A fundamental assumption about language is that, regardless of language modality, it faces the linearization problem, i.e., an event that occurs simultaneously in the world has to be split in language to be organized on a temporal scale. However, the visual modality of signed languages allows its users not only to express meaning in a linear manner but also to use iconicity and multiple articulators

Despite intricate interactions between emotion and decision making, the underlying cognitive mechanisms that govern their relationship remain elusive. Recent theoretical and empirical advances suggest that preferences in risky decision making can arise from the computation of subjective utility (value-dependent) or direct approach-avoidance action tendencies (value-independent). Here, 48 participants

Successfully learning and remembering people's names is a challenging memory task for adults of all ages, and this already difficult social skill worsens with age, even in normative “healthy” aging. The own-age bias, a type of in-group bias, could affect the difficulty of this task across age. Past evidence supports an own-age bias in face processing, wherein individuals preferably attend to and better

Social interactions can strengthen memories, but they can also contaminate them, for instance, when individuals integrate misinformation from social sources into their own memories. In two experiments, we examined such social contagion in a novel recognition-based collaboration task. Groups of three subjects studied lists of words in isolation, but unbeknownst to subjects, only half of these words

Attractive serial dependence – a bias whereby the current stimulus appears more similar to the previous ones – is thought to reflect a stability mechanism integrating past and current visual signals. Prior work suggests that serial dependence originates from both perceptual and cognitive mechanisms, but the conditions under which this attractive bias occurs remain to be studied. In particular, whether

Research on speech comprehension in noise indicates that a multilinguistic experience may confer advantages in filtering out verbal interference, an effect observed both in children acquiring two or more languages since birth (Filippi, Morris, Richardson, et al., 2015) and in second language learner adults (Filippi, Leech, Thomas, et al., 2012). A possible interpretation for this advantage is that

The processes and mechanisms of human learning are central to inquiries in a number of fields including psychology, cognitive science, development, education, and artificial intelligence. Arguments, debates, and controversies linger over the questions of human learning with one of the most contentious being whether simple associative processes could explain human children's prodigious learning, and

According to a prominent account of inflectional encoding (Pinker, 1999; Pinker & Ullman, 2002b), regular forms are encoded by a rule-governed combination of stems and affixes, whereas irregular forms are retrieved from memory while inhibiting rule application. Sahin, Pinker, and Halgren (2006) suggested that this concerns a domain-general mechanism. Previous research on domain-general inhibition has

Bilinguals have a remarkable ability to juggle two languages. A central question in the field is concerned with the control mechanisms that enable bilinguals to switch language with ease. Theoretical models and neuroimaging evidence suggest that a range of control processes are at play during language switching, and their underlying neural mechanisms are closely related to executive function. What

Understanding processes that lead people to invest a certain amount of time in challenging tasks is important for theory and practice. In particular, researchers often assume strong linear associations between confidence, consensuality (the degree to which an answer is independently given by multiple participants), and response time. The Diminishing Criterion Model (DCM; Ackerman, 2014) is a metacognitive

Identifying a spoken word in a referential context requires both the ability to integrate multimodal input and the ability to reason under uncertainty. How do these tasks interact with one another? We study how adults identify novel words under joint uncertainty in the auditory and visual modalities, and we propose an ideal observer model of how cues in these modalities are combined optimally. Model

Mind wandering at critical moments during a cognitive task degrades performance. At other moments, mind wandering could serve to conserve task-relevant resources, allowing a brief mental respite. Recent research has shown that, if target timing is predictable, mind wandering episodes coincide with moments of low target likelihood. Conversely, mind wandering can be avoided at moments when targets are

Both children and adults are more likely to remember information when they have control over their learning environment. Despite many demonstrations of this effect in the literature, it is still unclear how and why people are more likely to remember information that is obtained through their own actions rather than passively received. One possibility is that individuals are biased to remember the outcomes

Knowledge of predictive relations is a core aspect of learning. Beyond individual relations, we also represent intuitive theories of the world, which include interrelated sets of relations. We asked whether individual predictive relations learned incidentally in the same context become associatively bound and whether they spontaneously influence later learning. Participants performed a cover task while

To test for evidence of metacognition in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella), we analyzed confidence movements using a paradigm adapted from research with chimpanzees. Capuchin monkeys provide an interesting model species for the comparative assessment of metacognition as they show limited evidence of such cognitive-monitoring processes in a variety of metacognition paradigms. Here, monkeys were presented

Other peoples' (imagined) visual perspectives are represented perceptually in a similar way to our own, and can drive bottom-up processes in the same way as own perceptual input (Ward, Ganis, & Bach, 2019). Here we test directly whether visual perspective taking is driven by where another person is looking, or whether these perceptual simulations represent their position in space more generally. Across

Remembering and imagining specific, personal experiences can help shape our decisions. For example, cues to imagine future events can reduce delay discounting (i.e., increase the subjective value of future rewards). It is not known, however, whether such cues can also modulate other forms of reward discounting, such as probability discounting (i.e., the decrease in the subjective value of a possible

Dual-process theories posit that separate kinds of intuitive (Type 1) and reflective (Type 2) processes contribute to reasoning. Under this view, inductive judgments are more heavily influenced by Type 1 processing, and deductive judgments are more strongly influenced by Type 2 processing. Alternatively, single-process theories propose that both types of judgments are based on a common form of assessment

A central component of evaluating others as sources of information involves estimating how much they know about different domains: one might be quite knowledgeable about a certain domain (e.g., clocks), but relatively ignorant about another (e.g., birds). Estimating one's domain knowledge often involves making inferences from specific instances or demonstrations, with some suggesting broader knowledge

The repeated pairing of a particular stimulus with a specific cognitive control process, such as task switching, can bind the two together in memory, resulting in the formation of stimulus-control associations. These bindings are thought to guide the context-sensitive application of cognitive control, but it is not presently known whether such stimulus-control associations are only acquired through

Research on how humans understand the relative magnitude of symbolic fractions presents a unique case of the symbol-grounding problem with numbers. Specifically, how do people access a holistic sense of rational number magnitude from decimal fractions (e.g. 0.125) and common fractions (e.g. 1/8)? Researchers have previously suggested that people cannot directly access magnitude information from common

Simultaneous presentation of multisensory cues has been found to facilitate children's learning to a greater extent than unisensory cues (e.g., Broadbent, White, Mareschal, & Kirkham, 2017). Current research into children's multisensory learning, however, does not address whether these findings are due to having multiple cross-sensory cues that enhance stimuli perception or a matter of having multiple

Bayesian accounts of perception, in particular predictive coding models, argue perception results from the integration of 'top-down' signals coding the predicted state of the world with 'bottom-up' information derived from the senses. This integration is biased towards predictions or sensory evidence according to their relative precision. Recent theoretical accounts of autism suggest that several characteristics

Many human societies feature institutions for redistributing resources from some individuals to others, but preferred levels of redistribution vary greatly within and between populations. We postulate that support for redistribution is the output of a structured cognitive system that is sensitive to features of the social situation. We developed an experimental approach in which participants prescribe

The present study examined a multi-faceted approach to individual differences in mind-wandering. Further, the influence of task demands as a moderator of inter-individual relationships and the distinction between intentional and unintentional mind-wandering was also examined. A large sample (N = 332) of participants completed a battery of tasks during which mind-wandering was measured with periodic

Across cultures, adults produce infant-directed speech (IDS) when addressing infants. We explored whether infants expect IDS to be directed at infants and adult-directed speech (ADS) to adults. Infants from Spain and Turkey (12-15 months) watched animated videos with geometric figures, where one adult figure talked to an infant or another adult figure, while they were gazing at each other (Experiments

Human memories are malleable and often shaped by social interactions. Previous work has demonstrated that not only one's own goals, but also those of a task-partner can facilitate subsequent retrieval of goal-relevant lexical stimuli, known as the Joint Memory Effect (JME). We outline a social-epistemic account of the JME which proposes that this memory enhancement reflects humans' tendency to map

If remembering the past requires a cue to stimulate mental reactivation of an experience (i.e., a memory), then the nature of the retrieval cue should bias how that experience is recalled. Based on the established link between emotion and memory, we tested how two emotional properties of a cue - valence (positive and negative) and arousal (high and low) - influence different phases of autobiographical

This study examined how the distribution and amount of practice affect word retrieval in aphasia as well as how such factors relate to the efficiency of learning. The central hypothesis was that factors that enhance the learning of new knowledge also enhance persistent access to existing, but inconsistently available, word representations. The study evaluated the impact of learning principles on word

At any moment in time, streams of information reach the brain through the different senses. Given this wealth of noisy information, it is essential that we select information of relevance - a function fulfilled by attention - and infer its causal structure to eventually take advantage of redundancies across the senses. Yet, the role of selective attention during causal inference in cross-modal perception

Predictions about likely upcoming input may promote rapid language processing, but the mechanisms by which such predictions are generated remain unclear. One hypothesis is that comprehenders use their production system to covertly produce what they would say if they were the speaker. If reading predictable words involves covert production, this act might have consequences for memory. The present study

Understanding complex sentences that contain multiple clauses referring to events in the world and the relations between them is an important development in children's language learning. A number of theoretical positions have suggested that factors like syntactic structure (clause order), iconicity (whether the order of clauses reflects the order of events), and givenness (whether information is shared

When interacting with other humans, facial expressions provide valuable information for approach or avoid decisions. Here, we consider facial attractiveness as another important dimension upon which approach-avoidance behaviours may be based. In Experiments 1-3, we measured participants' responses to attractive and unattractive women's faces in an approach-avoidance paradigm in which there was no explicit

Categories provide a fundamental source of information used to structure our perception of the world. For example, when people reproduce the remembered location of a dot in a circle, they implicitly impose vertical and horizontal axes onto the circle, and responses are biased towards the center of each of the resulting quadrants. Such results reveal the existence of spatial prototypes, which function

Our knowledge about the world is represented not merely as a collection of concepts, but as an organized lexico-semantic network in which concepts can be linked by relations, such as "taxonomic" relations between members of the same stable category (e.g., cat and sheep), or association between entities that occur together or in the same context (e.g., sock and foot). To date, accounts of the origins

Successful word learning requires establishing an initial representation that is sufficiently robust to be retained in memory. Sleep has profound advantages for memory consolidation, but evidence concerning the effects of sleep in young children's word learning is slim and focuses almost exclusively on learning nouns. Verbs are representationally more complex and are often learned from non-concurrent

Words in polysynthetic languages, such as the Australian language Wubuy, can be semantically complex and translate into whole phrases in analytic languages such as English. This raises questions about whether such words are like words in English, or whether they are more like phrases. In the following, we examine Wubuy speakers' knowledge of word-internal morphological complexity in a word-preference

While parameters are crucial components of cognitive models, relatively little importance has been given to their units. We show that this has lead to some parameters to be contaminated, introducing an artifactual correlation between them. We also show that this has led to the illegal comparison of parameters with different units of measurement - this may invalidate parameter comparisons across participants

Brain regions involved in saccadic eye movements partially overlap with a frontoparietal network implicated in encoding numerosities. Eye movement patterns may plausibly reflect strategic scanning behaviours to resolve the open-ended task of efficiently enumerating visual arrays. If so, these patterns may help explain individual differences in enumeration acuity in terms of well-understood visual attention

Coins are physical representations of monetary values. Like mental or verbal representations of quantities, coins encode sums of money in formats shaped, in part, by cognitive and communicative needs. Studying the coins circulating today, we consider how their design, colour, and size reflect their value. We show that coin designs solve a trade-off between informativeness-the pressure to highlight

Such is the consistency by which performance on measures of short-term memory (STM) increase with age that developmental increases in STM capacity are largely accepted as fact. However, our analysis of a robust but almost ignored finding - that span for digit sequences (the traditional measure of STM) increases at a far greater rate than span for other verbal material - fundamentally undermines the

Humans have the remarkable ability to rapidly estimate the number of objects in a visual scene without relying on counting, something referred to as the number sense. It has been well documented that the more clustered the elements are, the lower their perceived numerosity is. A recent account of this observation is the crowdinghypothesis, which posits that the perceived underestimation is driven by

In two eye-tracking experiments using the Visual World Paradigm, we examined how listeners recognize words when faced with speech at lower intensities (40, 50, and 65 dBA). After hearing the target word, participants (n = 32) clicked the corresponding picture from a display of four images - a target (e.g., money), a cohort competitor (e.g., mother), a rhyme competitor (e.g., honey) and an unrelated

We use representations and expectations formed during life-long learning to support attentional allocation and perception. In comparison to traditional laboratory investigations, real-world memory formation is usually achieved without explicit instruction and on-the-fly as a by-product of natural interactions with our environment. Understanding this process and the quality of naturally formed representations

In English, when two nouns in a disjunctive subject differ in number (e.g., the dogs or the cat), the verb tends to agree with the number of the nearer noun. This is exceptional, as a noun's linear proximity to the verb does not generally play a role in agreement. In the present study, we investigate a further puzzle about agreement with disjunction, namely, the existence of a pattern in which two

There is strong evidence that comprehenders can parse sentences in an incremental fashion. However, when the sentence contains a negation, the evidence is less clear. Previous work has shown that increasing the pragmatic felicity of a negative sentence reduces or eliminates any processing overhead relative to affirmative sentences. However, in previous work felicity has gone hand-in-hand with the predictability

Although it remains contentious, women's changeable attraction to masculine faces has been used to inform evolutionary ideas about human mating strategies. Typical experiments in this area use two-alternative-forced-choice (2afc) over a few pairs of similar images. The reliability of these measures is analysed suggesting that many studies have too few trials to be reliable. In the current experiment

We report two experiments that suggest that syntactic category plays a key role in limiting competition in lexical access in speaking. We introduce a novel sentence-picture interference (SPI) paradigm, and we show that nouns (e.g., running as a noun) do not compete with verbs (e.g., walking as a verb) and verbs do not compete with nouns in sentence production, regardless of their conceptual similarity

When observers search for an object in the environment, they compare the incoming sensory information to the attentional template, a representation of the target in visual working memory (VWM). Previous studies have shown that visual search is more efficient when the attentional template is precise. We pursued the hypothesis that the attentional template in VWM is automatically complemented by features

It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn (Typological Prevalence Hypothesis; TPH). Prior work supports this idea in phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed semantics. Using Artificial Language Learning experiments with adults, we test predictions made by the TPH about the relative learnability of semantic distinctions in the domain

People segment the stream of experience into events, or temporal segments that have a beginning and an ending. But how are such event boundaries defined? Linguistic theories of event encoding draw a distinction between bounded events that include an inherent endpoint ("eat a pretzel") and unbounded events that lack such an endpoint ("eat cheerios"). Even though the literature on event cognition has

Items with special histories (e.g. celebrity owners) or qualities (e.g. limited editions) are more valuable than similar "inauthentic" items. Typically developing (TD) children privilege authenticity and are particularly influenced by who objects belong to. Here, we explore why children and adults over-value items with special ownership histories and examine how autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects

Processing fluency-the subjective ease of information processing-influences a variety of judgments (e.g., judgments of familiarity, liking, and truth). A study by Laham, Alter, and Goodwin (2009) suggests that this is also true for moral judgments. More specifically, the authors found that discrepant perceptual fluency mitigates moral wrongness ratings. In five studies (total N = 694), we tested the

In two studies, participants performed a switching task, and we provided to only half of them feedback on goal progress (how much of the task still remains). Importantly, this feedback did not inform participants on how well they performed. We found that participants in the feedback condition achieved a higher asymptotic level of performance, reported less fatigue and took shorter breaks between blocks

In a process known as the Baldwin Effect, developmental plasticity, such as learning, has been argued to accelerate the biological evolution of high-fitness traits, including language and complex intelligence. Here we investigate the evolutionary consequences of developmental plasticity by asking which aspects of a plastic trait are the focus of genetic change. The aspects we consider are: (i) dependencies

It is generally acknowledged that humans have an egocentric bias; processing self-related stimuli in a specialised, preferential manner. The self-bias has been studied within cognitive domains such as memory, attention and perception; but never across cognitive domains in order to assess whether self-biases are a product of a common bias, or independent. This has relevance for conditions such as Autism

Recent eye-movement evidence suggests readers are more likely to skip a high-frequency word than a low-frequency word independently of the semantic or syntactic acceptability of the word in the sentence. This has been interpreted as strong support for a serial processing mechanism in which the decision to skip a word is based on the completion of a preliminary stage of lexical processing prior to any

Successful navigation involves finding the way, planning routes, and avoiding collisions. Whilst previous research has shown that people can navigate using non-visual cues, it is not clear to what degree learned non-visual navigational abilities generalise to 'new' environments. Furthermore, the ability to successfully avoid collisions has not been investigated separately from the ability to perceive

Accurate recognition of others' emotions is an important skill for successful social interaction. Unsurprisingly, it has been an enduring topic of interest, and notable individual differences have been observed. Despite this focus, the underlying functional architecture of this ability has not been thoroughly investigated, particularly concerning emotion recognition across different sensory domains