Psychological review最新文献

According to Bayesian, "inverse optics" accounts of vision, perceiving is inferring the most likely state of the world given noisy sensory data. This inference depends not only on prior beliefs about the world but also on an internal model specifying how world states translate to visual sensations. Alternative accounts explain perceptual decisions as a rule-based process, with no role for such beliefs about perception. Here, we contrast the two alternatives, focusing on decisions about perceptual absence as a critical test case. We present data from three preregistered experiments where participants performed a near-threshold detection task under different levels of partial stimulus occlusion, thereby visibly manipulating the measurement function going from external world states to internal perceptual states. We find that decisions about presence and absence are differentially sensitive to sensory evidence and occlusion. Furthermore, we observe reliably opposite individual-level effects of occlusion on decisions about absence. Our model accounts for these findings by postulating robust individual differences in the incorporation of beliefs about visibility into perceptual inferences, independent of population variability in visibility itself. We discuss implications for the varied and inferential nature of visual perception more broadly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Behavioral genetic research has demonstrated that shared genetics, not shared environment, makes adults who grew up in the same family similar in personality and psychopathology. The same research affirms the importance of the environment but shows that salient environmental influences in adulthood are not shared by family members; they are unique to the individual. Cognitive traits such as cognitive abilities and educational achievement are thought to be an exception, with half of the environmental variance attributed to shared environmental influences. However, most of this cognitive research has involved children. Here, we show that shared environmental influence on cognitive abilities and educational achievement declines from accounting for 20%-30% of the variance in childhood to 10%-20% in adolescence and to near 0% by early adulthood. Educational attainment (years of schooling) shows lasting shared environmental influence (30%) carried over from decisions made in adolescence to go to university, which shows the greatest shared environmental influence (47%). We conclude that specific cognitive abilities as well as general cognitive ability show moderate shared environmental influence in childhood when children live at home, but this influence disappears as young people make their own way in the world. We propose that random endogenous processes are responsible for nonshared environmental influences on adult cognitive abilities. We discuss the far-reaching implications for understanding the environmental causes of individual differences in cognitive abilities in adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

To date, research has reliably shown that language can engage and modify perceptual processes in a top-down manner. However, our understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying such top-down influences is still under debate. In this review, we provide an overview of findings from literature investigating the organization of semantic networks in the brain (spontaneous engagement of the visual system while processing linguistic information), and linguistic cueing studies (looking at the immediate effects of language on the perception of a visual target), in an effort to isolate such mechanisms. Additionally, we connect the findings from linguistic cueing studies to those reported in (nonlinguistic) literature on priors in perception, in order to find commonalities in neural processes allowing for top-down influences on perception. In doing so, we discuss the effects of language on perception in the context of broader, general cognitive and neural principles. Finally, we propose a way forward in the study of linguistic influences on perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous research suggests that the MINERVA2 model can capture basic Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) false recognition findings with either randomized representations or distributional semantic representations. In the current article, we extended this line of research by showing that MINERVA2 can accommodate not only basic DRM recognition findings but also the effects of various theory-driven manipulations. Importantly, we incorporated two assumptions of fuzzy-trace theory into MINERVA2: the verbatim-gist distinction and hierarchies of gist. To implement the verbatim-gist distinction, we represented local gist traces with distributional semantic vectors and verbatim traces with holographic word-form vectors. With separate representations incorporated, MINERVA2 successfully simulated a wide range of empirical effects in the DRM illusion, as well as remember/know and source judgments. To incorporate hierarchies of gist into the framework, we added an assumption that an item's storage quality depends on its semantic similarity to the preceding item. This accommodated the effect of global gist beyond that of local gist and solved the problem of storage independence in multitrace models of episodic memory. Our findings provided extensive evidence that MINERVA2 is a viable candidate for scalable modeling of the DRM illusion and strengthened the connection between computational modeling and substantive theories of false memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning accurate beliefs about the world is computationally demanding but critical for adaptive behavior across the lifespan. Here, we build on an established framework formalizing learning as predictive inference and examine the possibility that age differences in learning emerge from efficient computations that consider available cognitive resources differing across the lifespan. In our resource-rational model, beliefs are updated through a sampling process that stops after reaching a criterion level of accuracy. The sampling process navigates a trade-off between belief accuracy and computational cost, with more samples favoring belief accuracy and fewer samples minimizing costs. When cognitive resources are limited or costly, a maximization of the accuracy-cost ratio requires a more frugal sampling policy, which leads to systematically biased beliefs. Data from two lifespan studies (N = 129 and N = 90) and one study in younger adults (N = 94) show that children and older adults display biases characteristic of a more frugal sampling policy. This is reflected in (a) more frequent perseveration when participants are required to update from previous beliefs and (b) a stronger anchoring bias when updating beliefs from an externally generated value. These results are qualitatively consistent with simulated predictions of our resource-rational model, corroborating the assumption that the identified biases originate from sampling. Our model and results provide a unifying perspective on perseverative and anchoring biases, show that they can jointly emerge from efficient belief-updating computations, and suggest that resource-rational adjustments of sampling computations can explain age-related changes in adaptive learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Statistical learning (SL) is typically assumed to be a core mechanism by which organisms learn covarying structures and recurrent patterns in the environment, with the main purpose of facilitating processing of expected events. Within this theoretical framework, the environment is viewed as relatively stable, and SL "captures" the regularities therein through implicit unsupervised learning by mere exposure. Focusing primarily on language-the domain in which SL theory has been most influential-we review evidence that the environment is far from fixed: It is dynamic, in continual flux, and learners are far from passive absorbers of regularities; they interact with their environments, thereby selecting and even altering the patterns they learn from. We therefore argue for an alternative cognitive architecture, where SL serves as a subcomponent of an information foraging (IF) system. IF aims to detect and assimilate novel recurrent patterns in the input that deviate from randomness, for which SL supplies a baseline. The broad implications of this viewpoint and their relevance to recent debates in cognitive neuroscience are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

A canonical view in the neuroscience of learning and memory literature is that failures in memory expression reflect storage failures, and hence, amnesic manipulations following training or following memory reactivation can permanently erase memory traces. In this review, we analyze extant literatures from the learning and memory domains suggesting that most if not all of these memory deficits can be restored with the appropriate retrieval cues. We contend that all experience-dependent manipulations conducted immediately after training or following memory reactivation result in new learning, which interferes with the original learning and hence makes information highly dependent on retrieval cues for memory expression. Thus, although acquisition and storage mechanisms are surely important, memory retrieval is a critical component of memory performance, with numerous findings from behavioral and neurobiological studies all converging on this general stance. These conclusions invite a rethinking of the learning and memory literatures and provide new avenues for research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Communication is ubiquitous in human social life. There are many possible modes of human communication but language use is plainly of special interest: because it plays a critical role in culture and society; and because languages are important cultural products in their own right, with their own distinctive properties. These properties include in particular grammatical structure. However, we do not presently have any compelling synthesis of our understanding of communication and our understanding of grammar. This problem is important because synthesizing knowledge across neighboring domains can considerably deepen understanding in its own right, and bring new perspectives to bear on old issues. Mature syntheses are major scientific breakthroughs. Here, I argue that contextualist theories of communication, and constructionist approaches to the description of grammars, together provide a cohesive picture. Both bodies of work have proved enormously influential in their respective subfields, but their synthesis provides a unified picture of considerable clarity. Linguistic communication is a coordination problem on the speaker's informative intentions; and grammars are networks of microconventions ("constructions") that enable language users to resolve this coordination problem far more easily than they otherwise would. This synthesis in turn provides fresh perspectives on many classical issues in the language sciences. I sketch three examples: literal meaning and "construction modulation"; language learning; and the evolutionary emergence of language in our species. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Episodic memory is a core function that allows us to remember the events of our lives. Given that many events in our life contain overlapping elements (e.g., similar people and places), it is critical to understand how well we can remember the specific events of our lives versus how susceptible we are to interference between similar memories. Several prominent theories converged on the notion that pattern separation in the hippocampus causes it to play a greater role in processes such as recollection, associative memory, and memory for specific details, while overlapping distributed representations in the neocortex cause it to play a stronger role in domain-specific memory. We propose that studying memory performance on tasks with targets and similar lures provides a critical test bed for comparing the extent to which human memory is driven by pattern separation (e.g., hippocampus) versus more overlapping representations (e.g., neocortex). We generated predictions from several computational models and tested these predictions in a large sample of human participants. We found a linear relationship between memory performance and target-lure pattern similarity within a neural network simulation of inferior temporal cortex, an object-processing region. We also observed strong effects of test format on performance and consistent relationships between test formats. Altogether, our results were better accounted for by distributed memory models at the more linear end of a representational continuum than pattern-separated representations; therefore, our results provide important insight into prominent memory theories by suggesting that recognition memory performance is primarily driven by overlapping representations (e.g., neocortex). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined how elements are integrated into larger units in working memory (WM). Four contrasting conceptual models exist with regard to this question: (a) a unitization model, in which there is a single integrated representation which is retrieved in an all-or-none fashion; (b) a unitization-with-element-failure model, in which a single integrated representation is retrieved as a whole, but access to its elements can still fail individually; (c) a pairwise-binding model, in which elements of a unit are represented separately and are bound together in pairs; (d) a hybrid model that includes an integrated representation as well as pairwise bindings between element representations. We developed four multinomial process tree models to test these theories. In three experiments, participants memorized multiple units which were random combinations of three elements. They were given one element as a cue and prompted to report the other two elements. The model-comparison analysis revealed that the hybrid model provides the best quantitative fit to the data. We conclude that multielement units are represented on two levels, as an integrated unit retrieved in an all-or-none manner, and in addition through pairwise bindings between their elements. Moreover, the assumption that bindings of nonspatial elements are mediated through their shared spatial location-a special case of the pairwise-binding model-was not supported by the data. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).