Most research on leisure reading and theory of mind (the understanding of our own and others’ mental states) has been conducted with adults, whereas research on theory of mind and reading comprehension has been conducted with children.
Cognition
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social
EiC team: Johan Wagemans, Ian Dobbins, Ori Friedman, and Katrien Segaert
Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social
In a new paper out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, @gordpennycook.bsky.social and I argue the classic view that System 2 spontaneously corrects System 1 is flawed. We provide evidence that S2 is instead triggered by conflict between competing S1 intuitions www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Throughout our lives, we learn that pressing a button often produces a sound, yet almost none of us has ever produced a sound through an eye movement. Does this shape how we perceive it?
How do people build new ideas from existing knowledge? By tracking Wikipedia searches, we found that novel ideas emerged when people balanced exploration with exploitation—alternating between distant topics and deep dives into related information.
We disagree about abortion, guns, immigration. But does disagreement have to mean contempt? In this series of studies, we asked whether seeing someone as morally reasonable is a way out.
Can we perceive another person’s finger as part of our body? ☝️This new paper shows that the sixth finger illusion can blur the boundary between the self & the other.
New paper out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! We study real-time sentence processing in the Oaxacan language Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, and we find new evidence for the ways people tune their incremental comprehension processes to the patterns of their language.
Delayed structural prediction for relative clauses: A new argument for learning to parse from Santiago Laxopa Zapotec
Comprehenders in many of the world’s languages exhibit a preference or a greater ease in comprehending transitive relative clauses (RCs) when associat…
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What’s the difference between an understandable word we’ve never heard before, like “tributer”, and one we’ve heard countless times, like “admirer”? How does the brain process familiar vs. new words, and what about a new word shapes its processing?
Now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social ! We show that the persistence of memory biases across retrieval episodes may critically depend on attention to inducer stimuli during initial interference. w/ @keisukefukuda.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A single perceptual comparison is sufficient, but not necessary, to induce lasting memory distortion
Humans constantly compare their visual memories with similar visual inputs to modify their behavior adaptively. However, basic and applied studies sug…
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🌵🏜️🌵 Out now in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @rbhui.bsky.social! If your advisor sends you an unclear email, do you interpret it as good or bad? 😏😱 In a new paper, we show how people make inferences about this type of ambiguous feedback during learning. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Ambiguity and confirmatory reward learning
We tend to interpret feedback in ways that confirm our pre-existing beliefs. Such confirmatory tendencies are often viewed as cognitive flaws, but mig…
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"Prior knowledge biases episodic memory by filling in the gaps in imprecise memories: Simulating aging effects in younger adults" New paper from @michelleramey.bsky.social Read more here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
We often interpret ambiguous feedback in ways that confirm what we already believe. A laugh can feel supportive or mocking. A neutral email can feel encouraging or disappointing. A new paper studies how this happens during reward learning.
📢 Now published in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social : “Functional role and semantic structure shape word memorability: Cue–target asymmetries in cued recall." Memorability is often treated as an intrinsic property of stimuli. But is the same word equally effective as a cue vs. a target? 1/8
New paper in Cognition! Does body function constrain what we can embody? Using VR, we gave children & adults arms that reached further or less far than their own. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
How do we maintain visual information in short-term memory? One influential proposal is that such storage relies on the same sensory representations that support perception itself.
1/ Relational ability — the ability to compare situations and discover common relations — is key to our capacity for higher-order cognition. But when and how does this ability emerge? Our new paper in Cognition tackles this question.
"Random generation is what comes to mind in naturalistic settings" 📢New paper from: Lucas Castillo (lcastillo.bsky.social), Pablo León-Villagrá (pleonv.bsky.social), Johanna Falbén, Nick Chater, & Adam Sanborn (asanborn.bsky.social) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Random generation is what comes to mind in naturalistic settings
Being unpredictable is useful for creativity, exploration, and good decision-making. Decades of research asking people to generate random sequences of…
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Words that look like their meanings (e.g., “bubbles", “bed", “look") are processed faster and more accurately on lexical decision tasks.
"Gaze patterns reveal attention-based modulation of lure discrimination" 📢New paper from: Tarek Amer, Jordana Wynn, Margaret Porterfield, Daniel Schacter, & Lila Davachi www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @tarekamer.bsky.social ky.social @jordwynn.bsky.social @liladavachi.bsky.social
Gaze patterns reveal attention-based modulation of lure discrimination
The ability to differentiate highly overlapping stimuli or experiences in memory (and the behavioral lure discrimination outcomes that reflect this ab…
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A computational theory of Aha! moments! New paper explaining why Aha! moments occur & why they feel so good. TLDR: They are a form of meta-cognitive prediction errors i.e. they occur when we surprise ourselves about our own abilities! @rachitdubey.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Memorable images don’t just last longer in memory—they get in better. Our EEG study shows that image memorability enhances the early formation of visual working memory representations, rather than changing later stable maintenance. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Image memorability facilitates visual working memory formation: Evidence from contralateral delay activity
Human observers remember some images more reliably than others, a phenomenon known as image memorability, a stimulus-driven property that predicts rel…
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New paper out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social by Ombline Rérolle and Leila Selimbegovic. How do we perceive dehumanized others? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Deepest Thanks to Fondation Ostad Elahi – éthique et solidarité humaine, for funding this work!
When less humanity is more: A single target compensation phenomenon between human nature and human uniqueness
This research examines the dynamic relationship between the two dimensions of humanity perception – human nature (HN) and human uniqueness (HU) – as d…
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How does the brain tell something is “alive” just by the way it moves? Using visual adaptation, this study suggests the existence of a neural mechanism for perceiving “life” from the movements of other people and even animals 👇.
How do we search in the real world? In our new paper in Cognition, we used immersive VR to study visual search beyond standard 2D screens — and found that people learn not just where to look, but how to look.
Not all prior knowledge influences what we see in the same way. Studying motion extrapolation, i.e. the ability to infer an object position from its past trajectory, this work highlights that implicit knowledge reshapes perception itself, while explicit knowledge adjusts how much we trust our senses
Faces behind us can be perceived as more intense, particularly for negative emotions, as egocentric spatial position biases emotion perception—even without turning. This may reflect a bias prioritizing potential threats located behind the observer. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Enhanced emotion perception for faces behind the observer
Understanding facial expressions is vital for communication because they convey essential emotional and social cues. While many studies have focused o…
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Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social! Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6
Human cultures vary in how they talk and think about space: some rely on body-centered (egocentric) reference frames, others on environment-centered (geocentric) ones.
We’re excited to feature new research uncovering the neural underpinnings of dependency length processing—a core quantitative syntactic feature—during natural language comprehension!