Cognition最新文献

{"title":"I want to know why this feels so familiar: Familiarity-detection during recall failure prompts curiosity and information seeking","authors":"Andrew M. Huebert ,&nbsp;Brooke N. Carlaw ,&nbsp;Katherine L. McNeely-White ,&nbsp;Anne M. Cleary","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106286","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106286","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>According to the Region of Proximal Learning framework, curiosity emerges when there is a feeling of <em>almost</em> knowing a piece of information—but what leads to a feeling of <em>almost</em> knowing? Here, we demonstrate that cue familiarity-detection increases curiosity. We used the recognition without cued recall method to experimentally manipulate cue familiarity during recall failure. Consistent with prior research, our manipulation was successful at increasing perceived cue familiarity during recall failure. Importantly, curiosity ratings during recall failure increased with greater cue familiarization. Expenditure of limited opportunities to discover the source of any perceived cue familiarity also increased with cue familiarization. These results indicate that familiarity-detection can drive feelings of curiosity and information-seeking behavior, suggesting that one contributor to a feeling of almost knowing may be detecting familiarity. We also found evidence of increased internal memory search effort regarding the source of familiarity; commission errors (a possible proxy for retrieval search effort) increased as cue familiarity was experimentally increased.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106286"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144879383","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":"Stronger effects of motion priors on sensitivity and bias in children","authors":"Eman Mhajne ,&nbsp;Sarit F.A. Szpiro","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106282","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106282","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>According to Bayesian inference models, perception is affected by incoming input (i.e., likelihood) and by experience (i.e., priors). How perceptual inference is modified during development remains unclear. This gap is especially important when considering the two fundamental dimensions of perception—sensitivity and bias, which may evolve differently in children. In adults, a natural prior for cardinal directions affects both dimensions, resulting in lower motion direction thresholds and larger estimation biases for cardinal versus oblique directions. Here, we investigate how this natural prior for cardinal directions influences sensitivity and bias in the perception of motion direction in adults (<em>n</em> = 28) and children (<em>n</em> = 25, age range = 7–8) with identical stimuli presentation durations, and in an additional group of children with longer stimuli presentation durations to examine whether providing more time to integrate sensory information affects children's reliance on priors (long duration: <em>n</em> = 25, age range = 6.5–10.5). First, we tested individual coherence discrimination thresholds for near oblique versus near horizontal directions. Then, participants moved a mouse to estimate the at-threshold motion directions. As expected, children had higher overall thresholds compared to adults. All groups showed a prior to horizontal - significantly lower thresholds and larger estimation biases for near horizontal motion compared to near oblique motion. Critically, these differences, between oblique and horizontal, were significantly more pronounced in both groups of children compared to the adult group. These results reveal a larger impact of priors in children and highlight the developmental changes in sensitivity and bias, underscoring the importance of studying perceptual inferences in children.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106282"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144879384","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 role of gender labels and gendered appearances in children's social inferences","authors":"Jenna Alton ,&nbsp;Andrei Cimpian ,&nbsp;Lucas Payne Butler","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106281","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106281","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Two preregistered studies investigated how children use gender labels and gendered appearances when making inductive inferences about unfamiliar individuals' gender-related attributes. Prior research on this question has yielded mixed results, motivating a closer examination. We assessed the relative weight children assign to these cues (labels vs. appearances) when predicting whether unfamiliar individuals will display masculine versus feminine attributes (e.g., playing with robots vs. dolls). Children ranked characters varying orthogonally in gender labels (“girl” vs. “boy”) and gendered appearances (feminine vs. masculine) on their likelihood of exhibiting these attributes. Study 1 tested 4–5-year-olds (<em>N</em> = 46); Study 2 tested 7–12-year-olds (<em>N</em> = 140). Children treated both gender labels and gendered appearances as informative, even at the youngest ages. Appearances carried more weight in three key contexts: First, children relied more on appearances (vs. labels) when reasoning about individuals labeled “boy” (vs. “girl”), consistent with the stricter sanctions boys face for gender non-conformity in appearance, which makes the stereotypicality of their appearance an especially informative cue. Second, children relied more on appearances (vs. labels) when reasoning about feminine (vs. masculine) attributes, consistent with femininity's stronger cultural association with physical appearances. Third, children relied more on appearances (vs. labels) when they themselves were boys (vs. girls), perhaps reflecting boys' greater attunement to appearance cues given the stronger policing of their gender expression. These findings suggest that children integrate labels and appearances in their gender-based reasoning in ways that reflect a growing sensitivity to the broader societal context of gender.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106281"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144860608","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":"Discourse genre predicts demonstrative use in text: Experimental evidence from Dutch and Mandarin","authors":"David Peeters ,&nbsp;Suzanne Schuurman ,&nbsp;Tianning Zhai ,&nbsp;Emiel Krahmer ,&nbsp;Yan Gu ,&nbsp;Alfons Maes","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106285","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106285","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In written language, demonstratives such as <em>this</em> and <em>that</em> allow writers to produce coherent texts and readers to build up a consistent mental model of the message that is conveyed. But what makes a writer decide to use one demonstrative (<em>e.g.</em>, <em>this</em>) over another (<em>e.g.</em>, <em>that</em>)? Here we present experimental evidence, from both Dutch and Mandarin, that discourse genre is the main predictor of writers' demonstrative use in text. Specifically, the results of a text elicitation task show that expository texts mainly elicited proximal demonstratives (<em>this</em>, <em>these, here</em>) while narrative texts showed a significant increase in distal demonstrative (<em>that</em>, <em>those</em>, <em>there</em>) use. This finding is taken to reflect that writers mentally position textual referents in psychological proximity to themselves or to the reader as a function of the genre of their text.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106285"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144831034","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":"Children's detection of online misinformation","authors":"Andrew Shtulman ,&nbsp;Lucy Stoll ,&nbsp;Lesly Sabroso ,&nbsp;Andrew G. Young","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106279","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106279","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Adults' ability to detect online misinformation is improved by cognitive reflection and targeted instruction. Is the same true for children, who are also on the internet and may also be exposed to online misinformation? We explored this question by asking children aged 4 to 12 (<em>N</em> = 135, 54 % female, 31 % white) to judge the veracity of news stories that had circulated on the internet, some real and some fake. We compared their differentiation of fake news from real news to their performance on a developmental version of the Cognitive Reflection Test, the CRT-D. We also administered a brief tutorial encouraging children to scrutinize the plausibility of a story's content or the credibility of its source. Children's differentiation of fake news from real news was strongly correlated with their CRT-D scores but did not improve with instruction; rather, instruction made children more skeptical of all news. A comparison group of adults (<em>N</em> = 117) demonstrated similar findings with the exception that instruction improved adults' differentiation of fake news from real news for those who received source-based instruction. These findings indicate that the evaluation of online news is aided by cognitive reflection from the start and that knowledge of news sources, and news production more generally, may be critical for developing adult-level competencies at detecting online misinformation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106279"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144781134","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":"When metrics matter: How reasoning in different metrics impacts judgments of uncertainty","authors":"David Zimmerman ,&nbsp;Stephen A. Spiller ,&nbsp;Nicholas Reinholtz ,&nbsp;Sam J. Maglio","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106277","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106277","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The uncertainty of a point estimate, often conceptualized and quantified via a prediction interval, can vary in both magnitude (e.g., width) and symmetry. Further, when people make many types of estimates, they can use different but equitable metrics (e.g., feet vs. meters). In a series of experiments, we investigate whether using different metrics impacts people's estimates of uncertainty. Three empirical regularities guide our focus: First, people believe risk scales with magnitude, reporting greater uncertainty for bigger point estimates, leading to inconsistent prediction intervals across metrics differing by a fixed additive constant. Second, people are insufficiently sensitive to unit changes, leading to inconsistent prediction interval widths across metrics differing by a multiplicative constant. Third, people tend to assume that distributions are symmetric, leading to inconsistent symmetry across metrics differing by an inverse transformation. Together, these three regularities exemplify how uncertainty estimations are sensitive to metric in substantive ways.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106277"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144772852","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":"Dyadic learning shapes gaze-mediated social attentional orienting","authors":"Shujia Zhang ,&nbsp;Bin Zhan ,&nbsp;Li Wang ,&nbsp;Yi Jiang","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106280","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106280","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>People tend to automatically shift their attention in response to social cues, such as eye gaze—a phenomenon known as social attentional orienting, which is crucial for adaptive social behaviors and interpersonal communication. While this ability is genetically influenced and typically stable, the current research shows that it can be enhanced within a specific social context by dyadic learning. We engaged pairs of participants in a standard gaze-cuing task, during which they received instant feedback on each other's performance. Unbeknownst to the participants, the feedback was designed to create a social context in which the partner appeared to respond to the cued location faster than the participant. We found that such a social context significantly increased the magnitude of gaze cuing effect. Importantly, the observed enhancement was not attributable to confounding factors such as arousal level or overall performance difference, nor to implicit learning from the feedback structure. Instead, drift-diffusion model analysis suggested that such a social context improved both the initial attentional orienting process and the sustained allocation of processing resources to the gazed-at location, resulting in a stronger gaze cuing effect. A subsequent experiment replaced gaze cues with non-social arrow cues and observed no modulatory effect, underscoring the distinction between social and non-social attentional orienting. The current research provides compelling evidence that social attentional orienting is malleable and highlights the significant impact of dyadic learning in shaping this capability.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106280"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144767193","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":"Competition for selection drives the nature of bilingual language control: Picture naming, but not reading aloud, triggers global inhibition of the dominant language","authors":"Maria Fernanda Gavino ,&nbsp;Tehila Malul ,&nbsp;Anat Prior ,&nbsp;Tamar Degani ,&nbsp;Tamar H. Gollan","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106260","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106260","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The current study tested the hypothesis that bilingual language control mechanisms vary depending on the extent of competition for selection. Forty-eight English-dominant Spanish-English bilinguals switched languages in production of single words, which was elicited with picture naming versus reading aloud in counterbalanced order. Results revealed some key similarities across tasks including: a) significant switch costs, b) larger switch costs in the dominant when compared to the nondominant language (i.e., in English versus in Spanish), and c) only the nondominant language benefitted from repetition. However, switch costs were larger in picture naming than in reading aloud, and only the picture naming task exhibited the strongest signature effect of inhibition of the dominant language in the form of reversed language dominance. These results provide evidence that language control mechanisms adapt to meet varying task demands depending on the nature and extent of competition for selection between languages.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106260"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144757013","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":"Motivated information search: Context-dependent efficiency in children and adults","authors":"Ohan Hominis ,&nbsp;Christophe Heintz ,&nbsp;Azzurra Ruggeri","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106278","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106278","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>While the motivation to gather accurate information emerges early in childhood, social motivations can modulate the drive for accuracy. Across two studies we investigate how social narratives can impact the efficiency of information search in children (6–14 years old), adolescents (14–17 years old), and adults. Work investigating the developmental trajectory of information-search strategies has found that efficiency begins to improve dramatically at age 3, and that children as young as 2 are able to tailor their search strategies to their environments to maximize information gain. In the presented studies (<em>n</em> = 174; <em>n</em> = 175), participants are told they are competing in a sporting event and that their team is either winning or losing. Participants are then tasked with playing a 20-Questions game to try to find a culprit guilty of foul play, and told that if they are not found the competition will be canceled. Whether the participant's team is winning or losing determines whether their team would benefit from finding the culprit. As hypothesized, we found that participants from all age groups searched more efficiently when finding the culprit was in their best interest. Our findings suggest that social contexts play a crucial role in modulating the efficiency of information search across age groups, particularly in comparison to their performance on a standard 20-Questions game, highlighting the importance of taking social contexts into account when designing new paradigms and tracing the developmental trajectory of children's information search strategies in lab settings and the real world.</div></div><div><h3>Public significance statement</h3><div>This work highlights how our environments shape our motivations as we engage with information. Specifically, it examines how our beliefs and our social contexts influence what information we search for and how much of it we gather. In today's media landscape, where content reflects every conceivable viewpoint, it is essential to recognize how our interactions with information are influenced by our contexts. Making sense of these relationships is key to grasping how sources and content platforms shape our behavior with regard to what and how we search.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 106278"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144723624","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":"A counterfactual explanation for recency effects in double prevention scenarios: Commentary on Thanawala and Erb (2024)","authors":"Tadeg Quillien ,&nbsp;Kevin O’Neill ,&nbsp;Paul Henne","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106106","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106106","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Many cognitive scientists and philosophers take cases of double prevention to be one of the primary motivations for accepting causal pluralism, the view that people have multiple concepts of causation. Thanawala and Erb (2024) argue against Lombrozo (2010)’s account of causal pluralism. They find that the temporal order of events affects people’s causal judgments in double prevention cases, and they argue that this finding is not easily explained by prominent versions of causal pluralism or by counterfactual theories. In contrast to this interpretation, we argue that counterfactual thinking can explain their findings. On this explanation, the temporal order of events affects the extent to which people simulate counterfactual alternatives to these events. We show that under this assumption, a recent counterfactual model of causal judgment can reproduce all qualitative effects of temporal order found in Thanawala and Erb (2024)’s new work. Our findings complement past research that applied the counterfactual framework to temporal-order effects and double prevention cases independently, suggesting that these explanations are highly generalizable.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106106"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144738468","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}