Cognitive Science最新文献

{"title":"A Simple Explanation for Harmonic Word Order","authors":"John Mansfield,&nbsp;Lothar Sebastian Krapp","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70056","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Harmonic word order is a well-established tendency in natural languages, which has previously been explained as a single ordering rule for all head-dependent relations. We propose that it can be more parsimoniously explained as an outcome of word-class frequencies, where the purported “head” is the most frequently instantiated word class in a phrasal schema. We show that the most frequent class gravitates spontaneously to an edge position in a phrasal replication process, as long as words of one class may influence the position of words of another class. This avoids the need to posit head-dependent ordering as an innate rule or bias, simplifying our theory of word order. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of harmony from word-class frequencies using a simple computational model of phrasal replication, and in further extensions show that the principle remains robust with fuzzy word classes and multiword chunks, can capture competition between harmony and locality, and is compatible with the results of behavioral experiments on harmonic ordering. Our findings support further exploration of syntactic models with nondiscrete word classes.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70056","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143801852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Sustained Attention Paradox: A Critical Commentary on the Theoretical Impossibility of Perfect Vigilance","authors":"Benjamin T. Sharpe,&nbsp;Ian Tyndall","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70061","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The human capacity for sustained attention represents a critical cognitive paradox: while essential for numerous high-stakes tasks, perfect vigilance is fundamentally impossible. This commentary explores the theoretical impossibility of maintaining uninterrupted attention, drawing from extensive interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Multiple converging lines of evidence demonstrate that sustained attention is constrained by neural, biological, and cognitive limitations. Neural mechanisms reveal that attention operates through rhythmic oscillations, with inherent fluctuations in frontoparietal networks and default mode network interactions. Neurochemical systems and cellular adaptation effects further underscore the impossibility of continuous, perfect vigilance. Empirical research across domains—including aviation, healthcare, industrial safety, and security—consistently demonstrates rapid declines in attention performance over time, regardless of individual expertise or motivation. Even elite performers like military personnel and experienced meditators exhibit inevitable attention lapses. This paper presents an argument against traditional approaches that seek to overcome these limitations through training or willpower. Instead, it advocates for designing human–technology systems that work harmoniously with cognitive constraints. This requires developing adaptive automation, understanding individual and cultural attention variations, and creating frameworks that strategically balance human capabilities with technological support.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70061","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143793500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playing With Language in the Manual Modality: Which Motions Do Signers Gradiently Modify?","authors":"Casey Ferrara,&nbsp;Jenny C. Lu,&nbsp;Susan Goldin-Meadow","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Language is traditionally characterized as an arbitrary, symbolic system, made up of discrete, categorical forms. But iconicity and gradience are pervasive in communication. For example, in spoken languages, word forms can be “played with” in iconic gradient ways by varying vowel length, pitch, or speed (e.g., “It's been a loooooooong day”). However, little is known about this process in sign languages. Here, we (1) explore gradient modification in three dimensions of motion in American Sign Language (ASL), and (2) ask whether the three dimensions are equally likely to be modified. We asked deaf signers of ASL (<i>n</i> = 11, mean age = 49.3) to describe an event manipulated along speed, direction, or path, and observed their use of gradient modification in lexical and depicting signs. We found that signers alter the forms of both types of signs to enhance meaning. However, the three motion dimensions were not modified equally in lexical signs, suggesting constraints on gradient modification. These constraints may be linguistic in nature, found only in signers. Alternatively, the constraints could reflect difficulties in using the hands to convey particular modifications and, if so, should be found in speakers as well as signers.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70051","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143741005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"To Improve Literacy, Improve Equality in Education, Not Large Language Models","authors":"Samuel H. Forbes,&nbsp;Olivia Guest","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70058","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Huettig and Christiansen in an earlier issue argue that large language models (LLMs) are beneficial to address declining cognitive skills, such as literacy, through combating imbalances in educational equity. However, we warn that this technosolutionism may be the wrong frame. LLMs are labor intensive, are economically infeasible, and pollute the environment, and these properties may outweigh any proposed benefits. For example, poor quality air directly harms human cognition, and thus has compounding effects on educators' and pupils' ability to teach and learn. We urge extreme caution in facilitating the use of LLMs, which like much of modern academia run on private technology sector infrastructure, in classrooms lest we further normalize: pupils losing their right to privacy and security, reducing human contact between learner and educator, deskilling teachers, and polluting the environment. Cognitive scientists instead can learn from past mistakes with the petrochemical and tobacco industries and consider the harms to cognition from LLMs.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143749378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Differentiation and Generic Sentences","authors":"Patrick Rothermund,&nbsp;Roland Deutsch","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70057","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Generic sentences such as “Birds lay eggs” are used frequently and effortlessly, but there is no simple quantitative rule that determines whether they are true or false. For instance, while “Birds lay eggs” is considered true, “Birds are female” is considered false, even though there are necessarily fewer birds that lay eggs than birds that are female. In this article, we adopt a cognitive perspective on genericity. Specifically, we draw on learning principles that predict asymmetries in the acquisition of category representations, which in turn might determine the acceptance of generic sentences. Our key hypotheses were that generics are more likely accepted when the attributes they refer to are distinctive (i.e., more prevalent in the category relative to comparison categories) and that this pattern is sensitive to the temporal order in which category information is acquired. We report three preregistered experiments to test these hypotheses. In all experiments, we employed a trait-learning paradigm in which participants received information about exemplars of two fictitious kinds (human-like sea creatures in Experiments 1–3, stones in Experiment 2) in sequential order. We manipulated the prevalence of attributes within kinds, as well as their status as being shared between kinds or distinctive for either the first- or second-learned kind. As hypothesized, generic sentences were more likely accepted when referring to distinctive (vs. shared) attributes, but only for the second-learned kind. We discuss implications for theories of generics as well as stereotype formation and representation.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70057","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143698846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“The Earth is Alive”: Attributing Agency to the Earth Causes Moral Concern for the Environment and Biocentric Attitudes","authors":"Lizette Pizza,&nbsp;Deborah Kelemen","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70052","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Do people need to attribute agency to nature to morally care for it? The answer to this question has significant implications for our understanding of social cognitive effects on moral judgment. Despite its relevance during an environmental crisis, surprisingly little is known about the answer. Across two studies, we explored whether attributing agency to nonhuman natural entities like the Earth has a causal influence on environmental moral concern and intrinsic valuing of nature (biocentrism). In Study 1, we used an experimental design, assigning U.S. urban adults to one of three videos about the history of Earth's ecosystems. Two of them described the Earth as an agent: either as a thoughtful person (psychological) or as a living animal (vitalist). The third described the Earth as a nonagentic object (control). Participants in either agentic condition showed greater environmental moral concern and biocentrism than participants in the nonagentic condition. In Study 2, we examined whether—absent any agency cues—a scientifically informative video about Earth's history would prompt environmental moral concern and have a greater effect than watching awe-inspiring depictions of the Earth or learning irrelevant information in a control condition. No significant differences were found. However, patterning with Study 1, individuals’ tendencies to attribute mind to the Earth predicted environmental moral reasoning. Carefully invoked, vitalist agency attributions—which deviate less from scientific understandings of the Earth than psychological ones—can mobilize conservationist attitudes among U.S. adults. Overall, our results suggest that agentic attributions of life are required to engage significant moral concern.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143690071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Action Predictions Facilitate Embodied Geometric Reasoning","authors":"Fangli Xia,&nbsp;Mitchell J. Nathan,&nbsp;Kelsey E. Schenck,&nbsp;Michael I. Swart","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70055","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70055","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Task-relevant actions can facilitate mathematical thinking, even for complex topics, such as mathematical proof. We investigated whether such cognitive benefits also occur for action predictions. The action-cognition transduction (ACT) model posits a reciprocal relationship between movements and reasoning. Movements—imagined as well as real ones operating on real or imaginary objects—activate feedforward mechanisms for the plausible predicted outcomes of motor system planning, along with feedback from the effect actions have on the world. Thus, ACT posits cognitive influences for making action predictions regardless of whether those actions are performed. Using a two-by-two factorial design, we investigated how generating task-relevant <i>action predictions</i> or performing task-relevant <i>directed actions</i> influenced undergraduates’ (<i>N</i> = 127) geometry proof performance. As predicted, making action predictions significantly enhanced participants’ proof production. No evidence suggests that combining action predictions and directed actions provided additional benefits, supporting the claim that predicting and performing actions engage overlapping processes, as theorized by ACT. <i>Gestural replays</i>, reenactments of previously performed actions during explanations, were associated with significantly better insight and proof performance for both (actor-generated) predicted actions and (investigator-generated) directed actions. Prompting people to predict task-relevant actions enhances mathematical cognition, possibly through simulated actions of transformations on imagined mathematical objects, as revealed by increased production of speech describing mathematical operations and increased production of gestural replays. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings regarding the influences of embodied simulation of movements on cognition, and the educational implications of facilitating mathematical reasoning through interventions prompting students to perform and imagine performing task-relevant body movements.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11927934/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143674755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How to Live in the Moment: The Methodology and Limitations of Evolutionary Research on Consciousness","authors":"Christian R. de Weerd,&nbsp;Leonard Dung","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70053","url":null,"abstract":"<p>There is much interest in investigating the <i>evolution question</i>: How did consciousness evolve? In this paper, we evaluate the role that evolutionary considerations can play in <i>justifying</i> (i.e., confirming or falsifying) hypotheses about the origin, nature, and function of consciousness. Specifically, we argue against what we call <i>evolution-first approaches to consciousness</i>, according to which evolutionary considerations provide the primary and foundational lens through which we should assess hypotheses about the nature, function, or distribution of consciousness. Based on the example of Walter Veit's account and additional reasoning, we contend that evolution-first approaches struggle to provide compelling empirical evidence for their key claims about consciousness. In contrast with these approaches, we argue that consciousness science needs to foundationally rely on experimental and observational evidence from humans and other present-day animals. If our arguments succeed, then researchers, when investigating consciousness, are better advised to take as their primary source of evidence consciousness’ present, not its past. Having said this, we acknowledge that evolutionary thinking plays an important role in consciousness science. We delineate this role by stressing several ways in which evolutionary considerations can substantially help advance consciousness research, although in a manner that avoids the evolution-first approach. Since our argument only concerns the assessment of hypotheses (the “context of justification”), it leaves it open which role evolutionary considerations play in generating hypotheses (the “context of discovery”). That is, evolutionary considerations may nevertheless play a foundational role in hypothesis generation in consciousness science.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70053","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143646253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Semantic and Phonological Prediction in Language Comprehension: Pretarget Attraction Toward Semantic and Phonological Competitors in a Mouse Tracking Task","authors":"Wenting Ye,&nbsp;Qingqing Qu","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70054","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recent evidence increasingly suggests that comprehenders are capable of generating probabilistic predictions about forthcoming linguistic inputs during language comprehension. However, it remains debated whether language comprehenders predict low-level word forms and whether they always make predictions. In this study, we investigated semantic and phonological prediction in high- and low-constraining sentence contexts, utilizing the mouse-tracking paradigm to trace mouse movement trajectories. Mandarin Chinese speakers listened to high- and low-constraining sentences which resulted in high and low predictability for the critical target words. While listening, participants viewed a visual display featuring two objects: one corresponding to the critical target word (the target object) and the other being either semantically related, phonologically related, or unrelated to the target word. Participants were instructed to click on the target object. The analysis of mouse movement trajectories revealed two key findings: (1) In both high- and low-constraining contexts, there was a spatial attraction of the cursor toward semantic competitors, notably occurring before the target word was heard; (2) there are indications that phonological pretarget attraction effects were observed primarily in high-constraining contexts. These findings suggest that the constraints of sentences have the potential to modulate the representational contents of linguistic prediction during language comprehension. Methodologically, the mouse-tracking paradigm presents a promising tool for further exploration of linguistic prediction.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143638721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conceptual Combination in Large Language Models: Uncovering Implicit Relational Interpretations in Compound Words With Contextualized Word Embeddings","authors":"Marco Ciapparelli,&nbsp;Calogero Zarbo,&nbsp;Marco Marelli","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70048","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as candidate models of human semantics, and as such, they must be able to account for conceptual combination. This work explores the ability of two LLMs, namely, BERT-base and Llama-2-13b, to reveal the implicit meaning of existing and novel compound words. According to psycholinguistic theories, understanding the meaning of a compound (e.g., “snowman”) involves its automatic decomposition into constituent meanings (“snow,” “man”), which are then connected by an implicit semantic relation selected from a set of possible competitors (FOR, <span>MADE</span> <span>OF</span>, BY, …) to obtain a plausible interpretation (“man MADE OF snow”). Here, we leverage the flexibility of LLMs to obtain contextualized representations for both target compounds (e.g., “snowman”) and their implicit interpretations (e.g., “man MADE OF snow”). We demonstrate that replacing a compound with a paraphrased version leads to changes to the embeddings that are inversely proportional to the paraphrase's plausibility, estimated by human raters. While this relation holds for both existing and novel compounds, results obtained for novel compounds are substantially weaker, and older distributional models outperform LLMs. Nonetheless, the present results show that LLMs can offer a valid approximation of the internal structure of compound words posited by cognitive theories, thus representing a promising tool to model word senses that are at once implicit and possible.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2025-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143617649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}