robust phenomenon when statements are ambiguous. However, previous studies provided conflicting evidence on whether repetition similarly affects truth judgments for plausible and implausible statements. Given the lack of a formal theory explaining the interaction between repetition and plausibility on the truth effect, it is important to develop a model specifying the assumptions regarding this phenomenon. In this study, we propose a Bayesian model that formalizes the simulation-based model by Fazio, Rand, and Pennycook (2019; Psychonomic Bulletin & Review). The model specifies how repetition and plausibility jointly influence the truth effect in light of nonlinear transformations of binary truth judgments. We test our model in a reanalysis of experimental data from two previous studies by computing Bayes factors for four competing model variants. Our findings indicate that, while the truth effect is usually larger for ambiguous than for highly implausible or plausible statements on the probability scale, it can simultaneously be constant for all statements on the probit scale. Hence, the interaction between repetition and plausibility may be explained by a constant additive effect of repetition on a latent probit scale.
Citation frequency is widely recognized as a crucial metric for assessing academic impact. Previous studies analyzing data from citation databases have observed a surname order bias-a phenomenon where the alphabetical ordering of researchers' surnames negatively impacts their citation counts. However, the underlying mechanisms driving this bias, the causality behind it, and its implications for in-text citation practices remain poorly understood. Therefore, the present research aims to address these gaps through two preregistered studies. Study 1 replicates and extends the work of Stevens and Duque (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 1020-1026, 2019), using a larger sample of 446,755 articles and controlling for surname initial frequency and publication year. Study 2 is an experiment with 307 valid responses from academics holding doctoral degrees, manipulating both citation systems and surname alphabetical order. Consistent and robust findings emerged across both studies: articles authored by individuals with surnames appearing earlier in the alphabet were more likely to be cited. This effect was especially pronounced in the context of alphabetical citation systems, compared with numerical citation systems. The current research provides a testable, reliable explanation for the surname order bias and establishes a causal link between surname alphabetical order and citation frequency. Implications for theory and academic practice are discussed.
Smith and Church (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25, 1565-1584 2018) present a "testimonial" review of dissociable learning processes in comparative and cognitive psychology, by which we mean they include only the portion of the available evidence that is consistent with their conclusions. For example, they conclude that learning the information-integration category-learning task with immediate feedback is implicit, but do not consider the evidence that people readily report explicit strategies in this task, nor that this task can be accommodated by accounts that make no distinction between implicit and explicit processes. They also consider some of the neuroscience relating to information-integration category learning, but do not report those aspects that are more consistent with an explicit than an implicit account. They further conclude that delay conditioning in humans is implicit, but do not report evidence that delay conditioning requires awareness; nor do they present the evidence that conditioned taste aversion, which should be explicit under their account, can be implicit. We agree with Smith and Church that it is helpful to have a clear definition of associative theory, but suggest that their definition may be unnecessarily restrictive. We propose an alternative definition of associative theory and briefly describe an experimental procedure that we think may better distinguish between associative and non-associative processes.