{"title":"Chance as a (non)explanation: A cross-cultural examination of folk understanding of chance and coincidence.","authors":"Ze Hong","doi":"10.1037/rev0000568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000568","url":null,"abstract":"Causal explanations are a key component of human cognition. While we possess certain causal models of the world that offer satisfactory explanations for a range of phenomena, our cognitive capacities have their limits when dealing with the complexities of the world, leaving the causes of many events elusive. In this article, I integrate ethnographic and historical evidence to show that, despite our limited understanding of why certain events occur, people throughout human history and across diverse societies have seldom invoked \"chance\"-a concept that has gained significant importance in contemporary, modern societies-as an explanation. Instead, they frequently propose putative causal relationships or posit intermediary entities such as \"luck\" to account for why specific events unfold within their particular spatial-temporal contexts. I discuss the psychological, cognitive, and cultural evolutionary factors that hinder the development of chance-based explanations and argue that the conceptualization of chance as something measurable and its subsequent acceptance as a legitimate explanation emerged relatively late in human history, marking a pivotal intellectual shift with profound implications on how we perceive and manage uncertainty in our daily lives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":"131 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144087851","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":"Ensemble-based working memory updating and its computational rules.","authors":"Wei Chen,Wenwen Li,Xiaowei Ding","doi":"10.1037/rev0000569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000569","url":null,"abstract":"Manipulation plays a critical role in working memory, wherein understanding how items are represented during manipulation is a fundamental question. Previous studies on manipulation have primarily assumed independent representations by default (independent hypothesis). Here, we propose the ensemble hypothesis to challenge this conventional notion, suggesting that items are represented as ensembles undergoing updating during manipulation. To test these hypotheses, we focused on working memory updating in accordance with new information by conducting three delayed-estimation tasks under addition, removal, and replacement scenarios (Study 1). A critical manipulation involved systematically manipulating the mean orientation of all memory stimuli, either increasing (clockwise) or decreasing (counterclockwise) after the updating process. Following the independent hypothesis, memory errors would be similar under both conditions. Conversely, considering the biasing effect of the ensemble on individual representations, the ensemble hypothesis predicts that memories of individual items would be updated, aligning with the ensemble's change direction. Namely, memory errors would be more positive in the increase-mean condition compared to the decrease-mean condition. Our results supported the ensemble hypothesis. Furthermore, to investigate the mechanisms underlying ensemble computations in updating scenarios, we conducted three ensemble tasks (Study 2) with similar designs to Study 1 and developed a computational model to quantify the contributions of each memory item. The results consistently demonstrated that addition involved complete updating, while removal led to incomplete updating. Across these three research parts, we propose that items are represented as dynamic ensembles during working memory updating processes. Furthermore, we elucidate the computational principles underlying ensembles throughout this process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144087852","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":"Disorders of self-categorization: How and why a healthy social self-system is the cornerstone of mental health.","authors":"Tegan Cruwys,S Alexander Haslam,Daniel P Skorich","doi":"10.1037/rev0000566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000566","url":null,"abstract":"The self had a central role in early theories of psychopathology and has long been of interest to mental health practitioners. However, these early theories typically made what we consider to be two key errors: they conceptualized mental ill-health as constituting discrete categories of illness, and they conceptualized the self as inherently individualized and stable. There is a growing recognition in psychiatry and clinical psychology of the former error, with a change well underway to reconceptualize psychopathology in terms of transdiagnostic continua of symptoms rather than as discrete categories. At the same time, modern understandings of self-processes acknowledge their fluid, socially structured, and context-sensitive nature. Here, we argue that the integration of these two perspectives-into a self-categorization model of mental health with a healthy social self-system at its core-can provide new insights into both the nature of mental health and ill-health and the relevant focus for intervention. We illustrate this by exploring the implications of our analysis for three conditions (depression, schizophrenia, and autism) and report the findings of a verification study with experts in both social identity theorizing and clinical practice. We conclude by proposing key priorities for future research on self-categorization in mental health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144087856","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":"Supplemental Material for Ensemble-Based Working Memory Updating and Its Computational Rules","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/rev0000569.supp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000569.supp","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144229358","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":"Supplemental Material for Adapting to Loss: A Computational Model of Grief","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/rev0000567.supp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000567.supp","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144229362","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":"Is visual perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer illusion and the cultural byproduct hypothesis.","authors":"Dorsa Amir,Chaz Firestone","doi":"10.1037/rev0000549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000549","url":null,"abstract":"A fundamental question in the psychological sciences is the degree to which culture shapes core cognitive processes-perhaps none more foundational than how we perceive the world around us. A dramatic and oft-cited \"case study\" of culture's power in this regard is the Müller-Lyer illusion, which depicts two lines of equal length but with arrowheads pointing either inward or outward, creating the illusion that one line is longer than the other. According to a line of research stretching back over a century, depending on the society you were raised in (and how much carpentry you were exposed to), you may not see the illusion at all-an ambitious and influential research program motivating claims that seemingly basic aspects of visual processing may actually be \"culturally evolved byproducts.\" This cultural byproduct hypothesis bears on foundational issues in the science, philosophy, and sociology of psychology, and remains popular today. Yet, here we argue that it is almost certainly false. We synthesize evidence from diverse fields which demonstrate that (a) the illusion is not limited to humans, appearing in nonhuman animals from diverse ecologies; (b) the statistics of natural scenes are sufficient to capture the illusion; (c) the illusion does not require straight lines typical of carpentry (nor even any lines at all); (d) the illusion arises in sense modalities other than vision; and (e) the illusion arises even in congenitally blind subjects. Moreover, by reexamining historical data and ethnographic descriptions from the original case studies, we show that the evidence for cultural variation and its correlation with key cultural variables is in fact highly inconsistent, beset by questionable research practices, and misreported by later discussions. Together, these considerations undermine the most popular and dramatic example of cultural influence on perception. We further extend our case beyond this phenomenon, showing that many of these considerations apply to other visual illusions as well, including similarly implicated visual phenomena such as the Ebbinghaus, Ponzo, Poggendorf, and horizontal-vertical illusions. We conclude by outlining future approaches to cross-cultural research on perception, and we also point to other potential sources of cultural variation in visual processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144087850","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":"Simplicity and complexity of probabilistically defined concepts.","authors":"Jacob Feldman","doi":"10.1037/rev0000563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000563","url":null,"abstract":"Human concept learning is known to be impaired by conceptual complexity: Simpler concepts are easier to learn, and more complex ones are more difficult. However, the simplicity bias has been studied almost exclusively in the context of deterministic concepts defined over Boolean features and is comparatively unexplored in the more general case of probabilistic concepts defined over continuous features. This article reports a series of experiments in which subjects were asked to learn probabilistic concepts defined over a novel 2D continuous feature space. Each concept was a mixture of several distinct Gaussian components, and the complexity of the concepts was varied by manipulating the positions of the mixture components relative to each other while holding the number of components constant. The results confirm that the positioning of mixture components strongly impacts learning, independent of the intrinsic statistical separability of the concepts, which was manipulated independently. Moreover, the results point to an information-theoretic basis framework for quantifying the complexity of probabilistic concepts, centered on the notion of compressive complexity: Simple concepts are those that can be approximately recovered from a projection of the concept onto a lower dimensional feature space, while more complex concepts are those that can only be represented by combining features. The framework provides a consistent, coherent, and broadly applicable measure of the complexity of probabilistic concepts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144065717","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":"Supplemental Material for Is Visual Perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer Illusion and the Cultural Byproduct Hypothesis","authors":"","doi":"10.1037/rev0000549.supp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000549.supp","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":"173 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144229363","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":"Chunk-based incremental processing and learning: An integrated theory of word discovery, implicit statistical learning, and speed of lexical processing.","authors":"Andrew Jessop, Julian Pine, Fernand Gobet","doi":"10.1037/rev0000564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000564","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>According to chunking theories, children discover their first words by extracting subsequences embedded in their continuous input. However, the mechanisms proposed in these accounts are often incompatible with data from other areas of language development. We present a new theory to connect the chunking accounts of word discovery with the broader developmental literature. We argue that (a) children build a diverse collection of chunks, including words, multiword phrases, and sublexical units; (b) these chunks have different processing times determined by how often each chunk is used to recode the input; and (c) these processing times interact with short-term memory limitations and incremental processing to constrain learning. We implemented this theory as a computational modeling architecture called Chunk-Based Incremental Processing and Learning (CIPAL). Across nine studies, we demonstrate that CIPAL can model word discovery in different contexts. First, we trained the model with 70 child-directed speech corpora from 15 languages. CIPAL gradually discovered words in each language, with cross-linguistic variation in performance. The model's average processing time also improved with experience, resembling the developmental changes observed in children's speed of processing. Second, we showed that CIPAL could simulate seven influential effects reported in statistical learning experiments with artificial languages. This included a preference for words over nonwords, part words, frequency-matched part words, phantom words, and sublexical units. On this basis, we argue that incremental chunking is an effective implicit statistical learning mechanism that may be central to children's vocabulary development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144029115","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":"Chunk-based incremental processing and learning: An integrated theory of word discovery, implicit statistical learning, and speed of lexical processing.","authors":"Andrew Jessop,Julian Pine,Fernand Gobet","doi":"10.1037/rev0000564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000564","url":null,"abstract":"According to chunking theories, children discover their first words by extracting subsequences embedded in their continuous input. However, the mechanisms proposed in these accounts are often incompatible with data from other areas of language development. We present a new theory to connect the chunking accounts of word discovery with the broader developmental literature. We argue that (a) children build a diverse collection of chunks, including words, multiword phrases, and sublexical units; (b) these chunks have different processing times determined by how often each chunk is used to recode the input; and (c) these processing times interact with short-term memory limitations and incremental processing to constrain learning. We implemented this theory as a computational modeling architecture called Chunk-Based Incremental Processing and Learning (CIPAL). Across nine studies, we demonstrate that CIPAL can model word discovery in different contexts. First, we trained the model with 70 child-directed speech corpora from 15 languages. CIPAL gradually discovered words in each language, with cross-linguistic variation in performance. The model's average processing time also improved with experience, resembling the developmental changes observed in children's speed of processing. Second, we showed that CIPAL could simulate seven influential effects reported in statistical learning experiments with artificial languages. This included a preference for words over nonwords, part words, frequency-matched part words, phantom words, and sublexical units. On this basis, we argue that incremental chunking is an effective implicit statistical learning mechanism that may be central to children's vocabulary development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).","PeriodicalId":21016,"journal":{"name":"Psychological review","volume":"319 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143992086","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}