Gary Jones, Francesco Cabiddu, Pablo Aros Muñoz, Jens Roeser, Wenchong Du, Caroline F Rowland
{"title":"Revisiting the noun bias: How frequency explains cross-linguistic differences in noun and verb production across early childhood.","authors":"Gary Jones, Francesco Cabiddu, Pablo Aros Muñoz, Jens Roeser, Wenchong Du, Caroline F Rowland","doi":"10.1037/xge0001964","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001964","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Frequency of occurrence is one of the main drivers of children's early vocabularies. However, multiple authors have concluded that it fails to account for one of the most important phenomena in word learning-the order in which children acquire nouns and verbs. Across many languages, there is an early noun bias despite nouns occurring far less frequently than verbs in caregiver speech. In this study we use large-scale caregiver-child corpora and a computational model to reexamine noun and verb learning in English, German, Spanish, and Mandarin. Our results show clear evidence for variations in the strength of the noun bias across languages that can be directly explained by a combination of the number of different nouns and verbs used by caregivers and their <i>sufficient frequency</i>: how often most nouns and verbs need to occur in caregiver speech to be learned. Our findings provide further evidence for frequency shaping early children's language development, in this case mapping onto the relative distributions of nouns and verbs in their mental lexicons. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2199-2215"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148684824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The (anti-)conformity strategy space: How flexible is social learning when group membership and incentive alignment vary?","authors":"Lukas von Flüe, Sonja Vogt, Charles Efferson","doi":"10.1037/xge0001993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001993","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>People often look to what most others are doing for guidance, yet the same majority can be informative in one setting and misleading in another. We examined how people interpret social frequency information when group membership and payoff alignment vary. In an incentivized experiment, demonstrators first learned through private feedback which option maximized their own payoff. Social learners received no outcome feedback and decided only after observing demonstrators' choices. This separation ensured that the social signal reflected demonstrators' private learning rather than mutual influence among simultaneously observing learners. We varied whether demonstrators were ingroup or outgroup members and whether their incentives were aligned or misaligned with the social learner's. The same majority could therefore point to the best option in one context and to the worst option in another. The design thus tested whether people interpreted the same signal differently across contexts. Performance was highest when demonstrators were aligned with the learner's incentives, especially when those demonstrators were also ingroup members, even though group membership was induced by minimal cues. Cognitive load reduced memory performance but did not measurably alter the use of social information. We repeated the design in Switzerland and Kenya to study how findings extend across distinct participant pools. Individual strategies were heterogeneous in both sites but more dispersed in Kenya. These findings show that people do not treat the same social frequency signal as interchangeable across contexts defined by group membership and incentive alignment, and they highlight the value of studying social learning across distinct participant pools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148865191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The first location heuristic: An early emerging way of judging where things belong.","authors":"Terryn Kim, Ori Friedman","doi":"10.1037/xge0001951","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001951","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Judgments about where things belong guide people's expectations, actions, and social evaluations. In this article, we provide evidence for an early emerging <i>first location</i> heuristic that informs judgments about where things belong. According to this heuristic, objects belong where they were first encountered. We investigated this heuristic in both children aged 3-7 (<i>N</i> = 951) and in adults (<i>N</i> = 1,238) in Canada and the United States. In each experiment, participants judged where objects belonged in scenarios where an object first appeared in one location but was then moved. In Experiments 1-3, children and adults mostly judged that artifacts found indoors belong in their first locations, though this tendency was reduced (especially for adults) for objects moved by humans rather than natural forces. These experiments also ruled out two low-level explanations for the findings. Experiments 4 and 5 then found that children also use the heuristic with natural objects found outdoors and provided mixed evidence about adults. Experiment 5 also found that children and adults see the first location as normative. We discuss two explanations for why people use the heuristic to judge where things belong. One reason is that an object's first location is often informative about its history, for instance, indicating where the object is typically found or where it was intentionally placed. The heuristic, though, could also express the basic belief that things belong where they originate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"1849-1861"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148031082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sophie H Arnold, Mohit Mukherji, Mona Lebrun, Marjorie Rhodes
{"title":"Examining the efficacy of a common response to stereotypical generics.","authors":"Sophie H Arnold, Mohit Mukherji, Mona Lebrun, Marjorie Rhodes","doi":"10.1037/xge0001952","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001952","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>People often respond to stereotypical generic statements such as \"girls wear makeup\" with counter-stereotypical claims like \"boys can wear makeup too.\" But are such responses effective in reducing the stereotypical inferences people draw from the original claim? On the one hand, they may seem effective because they directly challenge the idea that a property (e.g., wearing makeup) applies only to one group (e.g., girls). On the other hand, listeners may reason that inserting the modal \"can\" implies that the second-mentioned group (e.g., boys) is less strongly associated with the property than the first. Here, we present experimental evidence from adults (<i>N</i> = 405) and 4- to 7-year-old children (<i>N</i> = 365) showing that such can generics are ineffective at extinguishing stereotypical inferences. Although <i>can</i> generics appeared helpful relative to leaving the other group completely unmentioned (i.e., not mentioning boys after hearing \"girls wear makeup\"), they nevertheless resulted in thinking that the group described with <i>can</i> generics is less associated with the relevant property than the group described without the additional modal term. The ineffectiveness of <i>can</i> generics stems from reasoning over alternative options: Because both groups could have been described in the same way, \"can\" signals a weaker relationship between the property and the group described with the additional modal term. We discuss implications for how to effectively respond to stereotypical statements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2091-2102"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148163352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Elcos are common, ajajatas are weird: Manner implicatures guide the interpretation of unfamiliar words for French children and for adults in 18 languages.","authors":"Olivier Mascaro, Adeline Depierreux, Ninon Peysson, Olivier Morin","doi":"10.1037/xge0001972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001972","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Overly long or effortful utterances are interpreted as carrying more information than short or easy ones-a phenomenon known as manner implicatures in pragmatics. Can this mechanism guide the interpretation of unfamiliar words? In seven studies testing adults (N = 1,762) and children (N = 282), participants had to pair two words in an unknown language (e.g., \"elco\" and \"ajajata\") with two referents, one more prototypical than the other (e.g., a green crocodile and a yellow crocodile). The less prototypical referent is less expected and more surprising; thus, the action of referring to it carries more information than the action of referring to the more prototypical referent. We predicted that shorter words would be preferentially paired with prototypical referents. This effect was verified on adult participants inside and across 18 languages and held even when participants explicitly claimed to have used no strategy at all. Varying the respective prototypicality of the stimuli did not measurably change this effect: Adult participants responded similarly to a large differential in prototypicality as to a more moderate one. French children aged 3 to 11 also showed the predicted effect, with little discernible effect of age. Consistent with manner implicatures, adult participants (across four languages) and French children also show the predicted effect when the phonotactic complexity of words is manipulated instead of their length. Thus, manner implicatures guide the interpretation of unfamiliar words by children and adults. These results are consistent with the view that costlier messages are generally interpreted as carrying more information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"155 8","pages":"1905-1920"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148630599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are frogs more forgiving than acorns anticipate? How response pressure confounds can generate (apparent) biases in metaperceptions.","authors":"Rebecca L Schaumberg, Joseph P Simmons","doi":"10.1037/xge0001971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001971","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Much research suggests that people are remarkably poor at understanding how others judge them, particularly regarding the impact of their actions on others. People appear to succumb to a host of nominally distinct biases that take a similar form: They overestimate how harshly they will be judged for bad actions and underestimate how positively they will be judged for good actions. In this article, we demonstrate that these biases can arise from \"response pressure\" confounds that are baked into how metaperceptions are typically studied. Specifically, we show that socially appropriate responses differ between those asked to predict how another person will feel about their actions and those asked to report how they feel about another person's actions. Predicting that someone will feel extremely grateful for your good deed is less appropriate than reporting that you are extremely grateful for someone else's good deed, while predicting that someone will feel extremely upset for your minor transgression is more appropriate than reporting that you are extremely upset at someone else's minor transgression. So if some participants provide inauthentic but socially appropriate responses, apparent biases will emerge, even if they do not exist. Across 13 preregistered studies, we show that differences in response pressures between predicting \"how others will judge me\" versus reporting \"how I would judge others\" can generate apparent biases and produce fanciful ones, such as people overestimating how negatively a frog would judge them if they were an acorn that fell on its head. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"155 8","pages":"1882-1904"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148630665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dorthe Berntsen, Ana Lucía Cardenas-Egúsquiza, Maria Cristina Buzzo, Svend Brinkmann, Rick H Hoyle, David C Rubin
{"title":"How autobiographical memory serves morality: Prevalence and properties of memories with moral content.","authors":"Dorthe Berntsen, Ana Lucía Cardenas-Egúsquiza, Maria Cristina Buzzo, Svend Brinkmann, Rick H Hoyle, David C Rubin","doi":"10.1037/xge0001954","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001954","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Morality is central to human nature. Being morally accountable requires an understanding of oneself as existing through time and space and an ability to remember past events. We present the first series of studies systematically examining the frequency and characteristics of autobiographical memories for morally themed events using open-ended sampling of autobiographical memories followed by independent coding for morality, following a predefined coding scheme. Overall, the findings show that autobiographical memory plays a central role in relation to morality. Across three studies, using different cueing methods, a substantial proportion of memories referred to a moral theme, with the theme of caring (vs. harming) being especially pronounced. The frequency of memories with moral content increased with greater self-relevance of the memory cue. Across cueing conditions, we found a predominance of memories referring to events in which the person was the agent for a morally good act. Personal misdeeds, being the target for misdeeds, and the target for good deeds were remembered less frequently and dated to have taken place more distant in time. Analyses of self-rated memory characteristics showed a tendency to downplay the narrative importance and self-relevance of memories for personal misdeeds but yielded little support for the idea of impaired memory for such events. The findings are related to evolutionary theory of the development of complex social systems and integrate the study of autobiographical memory with the growing field of moral psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2038-2059"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148251926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spontaneous perception of visuospatial ensembles.","authors":"Gabriel Waterhouse, Sami Yousif","doi":"10.1037/xge0001973","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001973","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Look out at a forest. What do you see? You see visual masses of green; you see large numbers of leaves; you see the various sizes of the many different trees. Is one of those features more salient than the others? According to a popular view in cognitive science, number is perceptually prioritized over other visuospatial ensemble properties like density and size, such that when you look out at a forest, what you see first and foremost is the number of trees (or trunks, or leaves) rather than their size or their density, etc. The problem with these arguments is that they mostly hinge on comparisons to only one other dimension: cumulative area. Here, we ask a very simple question: Might there be some other dimension that is prioritized over number? Across five unique paradigms and 13 experiments with over 2,000 participants, we show that human adults prioritize average size over number, such that they are more likely to (a) categorize, (b) explicitly match, (c) notice changes in, and (d) identify extreme instances of that dimension. We additionally show that children behave the same way. For this reason, we argue against the universal salience of number, noting that these \"competitive\" approaches (i.e., in which dimensions are compared against each other) are often context-dependent. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"155 8","pages":"1985-2000"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148630668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interventions to reduce implicit weight bias: A focus on mechanisms and individual differences.","authors":"Amanda Ravary, Mark W Baldwin","doi":"10.1037/xge0001959","DOIUrl":"10.1037/xge0001959","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Implicit weight bias-an automatic negative evaluation of individuals with higher weight-is pervasive in society. Intervention efforts to reduce implicit weight bias have been sparse and rarely successful. However, a recent set of studies by Lai and Le Forestier (2025) found supportive evidence for successful modification of weight bias by testing a variety of mechanistic, theoretically grounded interventions based on procedures already shown to be effective in reducing implicit racial bias. In the present study, which extends that work, 1,305 adult participants completed a Weight Implicit Association Test before and after one of five online interventions or a control condition. Four of the five interventions tested yielded reductions in bias, compared to the control condition. We also adopted an inductive, data-driven approach to assess individual differences in response: Results demonstrated that interventions may be particularly impactful to the extent that individuals are optimally matched with procedures that suit their personal characteristics. Overall, this work provides additional evidence for the overall efficacy of interventions that are directed toward the known social cognitive mechanisms of implicit bias and reveals avenues for future research into moderators of intervention outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"2075-2090"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148198996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metacognition and the dual function of social gaze.","authors":"D Jacob Gerlofs, Alan Kingstone","doi":"10.1037/xge0001967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001967","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>While the movement of one's eyes to extract information from the visual environment often occurs without conscious reflection, this may not be true when one's eyes are also a signal of information to others, such as in a social interaction. Metacognitive monitoring of one's ability to balance the use of gaze to both receive and send information has not been empirically tested. The present study investigated this issue by eye-tracking participants during a novel hide-and-seek paradigm. Hiders selected boxes on a computer display with the goal of cooperating with or deceiving a future seeker. Displays were either homogeneous or contained a visually conspicuous box. Hiders were either aware or unaware that their gaze would be revealed to future seekers. Hiders reported their confidence in their hiding success after every trial. To assess hider performance, a new group of participants (\"seekers\") were tasked with identifying the hiders' box selections after seeing an animation of hiders' fixations toward displays. The results indicate that hiders' confidence effectively predicted seeker accuracy, with this metacognitive ability being strongest when hiders both intentionally and cooperatively signaled with their eyes and when a visually conspicuous box aided communication. These findings highlight the capacity to monitor the use of one's gaze for both gathering and signaling information and reveal that this ability varies with both the environmental context and the form of communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":"155 8","pages":"1967-1984"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148630633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}