-
Controlling the narrative: Euphemistic language affects judgments of actions while avoiding perceptions of dishonesty Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-24 Alexander C. Walker; Martin Harry Turpin; Ethan A. Meyers; Jennifer A. Stolz; Jonathan A. Fugelsang; Derek J. Koehler
The present work (N = 1906 U.S. residents) investigates the extent to which peoples' evaluations of actions can be biased by the strategic use of euphemistic (agreeable) and dysphemistic (disagreeable) terms. We find that participants' evaluations of actions are made more favorable by replacing a disagreeable term (e.g., torture) with a semantically related agreeable term (e.g., enhanced interrogation)
-
Quantifying flexibility in thought: The resiliency of semantic networks differs across the lifespan Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-24 Abigail L. Cosgrove; Yoed N. Kenett; Roger E. Beaty; Michele T. Diaz
Older adults tend to have a broader vocabulary compared to younger adults – indicating a richer storage of semantic knowledge – but their retrieval abilities decline with age. Recent advances in quantitative methods based on network science have investigated the effect of aging on semantic memory structure. However, it is yet to be determined how this aging effect on semantic memory structure relates
-
The power of allies: Infants' expectations of social obligations during intergroup conflict Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-24 Anthea Pun; Susan A.J. Birch; Andrew Scott Baron
Many species of animals form social allegiances to enhance survival. Across disciplines, researchers have suggested that allegiances form to facilitate within group cooperation and defend each other against rival groups. Here, we explore humans' reasoning about social allegiances and obligations beginning in infancy, long before they have experience with intergroup conflict. In Experiments 1 and 2
-
Multiple-image arrays in face matching tasks with and without memory Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-20 Kay L. Ritchie; Robin S.S. Kramer; Mila Mileva; Adam Sandford; A. Mike Burton
Previous research has shown that exposure to within-person variability facilitates face learning. A different body of work has examined potential benefits of providing multiple images in face matching tasks. Viewers are asked to judge whether a target face matches a single face image (as when checking photo-ID) or multiple face images of the same person. The evidence here is less clear, with some studies
-
Finding the man amongst many: A developmental perspective on mechanisms of morphological decomposition Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-20 Nicola Dawson; Kathleen Rastle; Jessie Ricketts
Skilled reading is characterized by rapid recognition of morphologically complex words. Evidence suggests that adult readers segment complex words into their constituent morphemes during visual word recognition, and that this extends to items that have only a surface morphological structure (e.g., corner), a process termed ‘morpho-orthographic segmentation’. It is not yet known how and when this mechanism
-
A diffusion model analysis of belief bias: Different cognitive mechanisms explain how cognitive abilities and thinking styles contribute to conflict resolution in reasoning Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-21 Anna-Lena Schubert; Mário B. Ferreira; André Mata; Ben Riemenschneider
Recent results have challenged the widespread assumption of dual process models of belief bias that sound reasoning relies on slow, careful reflection, whereas biased reasoning is based on fast intuition. Instead, parallel process models of reasoning suggest that rule- and belief-based problem features are processed in parallel and that reasoning problems that elicit a conflict between rule- and belief-based
-
The ontogeny of early language discrimination: Beyond rhythm Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-19 Konstantina Zacharaki; Nuria Sebastian-Galles
Infants can discriminate languages that belong to different rhythmic classes at birth. The ability to perform within-class discrimination emerges around the fifth month of life. The cues that infants use to discriminate between prosodically close languages remain elusive. Segmental information could be a potential cue, since infants notice vowel mispronunciations of their names, show the first signs
-
When forgetting fosters learning: A neural network model for statistical learning Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-17 Ansgar D. Endress; Scott P. Johnson
Learning often requires splitting continuous signals into recurring units, such as the discrete words constituting fluent speech; these units then need to be encoded in memory. A prominent candidate mechanism involves statistical learning of co-occurrence statistics like transitional probabilities (TPs), reflecting the idea that items from the same unit (e.g., syllables within a word) predict each
-
A common selection mechanism at each linguistic level in bilingual and monolingual language production Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-17 Esti Blanco-Elorrieta; Alfonso Caramazza
The primary goal of research on the functional and neural architecture of bilingualism is to elucidate how bilingual individuals' language architecture is organized such that they can both speak in a single language without accidental insertions of the other, but also flexibly switch between their two languages if the context allows/demands them to. Here we review the principles under which any proposed
-
Encoding and decoding of meaning through structured variability in intonational speech prosody Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-15 Xin Xie; Andrés Buxó-Lugo; Chigusa Kurumada
Speech prosody plays an important role in communication of meaning. The cognitive and computational mechanisms supporting this communication remain to be understood, however. Prosodic cues vary across talkers and speaking conditions, creating ambiguity in the sound-to-meaning mapping. We hypothesize that listeners ameliorate this ambiguity in part by learning talker-specific statistics of prosodic
-
Motivated moral judgments about freedom of speech are constrained by a need to maintain consistency Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-16 Nikolai Haahjem Eftedal; Lotte Thomsen
Speech is a critical means of negotiating political, adaptive interests in human society. Prior research on motivated political cognition has found that support for freedom of speech depends on whether one agrees with its ideological content. However, it remains unclear if people (A) openly hold that some speech should be more free than other speech; or (B) want to feel as if speech content does not
-
Seeing through disguise: Getting to know you with a deep convolutional neural network Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-13 Eilidh Noyes; Connor J. Parde; Y. Ivette Colón; Matthew Q. Hill; Carlos D. Castillo; Rob Jenkins; Alice J. O'Toole
People use disguise to look unlike themselves (evasion) or to look like someone else (impersonation). Evasion disguise challenges human ability to see an identity across variable images; Impersonation challenges human ability to tell people apart. Personal familiarity with an individual face helps humans to see through disguise. Here we propose a model of familiarity based on high-level visual learning
-
Do portrait artists have enhanced face processing abilities? Evidence from hidden Markov modeling of eye movements Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-13 Janet H. Hsiao; Jeehye An; Yueyuan Zheng; Antoni B. Chan
Recent research has suggested the importance of part-based information in face recognition in addition to global, whole-face information. Nevertheless, face drawing experience was reported to enhance selective attention to the eyes but did not improve face recognition performance, leading to speculations about limited plasticity in adult face recognition. Here we examined the mechanism underlying the
-
Assessing abstract thought and its relation to language with a new nonverbal paradigm: Evidence from aphasia Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-15 Peter Langland-Hassan; Frank R. Faries; Maxwell Gatyas; Aimee Dietz; Michael J. Richardson
In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for
-
“The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-13 Letícia Kolberg; Alex de Carvalho; Mireille Babineau; Naomi Havron; Anne-Caroline Fiévet; Bernadete Abaurre; Anne Christophe
This work aims to investigate French children's ability to use phrasal boundaries for disambiguation of a type of ambiguity not yet studied, namely stripping sentences versus simple transitive sentences. We used stripping sentences such as “[Le tigre tape]! [Le canard aussi]!” (“[The tiger is hitting]! [The duck too]!”, in which both the tiger and the duck are hitting), which, without the prosodic
-
Emotional devaluation in ignoring and forgetting as a function of adolescent development Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-12 Ana B. Vivas; Elisavet Chrysochoou; Alejandra Marful; Teresa Bajo
We know that emotion and cognition interact to guide goal-directed behavior. Accordingly, it has recently been shown that distracting stimuli (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003) and instructed to-be-forgotten items (Vivas, Marful, Panagiotidou, & Bajo, 2016) are emotionally devaluated. The devaluation by inhibition hypothesis (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003) is the main theoretical explanation
-
Structural biases that children bring to language learning: A cross-cultural look at gestural input to homesign Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-10 Molly Flaherty; Dea Hunsicker; Susan Goldin-Meadow
Linguistic input has an immediate effect on child language, making it difficult to discern whatever biases children may bring to language-learning. To discover these biases, we turn to deaf children who cannot acquire spoken language and are not exposed to sign language. These children nevertheless produce gestures, called homesigns, which have structural properties found in natural language. We ask
-
‘Clap your hands’ or ‘take your hands’? One-year-olds distinguish between frequent and infrequent multiword phrases Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-09 Barbora Skarabela; Mitsuhiko Ota; Rosie O'Connor; Inbal Arnon
Although words are often described as the basic building blocks of language, there is growing evidence that multiword sequences also play an integral role in language learning and processing. It is not known, however, whether children become sensitive to multiword information at an age when they are still building knowledge of individual words. Using a central fixation paradigm, the present study examined
-
Metric error monitoring: Another generalized mechanism for magnitude representations? Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-08 Ece Yallak; Fuat Balcı
Error monitoring refers to the ability to monitor one's own task performance without explicit feedback. This ability is studied typically in two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigms. Recent research showed that humans can also keep track of the magnitude and direction of errors in different magnitude domains (e.g., numerosity, duration, length). Based on the evidence that suggests a shared mechanism
-
A computational framework for understanding the roles of simplicity and rational support in people's behavior explanations Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-08 Alan Jern; Austin Derrow-Pinion; AJ Piergiovanni
When explaining other people's behavior, people generally find some explanations more satisfying than others. We propose that people judge behavior explanations based on two computational principles: simplicity and rational support—the extent to which an explanation makes the behavior “make sense” under the assumption that the person is a rational agent. Furthermore, we present a computational framework
-
What makes a language easy to learn? A preregistered study on how systematic structure and community size affect language learnability Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-08 Limor Raviv; Marianne de Heer Kloots; Antje Meyer
Cross-linguistic differences in morphological complexity could have important consequences for language learning. Specifically, it is often assumed that languages with more regular, compositional, and transparent grammars are easier to learn by both children and adults. Moreover, it has been shown that such grammars are more likely to evolve in bigger communities. Together, this suggests that some
-
Crossmodal spatial distraction across the lifespan Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-06 Tiziana Pedale; Serena Mastroberardino; Michele Capurso; Andrew J. Bremner; Charles Spence; Valerio Santangelo
The ability to resist distracting stimuli whilst voluntarily focusing on a task is fundamental to our everyday cognitive functioning. Here, we investigated how this ability develops, and thereafter declines, across the lifespan using a single task/experiment. Young children (5–7 years), older children (10–11 years), young adults (20–27 years), and older adults (62–86 years) were presented with complex
-
Mindreading in conversation Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-06 Evan Westra; Jennifer Nagel
How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow
-
Explicit access to phonetic representations in 3-month-old infants Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-07 Karima Mersad; Claire Kabdebon; Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
Preverbal infants are particularly good at discriminating syllables that differ by a single phoneme but do they perceive syllables as a whole unit or can they become aware of the underlying phonemes if their attention is attracted to the relevant level of analysis? We trained 3-month-old infants to pair two consonants, co-articulated with different vowels, with two visual shapes. Using event-related
-
Arc-shaped pitch contours facilitate item recognition in non-human animals Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-05 Juan M. Toro; Paola Crespo-Bojorque
Acoustic changes linked to natural prosody are a key source of information about the organization of language. Both human infants and adults readily take advantage of such changes to discover and memorize linguistic patterns. Do they so because our brain is efficiently wired to specifically process linguistic stimuli? Or are we co-opting for language acquisition purposes more general principles that
-
Speakers extrapolate community-level knowledge from individual linguistic encounters Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-04 Anita Tobar-Henríquez; Hugh Rabagliati; Holly P. Branigan
Speakers' lexical choices are affected by interpersonal-level influences, like a tendency to reuse an interlocutor's words. Here, we examined how those choices are additionally affected by community-level factors, like whether the interlocutor is from their own or another speech community (in-community vs. out-community partner), and how such interpersonal experiences contribute to the acquisition
-
Children integrate speech and gesture across a wider temporal window than speech and action when learning a math concept Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-03 Elizabeth M. Wakefield; Cristina Carrazza; Naureen Hemani-Lopez; Kristin Plath; Susan Goldin-Meadow
It is well established that gesture facilitates learning, but understanding the best way to harness gesture and how gesture helps learners are still open questions. Here, we consider one of the properties that may make gesture a powerful teaching tool: its temporal alignment with spoken language. Previous work shows that the simultaneity of speech and gesture matters when children receive instruction
-
Learning words in space and time: Contrasting models of the suspicious coincidence effect Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-02-01 Gavin W. Jenkins; Larissa K. Samuelson; Will Penny; John P. Spencer
In their 2007b Psychological Review paper, Xu and Tenenbaum found that early word learning follows the classic logic of the “suspicious coincidence effect:” when presented with a novel name (‘fep’) and three identical exemplars (three Labradors), word learners generalized novel names more narrowly than when presented with a single exemplar (one Labrador). Xu and Tenenbaum predicted the suspicious coincidence
-
Culture moderates the relationship between self-control ability and free will beliefs in childhood Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-31 Xin Zhao; Adrienne Wente; María Fernández Flecha; Denise Segovia Galvan; Alison Gopnik; Tamar Kushnir
We investigate individual, developmental, and cultural differences in self-control in relation to children's changing belief in “free will” – the possibility of acting against and inhibiting strong desires. In three studies, 4- to 8-year-olds in the U.S., China, Singapore, and Peru (N = 441) answered questions to gauge their belief in free will and completed a series of self-control and inhibitory
-
The relative salience of numerical and non-numerical dimensions shifts over development: A re-analysis of Tomlinson, DeWind, and Brannon (2020) Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-29 Lauren S. Aulet; Stella F. Lourenco
Visual displays of objects include information about number and other magnitudes such as cumulative surface area. Despite the confluence of cues, a prevalent view is that number is uniquely salient within multidimensional stimuli. Consistent with this view, Tomlinson et al. (2020) report that, in addition to greater acuity for number than area among both children and adults, number biases area judgments
-
Negative mental representations in infancy Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-29 Jean-Rémy Hochmann; Juan M. Toro
How do infants' thoughts compare to the thoughts adults express with language? In particular, can infants entertain negative representations, such as not red or not here? In four experiments, we used pupillometry to ask whether negative representations are possible without an external language. Eleven-month-olds were tested on their ability to detect and represent the abstract structure of sequences
-
Eye movements and the label feedback effect: Speaking modulates visual search via template integrity Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-25 Katherine P. Hebert; Stephen D. Goldinger; Stephen C. Walenchok
The label-feedback hypothesis (Lupyan, 2012) proposes that language modulates low- and high-level visual processing, such as priming visual object perception. Lupyan and Swingley (2012) found that repeating target names facilitates visual search, resulting in shorter response times (RTs) and higher accuracy. In the present investigation, we conceptually replicated and extended their study, using additional
-
Eye movements during visual imagery and perception show spatial correspondence but have unique temporal signatures Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-25 Lilla M. Gurtner; Matthias Hartmann; Fred W. Mast
Eye fixation patterns during mental imagery are similar to those during perception of the same picture, suggesting that oculomotor mechanisms play a role in mental imagery (i.e., the “looking at nothing” effect). Previous research has focused on the spatial similarities of eye movements during perception and mental imagery. The primary aim of this study was to assess whether the spatial similarity
-
The violin case Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Lila R. Gleitman; Claire Gleitman
Three humorous episodes, reproduced here, illustrate debates that played out on the pages of Cognition under the aegis of its founding editor, Jacques Mehler. These are the formal structure of language, the mechanisms by which speech unfolds in time, and the constrained creativity of ordinary language use.
-
Maternal stress predicts neural responses during auditory statistical learning in 26-month-old children: An event-related potential study Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Lara J. Pierce; Erin Carmody Tague; Charles A. Nelson
Exposure to high levels of early life stress have been associated with long-term difficulties in learning, behavior, and health, with particular impact evident in the language domain. While some have proposed that the increased stress of living in a low-income household mediates observed associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and child outcomes, considerable individual differences have been
-
Prosody leaks into the memories of words Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-25 Kevin Tang; Jason A. Shaw
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend to occur in less predictable environments. One account of the informativity effect on duration is that the acoustic details of probabilistic reduction are stored
-
Visual perspective-taking and image-like representations: We don't see it Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-25 Steven Samuel; Klara Hagspiel; Madeline J. Eacott; Geoff G. Cole
The ability to represent another agent's visual perspective has recently been attributed to a process called “perceptual simulation”, whereby we generate an image-like or “quasi-perceptual” representation of another agent's vision. In an extensive series of experiments we tested this notion. Adult observers were presented with pictures of an agent looking at two horizontal lines, one of which was closer
-
The effect of uncertainty on prediction error in the action perception loop Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-23 Kelsey Perrykkad; Rebecca P. Lawson; Sharna Jamadar; Jakob Hohwy
Among all their sensations, agents need to distinguish between those caused by themselves and those caused by external causes. The ability to infer agency is particularly challenging under conditions of uncertainty. Within the predictive processing framework, this should happen through active control of prediction error that closes the action-perception loop. Here we use a novel, temporally-sensitive
-
Expectations from relative clauses: Real-time coherence updates in discourse processing Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-23 Jet Hoek; Hannah Rohde; Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul; Ted J.M. Sanders
When processing a text, comprehenders use available cues to anticipate both upcoming content and the dependencies that comprise the structure of the growing discourse. In an eye-tracking while reading experiment, we test discourse updating in passages in which dependencies are implicit and the segments convey content that is not required to participate in any coherence-driven inference. This study
-
Cognitive models of optimal sequential search with recall Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-21 Sudeep Bhatia; Lisheng He; Wenjia Joyce Zhao; Pantelis P. Analytis
Many everyday decisions require sequential search, according to which available choice options are observed one at a time, with each observation involving some cost to the decision maker. In these tasks, decision makers need to trade-off the chances of finding better options with the cost of search. Optimal strategies in such tasks involve threshold decision rules, which terminate the search as soon
-
The future is in front, to the right, or below: Development of spatial representations of time in three dimensions Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-21 Ariel Starr; Mahesh Srinivasan
Across cultures, people frequently communicate about time in terms of space. English speakers in the United States, for example, might “look forward” to the future or gesture toward the left when talking about the past. As shown by these examples, different dimensions of space are used to represent different temporal concepts. Here, we explored how cultural factors and individual differences shape
-
Evaluating models of robust word recognition with serial reproduction Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-19 Stephan C. Meylan; Sathvik Nair; Thomas L. Griffiths
Spoken communication occurs in a “noisy channel” characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input, robust spoken word recognition—and language processing more generally—relies heavily on listeners' prior knowledge to evaluate whether candidate interpretations of
-
Early visual deprivation does not prevent the emergence of basic numerical abilities in blind children Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-19 Virginie Crollen; Hélène Warusfel; Marie-Pascale Noël; Olivier Collignon
Studies involving congenitally blind adults shows that visual experience is not a mandatory prerequisite for the emergence of efficient numerical abilities. It remains however unknown whether blind adults developed lifelong strategies to compensate for the absence of foundations vision would provide in infancy. We therefore assessed basic numerical abilities in blind and sighted children of 6 to 13 years
-
Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-19 Corey Cusimano; Tania Lombrozo
When faced with a dilemma between believing what is supported by an impartial assessment of the evidence (e.g., that one's friend is guilty of a crime) and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation (e.g., that the friend is innocent), people often believe in line with the latter. But is this how people think beliefs ought to be formed? We addressed this question across three studies and
-
The emergence of word-internal repetition through iterated learning: Explaining the mismatch between learning biases and language design Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-16 Mitsuhiko Ota; Aitor San José; Kenny Smith
The idea that natural language is shaped by biases in learning plays a key role in our understanding of how human language is structured, but its corollary that there should be a correspondence between typological generalisations and ease of acquisition is not always supported. For example, natural languages tend to avoid close repetitions of consonants within a word, but developmental evidence suggests
-
Intelligibility of face-masked speech depends on speaking style: Comparing casual, clear, and emotional speech Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-12 Michelle Cohn; Anne Pycha; Georgia Zellou
This study investigates the impact of wearing a fabric face mask on speech comprehension, an underexplored topic that can inform theories of speech production. Speakers produced sentences in three speech styles (casual, clear, positive-emotional) while in both face-masked and non-face-masked conditions. Listeners were most accurate at word identification in multi-talker babble for sentences produced
-
Individual differences in voice adaptability are specifically linked to voice perception skill Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-12 Patricia E.G. Bestelmeyer; Constanze Mühl
There are remarkable individual differences in the ability to recognise individuals by the sound of their voice. Theoretically, this ability is thought to depend on the coding accuracy of voices in a low-dimensional “voice-space”. Here we were interested in how adaptive coding of voice identity relates to this variability in skill. In two adaptation experiments we explored first whether the aftereffect
-
Perceived similarity of imagined possible worlds affects judgments of counterfactual plausibility Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-11 Felipe De Brigard; Paul Henne; Matthew L. Stanley
People frequently entertain counterfactual thoughts, or mental simulations about alternative ways the world could have been. But the perceived plausibility of those counterfactual thoughts varies widely. The current article interfaces research in the philosophy and semantics of counterfactual statements with the psychology of mental simulations, and it explores the role of perceived similarity in judgments
-
Do doorways really matter: Investigating memory benefits of event segmentation in a virtual learning environment Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-07 Matthew R. Logie; David I. Donaldson
Event segmentation allows the flow of information experienced in life to be partitioned into distinct episodes, facilitating understanding of the world, action within it, and the ability to store information in memory. One basis on which experiences are segmented is the presence of physical boundaries, such as walking through doorways. Previous findings have shown that event segmentation has a significant
-
Simultaneous estimation procedure reveals the object-based, but not space-based, dependence of visual working memory representations Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-03 Hirotaka Sone; Min-Suk Kang; Aedan Y. Li; Hiroyuki Tsubomi; Keisuke Fukuda
Visual working memory (VWM) allows us to actively represent a limited amount of visual information in mind. Although its severe capacity limit is widely accepted, researchers disagree on the nature of its representational unit. Object-based theories argue that VWM organizes feature representations into integrated representations, whereas feature-based theories argue that VWM represents visual features
-
Stem similarity modulates infants' acquisition of phonological alternations Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-03 Megha Sundara; James White; Yun Jung Kim; Adam J. Chong
Phonemes have variant pronunciations depending on context. For instance, in American English, the [t] in pat [pæt] and the [d] in pad [pæd] are both realized with a tap [ɾ] when the –ing suffix is attached, [pæɾɪŋ]. We show that despite greater distributional and acoustic support for the [t]-tap alternation, 12-month-olds successfully relate taps to stems with a perceptually-similar final [d], not
-
Beyond moral dilemmas: The role of reasoning in five categories of utilitarian judgment Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-02 François Jaquet; Florian Cova
Over the past two decades, the study of moral reasoning has been heavily influenced by Joshua Greene’s dual-process model of moral judgment, according to which deontological judgments are typically supported by intuitive, automatic processes while utilitarian judgments are typically supported by reflective, conscious processes. However, most of the evidence gathered in support of this model comes from
-
Sensitive periods for social development: Interactions between predisposed and learned mechanisms Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2021-01-02 Orsola Rosa-Salva; Uwe Mayer; Elisabetta Versace; Marie Hébert; Bastien S. Lemaire; Giorgio Vallortigara
We analysed research that makes use of precocial species as animal models to describe the interaction of predisposed mechanisms and environmental factors in early learning, in particular for the development of social cognition. We also highlight the role of sensitive periods in this interaction, focusing on domestic chicks as one of the main animal models for this field. In the first section of the
-
A computational cognitive model of judgments of relative direction Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Phillip M. Newman; Gregory E. Cox; Timothy P. McNamara
In the past several decades, considerable theoretical progress has been made in understanding the role of reference frames in the encoding and retrieval of spatial information about the environment. Many of these insights have come from participants making judgments of relative direction using their memories of spatial layouts. In this task, participants are asked to imagine standing at a given location
-
Tactile interactions in the path of tactile apparent motion Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Souta Hidaka; Luigi Tamè; Matthew R. Longo
Perceptual completion is a fundamental perceptual function serving to maintain robust perception against noise. For example, we can perceive a vivid experience of motion even for the discrete inputs across time and space (apparent motion: AM). In vision, stimuli irrelevant to AM perception are suppressed to maintain smooth AM perception along the AM trajectory where no physical inputs are applied.
-
Activating episodic simulation increases affective empathy Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2020-12-29 Marius C. Vollberg; Brendan Gaesser; Mina Cikara
Affective empathy, feeling what others feel, is a powerful emotion that binds us to one another. Here we ask whether how we mentally represent the scene in which another suffers informs our emotions. For example, when we learn about someone suffering outside of the here and now, such as a refugee devastated by violence or famine, does a manipulation potentiating our ability to simulate the scene around
-
Attention need not always apply: Mind wandering impedes explicit but not implicit sequence learning Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2020-12-28 Nicholaus P. Brosowsky; Samuel Murray; Jonathan W. Schooler; Paul Seli
According to the attentional resources account, mind wandering (or “task-unrelated thought”) is thought to compete with a focal task for attentional resources. Here, we tested two key predictions of this account: First, that mind wandering should not interfere with performance on a task that does not require attentional resources; second, that as task requirements become automatized, performance should
-
Training enhances the ability of listeners to exploit visual information for auditory scene analysis Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2020-12-26 Huriye Atilgan; Jennifer K. Bizley
The ability to use temporal relationships between cross-modal cues facilitates perception and behavior. Previously we observed that temporally correlated changes in the size of a visual stimulus and the intensity in an auditory stimulus influenced the ability of listeners to perform an auditory selective attention task (Maddox, Atilgan, Bizley, & Lee, 2015). Participants detected timbral changes in
-
Reconstructive nature of temporal memory for movie scenes Cognition (IF 3.294) Pub Date : 2020-12-26 Matteo Frisoni; Monica Di Ghionno; Roberto Guidotti; Annalisa Tosoni; Carlo Sestieri
Remembering when events took place is a key component of episodic memory. Using a sensitive behavioral measure, the present study investigates whether spontaneous event segmentation and script-based prior knowledge affect memory for the time of movie scenes. In three experiments, different groups of participants were asked to indicate when short video clips extracted from a previously encoded movie
-
Contents have been reproduced by permission of the publishers.