Psychological review最新文献

Object individuation studies have been a valuable tool in understanding the development of kind concepts. In this article, we review evidence from object individuation paradigms to argue that by their first birthday, infants represent at least three superordinate-level sortal kinds: OBJECT, ANIMATE, and AGENT (possibly also ARTIFACT). These superordinate sortal-kind concepts share key characteristics of adult kind concepts, such as prioritizing causal properties and having inductive potential. We then discuss the implications of this body of research. First, we discuss how the early development of these sortal-kind concepts (i.e., OBJECT, ANIMATE, and AGENT) relate to the two major theories of concepts: core knowledge and psychological essentialism. Second, we suggest that superordinate kind concepts set the stage for later development of basic-level kind concepts and present evidence that human communication, either in the form of language or pedagogical demonstration, plays a key role in constructing basic-level kinds. Third, we compare feature-based versus kind-based object individuation studies and put forth the hypothesis that they may reflect two modes of construal theory. Last, we discuss several open theoretical and empirical questions about sortal-kind concepts and suggest directions for future research. Overall, our review underscores the importance of object individuation methods as a powerful research tool for investigating the development of kind concepts, mechanisms of learning, and the relationship between language and thoughts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Nonlinguistic external representations, such as diagrams, animations, or puppet shows, involve local relations between a perceptually available object (a symbol) and an entity that is relevant in the current communicative context (a discourse referent). By analyzing the empirical evidence on early pretend play, I argue that object substitution pretense can be fully accounted for if it is conceived of as a subspecies of external representation. This implies that the capacity to interpret objects as symbols emerges early and reliably in human ontogeny. I discuss several accounts of pretend play and related phenomena and argue that the current proposal provides a better and more general account of early symbolic understanding than alternative views. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological measures frequently show trait-like properties, and the ontological status of stable psychological traits has been discussed for decades. We argue that these properties can emerge from causal dynamics of time-varying processes, which are omitted from the analysis model, potentially leading to the estimation of traits that are, at least in part, illusory. Theories positing the importance of a large set of dynamic psychological causes across development are consistent with the existence of illusory traits. We show via simulation that even a linear system with many processes can generate a covariance matrix with trait-like properties. We then attempt to examine how illusory traits affect our conclusions drawn from a common statistical model, which assumes stable traits to analyze longitudinal panel data-a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM). We find that the RI-CLPM sometimes falsely detects the existence of traits in the presence of omitted processes, even when the data-generating model does not include any traits. However, in this scenario, the RI-CLPM estimates less causally biased autoregressive and cross-lagged effects than an analysis model, which does not assume traits (i.e., the cross-lagged panel model). The results indicate that the detection of trait variance should not be inferred as strong evidence for the existence of time-invariant trait causes. On the other hand, even when traits are illusory, statistical models assuming stable traits may sometimes be useful for causal inference. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 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) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Identifying safe and efficient pharmaceutical pain treatments remains an enduring challenge. However, despite significant advancements in pharmacological pain management, the inconsistent effectiveness of many analgesics between people remains puzzling. To address this problem, we introduce a new hypothesis suggesting that psychosocial factors exacerbate or attenuate (i.e., moderate) pain-relieving effects of analgesics: the psychosocial moderation hypothesis of pharmacological analgesia. According to this hypothesis, psychosocial factors can be categorized into three groups: (a) dispositional psychological factors, (b) situational cognitive or affective factors, and (c) contextual and social factors. The psychosocial moderation hypothesis is intended to extend the biopsychosocial model of pain to pharmacological pain management, with the goals to deepen the understanding of how analgesic drugs function and to open new paths to pain research and management beyond the traditional biomedical approach in pharmacological pain treatment. This hypothesis thus points toward a more comprehensive, psychosocial approach to pharmacological pain management and encourages the development of analgesic models that take the psychosocial context of analgesic consumers into account. We hope that this hypothesis will stimulate novel empirical and theoretical efforts in identifying the most beneficial analgesic for different types of people in different situations and, thus, to optimize analgesic dosing to provide adequate pharmacological pain relief while minimizing adverse side effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Memory is formed through repeated action and perception. The primitive manifestation of this type of memory in infants has been observed through a procedure called mobile paradigm. Three-month-old infants can retain behavioral changes during interaction with a mobile for a week without reminders, and this retention can be prolonged for 2-4 weeks with reminders. However, precisely what infants can remember and how memory retention and reactivation work at this young age remains unclear. In this article, we introduce dynamical systems models that replicate this form of memory by incorporating two dynamic properties. The first dynamic process is responsible for creating and retaining a memory of the experience of controlling movement generation to interact with the environment. While this memory can be used in retention tests of learned behaviors, it undergoes a gradual decay. The second property involves asymmetric bifurcation, through which a memory of the circular causality between self-movement and environmental events is formed. This memory, related to agency, persists and enables reactivation of the decayed memory of learned behaviors. Our simulation suggests that memory emerges as an embodiment of internal dynamics through the repetition of action and perception. The form of retained memory in the mobile paradigm is comparable to that in the A-not-B error and habituation-dishabituation tasks. The theory of dynamical systems unifies experimental results regarding memory in early life as an embodied process, with the maturation of the memory system originating from the embodied process between the brain, body, and environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 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) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Group creative ideation, the capacity of group to produce novel and useful ideas, is essential for navigating challenges and embracing opportunities. Despite its significance, research to decode its neurocognitive underpinnings utilizing interpersonal neuroscience paradigm has just commenced, linking group creative ideation to interpersonal neural coupling. In this perspective, we propose an interpersonal neural coupling in group creative ideation framework, which suggests that group creative ideation is supported by interpersonal neural coupling within three interrelated systems: cognitive, affective, and physical alignments. The cognitive alignment system is considered as the core system that determines the outcome of group creative ideation. Variations in cognitive alignment spanning shared intention, joint attention, shared comprehension, and idea convergence interact with an individual decision making in selecting any of three creative ideation pathways, including flexibility, persistence, and convergence, which collectively determine the final creative performance. The interpersonal neural coupling in group creative ideation framework enhances our understanding of the neurocognitive underpinnings of group creative ideation and outlines promising avenues for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

When it comes to body movements in external space, people are experts in learning fine-grained voluntary control, for example, when manipulating tiny objects. Voluntarily controlling actions in the internal body (e.g., decreasing heart rate), however, is far more difficult and requires dedicated training, for example, in meditation or yoga. Not much is currently known about the learning mechanism underlying the acquisition of voluntary control over internal visceromotor actions (i.e., interoaction) or why it is so difficult compared to controlling our external somatomotor actions (i.e., exteroaction). We propose the ideomotor hypothesis of voluntary interoaction in this article, which asserts that voluntary exteroactions and interoactions are governed by the same general principle, namely, the anticipation of sensory feedback. We apply this hypothesis to two techniques that can be used to acquire voluntary control over interoactions, that is, autogenic training and biofeedback training. As the afferent signal we receive from interoaction (i.e., interoceptive signals from the internal body) is of lower sensory quality than the afferent signal that we receive from exteroaction (i.e., exteroceptive signals from the external environment), this hypothesis explains why learning to control interoactions is more difficult. We propose ways in which to test predictions from this hypothesis and show its theoretical value by comparing it to other frameworks in the literature. We hope that this work motivates future empirical studies directly examining voluntary interoaction and its clinical applications, such as autogenic and biofeedback training, and mind-body practices more generally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).