Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 147, Issue 3, 431-443 Abstract “Across 2 independent samples, we examined the relation between individual differences in rates of self-caught mind wandering and individual differences in temporal monitoring of an unrelated response goal. Rates of self-caught mind wandering were assessed during a commonly used sustained-attention task, and temporal goal monitoring was indexed during a well-established prospective-memory task. The results from both samples showed a positive relation between rates of self-caught mind wandering during the sustained-attention task and rates of checking a clock to monitor the amount of time remaining before a response was… Read More
Perceptual But Not Complex Moral Judgments Can Be Biased by Exploiting the Dynamics of Eye-Gaze
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 147, Issue 3, 409-417 Abstract “Can judgments be biased via passive monitoring of eye-gaze? We examined this question using a perceptual discrimination task (Experiment 1) and a complex moral judgment task (Experiment 2). Information about the location of participants’ gaze at particular time-points in a trial was used to prompt responses. When there was no objective perceptual information available to decision-makers, the timing of the prompt had a small, but detectable effect on judgments (Experiment 1). However, this small effect did not scale up to more complex judgments about moral issues (Experiment 2).… Read More
Simulational Fluency Reduces Feelings of Psychological Distance
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 147, Issue 3, 354-376 Abstract “Why do some events feel “like yesterday” whereas others feel “ages away”? Past research has identified cues that influence people’s estimates of distance in units such as how many miles or days away events are from the self. However, what makes events feel psychologically close or distant? We examine the hypothesis that increased simulational fluency, the ease with which people mentally imagine events, makes events feel psychologically close. Simulational fluency was associated with feelings that multiple past and future holidays were psychologically close (Studies 1a and 1b). Writing… Read More
Robust, Replicable, and Theoretically-Grounded: A Response to Brown and Coyne’s (2017) Commentary on the Relationship Between Emodiversity and Health
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 147, Issue 3, 451-458 Abstract “In 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we reported 2 studies demonstrating that the diversity of emotions that people experience—as measured by the Shannon-Wiener entropy index— was an independent predictor of mental and physical health, over and above the effect of mean levels of emotion. Brown and Coyne (2017) questioned both our use of Shannon’s entropy and our analytic approach. We thank Brown and Coyne for their interest in our research; however, both their theoretical and empirical critiques do not undermine the central theoretical tenets and… Read More
The Ego-Moving Metaphor of Time Relies on Visual Experience: No Representation of Time Along the Sagittal Space in the Blind
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 147, Issue 3, 444-450 Abstract “In many cultures, humans conceptualize the past as behind the body and the future as in front. Whether this spatial mapping of time depends on visual experience is still not known. Here, we addressed this issue by testing early-blind participants in a space–time motor congruity task requiring them to classify a series of words as referring to the past or the future by moving their hand backward or forward. Sighted participants showed a preferential mapping between forward movements and future-words and backward movements and past-words. Critically, blind participants… Read More
Do We See It or Not? Sensory Attenuation in the Visual Domain
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 147, Issue 3, 418-430 Abstract “Sensory consequences of an agent’s actions are perceived less intensely than sensory stimuli that are not caused (and thus not predicted) by the observer. This effect of sensory attenuation has been discussed as a key principle of perception, potentially mediating various crucial functions such as agency and the discrimination of self-caused sensory stimulation from stimuli caused by external factors. Precise models describe the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon across a variety of modalities, especially the auditory, tactile, and visual domain. Despite these strong claims, empirical evidence for sensory… Read More
Alexithymia Is Associated With a Multidomain, Multidimensional Failure of Interoception: Evidence From Novel Tests
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 147, Issue 3, 398-408 Abstract “Interoception, the perception of the body’s internal state, contributes to numerous aspects of higher-order cognition. Several theories suggest a causal role for atypical interoception in specific psychiatric disorders, including a recent claim that atypical interoception represents a transdiagnostic impairment across disorders characterized by reduced perception of one’s own emotion (alexithymia). Such theories are supported predominantly by evidence from only one interoceptive domain (cardiac); however, evidence of domain-specific interoceptive ability highlights the need to assess interoception in noncardiac domains. Using novel interoceptive tasks, we demonstrate that individuals high in… Read More
Complementarity in false memory illusions
Published in: Journal of Experimental: Psychology, Volume 147, Issue 3, 305-327 Abstract “For some years, the DRM illusion has been the most widely studied form of false memory. The consensus theoretical interpretation is that the illusion is a reality reversal, in which certain new words (critical distractors) are remembered as though they are old list words rather than as what they are—new words that are similar to old ones. This reality-reversal interpretation is supported by compelling lines of evidence, but prior experiments are limited by the fact that their memory tests only asked whether test items were old. We removed that… Read More
Implications of Individual Differences in On-Average Null Effects
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 147, Issue 3, 377-397 Abstract “Most psychological models are intended to describe processes that operate within each individual. In many research areas, however, models are tested by looking at results averaged across many individuals, despite the fact that such averaged results may give a misleading picture of what is true for each one. We consider this conundrum with respect to the interpretation of on-average null effects. Specifically, even though an experimental manipulation might have no effect on average across individuals, it might still have demonstrable effects—albeit in opposite directions—for many or all of… Read More
Tests of an Exemplar-Memory Model of Classification Learning in a High-Dimensional Natural-Science Category Domain
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 147, Issue 3, 328-353 Abstract “Experiments were conducted in which novice participants learned to classify pictures of rocks into real-world, scientifically defined categories. The experiments manipulated the distribution of training instances during an initial study phase, and then tested for correct classification and generalization performance during a transfer phase. The similarity structure of the to-be-learned categories was also manipulated across the experiments. A low-parameter version of an exemplar-memory model, used in combination with a high-dimensional feature-space representation for the rock stimuli, provided good overall accounts of the categorization data. The successful accounts included… Read More