Designing and evaluating tasks to measure individual differences in experimental psychology: a tutorial.

Experimental psychology is witnessing an increase in research on individual differences, which requires the development of new tasks that can reliably assess variations among participants. To do this, cognitive researchers need statistical methods that many researchers have not learned during their training. The lack of expertise can pose challenges not only in designing good, new tasks but also in evaluating tasks developed by others. To bridge the gap, this article provides an overview of test psychology applied to performance tasks, covering fundamental concepts such as standardization, reliability, norming and validity. It provides practical guidelines for developing and evaluating experimental tasks, as well as for combining tasks to better understand individual differences. To further address common misconceptions, the article lists 11 prevailing myths. The purpose of this guide is to provide experimental psychologists with the knowledge and tools needed to conduct rigorous and insightful studies of individual differences.

Inaugural editorial for Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

As the author begins her second term as editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (and third term as editor of an APA journal), she wants to reflect on the editorial team's successes, on how the work they publish is changing, and looks forward to new ways for the Journal stakeholders to meet their common goals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A comprehensive scan of psychological disciplines through self-identification on Google Scholar: Relative endorsement, topical coverage, and publication patterns.

Psychological researchers often identify with psychological disciplines, such as social or clinical psychology. The current study analyzed Google Scholar profiles from 6,532 international scientists who attracted more than 100 citations in 2019 and self-identified with at least one of 10 common psychological disciplines (psychoanalysis; clinical psychology; (cognitive) neuroscience; developmental psychology; educational psychology; experimental psychology; biological psychology/psychophysiology; mathematical psychology/psychometrics; social psychology; personality psychology). Results indicated that almost half of all psychologists self-identified with either social psychology or cognitive neuroscience. There were 487 topics that were endorsed at least five times, ranging from highly discipline-specific topics to more integrative ones, such as emotion and personality. We also factor-analyzed frequencies of topical endorsement across disciplines and found two factors, which we interpreted as reflecting correlational and experimental research traditions (with social psychology being the largest discipline within the former tradition and cognitive neuroscience being the largest discipline within the latter tradition). Differences in productivity and impact were also found, with researchers identifying with psychometrics being the most productive and researchers identifying with personality psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and multidisciplinary psychology as the most impactful in terms of citation increases per additional output. Recommendations for promoting cross-fertilization across psychological disciplines are formulated.

Reception of experimental pedagogy and psychology in Chile. Analysis of the intellectual influences of Wilhelm Mann, 1904-1915.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the intellectual research project of Wilhelm Mann, one of the pioneers of experimental and educational psychology in Chile. Mann's work has been the object of so little analysis that his intellectual influences and networks are not clearly known. We analyzed 338 intratext citations from 22 works by Wilhelm Mann published during the period 1904-1915. As a result, we obtained a mapping of his cooperation networks and used a quantitative approach to study the authors who most influenced his career, among whom were William Stern, Herbert Spencer, Wilhelm Wundt, Alfred Binet, and Ernst Meumann. Mann was closely connected to the international and contemporary advances and discussions of his time, despite the lack of infrastructure and difficulties in communication. Mann was the first psychologist to develop a long-term project in Chile that aimed to measure the individualities of Chilean students and their intellectual development.

Improving diagnostic performance of coronavirus disease 2019 rapid antigen testing through computer-based feedback training using open-source experimental psychology software.

INTRODUCTION: Rapid antigen testing (RAT) results are visually read as whether colored line is present or absent. The subjective interpretation potentially misses detecting weak lines due to lower analyte concentration in samples tested, requiring training. Although routine test experience has improved the result readout skills, it consumes time and resources. Therefore, we created a computer-based feedback training method using open-source experimental psychology software, wherein participants accumulate RAT result readout experience by repeatedly responding positive/negative to randomly presented pictures showing RAT results; then, they receive feedback on their answers as correct or incorrect and are asked to stare at the pictures again with the knowledge of correct answer. This study aimed to examine the training effects in improving the skills, using coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) RAT. METHODS: Twenty-two medical technologists were randomly divided into two groups: the feedback-training and test-experience groups. Using several pictures showing positive and negative results of COVID-19 RAT, after examination of their initial result readout skills, feedback-training group received the feedback training, whereas test-experience group performed an equal number of tests without feedback to accumulate test experience, and their skills were examined again. The ratio of "positive" answers to the pictures showing positive results (i.e., hit rate) was statistically analyzed. RESULTS: The feedback-training group showed a significantly higher hit rate after their training, whereas the test-experience group did not. The feedback training effects were manifested in weak line detection. CONCLUSIONS: This computer-based feedback training method can be an effective tool for improving RAT result readout skills.

A Naturalistic Setup for Presenting Real People and Live Actions in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Studies.

Perception of others' actions is crucial for survival, interaction, and communication. Despite decades of cognitive neuroscience research dedicated to understanding the perception of actions, we are still far away from developing a neurally inspired computer vision system that approaches human action perception. A major challenge is that actions in the real world consist of temporally unfolding events in space that happen "here and now" and are actable. In contrast, visual perception and cognitive neuroscience research to date have largely studied action perception through 2D displays (e.g., images or videos) that lack the presence of actors in space and time, hence these displays are limited in affording actability. Despite the growing body of knowledge in the field, these challenges must be overcome for a better understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of the perception of others' actions in the real world. The aim of this study is to introduce a novel setup to conduct naturalistic laboratory experiments with live actors in scenarios that approximate real-world settings. The core element of the setup used in this study is a transparent organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen through which participants can watch the live actions of a physically present actor while the timing of their presentation is precisely controlled. In this work, this setup was tested in a behavioral experiment. We believe that the setup will help researchers reveal fundamental and previously inaccessible cognitive and neural mechanisms of action perception and will be a foundation for future studies investigating social perception and cognition in naturalistic settings.

Strategies, debates, and adversarial collaboration in working memory: The 51st Bartlett Lecture.

Frederic Bartlett championed the importance of individual strategy differences when remembering details of events. I will describe how long-running theoretical debates in the area of working memory may be resolved by considering differences across participants in the strategies that they use when performing cognitive tasks, and through adversarial collaboration between rival laboratories. In common with the established view within experimental cognitive psychology, I assume that adults have a range of cognitive functions, evolved for everyday life. However, I will present evidence showing that these functions can be engaged selectively for laboratory tasks, and that how they are deployed may differ between and within individuals for the same task. Reliance on aggregate data, while treating inter- and intra-participant variability in data patterns as statistical noise, may lead to misleading conclusions about theoretical principles of cognition, and of working memory in particular. Moreover, different theoretical perspectives may be focused on different levels of explanation and different theoretical goals rather than being mutually incompatible. Yet researchers from contrasting theoretical frameworks pursue science as a competition, rarely do researchers from competing labs work in collaboration, and debates self-perpetuate. These approaches to research can stall debate resolution and generate ever-increasing scientific diversity rather than scientific progress. The article concludes by describing a recent extended adversarial collaboration (the WoMAAC project) focused on theoretical contrasts in working memory, and illustrates how this approach to conducting research may help resolve scientific debate and facilitate scientific advance.

Reconstruction of Wilhelm Wundt's last residence in Saxony and the search for subsequent use as a research institute, fellowship house, or museum of psychotechnics.

The German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) is now recognized worldwide as the founding figure of academic psychology. He founded the first Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig in 1879 and gained recognition during his lifetime. The scientist's last home in the small village of Großbothen in East Germany, about 100 miles (160 km) south of Berlin, was left to decay after German reunification in 1989/1990. Wundt's other homes in Leipzig were destroyed during World War II. During the GDR period, when the house was owned by the public sector, an inscription in honor of Wundt was added. It then stood empty for many years and fell into disrepair. In June 2016, an association was founded at Schloss Altranstädt near Leipzig with the aim of acquiring the rights to use the Wilhelm Wundt House. Thanks to their efforts, the house has now been entrusted to a conservationist as of 2018. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Attentional switching between perception and memory: Examining asymmetrical switch costs.

Attention can be defined as a mechanism for the selection and prioritization of elements among many. When attention is directed to a specific piece of information, this information is assumed to be in the focus of attention. On a day-to-day basis, we need to rely on efficient switching between information we are holding in working memory (internal modality) and information presented in the world around us (external modality). A recent set of studies investigated between-modality attentional switches and found that there is an asymmetrical switch cost for switching between the internal and external focus of attention (Verschooren et al., 2020, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 46[9], 912-925; Verschooren, Liefooghe, et al., 2019a, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45[10], 1399-1414). In particular, participants switched on a trial-by-trial basis between an internal task using stimuli retrieved from memory and an external task using on-screen presented stimuli. A larger cost was found when switching from the external modality towards the internal modality than the other way around. The authors found that this cost asymmetry could be best explained in terms of associative interference (i.e., differences in shielding efficiency against the memory traces from the competing task set). The present study aimed to replicate the asymmetrical switch cost (Experiment 1) and investigate whether an alternative explanation in terms of stimulus strength can account for the asymmetrical switch cost (Experiment 2). Overall, the results confirm the presence of a subtle, asymmetrical switch cost, but we observed little to no contribution of stimulus strength.

Inaugural editorial.

In this editorial, the new journal editor introduces herself and then describes her goals for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Reflections upon having been elected a fellow of APA.

In this article, the author offers his reflections on being elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association as an historian of psychology. The author didn't start out as an historian. His bachelor and doctorate are both in psychology. But he did also certainly choose to leave psychology, then to return with a different perspective. So this election feels like an affirmation of that decision, and an endorsement of the scholarship that resulted: his service to science by other means, after he was himself "revised and resubmitted." Nearly two decades after his original departure from experimental psychology, the author has decided that "science" is the set of tested- and defended boundaries of what we think we know, which move as they're renegotiated. In other words, science is the shared collection and discussion of what has been accepted to be the case (as well as the process of careful revision). But it's also then the history of science that provides evidence to answer the philosophical "demarcation problem," not science itself. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A modified procedure for naming 332 pictures and collecting norms: Using tangram pictures in psycholinguistic studies.

Tangram pictures are abstract pictures which may be used as stimuli in various fields of experimental psychology and are often used in the field of dialogue psychology. The present study provides the first norms for a set of 332 tangram pictures. These pictures were standardized on a set of variables classically used in the literature on cognitive processes, such as visual perception, language, and memory: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Furthermore, norms for concreteness were also provided owing to the influence of this variable on the processes involved in lexical production. Correlational analyses on all variables were performed on the data collected from French native speakers. This new set of standardized pictures constitutes a reliable database for researchers when they select tangram pictures. Given the abstract nature of tangram pictures, this paper also discusses the similarities and differences with the literature on line drawings, and highlights their value for dialogue psychology studies, for psycholinguistics studies, and for cognitive psychology in general.

Measuring binding effects in event-based episodic representations.

Remembering an experienced event in a coherent manner requires the binding of the event's constituent elements. Such binding effects manifest as a stochastic dependency of the retrieval of event elements. Several approaches for modeling these dependencies have been proposed. We compare the contingency-based approach by Horner & Burgess (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(4), 1370-1383, 2013), related approaches using Yule's Q (Yule, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 75(6), 579-652, 1912) or an adjusted Yule's Q (c.f. Horner & Burgess, Current Biology, 24(9), 988-992, 2014), an approach based on item response theory (IRT, Schreiner et al., in press), and a nonparametric variant of the IRT-based approach. We present evidence from a simulation study comparing the five approaches regarding their empirical detection rates and susceptibility to different levels of memory performance, and from an empirical application. We found the IRT-based approach and its nonparametric variant to yield the highest power for detecting dependencies or differences in dependency between conditions. However, the nonparametric variant yielded increasing Type I error rates with increasing dependency in the data when testing for differences in dependency. We found the approaches based on Yule's Q to yield biased estimates and to be strongly affected by memory performance. The other measures were unbiased given no dependency or differences in dependency but were also affected by memory performance if there was dependency in the data or if there were differences in dependency, but to a smaller extent. The results suggest that the IRT-based approach is best suited for measuring binding effects. Further considerations when deciding for a modeling approach are discussed.

The influence of journal submission guidelines on authors' reporting of statistics and use of open research practices: Five years later.

Changes in statistical practices and reporting have been documented by Giofrè et al. PLOS ONE 12(4), e0175583 (2017), who investigated ten statistical and open practices in two high-ranking journals (Psychological Science [PS] and Journal of Experimental Psychology-General [JEPG]): null hypothesis significance testing; confidence or credible intervals; meta-analysis of the results of multiple experiments; confidence interval interpretation; effect size interpretation; sample size determination; data exclusion; data availability; materials availability; and preregistered design and analysis plan. The investigation was based on an analysis of all papers published in these journals between 2013 and 2015. The aim of the present study was to follow up changes in both PS and JEPG in subsequent years, from 2016 to 2020, adding code availability as a further open practice. We found improvement in most practices, with some exceptions (i.e., confidence interval interpretation and meta-analysis). Despite these positive changes, our results indicate a need for further improvements in statistical practices and adoption of open practices.

Attention and Free Will in Experimental Psychology: An Unexpected Analysis of Voluntary Action by William James and Theodule Ribot.

This article aims to highlight the difficulties encountered by the experimental psychology promoted by Ribot, at the end of the nineteenth century up until the beginning of the twentieth century, with regard to the question of free will as part of his analysis of voluntary attention. It also aims to shed some light on William James's possible role in Ribot's subtle change of opinion in regards to the power of attention, as a mental effort somehow revealing the possibility of a top-down voluntary activity. In most of Ribot's work, at first glance, the will is understood as a determined product of our idiosyncratic character, of our affective and physiological tendencies-rather than as an autonomous faculty of self-determination. But what might look like Ribot's commitment to determinism calls for some nuance. Some uses of the term "voluntary" in his work, particularly to describe the phenomenon of attention, seem to refer to a form of free will looking a lot more like an autonomous faculty than like a mere illusion induced by an epiphenomenal conscious state. We end the paper with remarks about the current state of studies of consciousness and voluntary action in relation to Ribot and James's accounts of attention and will.

The degree course in psychology in Rome in the history of Italian psychology.

Italian academic psychology found its first location in the Anthropological Museum of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Rome, where in 1890 a Laboratory of Experimental Psychology was established. In 1905, the first three Chairs of Experimental Psychology at the Universities of Turin, Rome, and Naples were created. These were followed in the subsequent years by others, until 1930, in other academic institutions. After many years and a long period of crisis linked to the fascist regime, only after the World War II (WWII), with the rebirth of the country, did psychology gradually rebuild its status as a scientific discipline. Within this framework of the renewal of society and university studies, in 1971, two degree courses were instituted in Rome and Padua. Based on research in central and local academic archives and on an analysis of the secondary literature, the gestation phase of the 4-year degree course in Psychology, the progressive establishment of the Psychology Departments, and the 5-year reform of the courses up to the birth of the first Faculty of Psychology at an Italian university are reconstructed. The aim of this article is to propose a well-founded discontinuist historiographical reading of the process of sedimentation of psychological experimentation that, after being born in the Faculty of Sciences and later transferring to the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, also led to important developments in the Faculty of Education, with the recognition of an autonomous academic space of scientific discipline with a degree course, departments and finally the Faculty of Psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological experiments on student self-government: The early impact of Wilhelm Mann's work in Chile and the German Empire.

One of the most important successes in the history of psychology in Chile was the foundation in 1908 of the first experimental psychology laboratory in Santiago by the German psychologist Wilhelm Mann (1974-1943). Four years later, Mann give a shift to his classical experimental psychology research to intervene in the discussions about German School Reform (1900-1920). Mann used Chile as a "testing ground" for explore the viability of student self-government published in three papers. The method used to verify the early impact of Mann's papers was the quantitative analysis of citations with Publish or Perish software using a Google Books database and Scripta Paedagogica. The reception of Mann's texts was analyzed using the context of citation and the functions and use of those citations. The three unknow Mann's papers about Student Self-Government published in 1913 and his citations. The results shows that Mann's critics and recommendations published in one of his papers was the fourth more citated in a database of 16 foundational German works of to self-student government. Finally, this Mann's article was cited and used in an ideological way to argue in favor of reactionary and conservative opinions of school democratization in German Empire teacher circles. Mann's diagnosis and critical suggestions was recognized by prominent German philosophers and pedagogues. Precisely Mann criticized the Student Republics as the only way to stimulate the student self-government for their artificial character and especially for the loss of students' psychological individuality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Unconscious inferences in perception in early experimental psychology: From Wundt to Peirce.

What are unconscious inferences in psychology? This article investigates their journey from the early philosophical psychology of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) to the experimental psychology of the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914). Peirce's reception of Wundt's early works situates him in an international web of 19th-century experimental psychologists and its reconstruction opens new perspectives on the relation between philosophy, psychology, and epistemology. Moreover, this reception testifies to a heretofore overlooked strand of influence of Wundt on North American experimental psychology. The notion of unconscious inferences, of which Hermann von Helmholtz is usually considered the chief exponent, becomes the backbone of Peirce's theory of perception mostly because of the affinity between Wundt's early philosophy of mind and Peirce's logic-mediated approach to psychology.

Hayne Waring Reese (1931-2022).

Memorializes Hayne Waring Reese (1931-2022). Hayne is remembered for impeccable scholarship, incisive analyses, and broad perspective on psychology. Early in his career, he published seminal analyses of transpositional learning by children. Later, he and Lewis Lipsitt helped solidify experimental child psychology with a textbook of that title. He became editor of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in 1983, remaining so until 1997. He also edited the annual Advances in Child Development and Behavior from 1969 to 1999 and books resulting from the WVU Conferences on Life-Span Development from 1969 to 1992. His writings, many with William Overton, on worldviews in psychology are foundational to the field and widely cited. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

"Orthographic forms affect speech perception in a second language: Consonant and vowel length in L2 English": Correction to Bassetti et al. (2021).

Reports an error in "Orthographic forms affect speech perception in a second language: Consonant and vowel length in L2 English" by Bene Bassetti, Jackie Masterson, Tania Cerni and Paolo Mairano (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2021[Dec], Vol 47[12], 1583-1603). In the article, there are several editorial production errors. Jackie Masterson's ORCID iD (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2869-6612) was missing, and the awardees for Grant RPG 2013 180 were listed incorrectly. This grant was awarded to Bene Bassetti and Jackie Masterson. In the sixth paragraph of The Present Study section, the parenthetical text in the fifth sentence was corrected to read "(for example, the ie in pie has seven readings, Carney, 1994)." Other small typographical errors were fixed, several references were correctly reordered, and one supplemental materials file was removed. The online version of this article has been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2022-13139-001.) ItalianL1 speakers of EnglishL2 produce the same English sound as longer if spelled with two than with one letter, following Italian grapheme-phoneme conversion rules. Do Italian listeners perceive short and long sounds in English homophonic word pairs that are spelled with a single letter or a digraph (finish-Finnish; morning-mourning)? In Experiment 1, 50 ItalianL1-EnglishL2 bilinguals and 50 English controls performed a Consonant Perception task and a Vowel Perception Task. They heard English homophonic word pairs containing a target sound spelled with one or two letters and indicated whether the two words contained the same sounds or not. For half of the listeners a picture was used to activate target words (Auditory-Visual Input group). Bilinguals in this group perceived different sounds in homophonic pairs. Experiment 2 tested whether naturalistic exposure reduces orthographic effects on speech perception by comparing learners, sequential bilinguals, and English controls (all n = 30) with Auditory-Visual Input. Orthographic form (spelling) affected consonant perception in both of the second language listener groups. Learners were less affected than bilinguals. Analyses indicated that this was because of the learners' high proficiency. It appears that ItalianL1 speakers of EnglishL2 make a long-short contrast for consonants-unattested in English-and illusorily perceive it in spoken English homophonous words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).