Psychological review最新文献

Humans evolved to solve adaptive problems with kin and nonkin across fitness-relevant domains, including childcare and resource sharing, among others. Therefore, there is a great diversity in the types of interdependences humans experience across activities, relationships, and ecologies. To identify human psychological adaptations for cooperation, we argue that researchers must accurately characterize human fitness interdependence (FI). We propose a theoretical framework for assessing variation in FI that applies to the social interactions humans would have experienced across situations, relationships, and ecologies in the ancestral past and continue to experience today. According to this model, FI is characterized along four dimensions: (a) corresponding versus conflicting interests (b) mutual dependence versus independence, (c) asymmetrical versus symmetrical dependence (i.e., power), and (d) coordination. Because humans evolved to be highly mutually dependent on others to solve myriad adaptive problems, even compared to our closest living relatives, there is immense variability in the types of interdependences humans experience in daily life. Here, we describe the kinds of variation in interdependence humans experience, paying particular attention to social life in small-scale societies. In demonstrating the diversity of conflicts and coordination problems humans manage, we contend that humans evolved psychological adaptations to infer from signals, cues, and properties of the environment the four dimensions of FI under degrees of uncertainty to reduce the costs of cooperation. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of FI theory and emphasize that when individuals understand that others depend on them, it gives way to a new means of leverage to influence how others behave toward them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Considerable recent research in neurosciences has dealt with the topic of consciousness, even though there is still disagreement about how to identify and classify conscious states. Recent behavioral work on the topic also exists. We survey recent behavioral and neuroscientific literature with the aims of commenting on strengths and weaknesses of the literature and mapping new directions and recommendations for experimental psychologists. We reconcile this literature with a view of human information processing (Cowan, 1988; Cowan et al., 2024) in which a capacity-limited focus of attention is embedded within the activated portion of long-term memory, with dual bottom-up and top-down control of the focus of attention. None of the many extant theories fully captures what we propose as the organization of conscious thought at cognitive and neural levels. It seems clear that information from various cognitive functions, based on signals from various brain areas, is integrated into a conscious whole. In our new proposal, the integration involves funneling information to a hub or focus of attention neurally centered in the parietal lobes and functionally connected to areas representing the currently attended information. This funneling process (bringing information from diverse sensory and frontal sources to contact a small parietal area where attended information is coordinated and combined) may be the converse of global broadcasting, from other proposals (Baars et al., 2021; Baars & Franklin, 2003; Dehaene & Changeux, 2011). The proposed system incorporates many principles from previous research and theorization and strives toward a resolution of the relation between consciousness and attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Partisan animosity has been growing in the United States and around the world over the past few decades, fueling efforts by researchers and practitioners to help heal the divide. Many studies have been conducted to test interventions that aim to promote open-mindedness; however, these studies have been conducted in disparate literatures that do not always use the same terminology. In this review, we integrate research on open-mindedness in order to facilitate cross-talk and collaboration between disciplines. We review various concepts related to open-mindedness and then offer a conceptual model to help guide the further development of interventions and research to understand open-mindedness. We propose that open-mindedness is multifaceted and dynamic, such that interventions should focus on targeting multiple psychological pathways in order to maximize and sustain their effects. Specifically, we propose that interventions that target cognitive and/or motivational pathways can induce open-mindedness initially. Then, training in emotion regulation and/or social skills can help to sustain and build on open-mindedness once individuals enter into a situation where their beliefs are challenged. We conclude with a discussion of potential future directions for research on open-mindedness interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

A review of Pavlovian conditioning in animals and humans reveals a critical role for expectancy in the learning of an association between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US), as well as in the expression of this association in a conditioned response (CR). The automatic and involuntary nature of CRs has traditionally been explained in terms of the formation of excitatory or inhibitory links between representations of the CS and US. However, this view has difficulty accounting for the variety of CRs that are observed, some qualitatively different from those elicited by the US, depending on the imminence of the predicted US and the nature of the CS. Furthermore, in humans, the same anticipatory responses are seen when the CS-US relationship is instructed rather than experienced and when the imminent occurrence of the US is directly instructed, without a mediating CS. These findings suggest an alternative explanation in which CRs are anticipatory responses elicited automatically by a specific state of expectancy of the US. The similarity between Pavlovian conditioning in animals and humans in turn suggests a continuity of core mechanisms for learning and performance. We conclude that research and theory in Pavlovian conditioning should go beyond the search for direct CS-US connections and seek to understand the mechanisms that underlie CS-US contingency knowledge, expectancy states, and the generation of anticipatory responses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) is the tendency for fast decisions to come at the expense of accurate performance. Evidence accumulation models such as the drift diffusion model can reproduce a variety of behavioral data related to the SAT, and their parameters have been linked to neural activities in the brain. However, our understanding of how biological neural networks realize the associated cognitive operations remains incomplete, limiting our ability to unify neurological and computational accounts of the SAT. We address this gap by developing and analyzing a biologically plausible spiking neural network that extends the drift diffusion approach. We apply our model to both perceptual and nonperceptual tasks, investigate several contextual manipulations, and validate model performance using neural and behavioral data. Behaviorally, we find that our model (a) reproduces individual response time distributions; (b) generalizes across experimental contexts, including the number of choice alternatives, speed- or accuracy-emphasis, and task difficulty; and (c) predicts accuracy data, despite being fit only to response time data. Neurally, we show that our model (a) recreates observed patterns of spiking neural activity and (b) captures age-related deficits that are consistent with the behavioral data. More broadly, our model exhibits the SAT across a variety of tasks and contexts and explains how individual differences in speed and accuracy arise from synaptic weights within a spiking neural network. Our work showcases a method for translating mathematical models into functional neural networks and demonstrates that simulating such networks permits analyses and predictions that are outside the scope of purely mathematical models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 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) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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) 2024 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) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Although the importance of unsupervised learning has been recognized since William James's "blooming, buzzing confusion," it has received less attention in the literature than supervised learning. An important form of unsupervised learning is clustering, which involves determining the groups of distinct objects that belong together. Visual clustering is foundational for ensemble perception, numerosity judgments, spatial problem-solving, understanding information visualizations, and other forms of visual cognition, and yet surprisingly few researchers have directly investigated this human ability. In this study, participants freely clustered arrays that varied in the number of points (10-40) and cluster structure of the stimuli, which was defined based on the statistical distribution of points. We found that clustering is a reliable ability: Participants' clusterings of the same stimulus on two occasions were highly similar. With respect to the objective properties of the clusterings that people produce, points of individual clusters tend to follow a Gaussian distribution. With respect to processing, we identified five visual attributes that characterize the clusters that participants draw-cluster numerosity, area, density, and linearity and also percentage of points on the convex hull. We also discovered evidence for sequential strategies, with some attributes dominating when drawing the initial clusters of a stimulus and others guiding the final clusters. Collectively, these findings offer a comprehensive picture of human visual clustering and serve as a foundation for the development of new models of this important ability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Covert identity signals permit the communication of group membership to ingroup members while avoiding potentially costly detection by members of other groups. If individuals are incentivized to detect others' group memberships, however, covert signals may not remain covert for very long. We propose a theoretical extension to the literature on covert signaling in which conventionalized identity signals can become destabilized when learned by outgroup individuals to be replaced by the emergence of new signaling conventions. We formalize this idea with both analytical and agent-based modeling of ingroup and outgroup individuals who learn about signals of group membership. Depending on the risk and associated cost of detection by the outgroup, the model yields three dynamic classes: saturation, where all identity signals become stable conventions and never go extinct; cycling, in which new signals emerge to replace old ones as they are learned by the outgroup; and suppression, in which informative identity signals never emerge. Our analysis has implications for understanding identity signaling, the emergence of conventions, coded speech, and the ebb and flow of fashion cycles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).