Cognition最新文献

{"title":"People can infer the magnitude of other people’s knowledge even when they cannot infer its contents","authors":"Rosie Aboody ,&nbsp;Isaac Davis ,&nbsp;Yarrow Dunham ,&nbsp;Julian Jara-Ettinger","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106236","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106236","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Inferences about other people’s knowledge and beliefs are central to social interaction. However, people’s behavior is often consistent with a range of potential epistemic states, making it impossible to tell what exactly they know. Nonetheless, we are still often able to form coarse intuitions about how much someone knows, despite being unable to pinpoint the exact contents of their knowledge. Here, we sought to explore this capacity in humans, by comparing their performance to a normative model capturing this type of broad epistemic inference. We evaluated this capacity in a graded inference task where people had to make inferences about how much an agent knew based on the actions they chose (Experiment 1), and joint inferences about how much someone knew and how much they believed they could learn (Experiment 2). Critically, the agent’s knowledge was always under-determined by their behavior, but the behavior nonetheless contained information about how much knowledge they possessed or believed they could gain. Our results reveal that people can make graded inferences about how much other people know from minimal behavioral data, but, interestingly, will sometimes achieve this through simpler approximations to the normative model that get the broad inferences right. Altogether, our paper reveals that people can make quantitatively precise judgments about the magnitude of an agent’s knowledge from minimal behavioral evidence.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106236"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144703128","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":"Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures","authors":"Moshe Poliak,&nbsp;Curtis Chen ,&nbsp;Edward Gibson","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106265","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106265","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The factors that affect the acceptability of long-distance extractions have long been debated, with multiple accounts proposed. Liu et al. (2022) proposed a succinct probability-based account of a sub-class of these kinds of materials, wh-questions with long-distance dependencies across sentence-complement verbs (e.g., “What did Mary whine that John bought?”). The explanation that they proposed was that the acceptability of such sentences depends on the probability of the verb-frame of the intermediate verb (e.g., “whine that”). In the current work, we evaluate some potentially simpler probability-based accounts on Liu et al.'s original data set, and show how an alternative (but also probability-based) approach accounts for the data better. We replicate their experiment and conduct the same analysis on the new dataset, finding the same results. Finally, we apply the same analysis to wh-questions with predicate adjectives (e.g., “What was Mary glad that John bought?”), and again find similar results. We conclude that the acceptability of such constructions is higher the more probable the words and constructions that make up the sentence are.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106265"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144703129","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 effects of inoculation interventions and repetition on perceived truth in younger and older adults","authors":"Jessica Udry ,&nbsp;Sarah J. Barber","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106275","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106275","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Inoculation interventions aim to improve discernment between true and false information, but their effectiveness with older adults is unknown. It is also unknown whether inoculation interventions are effective when misinformation is repeated, as repetition tends to make information seem truer, a phenomenon known as the illusory truth effect. To evaluate whether inoculation intervention efficacy varies with age and information repetition, in this study older and younger adult participants received either an inoculation treatment, in which they learned about a misinformation technique, or they received no intervention. Participants then completed a social media exposure phase where they saw true news headlines, as well as neutrally-framed and manipulatively-framed false news headlines. Participants rated the perceived truth of repeated and new headlines both immediately and after two weeks. Perceptions of threat and counterarguing, two proposed mediators for inoculation efficacy, were measured during both rating phases. Results revealed an illusory truth effect, such that repeated headlines were rated truer than new headlines. The magnitude of this illusory truth effect was larger for older than younger adults and was larger on the delayed than immediate test. However, the inoculation intervention did not improve discernment between true and false information and did not reduce the magnitude of the illusory truth effect for either age group. Although participants in the inoculation and control groups did not differ in perceived threat or counterarguing, counterarguing was consistently associated with higher discernment between true and false headlines. This suggests that counterarguing is an important factor associated with truth discernment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106275"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144704723","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":"Image primitives supporting perception of animate forms","authors":"Lindsay M. Peterson,&nbsp;Kritika Sarna,&nbsp;Branka Spehar,&nbsp;Colin W.G. Clifford","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106258","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106258","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The human visual system can recognise familiar forms, most notably faces, in other objects or patterns, a phenomenon known as pareidolia. The patterns that elicit pareidolia range from meaningful to ambiguous and random images, making it hard to generalise across the featural or configurational properties that trigger different types of pareidolia. Here, we aim to characterise the minimal stimuli associated with different types of pareidolia and investigate the extent to which pareidolia is tuned to variations in natural scene statistics and symmetry. Participants in the current study viewed a range of synthetic noise patterns varying in their spatiotemporal spectral and symmetry characteristics and reported any shapes or structure perceived in these patterns. The patterns with spatiotemporal properties typical of natural scenes generated the highest number of responses with more animate, rather than inanimate, forms overall. While faces were the most reported animacy-related percept, responses covered a wide range of animate agents including animals and mythical creatures. The greatest number and the highest proportion of animacy-related percepts were observed in vertically symmetrical patterns compared to other types of pattern symmetry. Together, the current study establishes that pareidolia is tuned to natural scene statistics and biased towards animate forms, especially in patterns with vertical symmetry. It also demonstrates the usefulness of synthetic noise stimuli for pareidolia research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106258"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144694537","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 your eyes following your thoughts? Exploring individual differences in internal coupling","authors":"Sonja Walcher ,&nbsp;Živa Korda ,&nbsp;Christof Körner ,&nbsp;Mathias Benedek","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106267","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106267","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The eyes are remarkably active during internal cognitive processes and often couple to internal events, but there is substantial interindividual variability in the amount of this internal coupling. These variations present considerable challenges for predicting cognitive states and raise important theoretical questions about their origins. This study explores whether internal coupling serves as a compensation mechanism to supports internal activities when task demands exceed individual's cognitive resources or if internal coupling occurs as a byproduct of mental imagery, with its co-occurrence determined by the quality of an individual's mental image.</div><div>We examined how consistently eye movements aligned with imagined movement in a visuospatial working memory task and related these coupled saccades to measures of working memory capacity (Complex span tasks) and imagery skills (VVIQ, OSIVQ). We found that the rate of coupled saccades, when the task was performed entirely in mind, ranged from zero to 90 %. The data showed some indications that people with lower working memory capacity and lower vividness of visual imagination might benefit from internal coupling, hinting at some functional and compensatory role of coupling. However, these results were not robust, and no adaptive response to increased task demands was observed, challenging the notion of strategic use of internal coupling. The quality of mental imagery influenced internal coupling, with the removal of a visual spatial reference reducing coupling frequency, especially in those participants with lower spatial working memory capacity. Overall, while internal coupling is partly related to functional aspects and the quality of mental images, a substantial portion of individual differences remained unexplained, highlighting the need for further research into the role of eye movements during internal cognitive processes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106267"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144694536","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":"People make suboptimal decisions about existential risks","authors":"Adam Elga ,&nbsp;Jian-Qiao Zhu ,&nbsp;Thomas L. Griffiths","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106216","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106216","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Allocating resources to maximize the probability that humanity survives a set of existential risks has a different structure from many decision problems, as the objective is the product of the probabilities of desired outcomes rather than the sum. We derive the optimal solution to this problem and use this solution to evaluate the choices that people make when presented with decisions that have this multiplicative structure. Our participants (total <span><math><mi>N</mi></math></span>=2,072) are appropriately sensitive to how responsive a risk is to investment, but are conservative in their decisions and do not allocate enough resources to risks with lower probability of survival. This pattern persists even with alternative framings that emphasize survival probabilities. Our results highlight a systematic flaw in people’s intuitions about how to respond to existential risks, and suggest that people may have particular difficulty with decisions that involve multiplicative objectives.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106216"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144679726","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":"Self-portrait of a stranger: Self-face representation and interoception in depersonalization experiences","authors":"Lara Maister ,&nbsp;Anna Ciaunica","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106261","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106261","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Depersonalization is a condition that makes people feel detached from one's self, body and others. The representation of one's own face is a salient bodily aspect of self-awareness and identity, and empirical evidence suggests that individuals with depersonalization disorder experience disrupted perception of their faces when viewing themselves in photographs or in the mirror, which has been corroborated by first-person reports. However, no study had yet explored the state of long-term self-face representations stored in visual memory in the context of depersonalization. By visualizing how individuals saw themselves “in the mind's eye”, this study provides the first empirical evidence for a relationship between depersonalization symptoms and impairments in self-face representation. Individuals reporting more frequent and intense depersonalization symptoms had lower self-face representation accuracy, but somewhat counterintuitively, also higher precision and informational content of this representation. These results suggested that individuals with high depersonalization were representing a distinct, but inaccurate, facial identity as themselves. The self-face representations of high-depersonalization participants were rated as visibly more emotionless and younger in appearance than those of low-depersonalisation participants, according to independent raters. These features were found to be specifically related to aspects of depersonalization symptomatology related to anomalous memory experiences. Finally, an intriguing role of interoceptive sensibility was revealed in both self-face representational accuracy and in depersonalization symptoms. These novel results highlight the link between interoceptive and exteroceptive bodily self-awareness and memory processes as important in those individuals who experience distressing feelings of being detached from one's self, body and the world.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106261"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144679725","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":"Recalling sequences from memory can explain the distribution of recursive structures in natural languages","authors":"Fenna H. Poletiek ,&nbsp;Peter Hagoort ,&nbsp;Bruno R. Bocanegra","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106244","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106244","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Language operates within the cognitive machinery of its users. Hence language structure is likely to evolve under the pressure of cognitive constraints (<span><span>Christiansen &amp; Chater, 2008</span></span>). The challenge remains, however, in determining precisely how this may have occurred. Hierarchical recursive structures are especially difficult to relate to finite cognitive features. Here, we propose a new cognitive account explaining why Center Embedded recursive structures of relative clauses (as in <em>The boy A</em>_<em>1</em> <em>the dog A</em>_<em>2</em> <em>chases B</em>_<em>2</em> <em>falls B</em>_<em>1</em><em>) (</em>A₁A₂B₂B₁) are ubiquitous among thousands of languages, whereas Crossed-Dependent (CD) structures <em>(</em>A₁A₂B₁B₂) hardly ever occur. The preponderance of CE grammars is surprising considering they can produce dependent elements at longer distances than CD. We propose that this can be explained by memory retrieval mechanisms combined with linguistic word binding operations (role assignment). Processing CE requires the sequential retrieval of referent words in a backward direction, and CD in a forward direction. We first specify two Retrieval-and-Binding (R&amp;B) functions, from which we derive mathematically that R&amp;B performance under backwards recall (CE) exceeds performance under forward recall (CD). Next, we reanalyze an existing dataset that investigated strategies of recall and review the literature on sequential recall strategies under conditions that mimic sentence processing. The reanalysis verified the predictions of our account and showed that a backwards recall (CE) strategy is superior under conditions relevant to language processing. We suggest that the productive power of recursive embeddings is best conserved in a CE instantiation because memory mechanisms optimally support the processing of this structure, which might explain why CE has prevailed during language evolution.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106244"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144662506","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 impact of retrieval goals on memory for complex events in younger and older adults","authors":"Can Fenerci,&nbsp;Samantha O'Toole,&nbsp;Emma Ranalli,&nbsp;Kailin Summers,&nbsp;Signy Sheldon","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106263","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106263","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Retrieval goals influence what individuals remember from past experiences. Previous research has demonstrated that adopting accuracy and social goals modify the content of an associated episodic memory. Age-related episodic memory changes coincide with shifts in retrieval goals, leading to questions about how retrieval goals alter memory in the context of aging. To answer these questions, we conducted a between-group experiment in which younger and older participants (<em>N</em> = 120) encoded an audiovisual movie and later recalled it with either an accuracy or social retrieval goal. Following a 24-h delay, participants completed two recognition memory tasks—one assessing memory for narrative (i.e., story structure), another for the perceptual aspects of the movie – and then freely recalled the movie. Using a Natural Language Processing model, we compared the similarity in content between the encoded movie and recollections as well as between the recollections. First, we found higher similarity for participants recalling the movie with an accuracy compared to a social goal, regardless of age group. Second, when comparing the recollections made to a social versus accuracy goal, we found greater similarity across goals for older compared to younger adults. Finally, while younger adults outperformed older adults on both recognition tasks, this effect was stronger for the perceptual than the narrative recognition task. These findings highlight how retrieval goals shape the content of younger and older adults' memories, yet age differences persist as a reduced ability to tune recall to retrieval goals and access precise details from a memory.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106263"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144662507","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":"Out of sight, but still in the mind: Body-specific associations between space and valence in blind people","authors":"Heng Li ,&nbsp;Yu Cao","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106262","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106262","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that individuals tend to associate positive concepts with their dominant side of space in their mental models. However, prior research indicates that the left-is-good bias among left-handed individuals is stronger than the right-is-good bias observed in right-handed individuals. One potential explanation for this asymmetry is that right-handers, during face-to-face interactions with predominantly right-handed communicators, experience a vicarious form of motor fluency that may contradict their own actions, thereby diminishing their bias toward the right-is-good mapping. However, this hypothesis has yet to be empirically tested. Here, we investigated this assertion by examining the role of visual experience in the scalability of the body-specificity effect among early blind (<em>N</em> = 123; 54.5 % females, mean age = 27.02) and sighted right-handers (<em>N</em> = 127; 54.3 % females, mean age = 28.93). Our results reveal that both Chinese blind and sighted individuals exhibited a body-specificity effect in their mental representations. Notably, the strength of the right-is-good pattern in blind right-handers was more pronounced than that observed in sighted controls. Collectively, our findings not only provide empirical evidence for the body-specificity effect within blind populations but also support the role of vicarious experiences in the development of implicit space-valence associations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106262"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144654191","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}