Understanding the mechanisms enabling the learning and flexible use of knowledge in context-appropriate ways has been a major focus of research in the study of both semantic cognition and cognitive control. We present a unified model of semantics and control that addresses these questions from both perspectives. The model provides a coherent view of how semantic knowledge, and the ability to flexibly

Partisan animosity has been growing in the United States and around the world over the past few decades, fueling efforts by researchers and practitioners to help heal the divide. Many studies have been conducted to test interventions that aim to promote open-mindedness; however, these studies have been conducted in disparate literatures that do not always use the same terminology. In this review, we

To navigate changes within a highly dynamic and complex environment, it is crucial to compare current visual representations of a scene to previously formed representations stored in memory. This process of mental comparison requires integrating information from multiple sources to inform decisions about changes within the environment. In the present article, we combine a novel systems factorial technology

Memory theories distinguish between item and associative information, which are engaged by different tasks: item recognition uses item information to decide whether an event occurred in a particular context; associative recognition uses associative information to decide whether two events occurred together. Associative recognition is slower and less accurate than item recognition, suggesting that item

Within psychology, the underachievement of students from working-class backgrounds has often been explained as a product of individual characteristics such as a lack of intelligence or motivation. Here, we propose an integrated model illustrating how educational contexts contribute to social class disparities in education over and beyond individual characteristics. According to this new Social Class-Academic

The explanation of psychological phenomena is a central aim of psychological science. However, the nature of explanation and the processes by which we evaluate whether a theory explains a phenomenon are often unclear. Consequently, it is often unknown whether a given psychological theory indeed explains a phenomenon. We address this shortcoming by proposing a productive account of explanation: a theory

Research on saccadic and pursuit eye movements led to great advances in our understanding of sensorimotor processing and human behavior. However, studies often have focused on isolated saccadic and pursuit eye movements measured with respect to different sensory information (static vs. dynamic targets). Here, we leveraged interindividual differences across a carefully balanced combination of different

A central goal of research into language acquisition is explaining how, when learners generalize to new cases, they appropriately restrict their generalizations (e.g., to avoid producing ungrammatical utterances such as *the clown laughed the man; "*" indicates an ungrammatical form). The past 30 years have seen an unresolved debate between statistical preemption and entrenchment as explanations. Under

Science and religion are influential social forces, and their interplay has been subject to many public and scholarly debates. The present article addresses how people mentally conceptualize the relationship between science and religion and how these conceptualizations can be systematized. To that end, we provide a comprehensive, integrative review of the pertinent literature. Moreover, we discuss

Work on the "double empathy problem" (DEP) is rapidly growing in academic and applied settings (e.g., clinical practice). It is most popular in research on conditions, like autism, which are characterized by social cognitive difficulties. Drawing from this literature, we propose that, while research on the DEP has the potential to improve understanding of both typical and atypical social processes

Cognitive science is a study of human universals. This assumption, which we will refer to as the Newtonian principle (NP), explicitly or implicitly pervades the theory, methods, and prose of most cognitive research. This is despite at least half a century of sustained critique by cross-cultural and anthropologically oriented researchers and glaring counterexamples such as the study of literacy. We

Humans selectively attend to task-relevant information in order to make accurate decisions. However, selective attention incurs consequences if the learning environment changes unexpectedly. This trade-off has been underscored by studies that compare learning behaviors between adults and young children: broad sampling during learning comes with a breadth of information in memory, often allowing children

Implicit leadership theories (ILTs) are people's lay theories, definitions, or conceptualizations of leadership. In adults, they determine what actions we perceive as leadership, influence to whom we grant leadership status, and shape our own behaviors when we want to be seen as leader. Naturally, there has been an enduring interest in how these ILTs develop in children. Current theorizing on the development

Humans and other animals are able to perceive and represent a number of objects present in a scene, a core cognitive ability thought to underlie the development of mathematics. However, the perceptual mechanisms that underpin this capacity remain poorly understood. Here, we show that our visual sense of number derives from a visual system designed to efficiently encode the location of objects in scenes

Although the Bayesian paradigm is an important benchmark in studies of human inference, the extent to which it provides a useful framework to account for human behavior remains debated. We document systematic departures from Bayesian inference under correct beliefs, even on average, in the estimates by experimental subjects of the probability of a binary event following observations of successive realizations

Perfectly rational decision making is almost always out of reach for people because their computational resources are limited. Instead, people may rely on computationally frugal heuristics that usually yield good outcomes. Although previous research has identified many such heuristics, discovering good heuristics and predicting when they will be used remains challenging. Here, we present a theoretical

Why do we punish negligence? Some current accounts raise the possibility that it can be explained by the kinds of processes that lead us to punish ordinary harmful acts, such as outcome bias, character inference, or antecedent deliberative choices. Although they capture many important cases, these explanations fail to account for others. We argue that, in addition to these phenomena, there is something

Reports an error in "Levels of analysis and explanatory progress in psychology: Integrating frameworks from biology and cognitive science for a more comprehensive science of the mind" by Laith Al-Shawaf (Psychological Review, Advanced Online Publication, Jan 22, 2024, np). Incorrect italic formatting was removed throughout the article, and an unnecessary paragraph of text was removed from the "Levels

Orthographic processing is an open problem. Decades of visual word recognition research have fueled the development of various theoretical frameworks. Although these frameworks have had good explanatory power, various recent results cannot be satisfactorily captured in any model. In order to account for old and new phenomena alike, here I present a new theory of how the brain computes letter positions

The present research develops a predictive model of prejudice. For nearly a century, psychology and other fields have sought to scientifically understand and describe the causes of prejudice. Numerous theories of prejudice now exist. Yet these theories are overwhelmingly defined verbally and thus lack the ability to precisely predict when and to what extent prejudice will emerge. The abundance of theory

This article introduces an integrated and biologically inspired theory of decision making, motor preparation, and motor execution. The theory is formalized as an extension of the diffusion model, in which diffusive accumulated evidence from the decision-making process is continuously conveyed to motor areas of the brain that prepare the response, where it is smoothed by a mechanism that approximates

We are all constantly going in and out of sync with the people we meet in our lives: significant others, incidental encounters, and strangers. Synchrony is a ubiquitous phenomenon, considered an evolution-based mechanism of survival. In recent years, technological development has made it possible to collect much data on synchrony across disciplines. The collected data show great potential to shed light

Why do some mental activities feel harder than others? The answer to this question is surprisingly controversial. Current theories propose that cognitive effort affords a computational benefit, such as instigating a switch from an activity with low reward value to a different activity with higher reward value. By contrast, in this article, I relate cognitive effort to the fact that brain neuroanatomy

Sensory perception is widely considered an inference process that reflects the best guess of a stimulus feature based on uncertain sensory information. Here we challenge this reductionist view and propose that perception is rather a holistic inference process that operates not only at the feature but jointly across all levels of the representational hierarchy. We test this hypothesis in the context

Pavlovian conditioning is widely used to study the substrates of learning and memory in the mammalian brain. In a standard protocol, subjects are exposed to pairings of a conditioned stimulus (CS; e.g., a tone) with an unconditioned stimulus (US; e.g., an electric shock). Subsequent presentations of the CS elicit a range of behaviors that relate to the US (e.g., freezing) showing that animals learned

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Psychological Review on Mar 14 2024 (see record 2024-63968-001). Incorrect italic formatting was removed throughout the article, and an unnecessary paragraph of text was removed from the "Levels of Analysis and the Branches of Psychology: What Is Needed for a Complete Explanation of a Behavior or Cognitive System?" section. These

According to ideomotor theory, actions are represented, controlled, and retrieved in terms of the perceptual effects that these actions experientially engender. When agents perform a motor action, they observe its subsequent perceptual effects and establish action-effect associations. When they want to achieve this effect at a later time, they use the action-effect associations to preactivate the action

Engaging in contemplative practice like meditation, yoga, and prayer, is beneficial for psychological and physical well-being. Recent research has identified several underlying psychological and biological pathways that explain these benefits. However, there is not yet consensus on the underlying overlapping physiological mechanisms of contemplative practice benefits. In this article, we integrate

Perception and action rely on integrating or binding different features of stimuli and responses. Such bindings are short-lived, but they can be retrieved for a limited amount of time if any of their features is reactivated. This is particularly true for stimulus-response bindings, allowing for flexible recycling of previous action plans. A relation to learning of stimulus-response associations suggests

Questions on early sapiens cognition, the cognitive abilities of our ancestors, are intriguing but notoriously hard to tackle. Leaving no hard traces in the archeological record, these abilities need to be inferred from indirect evidence, informed by our understanding of present-day cognition. Most of such attempts acknowledge the role that culture, as a faculty, has played for human evolution, but

Spatial distributional semantic models represent word meanings in a vector space. While able to model many basic semantic tasks, they are limited in many ways, such as their inability to represent multiple kinds of relations in a single semantic space and to directly leverage indirect relations between two lexical representations. To address these limitations, we propose a distributional graphical

The N-back task is often considered to be a canonical example of a task that relies on working memory (WM), requiring both maintenance of representations of previously presented stimuli and also processing of these representations. In particular, the set-size effect in this task (e.g., poorer performance on three-back than two-back judgments), as in others, is often interpreted as indicating that the

For over 35 years, the violation-of-expectation paradigm has been used to study the development of expectations in the first 3 years of life. A wide range of expectations has been examined, including physical, psychological, sociomoral, biological, numerical, statistical, probabilistic, and linguistic expectations. Surprisingly, despite the paradigm's widespread use and the many seminal findings it

The representation of complex phenomena via combinations of simple discrete features is a hallmark of human cognition. But it is not clear exactly how (or whether) discrete features can effectively represent the complex probabilistic fabric of the environment. This article introduces information-theoretic tools for quantifying the fidelity and efficiency of a featural representation with respect to

People's decisions often deviate from classical notions of rationality, incurring costs to themselves and society. One way to reduce the costs of poor decisions is to redesign the decision problems people face to encourage better choices. While often subtle, these nudges can have dramatic effects on behavior and are increasingly popular in public policy, health care, and marketing. Although nudges

Most of us have experienced moments when we could not recall some piece of information but felt that it was just out of reach. Research in metamemory has established that such judgments are often accurate; but what adaptive purpose do they serve? Here, we present an optimal model of how metacognitive monitoring (feeling of knowing) could dynamically inform metacognitive control of memory (the direction

Induction-the ability to generalize from existing knowledge-is the cornerstone of intelligence. Cognitive models of human induction are largely limited to toy problems and cannot make quantitative predictions for the thousands of different induction arguments that have been studied by researchers, or to the countless induction arguments that could be encountered in everyday life. Leading large language

The additive utility theory of discounting is extended to probability and commodity discounting. Because the utility of a good and the disutility of its delay combine additively, increases in the utility of a good offset the disutility of its delay: Increasing the former slows the apparent discount even with the latter, time-disutility, remaining invariant, giving the magnitude effect. Conjoint measurement

The multicomponent nature of executive functions (EF) has long been recognized, pushing for a better understanding of both the commonalities and the diversity between EF components. Despite the advances made, the operationalization of performance in EF tasks remains rather heterogeneous, and the structure of EF as modeled by confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) is still a topic of debate (Karr et al

People often form polarized beliefs, imbuing objects (e.g., themselves or others) with unambiguously positive or negative qualities. In clinical settings, this is referred to as dichotomous thinking or "splitting" and is a feature of several psychiatric disorders. Here, we introduce a Bayesian model of splitting that parameterizes a tendency to rigidly categorize objects as either entirely "Bad" or

Developing an accurate model of another agent's knowledge is central to communication and cooperation between agents. In this article, we propose a hierarchical framework of knowledge assessment that explains how people construct mental models of their own knowledge and the knowledge of others. Our framework posits that people integrate information about their own and others' knowledge via Bayesian

Decades of findings in psychology suggest that human belief is thoroughly irrational. At best, beliefs might be formed by heuristic processes that predictably lead to suboptimal outcomes. At worst, they are slaves to motivated reasoning, which allows people to come to whichever conclusions they prefer. In this article, we suggest that belief updating, narrowly construed, may be a rational process that

This article describes UMA (Unified Model of Arithmetic), a theory of children's arithmetic implemented as a computational model. UMA builds on FARRA (Fraction Arithmetic Reflects Rules and Associations; Braithwaite et al., 2017), a model of children's fraction arithmetic. Whereas FARRA-like all previous models of arithmetic-focused on arithmetic with only one type of number, UMA simulates arithmetic

People use language to influence others' beliefs and actions. Yet models of communication have diverged along these lines, formalizing the speaker's objective in terms of either the listener's beliefs or actions. We argue that this divergence lies at the root of a longstanding controversy over the Gricean maxims of truthfulness and relevance. We first bridge the divide by introducing a speaker model

Auditory perceptual deficits are widely observed among children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Yet, the nature of these deficits and the extent to which they explain speech and language problems remain controversial. In this study, we hypothesize that disruption to the maturation of the basilar membrane may impede the optimization of the auditory pathway from brainstem to cortex, curtailing

Face matching consists of the ability to decide whether two face images (or more) belong to the same person or to different identities. Face matching is crucial for efficient face recognition and plays an important role in applied settings such as passport control and eyewitness memory. However, despite extensive research, the mechanisms that govern face-matching performance are still not well understood

The ecological approach to psychology has been a main antecedent of embodied and situated approaches to cognition. The concept of affordances in particular has gained currency throughout psychological science. Yet, contemporary ecological psychology has seemed inaccessible to outsiders and protective of its legacy. Indeed, some prominent ecological psychologists have presented their approach as a "package

Individual differences in processing speed and executive attention have both been proposed as explanations for individual differences in cognitive ability, particularly general and fluid intelligence (Engle et al., 1999; Kail & Salthouse, 1994). Both constructs have long intellectual histories in scientific psychology. This article attempts to describe the historical development of these constructs

A key component of humans' striking creativity in solving problems is our ability to construct novel descriptions to help us characterize novel concepts. Bongard problems (BPs), which challenge the problem solver to come up with a rule for distinguishing visual scenes that fall into two categories, provide an elegant test of this ability. BPs are challenging for both human and machine category learners

The 11th version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) includes complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) as a separate diagnostic entity alongside posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). ICD-11 CPTSD is defined by six sets of symptoms, three that are shared with PTSD (reexperiencing in the here and now, avoidance, and sense of current threat) and three (affective dysregulation

Whether working memory reflects a thresholded recollection process whereby only a limited number of items are maintained in memory, or a signal detection process in which each studied item is increased in familiarity strength, is a topic of considerable debate. A review of visual working memory studies that have examined receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) across a broad set of materials and

Normative models of decision-making that optimally transform noisy (sensory) information into categorical decisions qualitatively mismatch human behavior. Indeed, leading computational models have only achieved high empirical corroboration by adding task-specific assumptions that deviate from normative principles. In response, we offer a Bayesian approach that implicitly produces a posterior distribution

Everything that happens has a multitude of causes, but people make causal judgments effortlessly. How do people select one particular cause (e.g., the lightning bolt that set the forest ablaze) out of the set of factors that contributed to the event (the oxygen in the air, the dry weather … )? Cognitive scientists have suggested that people make causal judgments about an event by simulating alternative

Since the cognitive revolution, language and action have been compared as cognitive systems, with cross-domain convergent views recently gaining renewed interest in biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Language and action are both combinatorial systems whose mode of combination has been argued to be hierarchical, combining elements into constituents of increasingly larger size. This structural

We systematically misjudge our own performance in simple economic tasks. First, we generally overestimate our ability to make correct choices-a bias called overconfidence. Second, we are more confident in our choices when we seek gains than when we try to avoid losses-a bias we refer to as the valence-induced confidence bias. Strikingly, these two biases are also present in reinforcement-learning (RL)

Identifying early causal factors leading to the development of poor mental health and behavioral outcomes is essential to design efficient preventive interventions. The substantial associations observed between parental risk factors (e.g., maternal stress in pregnancy, parental education, parental psychopathology, parent-child relationship) and child outcomes point toward the importance of parents

Analyses of human reaction to economic incentives reveal contradictory deviations from maximization. For example, underinvestment in the stock market suggests risk aversion, but insufficient diversification of financial assets suggests risk-seeking. Leading explanations for these contradictions assume that different choice environments (e.g., different framings) trigger different biases. Our analysis

How can choice, confidence, and response times be modeled simultaneously? Here, we propose the new dynamical weighted evidence and visibility (dynWEV) model, an extension of the drift-diffusion model of decision-making, to account for choices, reaction times, and confidence simultaneously. The decision process in a binary perceptual task is described as a Wiener process accumulating sensory evidence

Understanding model complexity is important for developing useful psychological models. One way to think about model complexity is in terms of the predictions a model makes and the ability of empirical evidence to falsify those predictions. We argue that existing measures of falsifiability have important limitations and develop a new measure. KL-delta uses Kullback-Leibler divergence to compare the

Most words have multiple meanings, but there are foundationally distinct accounts for this. Categorical theories posit that humans maintain discrete entries for distinct word meanings, as in a dictionary. Continuous ones eschew discrete sense representations, arguing that word meanings are best characterized as trajectories through a continuous state space. Both kinds of approach face empirical challenges