Cognition最新文献

{"title":"Sensorimotor awareness requires intention: Evidence from minuscule eye movements","authors":"Jan-Nikolas Klanke ,&nbsp;Sven Ohl ,&nbsp;Martin Rolfs","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106176","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106176","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Microsaccades are tiny eye movements typically occurring spontaneously and without awareness but can also be intentionally controlled with high precision. We used these tiny visual actions to investigate how intention modulates sensorimotor awareness by directly comparing intended (upon instruction), unintended (occurring despite instruction to fixate), and spontaneous microsaccades. In addition, we dissociated the effects of action intention and the actions' visual consequences on awareness. To achieve this, we presented a stimulus at high temporal frequency rendering it invisible during stable fixation. Critically, this stimulus became visible when it slowed down on the retina, either incidentally, due to a microsaccade with comparable direction and speed, or physically, when replaying the retinal consequence of previous microsaccades. Trials without a stimulus were included as control. Participants reported whether they perceived the stimulus (visual sensitivity), whether they believed they had made a microsaccade (microsaccade sensitivity), and their level of confidence that their eye movement behavior was linked to their perception (causality assignment). Visual sensitivity was high for both generated and replayed microsaccades and comparable for intended, unintended, and spontaneous eye movements. Microsaccade sensitivity, however, was low for spontaneous microsaccades, but heightened for both intended and unintended movements. Thus, the intention to saccade or fixate enhances awareness of otherwise undetected eye movements. Visual consequences failed to aid eye movement awareness, and confidence ratings revealed a poor understanding of a causal relationship between eye movement and sensory consequence. These findings highlight the functional relevance of intention in sensorimotor awareness at the smallest scale of visual actions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106176"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144071957","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":"Curiosity overpowers cognitive effort avoidance tendencies","authors":"Markus W.H. Spitzer ,&nbsp;Younes Strittmatter ,&nbsp;Melvin Marti ,&nbsp;Aki Schumacher ,&nbsp;Lisa Bardach","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106167","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106167","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Curiosity has been described as a desire to learn new information, and previous studies have demonstrated that curiosity drives peoples’ decision to invest resources (e.g., time or tokens) to find out answers. It is commonly assumed that curiosity should also prompt people to invest more effort until they attain unknown answers. However, experimental evidence is lacking on whether people would be willing to exert cognitive effort — in addition to time investments — to find out answers. In three pre-registered experiments, we first asked participants to rate a set of 20 trivia questions regarding their curiosity about knowing the answers. Subsequently, participants had to perform a set of random-dot kinematograms (RDKs) to view the answer to each trivia question. We varied the motion coherence of the RDKs as a proxy for cognitive effort demands and tested whether curiosity overpowers cognitive effort avoidance tendencies. Our results provide converging evidence that curiosity outweighs peoples’ tendencies to avoid cognitive effort. That is, participants avoided high-effort RDKs if they were not curious about information and when the exertion of cognitive effort did not affect the attainment of information. However, if participants were curious about questions and if no alternative low-effort option was available, they were willing to employ cognitive effort to find out answers.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106167"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144069694","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":"20-month-olds can use negative evidence while learning word meanings","authors":"Alex de Carvalho ,&nbsp;Isabelle Dautriche","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106171","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106171","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Decades of research in psychology have built models and theoretical assumptions about language development evaluating how children extract information from positive evidence to learn the meanings of novel words. In the present set of studies, we evaluated whether children can also consider negative evidence, information about what a word cannot refer to. Across two experiments (<em>n</em> = 73), we show that English-learning 20-month-olds can use negative evidence in the form of negative sentences (e.g., “This is not a danu”) to constrain their interpretation of a novel word meaning (“danu”). These findings raise the possibility that learning word meanings through positive evidence alone, while possible, may not be the most accurate characterization of the word learning process and invite further developments of current word learning theories and models that incorporate negative evidence.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106171"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144069693","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":"Semantic audio-visual congruence modulates visual sensitivity to biological motion across awareness levels","authors":"Stefano Ioannucci,&nbsp;Petra Vetter","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106181","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106181","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Whether cross-modal interaction requires conscious awareness of multisensory information or whether it can occur in the absence of awareness, is still an open question. Here, we investigated if sounds can enhance detection sensitivity of semantically matching visual stimuli at varying levels of visual awareness. We presented biological motion stimuli of human actions (walking, rowing, sawing) during dynamic continuous flash suppression (CFS) to 80 participants and measured the effect of co-occurring, semantically matching or non-matching action sounds on visual sensitivity (d′). By individually thresholding stimulus contrast, we distinguished participants who detected motion either above or at chance level.</div><div>Participants who reliably detected visual motion above chance showed higher sensitivity to upright versus inverted biological motion across all experimental conditions. In contrast, participants detecting visual motion at chance level, i.e. during successful suppression, demonstrated this upright advantage exclusively during trials with semantically congruent sounds. Across the whole sample, the impact of sounds on visual sensitivity increased as participants' visual detection performance decreased, revealing a systematic trade-off between auditory and visual processing. Our findings suggest that semantic congruence between auditory and visual information can selectively modulate biological motion perception when visual awareness is minimal or absent, while more robust visual signals enable perception of biological motion independent of auditory input. Thus, semantically congruent sounds may impact visual representations as a function of the level of visual awareness.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106181"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143947454","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":"Beyond syncopation: The number of rhythmic layers shapes the pleasurable urge to move to music","authors":"Alberte B. Seeberg ,&nbsp;Tomas E. Matthews ,&nbsp;Andreas Højlund ,&nbsp;Peter Vuust ,&nbsp;Bjørn Petersen","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106178","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106178","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>People experience the strongest pleasurable urge to move to music (PLUMM) with rhythms of medium complexity, showing an inverted U-shaped relationship. Rhythmic complexity is typically defined by syncopation but likely interacts with the number and instrumentation of rhythmic layers (e.g., snare only vs snare and bass drum) in affecting PLUMM. This study investigated this interaction by comparing PLUMM ratings of rhythms with varying rhythmic layers and syncopation degrees.</div><div>Two online studies (study 1, <em>n</em> = 108; study 2, <em>n</em> = 46) were conducted asking participants to rate how much they wanted to move and the pleasure they felt while listening to rhythms. Each study used 12 rhythms in four versions: 1) snare only (SN) in study I and bass drum only (BD) in study II; 2) snare and hi-hat (SN + HH) in study I and bass drum and hi-hat (BD + HH) in study II; 3) snare and bass drum (SN + BD) and 4) the original with snare, bass drum, and hi-hat (SN + BD + HH) in both studies, totaling 48 stimuli per study. We tested for linear and quadratic effects of syncopation and rhythmic layers on PLUMM ratings.</div><div>Study I showed a significant interaction between syncopation and rhythmic layers. The SN + BD + HH versions exhibited the strongest inverted U as an effect of syncopation, followed by SN + BD and SN + HH, while SN showed a near-flat pattern of ratings as an effect of syncopation.</div><div>Study II had similar findings, but differences between versions were smaller, and the interaction was mainly driven by differences between BD and BD + HH and between SN + BD and SN + BD + HH, especially at moderate syncopation levels.</div><div>These findings suggest that the PLUMM response is shaped by the number of rhythmic layers, the roles that the different instruments play, and the way that they interact with each other and with syncopation, thus extending our understanding of the rhythmic features that drive the motor and hedonic responses to music.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106178"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143941986","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":"Moral psychological exploration of the asymmetry effect in AI-assisted euthanasia decisions","authors":"Michael Laakasuo ,&nbsp;Anton Kunnari ,&nbsp;Kathryn Francis ,&nbsp;Michaela Jirout Košová ,&nbsp;Robin Kopecký ,&nbsp;Paolo Buttazzoni ,&nbsp;Mika Koverola ,&nbsp;Jussi Palomäki ,&nbsp;Marianna Drosinou ,&nbsp;Ivar Hannikainen","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106177","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106177","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A recurring discrepancy in attitudes toward decisions made by human versus artificial agents, termed the Human-Robot moral judgment asymmetry, has been documented in moral psychology of AI. Across a wide range of contexts, AI agents are subject to greater moral scrutiny than humans for the same actions and decisions. In eight experiments (total <em>N</em> = 5837), we investigated whether the asymmetry effect arises in end-of-life care contexts and explored the mechanisms underlying this effect. Our studies documented reduced approval of an AI doctor's decision to withdraw life support relative to a human doctor (Studies 1a and 1b). This effect persisted regardless of whether the AI assumed a recommender role or made the final medical decision (Studies 2a and 2b and 3), but, importantly, disappeared under two conditions: when doctors kept on rather than withdraw life support (Studies 1a, 1b and 3), and when they carried out active euthanasia (e.g., providing a lethal injection or removing a respirator on the patient's demand) rather than passive euthanasia (Study 4). These findings highlight two contextual factors–the level of automation and the patient's autonomy–that influence the presence of the asymmetry effect, neither of which is not predicted by existing theories. Finally, we found that the asymmetry effect was partly explained by perceptions of AI incompetence (Study 5) and limited explainability (Study 6). As the role of AI in medicine continues to expand, our findings help to outline the conditions under which stakeholders disfavor AI over human doctors in clinical settings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106177"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143937050","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":"How much face identity information is required for face recognition?","authors":"Mintao Zhao ,&nbsp;Isabelle Bülthoff","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106175","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106175","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Many studies have shown that degradation of face identity information impairs face recognition, however, when such information degradation reaches the limit of our face recognition ability remains unclear. Here we systematically decreased face identity information by morphing an increasing number of faces together and investigated how much identity information is required for recognizing a face in a morph. Our results show that participants could identify half of faces mixed in 3-identity morphs using only their memory of these faces (Experiment 1) and, when perceptual information is available, they could recognize two of three faces mixed in a morph (Experiment 2). When we systematically reduced the contribution of each identity to a face morph from 50 % to 6.25 % (i.e., morphing 2 to 16 faces together; Experiments 3 and 4), participants could still consistently recognize faces in a morph containing as little as 12.5 % of their identity information. Moreover, familiarity with faces enhanced participants' performance, whether they were asked to recognize all faces mixed in a morph in one go (Experiments 1 and 2) or to recognize them individually (Experiments 3 and 4). Finally, image-based similarity between the faces and morphs could predict how decreasing identity information impairs face recognition performance. Together, these results not only help quantify the minimum information required for face recognition but also offer new insights into the representational differences between familiar and unfamiliar faces.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106175"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143937049","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":"Maintaining visual stability in naturalistic scenes: The roles of trans-saccadic memory and default assumptions","authors":"Yong Min Choi,&nbsp;Tzu-Yao Chiu,&nbsp;Jake Ferreira,&nbsp;Julie D. Golomb","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106165","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106165","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>How is visual stability maintained across saccades? One theory poses the visual system has an underlying assumption that the visual world has not changed during the saccade, and scrutinization of trans-saccadic memory occurs only when there is strong evidence against external stability. As support, prior studies demonstrated a “blanking effect”, where sensitivity to trans-saccadic change is increased when a short blank is inserted immediately after saccade onset. However, there remains a considerable gap between these findings, discovered with simple visual stimuli, and understanding trans-saccadic stability for rich naturalistic scenes. Here we tested human observers in a blanking paradigm with naturalistic scene images, using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated “scene wheel” stimuli that varied in a continuous and quantifiably controlled manner. Psychometric modeling revealed that inserting a brief blank screen during a saccade increased sensitivity to trans-saccadic scene changes <em>and</em> decreased the stability bias. These effects occurred only when observers made actual eye movements, but not when eye movements were simulated with retinal image shifts. These findings demonstrate that trans-saccadic memory of complex scenes and an overarching stability assumption work in tandem to achieve stable perceptual experience in natural environments.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106165"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143927839","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":"Prosody enhances learning of statistical dependencies from continuous speech streams in adults","authors":"Soila Kuuluvainen ,&nbsp;Saara Kaskivuo ,&nbsp;Martti Vainio ,&nbsp;Eleonore Smalle ,&nbsp;Riikka Möttönen","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106169","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106169","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Foreign languages sound like seamless streams of speech sounds without pauses between words and phrases. This makes it challenging for the listener to discover the underlying structure of a new language. However, all spoken languages have a melody, and changes in pitch, syllable duration and stress can provide prosodic cues about word and phrase boundaries. It is currently underspecified how adults use prosodic cues to crack the structure of a new language. Here, we investigated how pitch patterns affect the ability to learn adjacent and nonadjacent statistical dependencies from novel, artificial speech streams. In a series of eight online experiments along two studies, we presented native Finnish speakers with short, two-minute speech streams with a hidden probabilistic structure that did or did not include prosodic pitch patterns. We measured learning outcomes using a forced choice recognition task along with confidence ratings. In Study 1, we found that learning adjacent dependencies was boosted with familiar-to-listener (i.e., typical for Finnish language) prosodic pitch patterns but not with unfamiliar-to-listener or random prosodic pitch patterns. In Study 2, we found that more complex nonadjacent dependencies were only learned with the presence of familiar-to-listener prosodic patterns. Intriguingly, prosodic patterns also enabled concurrent learning of multiple adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies in speech. Moreover, they enhanced participants' confidence in remembering adjacent, but not nonadjacent, dependencies. Together, the results suggest that adults use language-background-dependent prosodic patterns to acquire novel linguistic knowledge from speech streams in a fast and efficient manner. The findings support the idea that prosody has an important role in language learning, making the underlying statistical structure of spoken languages more accessible and learnable for listeners.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106169"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143927838","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":"Medial temporal cortex supports object perception by integrating over visuospatial sequences","authors":"Tyler Bonnen ,&nbsp;Anthony D. Wagner ,&nbsp;Daniel L.K. Yamins","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106135","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106135","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Perception unfolds across multiple timescales. For humans and other primates, many object-centric visual attributes can be inferred ‘at a glance’ (i.e., given <span><math><mo>&lt;</mo></math></span>200 ms of visual information), an ability supported by ventral temporal cortex (VTC). Other perceptual inferences require more time; to determine a novel object’s identity, we might need to represent its unique configuration of visual features, requiring multiple ‘glances.’ Here we evaluate whether medial temporal cortex (MTC), downstream from VTC, supports object perception by integrating over such visuospatial sequences. We first compare human visual inferences directly to electrophysiological recordings from macaque VTC. While human performance ‘at a glance’ is approximated by a linear readout of VTC, participants radically outperform VTC given longer viewing times (i.e., <span><math><mo>&gt;</mo></math></span>200 ms). Next, we leverage a stimulus set that enables us to characterize MTC involvement in these temporally extended visual inferences. We find that human visual inferences ‘at a glance’ resemble the deficits observed in MTC-lesioned human participants. By measuring gaze behaviors during these temporally extended viewing periods, we find that participants sequentially sample task-relevant features via multiple saccades/fixations. These patterns of visuospatial attention are both reliable across participants and necessary for MTC-dependent visual inferences. These data reveal complementary neural systems that support visual object perception: VTC provides a rich set of visual features ‘at a glance’, while MTC is able to integrate over the sequential outputs of VTC to support object-level inferences.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"262 ","pages":"Article 106135"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143922492","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}