Psychological review最新文献

The theory of mind (ToM) hypothesis of autism is the idea that difficulties inferring the mental states of others may explain social communication difficulties in autism. In the present article, we critically evaluate existing theoretical accounts, concluding that none provides a sufficient explanation of ToM in autism. We then evaluate existing tests of ToM, identifying problems that limit the validity of the conclusions that may be drawn from them. Finally, as an example of how the identified issues may be resolved, we describe work developing a psychological account of ToM (the Mind-space framework) and a new test of ToM accuracy (the Interview Task). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Research suggests that negative affective states, such as fear and anxiety that accompany placebo treatment may be considered predictors of placebo hypoalgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia. There is also data showing that the likelihood of developing nocebo hyperalgesia is related to the relatively stable tendency to experience these negative emotions. We aimed to summarize the current state-of-the-art in studies and theoretical models on the role of fear and anxiety in placebo hypoalgesia/nocebo hyperalgesia, with a clear differentiation between these emotions. The role of fear and anxiety accompanying placebo treatment in shaping placebo effects is often studied, but less attention has been given to pretreatment emotional states. We propose a model that combines knowledge from the emotional and pain paradigms with the current research on placebo hypoalgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia to present the involvement of fear and anxiety as traits, as well as pretreatment and posttreatment states of fear and anxiety to placebo effects. The main assumption of the model is that trait fear, trait anxiety, and related pretreatment affective states impact pain perception differently. Heightened fear is associated with decreased pain perception, while heightened anxiety is linked to increased pain perception. Consequently, heightened pretreatment fear may lead to reduced nocebo hyperalgesia and enhanced placebo hypoalgesia, while heightened pretreatment anxiety may result in decreased placebo hypoalgesia and increased nocebo hyperalgesia. In conclusion, we propose future research directions and clinical applications of the model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are increasingly deploying computational models to develop testable theories of psychological functions and make quantitative predictions about cognition, brain activity, and behavior. Computational models are used to explain target phenomena such as experimental effects, individual, and/or population differences. They do so by relating these phenomena to the underlying components of the model that map onto distinct cognitive mechanisms. These components make up a "cognitive state space," where different positions correspond to different cognitive states that produce variation in behavior. We examine the rationale and practice of such model-based inferences and argue that model-based explanations typically miss a key ingredient: They fail to explain why and how agents occupy specific positions in this space. A critical insight is that the agent's position in the state space is not fixed, but that the behavior they produce is the result of a trajectory. Therefore, we discuss (a) the constraints that limit movement in the state space; (b) the reasons for moving around at all (i.e., agents' objectives); and (c) the information and cognitive mechanisms that guide these movements. We review existing research practices, from experimental design to the model-based analysis of data, and through simulations we demonstrate some of the inferential pitfalls that arise when we ignore these dynamics. By bringing the agent's perspective into sharp focus, we stand to gain better and more complete explanations of the variation in cognition and behavior over time, between different environmental conditions, and between different populations or individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Time is a central dimension against which perception, action, and cognition play out. From anticipating when future events will happen to recalling how long ago previous events occurred, humans and animals are exquisitely sensitive to temporal structure. Empirical evidence seems to suggest that estimating time prospectively (i.e., in passing) is qualitatively different from estimating time in retrospect (i.e., after the event is over). Indeed, computational models that attempt to explain both prospective and retrospective timing assume a fundamental separation of their underlying processes. We, in contrast, propose a new neurocomputational model of timing, the unified temporal coding (UTC) model that unifies prospective and retrospective timing through common principles. The UTC model assumes that both stimulus and timing information are represented inside the same rolling window of input history. As a consequence, the UTC model explains a wide range of phenomena typically covered by specialized models, such as conformity to and violations of the scalar property, one-shot learning of intervals, neural responses underlying timing, timing behavior under normal and distracting conditions, common capacity limits in timing and working memory, and how timing depends on attention. Strikingly, by assuming that prospective and retrospective timing rely on the same principles and are implemented in the same neural network, a simple attentional gain mechanism can resolve the apparently paradoxical effect of cognitive load on prospective and retrospective timing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion understanding goes beyond recognizing emotional displays-it also involves reasoning about how people's emotions are affected by their subjective evaluations of what they experienced. Inspired by work in adults on cognitive appraisal theories of emotion, we propose a framework that can guide systematic investigations of how an adult-like, sophisticated understanding of emotion develops from infancy to adulthood. We integrate basic concepts of appraisal theories with developmental theories of emotion understanding and suggest that over development, young children construct an intuitive, theory-like understanding of other people's emotions that is structurally similar to appraisal theories. That is, children are increasingly able to evaluate other people's situations from those people's perspectives along various appraisal dimensions and use such third-person appraisals to understand those people's emotional responses to events. This "third-person-appraisal" framework can not only incorporate existing empirical findings but can also identify gaps in the literature, providing a guiding framework for systematically investigating the development of emotion understanding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Compared to individuals who are rated as less creative, higher creative individuals tend to produce ideas more quickly and with more novelty-what we call faster-and-further phenomenology. This has traditionally been explained either as supporting an associative theory-based on differences in the structure of cognitive representations-or as supporting an executive theory-based on the principle that higher creative individuals utilize cognitive control to navigate their cognitive representations differently. Though extensive research demonstrates evidence of differences in semantic structure, structural explanations are limited in their ability to formally explain faster-and-further phenomenology. At the same time, executive abilities also correlate with creativity, but formal process models explaining how they contribute to faster-and-further phenomenology are lacking. Here, we introduce entropy modulation theory which integrates structure and process-based creativity accounts. Relying on a broad set of evidence, entropy modulation theory assumes that the difference between lower and higher creative individuals lies in the executive modulation of entropy during cognitive search (e.g., memory retrieval). With retrieval targets racing to reach an activation threshold, activation magnitude and variance both independently enhance the entropy of target retrieval and increase retrieval speed, reproducing the faster-and-further phenomenology. Thus, apparent differences in semantic structure can be produced via an entropy modulating retrieval process, which tunes cognitive entropy to mediate cognitive flexibility and the exploration-exploitation trade-off. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

A central goal of research into language acquisition is explaining how, when learners generalize to new cases, they appropriately restrict their generalizations (e.g., to avoid producing ungrammatical utterances such as *the clown laughed the man; "*" indicates an ungrammatical form). The past 30 years have seen an unresolved debate between statistical preemption and entrenchment as explanations. Under preemption, the use of a verb in a particular construction (e.g., *the clown laughed the man) is probabilistically blocked by hearing that other verb constructions with similar meanings only (e.g., the clown made the man laugh). Under entrenchment, such errors (e.g., *the clown laughed the man) are probabilistically blocked by hearing any utterance that includes the relevant verb (e.g., by the clown made the man laugh and the man laughed). Across five artificial-language-learning studies, we designed a training regime such that learners received evidence for the (by the relevant hypothesis) ungrammaticality of a particular unattested verb/noun + particle combination (e.g., *chila + kem; *squeako + kem) via either preemption only or entrenchment only. Across all five studies, participants in the preemption condition (as per our preregistered prediction) rated unattested verb/noun + particle combinations as less acceptable for restricted verbs/nouns, which appeared during training, than for unrestricted, novel-at-test verbs/nouns, which did not appear during training, that is, strong evidence for preemption. Participants in the entrenchment condition showed no evidence for such an effect (and in 3/5 experiments, positive evidence for the null). We conclude that a successful model of learning linguistic restrictions must instantiate competition between different forms only where they express the same (or similar) meanings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Reports an error in "One thought too few: An adaptive rationale for punishing negligence" by Arunima Sarin and Fiery Cushman (Psychological Review, 2024[Apr], Vol 131[3], 812-824). In the original article, the copyright attribution was incorrectly listed, and the Creative Commons CC BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "© 2024 The Author(s)," and the omitted disclaimer is present as: Open Access funding provided by University College London: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0; http://creativecommons.org/li censes/by/4.0). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format, as well as adapting the material for any purpose, even commercially. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2024-74001-001). Why do we punish negligence? Some current accounts raise the possibility that it can be explained by the kinds of processes that lead us to punish ordinary harmful acts, such as outcome bias, character inference, or antecedent deliberative choices. Although they capture many important cases, these explanations fail to account for others. We argue that, in addition to these phenomena, there is something unique to the punishment of negligence itself: People hold others directly responsible for the basic fact of failing to bring to mind information that would help them to avoid important risks. In other words, we propose that at its heart negligence is a failure of thought. Drawing on the current literature in moral psychology, we suggest that people find it natural to punish such failures, even when they do not arise from conscious, volitional choice. This raises a question: Why punish somebody for a mental event they did not exercise deliberative control over? Drawing on the literature on how thoughts come to mind, we argue that punishing a person for such failures will help prevent their future occurrence, even without the involvement of volitional choice. This provides new insight on the structure and function of our tendency to punish negligent actions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Improving emotion regulation abilities, a process that requires learning, can enhance psychological well-being and mental health. Empirical evidence suggests that emotion regulation can be learned-during development and the lifespan, and most explicitly in psychotherapeutic interventions and experimental training paradigms. There is little work however that directly addresses such learning mechanisms. The present article proposes that learning in specific components of emotion regulation-emotion goals, emotional awareness, and strategy selection-may drive skill learning and long-term changes in regulatory behavior. Associative learning (classical and instrumental conditioning) and social learning (including observational, instructed, or interpersonal emotion regulation processes) are proposed to function as underlying mechanisms, while reinforcement-learning models may be useful for quantifying how these learning systems operate. A framework for how people learn emotion regulation will guide basic science investigations and impact clinical interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

It has long been hypothesized that episodic memory supports adaptive decision making by enabling mental simulation of future events. Yet, attempts to characterize this process are surprisingly rare. On one hand, memory research is often carried out in settings that are far removed from ecological contexts of decision making. On the other hand, models of adaptive choice only invoke episodic memory in highly stylized terms, if at all. To address these gaps, we propose TCM-SR, a novel process-level model that grounds model-based evaluation in empirically informed dynamics of episodic recall. In this model, the probability of retrieving each available memory is governed by the successor representation, a biologically plausible world model in reinforcement learning. The evolution of these probabilities based on past retrievals, in turn, is dictated by the temporal context model, a prominent model of episodic retrieval. Through simulations and analytical derivations, we show that the patterns of episodic retrieval suggested by this model enables flexible computation of decision variables. On this basis, a number of previously described features of episodic memory might serve an adaptive purpose in sequential decision making. For instance, we show that the contiguity effect, a well-known bias in episodic retrieval, enables mental simulation via model-based rollouts to inform decisions. We also show that backward retrieval and emotional modulation improve generalization and the efficiency of decisions given limited experience. By bridging computational models across these two domains, we make several theoretical and empirical predictions linking episodic memory to adaptive choice in sequential tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).