{"title":"The psychological link between decisions and communicative behavior based on verbal probabilities","authors":"Hidehito Honda , Toshihiko Matsuka , Kazuhiro Ueda","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106230","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106230","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Verbal probability is categorized into two types in terms of directionality: positive (suggesting the occurrence of a target outcome: e.g., “it is likely”) or negative (suggesting the nonoccurrence: e.g., “it is quite uncertain”). Previous studies have shown that people's decisions are affected by differences in directionality, and that they use either positive or negative expressions depending on the communicative situation. In this study, we attempt to clarify the relationship between decisions and communicative behavior based on verbal probabilities. We proposed a quantitative model called <em>Decision by Belief Sampling</em> based on the Decision by Sampling model and the reference point hypothesis, and examined whether decisions and communicative behaviors could be explained with this model. The proposed model reveals the psychological mechanisms underlying superficially unrelated phenomena between decisions and communicative behaviors. In particular, listeners of verbal probabilities (decision-makers) infer the beliefs held by a speaker (conveyer of information) and make decisions based on these beliefs. These inferred beliefs align with the speaker's beliefs when communicating probabilistic information. Thus, the proposed model clarifies the psychological link between decisions affected by directionality and communicative behaviors (speaker's choice of directionality).</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106230"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144557204","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}
CognitionPub Date : 2025-07-04DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106223
Didi Dunin , Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco , Benjamin F. van Buren
{"title":"Remembering facial age: Assimilation in memory toward categories of ‘Young’ and ‘Old’","authors":"Didi Dunin , Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco , Benjamin F. van Buren","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106223","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106223","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>When we meet someone, we make all sorts of judgments based on their age. But how is a person's age represented in the mind at all: do we remember someone as younger, or older, than they actually were? In a matching-from-memory task, observers briefly saw a target face which was either Young (30 years old) or Old (60 years old). Afterward, they saw two new decoy faces — 10 years younger, and 10 years older than the target. Observers were strongly biased to match Young targets to younger decoys, and Old targets to older decoys. These biases held across artificially aged and real faces, regardless of observers' own age, and even when the decoys' races and genders differed from that of the target — suggesting that a common mechanism underlies memory for facial age across races and genders. Additional experiments indicated that these memory biases reflect assimilation toward visual category centers, rather than toward extremes. Thus, social categories of ‘young’ and ‘old’ shape and distort our memories of faces.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106223"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144557174","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}
CognitionPub Date : 2025-07-04DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106234
Christopher D. Erb, Huseina Thanawala
{"title":"Process and dependency are better together: A reply to Quillien et al. (2025)","authors":"Christopher D. Erb, Huseina Thanawala","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106234","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106234","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Thanawala and Erb (2024) found that causal judgments in double prevention scenarios are sensitive to the temporal order of events leading up to an outcome, even when the outcome remains constant across the scenarios. These findings challenged the causal pluralism account proposed by Lombrozo (2010) but ultimately supported its core insight: namely, that reasoners think about causal scenarios in terms of both process and dependency. Quillien et al. (2025) provided a compelling re-analysis of Thanawala and Erb's data, arguing that more sophisticated counterfactual accounts of causal reasoning (a type of dependency theory) can account for temporal order effects without appealing to causal pluralism. Here, we question whether continuing to frame the literature in terms of an opposition between process and dependency theories is the most productive path forward. We contend that investigations of causal reasoning would benefit from (1) occasionally emphasizing rich empirical exploration over strict theory comparison and (2) developing integrative accounts to capture how factors typically associated with either process or dependency theories jointly support causal reasoning.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106234"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144563874","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}
CognitionPub Date : 2025-07-02DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106227
Qiong Cao , Alexis Smith-Flores , Joanna Zhou , Jasmin Perez , Lisa Feigenson
{"title":"Violations of social expectations enhance infants' learning","authors":"Qiong Cao , Alexis Smith-Flores , Joanna Zhou , Jasmin Perez , Lisa Feigenson","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106227","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106227","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>When infants see objects behave in surprising ways, they not only notice these violations, but also experience enhanced learning about the objects. Although infants also notice when social agents behave in surprising ways, it is unclear whether violations of social expectations similarly enhance learning. Here we asked whether surprising events in the social domain amplify learning. In three experiments, 16- to 19-month-old infants saw a person behave either expectedly or unexpectedly towards an object, and then had the opportunity to learn about the object or person involved in the event. Experiment 1 presented infants with a person who produced an emotional reaction that was congruent with a target object, as expected, or produced a reaction that was surprisingly incongruent; Experiments 2 and 3 presented infants with a person whose preference among two different goal objects remained consistent, as expected, or suddenly reversed, defying expectations. Across Experiments 1–3, infants exhibited enhanced learning about both the object and, to some extent, the person involved in the surprising event. Combined with previous findings, these findings suggest that early expectations support learning in the social domain as well as in the physical domain.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106227"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144522532","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}
CognitionPub Date : 2025-07-02DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106218
Benjamin James Dyson
{"title":"Evaluating commercial game design decisions via the scientification of games: Asymmetrical task switching errors predict self-reported fun in Ghost Blitz","authors":"Benjamin James Dyson","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106218","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106218","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>By decomposing the structure, rule set and stimuli of games, it becomes possible to examine the impact of specific choices made by designers and publishers: not the ‘gamification of science’ but rather the ‘scientification of games.’ Here, the card game <em>Ghost Blitz</em> was analysed using both commercialized (cartoon illustrations) and a more ‘experiment-like’ (abstract shapes) format, where each card required players to search according to either the presence (Task A) or absence (Task B) of visual features. Thus, this game can be used to both demonstrate and study the cognitive phenomena of visual search asymmetry and task switching. The commercial format generated more fun and produced faster reaction times than the ‘experiment-like’ format, demonstrating the importance of surface characteristics. The original version of <em>Ghost Blitz</em> (where Task B was more frequent) was rated as less fun than an inversed version (where Task A was more frequent), highlighting the importance of structural characteristics. This surprising result was explained via multiple regression, where the frequency with which players experience accuracy loss during Task B to Task A switching predicted the reduction in self-reported fun. By meeting people where they are, games allow the public to have increased connection with psychological theory and enable the empirical validation of choices made during commercial game design.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106218"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144522531","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}
CognitionPub Date : 2025-07-01DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106201
Lucy Lai , Ann Z.X. Huang , Samuel J. Gershman
{"title":"Action chunking as conditional policy compression","authors":"Lucy Lai , Ann Z.X. Huang , Samuel J. Gershman","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106201","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106201","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Many skills in our everyday lives are learned by sequencing actions towards a desired goal. The action sequence can become a “chunk” when individual actions are grouped together and executed as one unit, making them more efficient to store and execute. While chunking has been studied extensively across various domains, a puzzle remains as to why and under what conditions action chunking occurs. To tackle these questions, we develop a model of <em>conditional</em> policy compression—the reduction in cognitive cost by conditioning on an additional source of information—to explain the origin of chunking. We argue that chunking is a result of optimizing the trade-off between reward and conditional policy complexity. Chunking compresses policies when there is temporal structure in the environment that can be leveraged for action selection, reducing the amount of memory necessary to encode the policy. We experimentally confirm our model’s predictions, showing that chunking reduces conditional policy complexity and reaction times. Chunking also increases with working memory load, consistent with the hypothesis that the degree of policy compression scales with the scarcity of cognitive resources. Finally, chunking also reduces overall working memory load, freeing cognitive resources for the benefit of other, not-chunked information.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106201"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144518598","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}
CognitionPub Date : 2025-07-01DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106229
Jean-François Bonnefon
{"title":"Editorial to the special issue on morality and AI","authors":"Jean-François Bonnefon","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106229","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106229","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"263 ","pages":"Article 106229"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144545534","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 effect of orthography on the visual processing of affixed words: Evidence from Bengali","authors":"Hilary S.Z. Wynne , Beinan Zhou , Sandra Kotzor , Aditi Lahiri","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106196","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106196","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The view that morphologically complex words are decomposed into constituent morphemes during lexical access has gained traction in the psycholinguistic literature, which in turn has had significant implications for theories of lexical organisation and processing. Nevertheless, the bulk of evidence for how morphologically complex Indo-European words are accessed and stored is based on based on Latinate scripts, where the orthography tends to be sequential. In many languages however, it is not straightforward to determine the internal structure of the word from the script alone. To critically examine the morphological decomposition in the visual domain, we present results from a visual delayed priming study covering every possible combination of morphologically complex words (i.e. stem ∼ prefixed, stem ∼ suffixed, prefixed – prefixed, suffixed – suffixed, and prefixed ∼ suffixed) in Bengali, a language rich with derivational morphology and orthographic complexity.</div><div>Results for configurations containing stems (stem ∼ affixed) showed the only priming effects in the study; crucially, these findings depended heavily on whether the prime was a stem or affixed word. When the prime was a stem word, responses to both prefixed and suffixed targets were facilitated to a similar degree. When the primes consisted of affixed words (either prefixed or suffixed), they did not reliably prime stem targets. We also tested relationships between all affixed words and found no reliable priming effect for any combination. We argue that our results reflect not only modality-specific aspects of processing, but also asymmetries in the orthographic significance of phonological processes occurring at the stem-affix boundaries in Bengali.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106196"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144518599","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}
CognitionPub Date : 2025-06-30DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106226
Chi-Chuan Chen , Daniel C. Hyde
{"title":"Understanding of exact equality emerges after and builds on symbolic number knowledge1","authors":"Chi-Chuan Chen , Daniel C. Hyde","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106226","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106226","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Establishing whether two sets of objects have the same number of objects turns out to be surprisingly challenging for children even if they have some basic number word and counting knowledge. Here we study the relationship between understanding of exact equality of sets and symbolic number knowledge in preschool children (<em>N</em> = 208, Age = 2.89–5.09 years) at various stages of symbolic number word acquisition. We gave children two classic verbal symbolic number word knowledge tasks (Give-N, How Many?) and two comparable but non-verbal set-matching tasks in which they were asked to produce a set of objects that numerically matched a target set. We find strong evidence that symbolic number knowledge is related to but precedes set-matching for exact equality, both replicating and extending recent findings. Specifically, set-matching accuracy was better for children who understood symbolic number cardinality compared to those who did not, even after accounting for age and executive functions. Furthermore, this effect was seen across the range of set sizes tested (1–8), including smaller set sizes (1–4) typically thought to be within the cognitive limits to be compared for exact equality non-verbally. Finally, set-matching performance was below ceiling even at set sizes corresponding to individual children's specific level of symbolic number knowledge (N) as well as the preceding quantity (N-1). Together these results suggest that understanding of exact equality builds on symbolic number knowledge. More broadly, our results support the emerging view that understanding symbolic number cardinality is only one early step towards understanding the symbolic number system.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106226"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144516916","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}
CognitionPub Date : 2025-06-27DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106222
Lindsay M. Peterson , Colin W.G. Clifford , Colin J. Palmer
{"title":"Image saliency predicts the expected looking behaviour of other agents","authors":"Lindsay M. Peterson , Colin W.G. Clifford , Colin J. Palmer","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106222","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106222","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>When we look at a visual scene, salient features, such as a region of high contrast or a familiar object, attract our attention. Here, we examined how image saliency—based on computational models developed to predict human eye movements—influences how human observers expect the <em>visual attention of others</em> to be directed. We created animations in which a cone-shaped object (the agent) ‘looks’ at complex images displayed in a 3D scene. The agent's looking behaviour was controlled by eye movements recorded from human observers while looking at the same images as the agent or different images. Expectations about looking behaviour were assessed by asking participants (<em>N</em> = 24) to judge whether the agent's gaze was matched to the scene. We find that participants can detect a mismatch between the agent's looking behaviour and its visual environment, based on how the pattern of fixations displayed by the agent align with the visual content of the scene. Discrimination sensitivity was modulated by the overlap between the agent's gaze and salient image features: for example, participants struggled to identify a mismatch when the mismatched gaze aligned by chance with salient features of the displayed image. Further analysis suggests that participants are likely using a combination of low- through to high-level image features to determine the expected gaze behaviour of the agent. Our findings highlight that image saliency models are useful for understanding not only how a person engages with their environment but also their expectations for how others should interact with the environment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"263 ","pages":"Article 106222"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144501084","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}