Frontiers in Cognition最新文献

{"title":"Editorial: Advances in vigilance research: exploring novel theoretical models and analytical approaches on the analysis of the vigilance decrement.","authors":"Juan Lupiáñez, Fernando Gabriel Luna, Daniel Smilek","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1948924","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1948924","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1948924"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13600812/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149042905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prêt-à-Jouer: commercial videogames as ready-made human perception labs.","authors":"Jaap Munneke, Brian Anthony, Jennifer E Corbett","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1944577","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1944577","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Cognitive science has long relied on carefully controlled laboratory paradigms to study perception, attention, and executive functioning, raising persistent questions about ecological validity when scenes are complex, demands are self-paced, and outcomes matter to the observer. Commercial videogames present exactly this kind of environment. They are cognitively demanding by design, motivating by nature and consistent enough across players to support systematic behavioral comparison. Unlike the tools of typical laboratory research, they already exist. Here, we encourage researchers to treat commercial games as ready-made testing grounds requiring only a minimal experimental toolkit of screen recording, eye tracking, and behavioral timing. We describe how researchers can select games, generate testable perceptual hypotheses directly from a game's affordances, and implement within-subjects designs, with no engine access or developer cooperation required. We close by distinguishing the ecological questions this approach can answer from the mechanistic ones it cannot.</p>","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1944577"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13581659/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148993099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Understanding never events: developing an ecologically valid behavioral test for left-right confusion during surgery.","authors":"Moritz Thaler, Henning Parschau, Janne Carstensen, Lorenz Mühlig, Jonathan Kirner, Hümeyra Altunkaynak, Gabriel Kändler, Rainer Petzina, Sebastian Ocklenburg","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1802120","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1802120","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Introduction: </strong>The accurate distinction between left and right is a critical cognitive function. A failure to correctly distinguish left and right during surgery can lead to a so-called Never Event, a preventable medical error that leads to death or severe injury of the patient. Unfortunately, such wrong-site surgeries still happen every year. Thus, understanding left-right confusion during surgery is critical for patient safety. However, current Left-Right Confusion (LRC) tests have low ecological validity for the complex, time-critical demands of a surgical environment. This study introduces the Never Events in Surgery Test (NEST), a novel, ecologically valid behavioural paradigm designed to simulate the cognitive dynamics during surgery.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>Participants (<i>N</i> = 108) completed the NEST alongside established LRC tasks: the Bergen Left-Right Discrimination Task (BLRDT), the Left-Right Commands Task (LRCT), and the Left-Right Questionnaire (LRQ).</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>NEST performance was significantly modulated by the posture of the training doll. Error rates were lowest in the prone position compared to lateral orientations (<i>p</i> < 0.05), while the supine position resulted in the shortest reaction times, significantly outperforming both prone and lateral positions (<i>p</i> < 0.001) without a significant increase in error rates. Crucially, the study established a cognitive dissociation: while reaction times across tasks were correlated, reflecting a shared component of general processing speed, the error rates from the established LRC measures (BLRDT, LRCT, LRQ) failed to predict the error rate observed in the applied NEST paradigm.</p><p><strong>Discussion: </strong>The lack of predictive power for errors suggests that LRC susceptibility in applied contexts is an independent, context-specific risk factor for laterality errors not captured by traditional assessments. The findings argue for a paradigm shift in training and screening toward tailored, context-specific approaches.</p>","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1802120"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13572152/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148972808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Regression analyses of event-related brain potentials dissociate general reading experience and domain-specific knowledge sources during language comprehension.","authors":"Melissa Troyer","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1856123","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1856123","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How do different sources of knowledge and experience shape how we make meaning from language in real time? The present work capitalizes on recent advances in ERP analysis (the regression ERP, or rERP approach, combined with AIC model comparison to compare how various measures of knowledge and experience related to millisecond-by-millisecond ERP time-course data recorded as individuals read sentences about a fictional world (Harry Potter; HP) one word at a time. Participants were individuals who ranged in the experiences they had contributing to their HP knowledge, including the number of times they had read each book and/or seen each movie. These participants also completed an objective measure of domain knowledge using a short trivia quiz, as well as more general measures of reading experience. HP-based measures out-performed general reading experience for multiple indices of word understanding. Notably, self-reported experience with HP movie-watching best explained N400 \"related anomaly\" effects, which reflect the immediate availability of linguistically inappropriate but event-related words. Thus, the rich multimodal experiences of watching movies may, at least in some cases, accelerate knowledge use during language understanding compared to purely linguistic experiences of reading. These findings run counter to theories on which meaning is based on linguistic experience alone, implicating multimodal contributions. More generally, these analyses illustrate how exploratory model set comparisons and continuous variable rERPs yield new insights into the time course of information processing during reading.</p>","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1856123"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13547009/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148908264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From probability to plausibility in climate-risk scenarios: a cognitive framework for decision-making under deep uncertainty.","authors":"Jeffery R L Pendleton, Paul W Pritchard, David Wilkinson, Clive Wilkins, Nicola S Clayton","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1928401","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1928401","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Climate-risk scenario analysis has become central to financial supervision, adaptation planning, and institutional governance, yet formally modeled futures often fail to guide action. We argue that the gap between representation and response is partly cognitive. Drawing on constructive memory, mental time travel, source monitoring, episodic future thinking, scenario planning, and organizational sensemaking, we develop a framework of plausible futures for decision-making under deep uncertainty. On this account, climate futures gain practical force when they become mentally constructible, narratively scaffolded, socially stabilized, and culturally legitimated. Simulational fluency is proposed as one pathway through which scenario form may influence how readily decision-makers construct, inspect, compare, and rehearse possible futures. The framework identifies false precision in quantitative models and the ways narrative can sharpen or mislead judgement. These insights support the joint development of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Climate-risk governance requires sophisticated calculation together with anticipatory practices that allow institutions to inhabit uncertain futures cognitively; those practices keep uncertainty explicit and judgement both revisable and answerable to evidence.</p>","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1928401"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13518178/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148841753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empathy and musical reward sensitivity in middle childhood: a psychometric validation of the Barcelona music reward questionnaire in children aged 7-9.","authors":"Maria Celeste Fasano, Maria Grazia Monaci, Gianni Nuti, Manuela Filippa","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1804916","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1804916","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Introduction: </strong>Music is a highly rewarding experience, yet individuals differ substantially in how pleasurable they find music. In adults, sensitivity to musical reward has been consistently linked to socio-emotional traits, particularly empathy. However, little is known about whether this association is already present in middle childhood, before music engagement becomes increasingly tied to identity formation and autonomous, self-directed use during adolescence. The present study examined musical reward sensitivity in middle childhood and its relationship with empathy.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>A sample of 621 children aged 7-9 years completed a child-adapted Italian version of the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ-MC) and the Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA). Confirmatory factor analyses tested the factorial structure of the BMRQ-MC and its measurement invariance across gender. Correlational and regression analyses examined associations of musical reward sensitivity with empathy, musical engagement, and musical ability.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>The original five-factor BMRQ model showed only partial support, with the Musical Seeking subscale displaying poor reliability and weak factor loadings. A four-factor model showed improved fit and measurement invariance across gender. Musical reward sensitivity was positively associated with empathy, particularly affective empathy, and showed a small positive association with musical engagement, whereas objective musical ability was unrelated.</p><p><strong>Discussion: </strong>These findings support the psychometric validity of the BMRQ-MC for assessing musical reward sensitivity in middle childhood and suggest that, at this developmental stage, individual differences in musical reward are more closely linked to socio-emotional dispositions and musical engagement than to perceptual musical skills. The study highlights empathy as a key correlate of early musical pleasure and positions music reward sensitivity as a socio-emotionally grounded individual difference relevant to children's developing social functioning.</p>","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1804916"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13518152/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148841700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The eco-affective health assessment protocol: a standardized multimodal instrument battery for measuring affective, cognitive, and functional responses to environmental change.","authors":"Lucas Murrins Marques","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1881278","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1881278","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The field of eco-affective health has produced a growing body of evidence linking environmental change to human psychological and cognitive functioning, but it has done so without a shared methodological foundation. Studies of solastalgia, eco-anxiety, environmental risk perception, and adaptive decision-making use incompatible instruments, inconsistent scoring procedures, and divergent operationalizations of the same constructs, limiting cumulative knowledge, cross-study comparison, and translation into policy-relevant surveillance. This Methods paper introduces the Eco-Affective Health Assessment Protocol (EAHAP): a standardized, multimodal, and modular instrument battery designed to measure affective, cognitive, and functional responses to environmental change in a coherent and replicable framework. The EAHAP organizes existing instruments, the large majority independently validated, with one adapted ecological grief measure explicitly flagged as a candidate instrument pending independent psychometric validation, into three interdependent domains. The eco-affective domain covers solastalgia, eco-anxiety, ecological grief, affective numbing, and place attachment. The cognitive domain covers environmental risk perception, attentional processing, environmental appraisal, and adaptive decision-making under ecological stress. The functional domain covers psychological distress, anxiety and depressive symptoms, sleep disruption, and daily functioning limitation. Each domain is theoretically positioned within the Eco-Affective Health framework as a distinct signal layer, with eco-affective states functioning as early-warning indicators, cognitive mediators explaining variability in response to identical exposures, and functional outcomes providing downstream validation and economic relevance. The paper provides a complete description of materials and instruments, a step-by-step implementation protocol with timing and decision rules, a module selection matrix for different study types, anticipated results with expected psychometric properties, and a troubleshooting guide for the most common pitfalls. Cultural adaptation procedures are specified as a mandatory component of all implementations. The EAHAP is designed to be modular, allowing domain-specific use in fundamental research, and fully integrated for epidemiological surveillance, early warning systems, and intervention evaluation. By providing a shared methodological infrastructure, the EAHAP aims to accelerate the development of eco-affective health as a cumulative, cross-contextual, and policy-relevant scientific field.</p>","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1881278"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13506454/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148835765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When similarity is less disruptive: feature-sharing distractors in visual working memory under diffuse attention.","authors":"Jinhua Fu, Dexiang Zhang, Hehong Wu, Yaxi Li","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1900438","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1900438","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Visual working memory (VWM) is a capacity-limited system that enables visual information to be maintained, prioritized, and used after perceptual input has disappeared. Although attention is often assumed to protect VWM from distraction, recent work suggests that distraction is not uniformly harmful and that its impact depends on the representational and attentional state of the memorized information. The present study examined how attentional prioritization and distractor similarity jointly shape VWM across encoding and maintenance. In two change-detection experiments, cue load and distractor type were manipulated within participants. Experiment 1 used pre-cues to guide external attention before encoding, whereas Experiment 2 used retro-cues to guide internal attention during maintenance. Trial-level binomial generalized linear mixed-effects models for accuracy and linear mixed-effects models for log-transformed correct-trial reaction time showed that performance was best when one or two items were prioritized and declined when attention was distributed across more items or when no cue was provided. Distractor effects depended on cue condition. Under broad or absent attentional guidance, non-feature-sharing distractors were generally more disruptive than distractors that shared one feature with an unprobed memory item; however, feature-sharing distractors did not improve accuracy relative to the no-distractor baseline. Accuracy and reaction time converged for the cue-load effect but often dissociated for distractor contrasts, indicating that RT-only effects should be interpreted cautiously as changes in retrieval or decision efficiency rather than memory fidelity. These findings support a conditional account in which the effect of feature overlap depends on attentional allocation and the accessibility of the maintained representations.</p>","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1900438"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13506417/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148835794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hippocampal relational memory and spatial reconstruction: where are we at and where are we bound?","authors":"Taylor K Brown, Ioannis Valoumas, Michael R Dulas","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1876456","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1876456","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Memory is increasingly understood as a reconstructive process, yet many memory paradigms assess only the outcome of retrieval rather than the structure of reconstruction itself. Spatial reconstruction tasks (SRTs) provide a powerful approach for examining reconstructive memory because they require participants to recreate studied object-location configurations and allow researchers to quantify multiple sources of spatial error. This review synthesizes theoretical and empirical work on SRTs as measures of hippocampally-mediated relational memory. Lesion studies established that hippocampal damage impairs spatial reconstruction as well as demonstrating that SRTs are sensitive to particular underlying mechanisms. SRTs have been utilized across amnesia, traumatic brain injury, aging, and development, with accumulating evidence suggesting that they index the role of the hippocampus in binding specific objects to specific locations. However, the literature is limited by substantial variability in task design, stimulus type, and analytic metrics. We review commonly used measures and differing interpretations across studies using SRTs. Finally, we outline recommendations for standardizing SRT design and analysis, discuss key limitations and methodological constraints that should be addressed, and highlight future directions involving eye-tracking, neuroimaging, clinical populations, and extensions beyond spatial memory. Overall, we argue that SRTs offer a sensitive framework for understanding how relational memories are encoded, bound, and reconstructed, and have great utility for future research avenues.</p>","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1876456"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13503249/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148819620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Effects of imagery training on cognitive function among collegiate athletes: a randomized controlled trial.","authors":"Yingke Li, Nurwina Anuar, Simon B Cooper","doi":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1826442","DOIUrl":"10.3389/fcogn.2026.1826442","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Cognitive functions are essential for athletic performance but are often compromised by fatigue, stress, and the combined demands of sport and academic study. Both physical exercise and motor imagery shown to influence cognition, but, their comparative acute effects remain underexplored in collegiate athletes. This study compared the effects of squat imagery, squat execution, and quiet rest on cognitive performance. Ninety-eight collegiate athletes were randomly assigned to a squat imagery group (30-min seated squat imagery; <i>n</i> = 36), a squat execution group (five sets of 1-min squats separated by 10-s rests; <i>n</i> = 32), or a control group (30-min seated rest; <i>n</i> = 30). Cognitive performance was assessed before and after the interventions using the Stroop, Flanker, Sternberg, and Visual Search tasks. Two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance (group × time) was conducted, and the Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR) procedure was applied to 18 primary interaction tests. Both squat imagery and execution improved cognitive performance, particularly inhibitory control and working memory. Significant group × time interactions were found for Stroop response time (simple and complex) and Sternberg response time (one- and three-item conditions; all <i>p</i> < 0.01, partial η² = 0.10-0.14). Follow-up analyses showed these improvements were primarily driven by the squat imagery group. Compared with squat execution, squat imagery produced greater reductions in response time for the Stroop simple and Sternberg three-item conditions, while improvements in the Stroop complex and Sternberg one-item conditions were comparable. Squat imagery also produced greater improvements in Visual Search congruent response time than both squat execution and control. A significant group × time interaction was observed for Visual Search incongruent accuracy (<i>p</i> < 0.05, partial η² = 0.08-0.14), reflecting reduced accuracy following squat execution, whereas performance remained stable in the squat imagery and control groups. Although Flanker incongruent accuracy initially showed a significant interaction (<i>p</i> = 0.032, partial η² = 0.07), this effect did not survive FDR correction (<i>p</i>FDR = 0.082). These findings demonstrate that acute squat imaging enhances inhibitory control and working memory without the drawbacks of physical activity. Squat visualization serves as a low-intensity, pragmatic cognitive improvement for collegiate athletes.</p>","PeriodicalId":94013,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Cognition","volume":"5 ","pages":"1826442"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13500232/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148815265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}