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).

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).

This editorial reflects on the significant role of the in the author's career and outlines key changes that demonstrate its evolution. She discusses three key areas she has focused on over the years: the diversity of our journal's contributors and editors (focusing on gender representation), the quality standards of our research (specifically, study sample sizes), and the analytical methodologies we endorse (namely, the use of Bayesian statistics). She compares how the journal fared when she started in 2017 compared to its first year, and the progress the journal has made since 2017. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The 50th birthday of the JEP: Human Perception and Performance is an appropriate occasion to salute its influence in the field. In this celebratory article, the author tries to trace some of the work reported in Volume 1 to current research. He hopes that this might be inspirational to some of its readers. His selection was guided by his familiarity with some areas of research, but almost all of the articles can be related to current trends. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Level-2 visuo-spatial perspective-taking (VPT) helps us to understand how the world appears for another person. The process has been linked to conceptual forms of perspective-taking, such as empathic perspective-taking. The present study tested whether similarity to the target of the process, as indicated by gender (in)congruency, affects its embodiment and conclusively answers the question whether there are gender differences in VPT performance. To address these questions, data of N = 2,226 female and male participants, completing K = 107,535 trials of a Level-2 VPT task involving female and male targets, were subjected to an independent participant meta-analysis. Confirmatory analyses revealed that gender (in)congruency did not affect Level-2 VPT performance, speaking against an effect of perceived similarity on the embodiment of Level-2 VPT. Additionally, we observed a significant performance advantage for female participants. Exploratory analyses showed gender-congruency effects can be detected if attentional task demands are low, likely making it easier for participants to process target features such as their gender. These findings clarify the disputed nature of gender differences in Level-2 VPT performance and inform theorizing about embodied and nonembodied strategies used to solve Level-2 VPT tasks, as well as process models of Level-2 VPT performance more generally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Motivational theories of imitation state that we imitate because this led to positive social consequences in the past. Because movement imitation typically only leads to these consequences when perceived by the imitated person, it should increase when the interaction partner sees the imitator. Current evidence for this hypothesis is mixed, potentially due to the low ecological validity in previous studies. We conducted two experiments ( = 94, = 110) in which we resolved this limitation by placing participants in a virtual environment with a seeing and a blindfolded virtual agent, where they reacted to auditory cues with a head movement to the left or right, while the agent(s) also made a left or right head movement. We tested the effect of model eyesight (Experiments 1 and 2) and social reward on imitation (Experiment 2). Data were collected in 2023 and 2024. As expected, participants tended to imitate the agents. However, we found only limited evidence for the effect of model eyesight on automatic imitation in Experiment 1 and no evidence for the effect of model eyesight or social reward in Experiment 2. These findings challenge claims made by motivational theories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Personal objects are known to have several psychological effects on their owners. However, the formation of a sense of object ownership (SoOO) remains unclear. This study tested the hypothesis that a sense of agency (SoA) is related to the formation of SoOO. As such, we conducted nine experiments: participants played a simple game on a computer, where they controlled colored balls using a mouse. We manipulated the SoA for the balls by altering the delay or consistency between the participants' actions and the ball movements; the participants felt a strong SoA when they controlled the ball without delay or when the ball moved correspondingly to their mouse movements. After the game, participants evaluated the extent to which they felt that the ball was their object. The results consistently showed that the SoOO for the ball was stronger when the SoA was higher than when it was lower. Moreover, this modulation occurred independently of the preference for balls, and the SoOO was higher when the action stemmed from one's own will rather than from another's. Our findings suggest that intended action plays an important role in forming SoOO. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Demonstrations of spontaneous perspective-taking are thought to provide some of the best evidence to date for "implicit mentalizing"-the ability to track simple mental states in a fast and efficient manner. However, this evidence has been challenged by a "submentalizing" account proposing that these findings are merely attention-orienting effects. The present research aimed to clarify the cognitive processes responsible by measuring spontaneous perspective-taking while controlling for attention orienting. Four experiments employed the widely used dot perspective task, modified by changing the order that stimuli were presented so that responses would be less influenced by attention orienting. This modification had different effects on speed and accuracy of responding. For response times, it attenuated spontaneous perspective-taking effects for avatars as well as attention-orienting effects for arrows. For error rates, robust spontaneous perspective-taking effects remained that were unaffected by manipulations targeting attention orienting, but contingent upon there being two competing active task sets (self- and other perspectives). These results confirm that attention orienting explains response time effects revealed by the original version of the dot perspective task. Error rate results also reveal the crucial role played by domain-general executive processes in enabling selection between perspectives. The absence of independent evidence for implicit mentalizing lends support to a revised submentalizing account that incorporates executive functions alongside attention orienting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Computational models of eye movement control during reading have revolutionized the study of visual, perceptual, and linguistic processes underlying reading. However, these models can only simulate and test predictions about the reading of single lines of text. Here we report two studies that examined how input variables for lexical processing (frequency and predictability) in these models influence the processing of line-final words. The first study was a linear mixed-effects analysis of the Provo Corpus, which included data from 84 readers reading 55 multiline texts. The second study was a preregistered eye movement experiment, where 32 participants read 128 items where frequency, predictability, and position (intraline vs. line-final) were orthogonally manipulated. Both studies were consistent in showing that reading times were shorter on line-final words. While there was mixed evidence for frequency and predictability effects in the Provo Corpus, our experimental data confirmed additive effects of frequency and predictability for line-final words, which did not differ from those for intraline words. We conclude that while models that make additive assumptions about the role of frequency and predictability may be better suited to modeling the current findings, additional assumptions are required if models are to be capable of modeling shorter reading times on line-final words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Growing evidence highlights the predictive power of cross-notation magnitude comparison (e.g., 2/5 vs. 0.25) for math outcomes, but whether these relations persist into adulthood and the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. Across two studies during the 2021-2022 academic year, we investigated undergraduates' cross-notation and within-notation comparison skills given equivalent fractions, decimals, and percentages (Study 1, N = 220 and Study 2, N = 183). We found participants did not perceive equivalent rational numbers equivalently. Cluster analyses revealed that approximately one-quarter of undergraduates exhibited a bias to select percentages as larger in cross-notation comparisons. Compared with the other cluster of undergraduates who showed little-to-no bias, the percentages-are-larger bias cluster performed worse on fraction number line estimation and fraction arithmetic (exact and approximate), as well as reporting lower Scholastic Aptitude Test/American College Test (SAT/ACT) scores. Hierarchical linear regression analyses demonstrated that cross-notation comparison accuracy accounted for variance in SAT/ACT beyond within-notation accuracy. Mediation analyses were consistent with a potential mechanism: Stronger cross-notation knowledge equips individuals to evaluate the reasonableness of fraction arithmetic solutions. Together, these results suggest the importance of an integrated understanding of rational number notations, which may not be fully assessed by within-notation measures alone. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Task-irrelevant sounds that are semantically congruent with the target can facilitate performance in visual search tasks, resulting in faster search times. In three experiments, we tested the underlying processes of this effect. Participants were presented with auditory primes that were semantically congruent, neutral, or incongruent to the visual search target, and importantly, we varied the set size of the search displays. According to seminal accounts of semantic priming, priming effects can be explained by processes not related to search (i.e., facilitation of target encoding; McNamara, 2013), which would predict a priming effect that is independent of set size. Alternatively, we tested if auditory priming can serve as a source of guidance for visual attention toward the primed target (i.e., in terms of altering attention-directing priorities; Wolfe, 2021), as indexed by higher search efficiency with congruent priming. Experiment 1 found that auditory color word primes resulted in faster responses and, importantly, flatter search slopes for congruent compared to incongruent color targets, indicating a more efficient search. As with many naturalistic search behaviors, we used multiple-target search. Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 with a reduced target set. Experiment 3 extended these findings to complex audiovisual objects. Our results provide direct evidence that cross-modal priming can guide visual selective attention, as reflected by enhanced visual search efficiency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

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).

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 (₁ = 23; ₂ = 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).

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).

The tendency to automatically imitate others' behavior is well documented. Successful interactions with others require some control of automatic imitation, but the nature of these control mechanisms remains unclear. The present study investigated whether the regulation of automatic imitation involves domain-specific versus domain-general control processes. Automatic imitation was assessed using the imitation-inhibition task, in which participants responded to an imperative stimulus with finger movements while seeing imitatively congruent versus incongruent, task-irrelevant movements. In Experiment 1, the imitatively congruent/incongruent trials ratio was manipulated, and increasing the amount of incongruent trials reduced the imitative congruency effect-as typically observed in "nonsocial" conflict tasks. In Experiment 2a, the imitation-inhibition task was intermixed with the Simon (spatial congruency) task. The ratio of spatially congruent/incongruent trials in the Simon task was varied while keeping the ratio of imitatively congruent/incongruent trials constant. Results indicate that increasing the amount of Simon conflict reduced both Simon and imitative congruency effects. Thus, control adaptations related to Simon congruency transferred to automatic imitation. In Experiments 2b and 3, the manipulation of the proportion of incongruent trials in the imitation-inhibition task did not exert an influence on the Simon effect. We discuss the domain-specific versus domain-general nature of the mechanisms regulating imitation in the light of these conflicting findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

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).

The present author was honored to serve as editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (JEP:HPP) for the 2000-2005 volumes, carrying on the work of his predecessors. Along with the happiness and pride he felt during his time as editor, he also experienced disquiet. He captures the source of the unease with an anecdote from when he was an independent researcher. These comments are not the mournful expressions of an-about-to-become dinosaur. Rather, they are motivated by the conviction that approaches which have proven useful should continue to be supported. Others have argued this point as well vis à vis the simultaneous pursuit of neural and behavioral science. Pursuing both paths is an imperative for the community at large. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Human listeners have a remarkable capacity to adapt to severe distortions of the speech signal. Previous work indicates that perceptual learning of degraded speech reflects changes to sublexical representations, though the precise format of these representations has not yet been established. Inspired by the neurophysiology of auditory cortex, we hypothesized that perceptual learning involves changes to perceptual representations that are tuned to acoustic modulations of the speech signal. We systematically filtered speech to control modulation content during training and test blocks. Perceptual learning was highly specific to the modulation filter heard during training, consistent with the hypothesis that learning involves changes to representations of speech modulations. In further experiments, we used modulation filtering and different feedback regimes (clear speech vs. written feedback) to investigate the role of talker-specific cues for cross-talker generalization of learning. Our results suggest that learning partially generalizes to speech from novel (untrained) talkers but that talker-specific cues can enhance generalization. These findings are consistent with the proposal that perceptual learning entails the adjustment of internal models that map acoustic features to phonological categories. These models can be applied to degraded speech from novel talkers, particularly when listeners can account for talker-specific variability in the acoustic signal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Spatial attention enhances processing of information, but how does unattended and task-irrelevant information influence visual processing within the spatial focus of attention? We tested this by asking participants to extract the average emotional expression of a set of sequentially presented faces while simultaneously presenting task-irrelevant faces at a spatially unattended and task-irrelevant location. Across several experiments, we found that participants' reports of the emotional expression of faces at the attended location were biased toward the task-irrelevant faces. For example, when happier faces were presented at the unattended location, participants were biased to perceive the attended faces as happier. A control experiment in which participants were asked to also detect probes at cued and uncued locations showed that spatial attention was directed towards the cued location as instructed. Together, these results reveal that unattended and task-irrelevant inputs do not only affect the efficiency of target processing, for example by slowing responses or lowering accuracies, but that they can systematically bias ensemble representations within the spatial focus of attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent research on duration perception suggests that duration encoding is not a single general process but involves several separate processes, some of which are specific to visual modality. Moreover, different functional aspects of visual processing can influence duration perception in distinct ways. One of the most important functions of the visual system is to identify and recognize features, shapes, and objects. However, it is still unclear whether and how computations related to these processes affect duration perception. To clarify this issue, we used a spatial crowding phenomenon, which allows the dissociation of low-level feature extraction from high-level processes such as object recognition. We created letter and vernier stimuli matched for their low-level properties but different in their discriminability due to spatial crowding. Here, we show that stimuli that became more difficult to discriminate appeared shorter in duration (data collected in 2019-2023). This difference in perceived duration could not be explained by low-level stimulus properties, cognitive bias due to discriminability, or perceived stimulus onsets or offsets. These results suggest the existence of time-sensitive structures specific to visual processing of features, shapes, and objects that is affected by crowding. These findings support the notion of distributed timing mechanisms in the visual system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Subsecond temporal perception is critical for understanding time-varying events. Many studies suggest that subsecond timing is an intrinsic property of neural dynamics, distributed across sensory modalities and brain areas. However, our recent finding of the transfer of temporal interval discrimination (TID) learning across sensory modalities supports the existence of a more abstract and conceptual representation of subsecond time that guides the temporal processing of distributed mechanisms. One major challenge to this hypothesis is that TID learning consistently fails to transfer from trained intervals to untrained intervals. To address this issue, here, we examined whether this interval specificity can be removed with double training, a procedure originally developed to eliminate various specificities in visual perceptual learning. Specifically, participants practiced the primary TID task, the learning of which per se was specific to the trained interval (e.g., 100 ms). In addition, they also received exposure to a new interval (e.g., 200 ms) through a secondary and functionally independent tone-frequency discrimination task. This double training successfully enabled complete transfer of TID learning to the new interval, indicating that training improved an interval-invariant component of temporal interval perception, which supports our proposal of an abstract and conceptual representation of subsecond time in the brain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).