Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance
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Many joint decisions in everyday life (e.g., Which bar is less crowded?) depend on approximate enumeration, but very little is known about the psychological characteristics of counting together. Here we systematically investigated collective approximate enumeration. Pairs of participants made individual and collective enumeration judgments in a 2-alternative forced-choice task and when in disagreement, they negotiated joint decisions via verbal communication and received feedback about accuracy at the end of each trial. ⋯ Moreover, such collective enumeration benefited from prior, noninteractive practice showing that social learning of how to combine shared information about enumeration required substantial individual experience. Finally, the collective context had a positive but transient impact on an individual's enumeration sensitivity. This transient social influence may be explained as a motivational factor arising from the fact that members of a collective must take responsibility for their individual decisions and face the consequences of their judgments.
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J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform · Apr 2013
Converging evidence for control of color-word Stroop interference at the item level.
Prior studies have shown that cognitive control is implemented at the list and context levels in the color-word Stroop task. At first blush, the finding that Stroop interference is reduced for mostly incongruent items as compared with mostly congruent items (i.e., the item-specific proportion congruence [ISPC] effect) appears to provide evidence for yet a third level of control, which modulates word reading at the item level. However, evidence to date favors the view that ISPC effects reflect the rapid prediction of high-contingency responses and not item-specific control. ⋯ Evidence for item-specific control, including transfer of the ISPC effect to new stimuli, is apparent when 4-item sets are employed but not when 2-item sets are employed. We attribute this pattern to the absence of high-contingency responses on incongruent trials in the 4-item set. These novel findings provide converging evidence for reactive control of color-word Stroop interference at the item level, reveal theoretically important factors that modulate reliance on item-specific control versus contingency learning, and suggest an update to the item-specific control account (Bugg, Jacoby, & Chanani, 2011).