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

We address four issues in response to Osth and Hurlstone's (2022) commentary on the context retrieval and updating (CRU) theory of serial order (Logan, 2021). First, we clarify the relations between CRU, chains, and associations. We show that CRU is not equivalent to a chaining theory and uses similarity rather than association to retrieve contexts. Second, we fix an error Logan (2021) made in accounting

Mindsets of ability (i.e., "fixed" and "growth" mindsets) play a pivotal role in students' academic trajectories. However, relatively little is known about the mechanisms underlying mindset development. Identifying these mechanisms is vital for understanding, and potentially influencing, how mindsets emerge and change over time. In this article, we formulate a comprehensive theoretical model that purports

As first reported several decades ago, pigeons (Columba livia) sometimes choose options that provide less food over options that provide more food. This behavior has been variously referred to as suboptimal, maladaptive, or paradoxical because it lowers overall food intake. A great deal of research has been directed at understanding the conditions under which animals and people make suboptimal choices

Language and social cognition come together in communication, but their relation has been intensely contested. Here, I argue that these two distinctively human abilities are connected in a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one cognitive skill boosts the development of the other. More specifically, I hypothesize that language and social cognition codevelop in ontogeny and coevolve in

Bayesian optimal inference is often heralded as a principled, general framework for human perception. However, optimal inference requires integration over all possible world states, which quickly becomes intractable in complex real-world settings. Additionally, deviations from optimal inference have been observed in human decisions. A number of approximation methods have previously been suggested,

Hunger refers to (1) the meaning of certain bodily sensations; (2) a mental state of anticipation that food will be good to eat; and (3) an organizing principal, which prioritizes feeding. Definitions (1) and (2) are the focus here, as (3) can be considered their consequent. Definition (1) has been linked to energy-depletion models of hunger, but these are no longer thought viable. Definition (2) has

Extensive research in the behavioral sciences has addressed people's ability to learn stationary probabilities, which stay constant over time, but only recently have there been attempts to model the cognitive processes whereby people learn-and track-nonstationary probabilities. In this context, the old debate on whether learning occurs by the gradual formation of associations or by occasional shifts

Recently, there is a renewed debate concerning the role of perspective in vision. Morales et al. (2020) present evidence that, in the case of viewing a rotated coin, the visual system is sensitive to what has often been called "perspectival shapes." It has generated vigorous discussions, including an online symposium by Morales and Cohen, an exchange between Linton (2021) and Morales et al. (2021)

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most prevalent and highly debated diagnosis for mental disorder in practice today. Two decades of research have substantially contributed to evolving conceptualizations and understanding of the condition. However, this evolution has not been extended to theoretical research. Current cognitive behavioral-based theories aim to identify the

Police investigators worldwide use lineups to test an eyewitness's memory of a perpetrator. A typical lineup consists of one suspect (who is innocent or guilty) plus five or more fillers who resemble the suspect and who are known to be innocent. Although eyewitness identification decisions were once biased by police pressure and poorly constructed lineups, decades of social science research led to

Inhibition can be defined as a phenomenon in which an agent prevents or suppresses a behavioral state that would otherwise occur. Associative learning studies have extensively examined how experiences shape the acquisition of inhibitory behavioral tendencies across many species and situations. Associative inhibitory phenomena can be studied at various levels of analysis. One could focus on the trajectory

Self-control describes the processes by which individuals control their habits, desires, and impulses in the service of long-term goals. Research has identified important components of self-control and proposed theoretical frameworks integrating these components (e.g., Inzlicht et al., 2021; Kotabe & Hofmann, 2015). In our perspective, these frameworks, however, do not yet fully incorporate important

Impaired inhibitory control is a core transdiagnostic mechanism in psychopathology. Directly targeting inhibitory control in intervention studies has, however, produced only little improvement. Recently, promising improvements in inhibitory control were shown by capitalizing on the inhibitory spillover effect (ISE). The central requirement of ISE is a simultaneous execution of two tasks, allowing for

In this article, existing research investigating how school performance relates to cognitive, self-awareness, language, and personality processes is reviewed. We outline the architecture of the mind, involving a general factor, g, that underlies distinct mental processes (i.e., executive, reasoning, language, cognizance, and personality processes). From preschool to adolescence, g shifts from executive

Higher-order conditioning results from a simple training procedure: Pairing two relatively neutral conditioned stimuli, A and X, allows properties separately conditioned to X (e.g., through pairing it with an unconditioned stimulus, US) to be evident during A. The phenomenon extends the range of ways in which Pavlovian conditioned responding can be expressed and increases its translational relevance

We present a computational model capable of simulating aspects of human knowledge for thousands of real-world concepts. Our approach involves a pretrained transformer network that is further fine-tuned on large data sets of participant-generated feature norms. We show that such a model can successfully extrapolate from its training data, and predict human knowledge for new concepts and features. We

People care a great deal about their social worth in other people’s eyes, and social worth is an important factor in many social scientific theories. At the same time, social worth phenomena are scattered across diverse literatures under different conceptual labels, with little correspondence between them. In the present article, we attempt to integrate social worth research by focusing on three core

Free association among words is a fundamental and ubiquitous memory task. Although distributed semantics (DS) models can predict the association between pairs of words, and semantic network (SN) models can describe transition probabilities in free association data, there have been few attempts to apply established cognitive process models of memory search to free association data. Thus, researchers

Quantitative, data-driven models for mental representations have long enjoyed popularity and success in psychology (e.g., distributional semantic models in the language domain), but have largely been missing for the visual domain. To overcome this, we present ViSpa (Vision Spaces), high-dimensional vector spaces that include vision-based representation for naturalistic images as well as concept prototypes

Affective experiences are commonly represented by either transient emotional reactions to discrete events or longer term, sustained mood states that are characterized by a more diffuse and global nature. While both have considerable influence in shaping memory, their interaction can produce mood-congruent memory (MCM), a psychological phenomenon where emotional memory is biased toward content affectively

In real-world scene perception, human observers generate sequences of fixations to move image patches into the high-acuity center of the visual field. Models of visual attention developed over the last 25 years aim to predict two-dimensional probabilities of gaze positions for a given image via saliency maps. Recently, progress has been made on models for the generation of scan paths under the constraints

The associative manner by which thoughts follow one another has intrigued scholars for decades. The process by which an association is generated in response to a cue can be explained by classic models of semantic processing through distinct computational mechanisms. Distributed attractor networks implement rich-get-richer dynamics and assume that stronger associations can be reached with fewer steps

The general theory of deception (GTD) aims to unify and complete the various sparse theoretical units that have been proposed in the deception literature to date, in a comprehensive framework fully describing from end to end the process by which deceptive messages are produced, and how this can inform more effective prevention and detection. As part of the elaboration of the theory, the different ways

The ensemble hypothesis proposes that language is but one of five cognitive capacities that separate human cognition qualitatively from other animal cognition as a result of their interactions. The ensemble consists of an episodic memory capable of mental time travel, mentalizing to augment social cognition, language for overt communication, advanced executive attention for governing working memory

Respiratory rhythms sustain biological life, governing the homeostatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Until recently, however, the influence of breathing on the brain has largely been overlooked. Yet new evidence demonstrates that the act of breathing exerts a substantive, rhythmic influence on perception, emotion, and cognition, largely through the direct modulation of neural oscillations

Central to perceptual dehumanization theory (PDT) is the claim that full engagement of a putative module for the visual analysis of faces is necessary in order to recognize the humanity or personhood of observed individuals. According to this view, the faces of outgroup members do not engage domain-specific face processing fully or typically and are instead processed in a manner akin to how the brain

The capacity for language has evolved remarkably quickly in recent human history. Its advent likely coincided with a range of cognitive innovations not found elsewhere at this level of complexity in the rest of the animal kingdom. This late yet near-simultaneous florescence of higher language and cognition is difficult to account for in terms of strictly modular neurocognitive systems, each with its

Understanding the cognitive processes underlying choice requires theories that can disentangle the representation of stimuli from the processes that map these representations onto observed responses. We develop a dynamic theory of how stimuli are mapped onto discrete (choice) and onto continuous response scales. It proposes that the mapping from a stimulus to an internal representation and then to

Two fundamental difficulties when learning novel categories are deciding (a) what information is relevant and (b) when to use that information. Although previous theories have specified how observers learn to attend to relevant dimensions over time, those theories have largely remained silent about how attention should be allocated on a within-trial basis, which dimensions of information should be

In this article, we formally present the Integrated Self-Categorization model of Autism (ISCA). This model brings together the cognitive–perceptual and social–communication features of autism under a single explanatory framework. Specifically, ISCA proposes that the social–communication features that are related to theory of mind dysfunction emerge from the cognitive–perceptual features related to

There has long been interest in how the mind represents numerical magnitude, particularly in the absence of symbols. For humans and nonhuman animals, number represents a core dimension of perceptual experience by which objects in the physical world are delineated. The physical world is also well characterized by other dimensions, many of which covary with number. Yet, the general consensus is that

The notion of equality (identity) is simple and ubiquitous, making it a key case study for broader questions about the representations supporting abstract relational reasoning. Previous work suggested that neural networks were not suitable models of human relational reasoning because they could not represent mathematically identity, the most basic form of equality. We revisit this question. In our

The open science framework has garnered increased visibility and has been partially implemented in recent years. Open science underscores the importance of transparency and reproducibility to conduct rigorous science. Recently, several journals published by the American Psychological Association have begun adopting the open science framework. At the same time, the field of psychology has been reckoning

It is nearly impossible to concurrently initiate and execute two motor actions with independent timing. For example, it is difficult to tap one rhythm with the right hand while tapping a different rhythm with the left hand, even after these rhythms have been practiced individually. However, if this task is restructured so that it is represented internally as one action done by two hands rather than

It has been recently suggested that research on human multitasking is best organized according to three research perspectives, which differ in their focus on cognitive structure, flexibility, and plasticity. Even though it is argued that the perspectives should be seen as complementary, there has not been a formal approach describing or explaining the intersections between the three perspectives. With

Continuous-outcome decisions, in which responses are made on continuous scales, are increasingly used to study perception and memory for stimulus attributes like color, orientation, and motion. This interest has led to the development of models of continuous-outcome decision processes like the circular diffusion model that predict joint distributions of decision outcomes and response times (RTs). We

An integrative account of consciousness should have a number of properties. It should build upon a framework of nonconscious behavior in order to explain how and why consciousness contributes to, and addresses the limitations of, nonconscious processes. It should also encompass the primary (phenomenal), secondary (access), and tertiary (self-awareness) aspects of consciousness. A number of accounts

For new mothers, coping with infant distress is challenging. Mothers’ self-efficacy in emotion-related parenting plays critical roles in shaping their adaptation and children’s development. Research on antecedents of maternal parenting self-efficacy has been predominantly based on the global self-efficacy theory outlined by Bandura in the 1970s. Despite the utility of Bandura’s theory, subsequent research

People invest precious time and resources on experiences such as watching movies or listening to music. Yet, we still have a poor understanding of how such sensed experiences gain aesthetic value. We propose a model of aesthetic value that integrates existing theories with literature on conventional primary and secondary rewards such as food and money. We assume that the states of observers’ sensory

There is rich structure in the order in which studied material is recalled in a free recall task (Howard & Kahana, 2002a). Extensive effort has been directed at understanding the processes and representations that give rise to this structure; however, it remains unclear why certain types of recall organization might be favored in the first place. We provide a rational analysis of the free recall task

Many psychological experiments have subjects repeat a task to gain the statistical precision required to test quantitative theories of psychological performance. In such experiments, time-on-task can have sizable effects on performance, changing the psychological processes under investigation. Most research has either ignored these changes, treating the underlying process as static, or sacrificed some

Social interaction is both ubiquitous and central to understanding human behavior. Such interactions depend, we argue, on shared intentionality: the parties must form a common understanding of an ambiguous interaction (e.g., one person giving a present to another requires that both parties appreciate that a voluntary transfer of ownership is intended). Yet how can shared intentionality arise? Many

In this article, we argue that a predictive processing framework (PP) may provide elements for a proximate model of play in children and adults. We propose that play is a behavior in which the agent, in contexts of freedom from the demands of certain competing cognitive systems, deliberately seeks out or creates surprising situations that gravitate toward sweet-spots of relative complexity with the

Maternal behavior is a highly motivated and adaptive social behavior. Its frequency and pattern change across the postpartum period in response to the changing characteristics of the young and psychophysiological state of the mother. In rodents, maternal behavior peaks shortly after parturition, remains stable for a certain period of time, and then declines gradually until weaning. These dramatic behavioral

An increasing number of cognitive, neurobiological, and computational models have been proposed in the last decade, seeking to explain how humans allocate physical or cognitive effort. Most models share conceptual similarities with motivational intensity theory (MIT), an influential classic psychological theory of motivation. Yet, little effort has been made to integrate such models, which remain confined

Standard definitions of social psychology, such as “the study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people” (Aronson et al., 2019, p. 3), fail to capture much of what social psychologists actually do and do not capture the basic theoretical foundations of the field. I suggest the field is founded on the construal principle

Psychology and philosophy have long reflected on the role of perspective in vision. Since the dawn of modern vision science—roughly, since Helmholtz in the late 1800s—scientific explanations in vision have focused on understanding the computations that transform the sensed retinal image into percepts of the three-dimensional environment. The standard view in the science is that distal properties—v

Mental fatigue is usually accompanied by drops in task performance and reduced willingness for further exertion. A value-based theoretical account may help to explain such negative effects. In this view, mental fatigue influences perceived costs and rewards of exerting effort. However, no formal mathematical framework has yet been proposed to model and quantitatively estimate the effects of mental

Overprecision is the excessive certainty in the accuracy of one’s judgment. This article proposes a new theory to explain it. The theory holds that overprecision in judgment results from neglect of all the ways in which one could be wrong. When there are many ways to be wrong, it can be difficult to consider them all. Overprecision is the result of being wrong and not knowing it. This explanation can

Dominant theoretical accounts of developmental language disorder (DLD) commonly invoke working memory capacity limitations. In the current report, we present an alternative view: That working memory in DLD is not under-resourced but overloaded due to operating on speech representations with low discriminability. This account is developed through computational simulations involving deep convolutional

Conflict tasks have become one of the most dominant paradigms within cognitive psychology, with their key finding being the conflict effect: That participants are slower and less accurate when task-irrelevant information conflicts with task-relevant information (i.e., incompatible trials), compared to when these sources of information are consistent (i.e., compatible trials). However, the conflict

Systems factorial technology (SFT) is a theoretically derived methodology that allows for strong inferences to be made about underlying processing architectures (e.g., whether processing occurs in a pooled, coactive fashion or in serial or in parallel). Measures of mental architecture using SFT have been restricted to the use of error-free response times (RTs). In this article, through formal proofs