Laura Voigt,Arne Nieuwenhuys,Rich S.W. Masters,Markus Raab
{"title":"Beyond attention: performance pressure shifts information-processing complexity","authors":"Laura Voigt,Arne Nieuwenhuys,Rich S.W. Masters,Markus Raab","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.008","url":null,"abstract":"Why does performance pressure sometimes cause choking but sometimes elicit exceptional performance? We propose that pressure shifts the complexity of information-processing rules that guide action. Performance improves when shifts move processing toward task-matched complexity and deteriorates when they promote maladaptive simplification, overcomplexification, or the use of rules that exceed available processing resources.","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":"295 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":19.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149172362","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}
Seh-Joo Kwon,Nicholas J. Dennis,Mauricio R. Delgado
{"title":"Every (slow) breath you take, every choice you make","authors":"Seh-Joo Kwon,Nicholas J. Dennis,Mauricio R. Delgado","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.006","url":null,"abstract":"Huang and colleagues investigated how slow-paced breathing shapes physiological and brain-related signals during financial decisions under risk. Their findings elucidate neurovisceral pathways linking prolonged exhalation to increased risk-taking, whereby heightened cardiac parasympathetic modulation increases reward sensitivity and neural activity in brain regions involved in valuation and interoception.","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":19.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149089556","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":"Childhood maltreatment and the developing brain: toward individualized models of psychiatric risk","authors":"Haley R. Wang,Carrie E. Bearden,Tiffany C. Ho","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":19.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149089557","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":"Scalable psychological solutions to environmental problems.","authors":"P Wesley Schultz, Kathy Pezdek","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.01.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.01.010","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Current levels of human consumption are unsustainable, and large changes are needed to both mitigate and adapt to environmental problems. In this review, we examine psychological interventions aimed at pro-environmental behavior, focusing on five scalable strategies: nudges, social norms, education, financial incentives, and contact with nature. Research has shown that each of these approaches can effectively promote pro-environmental behavior, although with varying degrees of effectiveness. This review article explores the cognitive processes that underlie these interventions, including heuristics, priming, and self-schemas. We discuss how drawing insights from cognitive science can help to enhance the effectiveness of efforts to promote change and, perhaps even more importantly, how these insights can help to prevent harmful, unintended environmental consequences.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":" ","pages":"922-932"},"PeriodicalIF":20.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147494498","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}
Samuel G B Johnson, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Yoshua Bengio, Nick Chater, Tobias Gerstenberg, Kate Larson, Sydney Levine, Melanie Mitchell, Iyad Rahwan, Bernhard Schölkopf, Igor Grossmann
{"title":"Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition.","authors":"Samuel G B Johnson, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Yoshua Bengio, Nick Chater, Tobias Gerstenberg, Kate Larson, Sydney Levine, Melanie Mitchell, Iyad Rahwan, Bernhard Schölkopf, Igor Grossmann","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.01.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.01.002","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly smart, its wisdom has not kept pace. In this opinion article, we examine what is known about human wisdom and sketch a vision of its AI counterpart. We introduce human wisdom as strategies for solving intractable problems-those outside the scope of analytic techniques-including both 'object-level' strategies, such as heuristics (for managing problems), and 'metacognitive' strategies, such as intellectual humility, perspective-taking, or context adaptability (for managing object-level task fit). We argue that AI systems particularly struggle with this type of metacognition. Wise metacognition would lead to AI that is more robust to novel environments, explainable to users, cooperative with others, and safer by risking fewer misaligned goals with human users. We discuss how wise AI might be benchmarked, trained, and implemented.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":" ","pages":"854-868"},"PeriodicalIF":20.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147318784","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":"Bayesian efficient coding as a theory of perception: progress, controversies, and prospects.","authors":"Ivan Tomić, Máté Lengyel, Paul Bays","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.05.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.05.001","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Bayesian efficient coding unifies two foundational theories of sensory processing: efficient coding and Bayesian inference. Central to this account is the idea that natural environmental statistics shape both how sensory information is encoded and how it is perceptually interpreted. By unifying these principles, the framework accounts for counterintuitive perceptual biases and establishes lawful relationships between environmental statistics, bias, and discrimination thresholds. In this article, we review behavioural and neural evidence for this theory in perception and cognition, as well as how short- and long-term adaptation to the environment may be expressed within the framework. We further review theoretical developments that extend the original framework, focusing on how response biases can be decomposed into encoding- and decoding-related components. A decade after its introduction, Bayesian efficient coding continues to evolve as a powerful theory, with recent extensions addressing early limitations and opening new directions for investigating perception and cognition.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":" ","pages":"903-921"},"PeriodicalIF":20.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148213134","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":"Looking inside and beyond eye fixations in reading.","authors":"Elizabeth R Schotter, Brennan R Payne","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.02.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.02.009","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Co-registration of neural and behavioral measures is key in developing a holistic understanding of reading. However, researchers must study not only neural effects inside fixations, early enough to initiate saccade decisions, but also later effects that are linguistically driven. Furthermore, researchers must not only use co-registration to allow for naturalistic reading but also to look beyond individual fixations to examine the coupling between temporally extended neural language processing and saccade decisions. Such an approach has revealed that saccade decisions are triggered at an intermediate point of lexical processing, followed by complete recognition and integration of a word into its context. This account can resolve the apparent paradox that the eyes can move through text faster than the brain understands it.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":" ","pages":"869-880"},"PeriodicalIF":20.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147576105","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 emerging field of cognitive brain-computer interfaces.","authors":"Ignacio Saez","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.06.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.06.012","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have achieved transformative success in restoring movement and communication. However, extending these approaches to decoding or recovery of cognitive function, such as attention or memory, poses fundamentally new challenges. Cognitive BCIs will need to contend with distributed and dynamic neural processes that differ sharply from the more localized, stable representations underlying motor and language control, imposing new technical and conceptual demands. Conversely, neuromodulation, long used in neurological and psychiatric therapies, offers a complementary methodological path and initial translational applications through causal modulation of cognitive circuits. Integrating these approaches into adaptive, closed-loop systems could allow cognitive BCIs to restore mental function and bridge systems neuroscience and next-generation neurotherapeutics capable of monitoring and shaping human cognition in real time.</p>","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":" ","pages":"881-902"},"PeriodicalIF":20.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148473903","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":"Time after time: neural codes of speech comprehension","authors":"Laura Gwilliams","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":19.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149089558","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":"From maps to new thoughts: can place-cell indexing generate novel cortical states?","authors":"Stephanie Theves","doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2026.09.002","url":null,"abstract":"Constructing novel states from experience underpins imagination and abstraction. The hippocampal formation is thought to contribute by capturing the relational structure of experiences, but it remains unclear how its abstract relational codes are eventually translated into cortical content representations. I highlight that hippocampal–cortical indexing may scaffold the generation of new states.","PeriodicalId":49417,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":19.9,"publicationDate":"2026-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149027552","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}