Cognition最新文献

{"title":"Wink or blush? Pupil-linked phasic arousal signals both change and uncertainty during assessment of changing environmental regularities","authors":"Gábor Gesztesi ,&nbsp;Péter Pajkossy","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106256","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106256","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>One main cornerstone of adaptive behavior is belief updating, whereby new and unexpected observations lead to the updating of learned associations between events, behaviors and outcomes. This process necessitates the detection of changed environmental contingencies which in turn leads to uncertainty about the environmental regularities. Change and uncertainty are thus inherently linked, and both constructs have been linked to pupil size changes, which might reflect activity in neural networks underlying belief updating. Thus, in our study, we aimed to disentangle the effects of change and uncertainty on pupil-linked arousal. We used a probabilistic reversal learning task, where participants had to act according to changing preferences of a fictional character, and used specific cues to independently manipulate the level of change and uncertainty (e.g. the fictional character winked for signaling change, or his face was blushed to indicate uncertainty). We found that when the cues triggered the same amount of uncertainty, larger levels of change in beliefs led to a transient increase in pupil size during cue processing. In contrast, when the cues signaled a similar amount of change, then increased belief uncertainty was associated with a sustained increase in pupil size, extending in time beyond cue processing. Thus, change and uncertainty exerted independent influence on pupil-linked arousal, possibly reflecting the activity of different neural networks, and highlighting the need to disentangle the effects of these overlapping but distinct theoretical constructs.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106256"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144662505","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":"Rules in the mist: Emerging probabilistic rules in uncertain categorization","authors":"Nicolás Marchant ,&nbsp;Guillermo Puebla ,&nbsp;Sergio E. Chaigneau","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106264","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106264","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this study, we explored the development of rules in probabilistic category learning, focusing on how knowledge acquired with uncertain feedback conditions transfers to a categorization task with similarity judgments. Using the Probabilistic Categorization Task (PCT) across two experiments, we examined whether rule-based knowledge learned under probabilistic feedback could be applied in the subsequent transfer phase. In Experiment 1, participants learned a unidimensional categorization rule with feedback reliability set at 70 %, 80 %, and 90 %. The findings indicated a strong correlation between feedback reliability during training and transfer phase performance, particularly in the 80 % and 90 % conditions. Experiment 2 expanded this approach by introducing a more complex categorization rule (XNOR), requiring participants to integrate two features. Here, participants trained with 80 % and 90 % reliable feedback successfully applied the learned rules in a similarity judgment task, proportionally to feedback reliability. Altogether, we argue that these findings question dual-system theories positing category learning as a sequential or competitive process between implicit and explicit systems. Instead, our results support the idea that a single either explicit rule-based or implicit similarity-based systems can effectively adapt to probabilistic settings, either independently or in close interaction with each other.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106264"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144662508","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":"Spatiotemporal dynamics of mouse tracking reveal general and selective control mechanisms of the congruency sequence effect in Simon tasks","authors":"Minwoo J.B. Kim ,&nbsp;Chae Eun Lim ,&nbsp;Hansol Rheem ,&nbsp;Nahyun Lee ,&nbsp;Yang Seok Cho","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106259","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106259","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Competition between conflicting responses enhances cognitive control over responses on the subsequent trial, generating a congruency sequence effect (CSE). The present study investigated the mechanism of post-conflict control involved in the CSE by measuring the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying the Simon task with computer-mouse tracking. To examine control-specific CSEs driven by response conflict, a confound-minimized design was employed, rigorously controlling for stimulus repetitions, response repetitions, contingency learning, and response errors. We presented horizontal and vertical Simon tasks, each with two distinct stimulus and response alternatives, in a trial-to-trial interchanging order. Participants responded by moving a mouse cursor from the screen center to a target response box, determined by stimulus color rather than its location. Dynamic features of spatial precision and movement speed, as well as discrete movement latency and spatial features, were analyzed. Beyond the typical Simon effect, we identified post-conflict slowing and selective suppression of task-irrelevant response activation as two distinguishable modes of post-conflict control that manifest in different movement features and processing stages. This suggests that the CSE likely arises from two sub-processes of post-conflict control, rather than a unitary mechanism.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106259"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144654190","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":"Representations of smells: The next frontier for language models?","authors":"Murathan Kurfalı ,&nbsp;Pawel Herman ,&nbsp;Stephen Pierzchajlo ,&nbsp;Jonas Olofsson ,&nbsp;Thomas Hörberg","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106243","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106243","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Whereas human cognition develops through perceptually driven interactions with the environment, language models (LMs) are “disembodied learners” which might limit their usefulness as model systems. We evaluate the ability of LMs to recover sensory information from natural language, addressing a significant gap in cognitive science research literature. Our investigation is carried out through the sense of smell — olfaction — because it is severely underrepresented in natural language and thus poses a unique challenge for linguistic and cognitive modeling. By systematically evaluating the ability of three generations of LMs, including static word embedding models (Word2Vec, FastText), encoder-based models (BERT), and the decoder-based large LMs (LLMs; GPT-4o, Llama 3.1 among others), under nearly 200 training configurations, we investigate their proficiency in acquiring information to approximate human odor perception from textual data. As benchmarks for the performance of the LMs, we use three diverse experimental odor datasets including odor similarity ratings, imagined similarities of odor pairings from word labels, and odor-to-label ratings. The results reveal the possibility for LMs to accurately represent olfactory information, and describe the conditions under which this possibility is realized. Static, simpler models perform best in capturing odor-perceptual similarities under certain training configurations, while GPT-4o excels in simulating olfactory-semantic relationships, as suggested by its superior performance on datasets where the collected odor similarities are derived from word-based assessments. Our findings show that natural language encodes latent information regarding human olfactory information that is retrievable through text-based LMs to varying degrees. Our research shows promise for LMs to be useful tools in investigating the long debated relation between symbolic representations and perceptual experience in cognitive science.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106243"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144654189","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":"Argument role sensitivity in real-time sentence processing: Evidence from a hybrid comprehension and production task","authors":"Eun-Kyoung Rosa Lee ,&nbsp;Colin Phillips","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106255","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106255","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Previous studies suggest that comprehenders initially fail to use argument roles (i.e., who did what to whom) when generating expectations for upcoming words in sentence processing. In contrast, production studies show that people rarely produce role-inappropriate sentence continuations in a speeded cloze task, indicating rapid use of argument roles. This contrast in role-sensitivity is unexpected if both situations involve the same underlying processes and if the experimental measures equally reflect those processes. Here, we show that the apparent conflict arises from different task demands involved in comprehension and production experiments, and that when they are engaged in an identical next-word generation task, people show immediate use of argument roles in both comprehension and production. In two experiments, participants had to either produce a continuation of a sentence fragment or judge the plausibility of a complete sentence. The trial types were interleaved and presented randomly, which ensured that the sentence contexts were processed in the same way. In Experiment 1, we found rapid use of argument roles in the production trials, where participants produced target verbs more frequently and with faster onset times in role-appropriate than in role-reversed contexts, indicating that role-sensitivity in production was unaffected by the interleaved comprehension trials. In Experiment 2, the same hybrid design was used to measure role-sensitivity in the comprehension trials, while participants quickly produced sentence continuations in the interleaved production trials. A significantly smaller N400 was observed on target verbs presented in role-appropriate contexts than in role-reversed contexts, indicating immediate role-sensitivity in comprehension, as found in production. Together, the results indicate that argument roles have an immediate impact on processing, in both comprehension and production, when there is a need to quickly commit to a single next-word continuation. Our findings shed light on the connection between speaking and understanding, and more broadly, the relationship between perception and action in cognitive science.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106255"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144633855","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":"Autosuggestion and mental imagery bias the perception of social emotions","authors":"Kasia A. Myga ,&nbsp;Matthew R. Longo ,&nbsp;Esther Kuehn ,&nbsp;Elena Azañón","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106235","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106235","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cognitive processes that modulate social emotion perception are of pivotal interest for psychological and clinical research. Autosuggestion and mental imagery are two candidate processes for such a modulation, however, their precise effects on social emotion perception remain uncertain. Here, we investigated how autosuggestion and mental imagery, employed during an adaptation period, influence the subsequent perception of facial emotions, and to which extent. Separate cohorts of participants took part in five experiments, where they either mentally affirmed (autosuggested; Experiments 1a and 1b) or imagined (Experiment 2) that a neutral face would be expressing a specific emotion (happy or sad). Subsequent facial emotion perception was then assessed by calculating points of subjective equality (PSEs) along a happiness-sadness continuum. Our results show that both autosuggestion and mental imagery induce a bias towards perceiving facial emotions in the direction of the desired emotion, with larger Bayes factors supporting autosuggestion. Experiment 3 confirmed the absence of effects when emotional words were presented together with a neutral face, suggesting a limited role of response bias in driving this effect. Finally, experiment 4 validated the experimental setup by demonstrating standard contrastive aftereffects when participants were adapted to actual, physical emotional faces. Together, our findings provide an initial step towards understanding the potential of intentional cognitive processes to modulate social emotions, specifically by biasing emotional face perception. With comparable effect sizes observed for both autosuggestion and mental imagery, both strategies show promise for self-directed interventions. Their practical applicability may vary due to individual responses, preferred cognitive strategies, and potential overlaps in underlying cognitive mechanisms.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106235"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144633856","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":"Does overnight memory consolidation support next-day learning?","authors":"Anna á V. Guttesen ,&nbsp;Marcus O. Harrington ,&nbsp;M. Gareth Gaskell ,&nbsp;Scott A. Cairney","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106241","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106241","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Sleep supports memory consolidation and next-day learning. The Active Systems model of consolidation proposes that sleep facilitates a shift in the memory retrieval network from hippocampus to neocortex in service of long-term storage. Accordingly, overnight consolidation may support efficient next-day learning. We tested this hypothesis across two preregistered behavioural experiments. In both experiments, participants learned a set of word pairs and recall was assessed before and after a 12-h delay containing overnight sleep or daytime wakefulness. Participants then learned and were immediately tested on a new set of word pairs. Word pair retention was better after the delay of sleep than wakefulness, suggesting a benefit of sleep for memory consolidation, but there was no sleep-related learning advantage for the new set of word pairs. Sleep-associated consolidation was not associated with next-day learning in our preregistered analyses, although a significant positive relationship with learning did emerge in an exploratory analysis that accounted for performance at pre-sleep recall. Taken together, our findings provide exploratory evidence that overnight consolidation may be linked to new learning, with pre-sleep retrieval performance influencing the magnitude of this relationship.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106241"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144654188","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":"Inverse option generation: Inferences about others' values based on what comes to mind","authors":"Jane Acierno ,&nbsp;Clare Kennedy ,&nbsp;Fiery Cushman ,&nbsp;Jonathan Phillips","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106238","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106238","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Prior research shows that when people try to think of things, such as solutions to a problem, the options that come to mind most often are those that they consider <em>statistically common</em> and <em>valuable.</em> Here, we ask whether ordinary people anticipate this and, therefore, infer that when uncommon solutions come to someone's mind, it is diagnostic of how much those solutions are represented as valuable—including in the moral domain. To illustrate, imagine your friend is brainstorming what to serve a vegetarian couple and says aloud, “maybe pizza, salad, or penne alfredo?” While some of the options can be explained by both their value and statistical frequency (e.g., pizza or salad), you might infer that only your friend's particular affection for penne alfredo explains why that option came to mind. Across four studies we demonstrate inferences of this kind, and our results suggest that participants are able to make such inferences by inverting their intuitive understanding of the option-generation process itself. Whereas many current models of our folk theory of mind focus on the core mechanics of deliberative choice – such as the use of beliefs and desires to plan rational action – our results show a much broader folk understanding of pre-deliberative aspects of thought, such as the very process of option generation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106238"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144631278","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":"Large-scale examination of the benefit and cost of spatial attention and their individual variability","authors":"Felipe Luzardo,&nbsp;Yaffa Yeshurun","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106242","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106242","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Spatial attention—the ability to prioritize relevant regions in the environment—is crucial for human cognition and has accordingly been studied extensively. However, large population samples have seldom been used, leaving inter-individual variability largely unexamined. This is especially true for the distinction between attentional benefit (improved performance when attending the correct location) and cost (impaired performance when attending the wrong location), which is critical for distinguishing facilitatory from inhibitory mechanisms. This distinction is sometimes avoided because it requires a baseline condition and choosing a truly neutral cue for this condition can be challenging. Here, we recruited a sizable participant pool (<em>N</em> = 662) across four experiments. We combined an acuity task with valid, invalid, and neutral pre-cues of different types and analyzed the averaged attentional benefits and costs and their inter-individual variability. We found robust attentional benefits, but attentional costs depended on inter-stimulus distance, highlighting the importance of employing neutral cues. Similar patterns of attentional benefit and cost emerged for the experiments that used different types of neutral cues. Moreover, when neutral cues were compared directly no difference in performance was found. These findings suggest that the neutral cue's characteristics are not critical. Hierarchical Bayesian analyses revealed true qualitative individual differences; while most individuals showed effects in the expected direction, some exhibited effects in the opposite direction. This finding emphasizes the complexity of attentional allocation, suggesting that a comprehensive account of spatial attention needs to incorporate several underlying mechanisms including factors that may result in attentional effects in the opposite direction.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106242"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144631277","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":"Forward false memories of actions only occur for single and simple actions","authors":"Teresa Limata ,&nbsp;Monica Bucciarelli ,&nbsp;Mara Stockner ,&nbsp;Danilo Mitaritonna ,&nbsp;Giuliana Mazzoni ,&nbsp;Francesco Ianì","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106252","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106252","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Observing a photo depicting an individual about to perform an action can implicitly trigger an automatic forward mental simulation of the action's unfolding. Since automatic processes can lead to errors in source monitoring (i.e. confusing self-generated information with perception), we investigated the tendency to form false memories of forward compared to backward phases of actions. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a series of static photos depicting unfolding actions on objects (e.g. blowing the nose), and in Experiment 2 they were presented with more complex actions in a naturalistic context (i.e. actions composed of three different sub-actions such as making coffee). In both experiments, fifteen minutes after encoding, participants completed a recognition task in which they were shown photos representing moments that were temporally distant (backward or forward in time) from the original photos, along with the same photos seen at encoding. Results revealed that participants were more likely to accept forward photos as seen compared to backward photos for simple actions, whereas this effect was absent for complex actions. In Experiment 3, we directly manipulated the complexity of actions in a single experiment and replicated the previous results. Our findings suggest that false memories due to implicit forward simulations only occur for simple actions when the action direction is mandatory. In contrast, complex actions might engage different mechanisms, such as higher-level event processing, which is easier to monitor and might reduce memory distortions. These insights expand our understanding of memory distortions for actions and highlight the role of action complexity in shaping the mechanisms of mental simulation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 106252"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144614804","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}