Most cognitive processes are studied using abstract or synthetic stimuli with specific features to fully control what is presented to subjects. However, recent studies have revealed enhancements of cognitive capacities (such as working memory) when processing naturalistic versus abstract stimuli. Using abstract stimuli constructed from distinct visual features (e.g., color and shape), we have recently

Theory of mind, the attribution of mental states to others is one form of social cognition. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of another, much simpler, form of social cognition, which I call vicarious representation. Vicarious representation is the attribution of other-centered properties to objects. This mental capacity is different from, and much simpler than, theory of mind as

We frequently experience feelings of agency over events we do not objectively influence – so-called ‘illusions of control’. These illusions have prompted widespread claims that we can be insensitive to objective relationships between actions and outcomes, and instead rely on grandiose beliefs about our abilities. However, these illusory biases could instead arise if we are highly sensitive to action-outcome

How do we represent extent in our spatial world? Recent work has shown that even the simplest spatial judgments — estimates of 2D area — present challenges to our visual system. Indeed, area judgments are best accounted for by ‘additive area’ (the sum of objects' dimensions) rather than ‘true area’ (i.e., a pixel count). But is ‘additive area’ itself the right explanation — or might other models better

Human languages are replete with ambiguity. This is most evident in homophony––where two or more words sound the same, but carry distinct meanings. For example, the wordform “bark” can denote either the sound produced by a dog or the protective outer sheath of a tree trunk. Why would a system evolved for efficient, effective communication display rampant ambiguity? Some accounts argue that ambiguity

Everyday experience is divided into meaningful events as a part of human perception. Current accounts of this process, known as event segmentation, focus on how characteristics of the experience (e.g., situation changes) influence segmentation. However, characteristics of the viewers themselves have been largely neglected. We test whether one such viewer characteristic, their cultural background, impacts

What constitutes a beautiful action? Research into dance aesthetics has largely focussed on subjective features like familiarity with the observed movement, but has rarely studied objective features like speed or acceleration. We manipulated the kinematic complexity of observed actions by creating dance sequences that varied in movement timing, but not in movement trajectory. Dance-naïve participants

Acute stress has been shown to influence reward sensitivity, feedback learning, and risk-taking during decision-making, primarily through activation of the hypothalamic pituitary axis (HPA). However, it is unclear how acute stress affects decision-making among choices that vary in their degree of uncertainty. To address this question, we conducted two experiments in which participants repeatedly chose

In order to talk about an event they see in the world, speakers have to build a conceptual representation of that event and generate a message that selects the pragmatically appropriate (e.g., informative) parts of that event that they want to talk about. To further understand the relationship between a speaker's conceptual representations and the pragmatic factors that influence message generation

Studies on person recognition have primarily examined recognition of static faces, presented on a computer screen at a close distance. Nevertheless, in naturalistic situations we typically see the whole dynamic person, often approaching from a distance. In such cases, facial information may be less clear, and the motion pattern of an individual, their dynamic identity signature (DIS), may be used for

We efficiently infer others' states and traits from their appearance, and these inferences powerfully shape our social behaviour. One key trait is sex, which is strongly cued by the appearance of the body. What are the visual representations that link body shape to sex? Previous studies of visual sex judgment tasks find observers have a bias to report “male”, particularly for ambiguous stimuli. This

The mere perception of manipulable objects usually grasped with a power-grip (e.g., an apple) or a precision-grip (e.g., a cherry) potentiate power-grip- and precision-grip-responses, respectively. This effect is seen as to be driven by automatic access of the representation of manipulable objects that includes a motor representation of usually performed grasping behaviors (i.e., the embodied view)

Higher courts sometimes assess the constitutionality of law by working through a concrete case, other times by reasoning about the underlying question in a more abstract way. Prior research has found that the degree of concreteness or abstraction with which an issue is formulated can influence people's prescriptive views: For instance, people often endorse punishment for concrete misdeeds that they

We examined whether the perceptual organization of hierarchical structure, and specifically, the integration of local elements into a global shape, requires visual awareness, using a masked priming paradigm, sandwich masking to render the prime invisible, and two types of primes, many-element hierarchical patterns composed of many relatively small elements (Experiment 1) and few-element hierarchical

Recent research suggests that graphic motor programs acquired through writing are part of letter representations and contribute to their recognition. Indeed, learning new letter-like shapes through handwriting gave rise to better recognition than learning through typing on a keyboard. However, handwriting and typing do not differ solely by the nature of the motor activity. Handwriting requires a detailed

Classic psychological theories have demonstrated the power and limitations of spatial representations, providing geometric tools for reasoning about the similarity of objects and showing that human intuitions sometimes violate the constraints of geometric spaces. Recent machine learning methods for deriving vector-space embeddings of words have begun to garner attention for their surprising capacity

Once fiercely rejected, the notion of delay-dependent forgetting from long-term memory has recently resurfaced. By this notion, the duration of the study-test delay predicts the magnitude of memory degradation. Our Representation Theory of Forgetting adopts the notion of delay-dependent forgetting, alongside interference due to similarity of representations as an additional cause of forgetting—rather

Experience sampling of attentional states has consistently demonstrated that mind wandering is a frequent and disruptive obstacle when one must sustain attention during continuous task performance. Yet, methods commonly used to assess the subjective experience of mind wandering may conflate several potential sources of meaningful variation in individuals' degree of task engagement. In the present study

Offloading to-be-remembered information is a ubiquitous memory strategy, yet in relying on external memory stores, our ability to recall from internal memory is often diminished. In the present investigation, we examine how offloading impacts true and false recall. Across three experiments, participants studied and wrote down word lists that were each strongly associated with an unstudied critical

Numerous studies have shown that the presentation of some studied items as retrieval cues at test can impair recall of the remaining items. This effect, often referred to as part-list cuing (PLC) impairment, has mostly been demonstrated with simple word lists and short retention intervals between study and test. Across 4 experiments, this study examined the effects of PLC with educationally relevant

Distinguishing meaningful structure from unpredictable randomness is a key challenge in many domains of life. We examined whether collaborating three-person groups (n = 81) outperform individuals (n = 81) in facing this challenge with a two-part repeated choice task, where outcomes were either serially independent (probabilistic part) or fixed in a particular sequence (pattern part). Groups performed

Language comprehension and production are generally assumed to use the same representations, but resumption poses a problem for this view: This structure is regularly produced, but judged highly unacceptable. Production-based solutions to this paradox explain resumption in terms of processing pressures, whereas the Facilitation Hypothesis suggests resumption is produced to help listeners comprehend

When a voluntary action is followed by a sensory outcome, their timings are perceived to shift toward each other compared to when they were generated independently. Recent studies have tried to explain this temporal binding effect based on the cue integration theory, in which the timing of action and outcome are estimated as a precision-weighted average of their individual estimates, although distinct

Third-party punishment of selfish individuals is an important mechanism to intervene against unfairness. However, there is another way in which third parties can intervene. Rather than focusing on the unfair individual, third parties can choose to help those who were treated unfairly by reducing inequality. Such third-party helping as an alternative to third-party punishment has received little attention

In social interactions, our sense of when we have eye contact with another person relies on the distribution of luminance across their eye region, reflecting the position of the darker iris within the lighter sclera of the human eye. This distribution of luminance can be distorted by the lighting conditions, consistent with the fundamental challenge that the visual system faces in distinguishing the

Intact recognition of familiar faces is critical for appropriate social interactions. Thus, the human face processing system should be optimized for familiar face recognition. Blauch et al. (2020) used face recognition deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) that are trained to maximize recognition of the trained (familiar) identities, to model human unfamiliar and familiar face recognition. In

Current studies on visuomotor decision making come to inconsistent conclusions regarding the optimality with which these decisions are made. When executing rapid reaching movements under uncertainty, humans tend to automatically select optimal movement paths that take into account the position of all potential targets (spatial averaging). In contrast, humans rarely employ optimal strategies when making

We agree with Blauch, Behrmann, and Plaut (2020) on a number of points, and are reassured that their data bear out our previous findings. We discuss differences in modelling style, and the usefulness of different types of model for supporting psychological understanding. We emphasise the role that within-person variability plays in recognising familiar faces and clarify the range over which it is idiosyncratic

Plural morphology in English is associated with a multiplicity inference. For example, “Emily fed giraffes” is typically interpreted to mean that Emily fed multiple giraffes. It has long been observed that this inference disappears in downward-entailing linguistic environments, such as in the scope of negation. For example, “Emily didn't feed giraffes” does not merely suggest that she didn't feed multiple

While the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie episodic future thinking are increasingly well understood, little is known about how the temporal unfolding of events is represented in future simulations. In this study, we leveraged wearable camera technology to examine whether real-world events are structured and compressed in the same way when imagining the future as when remembering the past

To best interact with the external world, humans are often required to consider the quality of their actions. Sometimes the environment furnishes rewards or punishments to signal action efficacy. However, when such feedback is absent or only partial, we must rely on internally generated signals to evaluate our performance (i.e., metacognition). Yet, very little is known about how humans form such judgements

When judging what caused an event, people do not treat all factors equally – for instance, they will say that a forest fire was caused by a lit match, and not mention the oxygen in the air which helped fuel the fire. We develop a computational model formalizing the idea that causal judgment is designed to identify “portable” causes - causes that are likely to generalize across a variety of background

Prior research indicates that solutions accompanied by an Aha! experience are remembered better than those missing this feeling of epiphany. The question for the present studies was whether this insight memory advantage for problem solutions is modulated by the affective component of insight (the strong feelings that typically accompany the Aha! experience), or by the cognitive component (the restructuring

We investigate the role of information-theoretic measures for compound word reading in two languages: Mandarin Chinese and English. For each language, we report the results of two analyses: a time-to-event analysis using piece-wise additive mixed models (PAMMs) and a causal inference analysis with causal additive models (CAMs). We use the PAMM analyses to gain insight into the temporal profile of the

It is unclear how implicit prior knowledge is involved and remains persistent in the extraction of the statistical structure underlying sensory input. Therefore, this study investigated whether the implicit knowledge of second-order transitional probabilities characterizing a stream of visual stimuli impacts the processing of unpredictable transitional probabilities embedded in a similar input stream

In order to explain the unacceptability of certain long-distance dependencies – termed syntactic islands by Ross (1967) – syntacticians proposed constraints on long-distance dependencies which are universal and purely syntactic and thus not dependent on the meaning of the construction (Chomsky, 1977; Chomsky, 1995 a.o.). This predicts that these constraints should hold across constructions and languages

Despite the ubiquity of knowledge attribution in human social cognition, its associated neural and cognitive mechanisms are poorly documented. A wealth of converging evidence in cognitive neuroscience has identified independent perspective-taking and inhibitory processes for belief attribution, but the extent to which these processes are shared by knowledge attribution isn't presently understood. Here

Do university ethics classes influence students' real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or

Research indicates that eye movements can reveal expressions of memory for previously studied relationships. Specifically, eye movements are disproportionately drawn to test items that were originally studied with the test scene, compared to other equally familiar items in the test display – an effect known as preferential viewing (e.g., Hannula, Ryan, Tranel, & Cohen, 2007). Across four studies we

Spatial hearing relies on a series of mechanisms for associating auditory cues with positions in space. When auditory cues are altered, humans, as well as other animals, can update the way they exploit auditory cues and partially compensate for their spatial hearing difficulties. In two experiments, we simulated monaural listening in hearing adults by temporarily plugging and muffing one ear, to assess

Some claims (e.g., that the Earth goes around the Sun) seem to call out for explanation: they make us wonder “why?”. For other claims (e.g., that God exists), one might accept that the explanation is a mystery. In the present research, we investigate “need for explanation” and “mystery acceptability” across the domains of science and religion, as a window onto differences between scientific and religious

Work on future thinking suggests that people use what they know about the world (e.g., contents of memory) to make predictions about events to come, which reflects an adaptive use of memory. Less work, however, has examined whether the outcomes of these predictions—whether the outcome is consistent or inconsistent with predictions—influences memory. In two experiments, participants learned trait information

We can perceive not only low-level features of events such as color and motion, but also seemingly higher-level properties such as causality. A prototypical example of causal perception is the 'launching effect': one object (A) moves toward a stationary second object (B) until they are adjacent, at which point A stops and B starts moving in the same direction. Beyond these motions themselves - and

Phonetic variability across talkers imposes additional processing costs during speech perception, often measured by performance decrements between single- and mixed-talker conditions. However, models differ in their predictions about whether accommodating greater phonetic variability (i.e., more talkers) imposes greater processing costs. We measured speech processing efficiency in a speeded word identification

In two eye-tracking studies we investigated whether readers can detect a violation of the phonological-grammatical convention for the indefinite article an to be followed by a word beginning with a vowel when these two words appear in the parafovea. Across two experiments participants read sentences in which the word an was followed by a parafoveal preview that was either correct (e.g. Icelandic),

Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world's languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using

When humans and other animals make repeated choices, they tend to repeat previously chosen actions independently of their reward history. This paper locates the origin of perseveration in a trade-off between two computational goals: maximizing rewards and minimizing the complexity of the action policy. We develop an information-theoretic formalization of policy complexity and show how optimizing the

Converting a multi-digit number to quantity requires processing not only the digits but also the number's decimal structure, thus raising several issues. First, are all the digits processed in parallel, or serially from left to right? Second, given that the same digit at different places can represent different quantities (e.g., “2” can mean 2, 20, etc.), how is each digit assigned to its correct decimal

Many theories of kind representation suggest that people posit internal, essence-like factors that underlie kind membership and explain properties of category members. Across three studies (N = 281), we document the characteristics of an alternative form of construal according to which the properties of social kinds are seen as products of structural factors: stable, external constraints that obtain

Looking at other people allows us to collect information about them, but it can also reveal our attentional state when we would rather conceal it. We report that individuals spontaneously employ sustained covert monitoring, rather than direct looking, when evaluating the actions of a live stranger. In contrast, individuals look directly at the actions of a stranger on video. We argue that the ability

Attention to relevant stimulus features in a categorization task helps to optimize performance. However, the relationship between attention and categorization is not fully understood. For example, even when human adults and young children exhibit comparable categorization behavior, adults tend to attend selectively during learning, whereas young children tend to attend diffusely (Deng & Sloutsky, 2016)

When naming pictures in mixed-language blocks, bilinguals sometimes exhibit reversed language dominance effects. These have been attributed to proactive inhibitory control of the dominant language, or adaptation of language-specific selection thresholds. Even though reversed dominance arguably provides the most striking evidence of inhibition, few studies have focused on when and why this effect occurs

Humanity's ability to conquer every corner of the planet rests on our inventiveness. But is this inventiveness best explained by individual problem-solving skills or by our species' exceptional social learning abilities? Using a tower-building task, we show that, on average, 3% of 4-6 year old children (n = 180) and adults (n = 192) independently combined tower pieces to produce the most optimal tower

Humans are thought to use the approximate number system (ANS) to make quick approximations based on quantity even before learning to count. However, there has long been controversy regarding the salience of number versus other stimulus dimensions throughout development, including a recent proposal that number sense is derived from a sense of general magnitude. Here, we used a regression approach to

There is an uncountable number of different ways of characterizing almost any given real-world stimulus. This necessitates finding stimulus features that are perceptually relevant - that is, they have distinct and independent effects on the perception and cognition of the stimulus. Here, we provide a theoretical framework for empirically testing the perceptual relevance of stimulus features through

Non-adjacent dependencies are ubiquitous in language, but difficult to learn in artificial language experiments in the lab. Previous research suggests that non-adjacent dependencies are more learnable given structural support in the input - for instance, in the presence of high variability between dependent items. However, not all non-adjacent dependencies occur in supportive contexts. How are such

Cognitive capacity is commonly assumed to predict performance in classic reasoning tasks because people higher in cognitive capacity are believed to be better at deliberately correcting biasing erroneous intuitions. However, recent findings suggest that there can also be a positive correlation between cognitive capacity and correct intuitive thinking. Here we present results from 2 studies that directly