Cognitive Science最新文献

Thick terms like "courageous," "smart," and "tasty" combine description and evaluation, contrasting with purely evaluative terms like "good" and "bad," and descriptive terms like "Italian" and "green." Thick terms intuitively constitute a special class of evaluative language; but we currently do not know whether the psycholinguistic effects of these terms are reducible to known semantic dimensions. Here, we start to systematically explore this question by comparing the behavior of thick terms and non-thick descriptive terms with similar affective valence, which is a strong candidate semantic dimension to account for differences between evaluative and non-evaluative language. We study thick terms from English, Dutch, and Italian, combining behavioral data from the cancellability task, Cloze task, and free association networks, with natural language processing methods and psycholinguistic ratings of word valence. We find that thick and non-thick descriptive terms are associated with different psycholinguistic effects, even when carefully matched for valence, suggesting that valence is insufficient to account for the difference between thick and non-thick terms. Instead, we find no reliable difference between positive and negative thick terms, and between moral, epistemic, and aesthetic thick terms. Our findings indicate that thick terms form a homogeneous class of evaluative language whose psycholingusitic effects cannot be explained only in terms of affective valence.

Languages describe “who is doing what to whom” by distinguishing the event roles of agent (doer) and patient (undergoer), but it is debated whether they result from nonlinguistic representations that may already exist in preverbal infants and nonhuman animals. The phenomenon of causal perception, where the subsequent movements of two objects A and B evoke the impression of A launching B, is a simple depiction of an agent−patient relation. The seminal study by Leslie and Keeble from 1987 proposed that infants of 6 months old may be able to attribute agent and patient roles to such causal displays, after they demonstrated the infants’ dishabituation upon seeing a launching event that was reversed. They introduced the idea that a role reversal had taken place upon reversing the direction of the launching event (launcher becoming launchee), but not in a noncausal temporal gap event where the agent and patient roles were not present. The present study tested this hypothesis in three different populations: 6-month-old human infants, human adults, and Guinea baboons (Papio papio). For the human infants, we applied a habituation-dishabituation design, and for the human adults and baboons, a conditional match-to-sample task. We were unable to replicate the findings of Leslie and Keeble in human infants. Similarly, we did not find evidence for an effect specific to reversing launching events in human adults and baboons. Inconsistent results across different studies call into question the role reversal paradigm for Michottean launches to study event role attribution.

Do we make gendered associations with objects whose linguistic labels have masculine/feminine grammatical gender? This question derives from the neo-Whorfian view that language shapes our conceptualizations of the world. Previous research has provided mixed answers. Here, we present three experiments where we tested for the gender effect on object conceptualization using a word association approach: a first group of participants generated adjectives for nouns referring to objects, and a second group subsequently rated those adjectives for masculinity/femininity. In Experiment 1, with native French speakers, we tested semantically related object nouns that have opposite grammatical gender (masculine vs. feminine) in French; in Experiment 2, with native French and German speakers, we tested translation equivalents having opposite grammatical gender in the two languages. Results from both experiments showed the absence of a gender effect in French, while a small gender effect was found in German. In both experiments, nouns had been presented with a gender-marked determiner. In Experiment 3, we tested a new group of German participants on the same items, which were now presented without a determiner; we again observed a small gender effect. Consistent with previous findings, we also found that people ascribe more feminine qualities to natural entities and masculine qualities to artificial entities. Taken together, we conclude that the influence of grammatical gender on object conceptualization is weak and dependent on language.

I argue that the emerging field of collective cognition lacks consensus as to how a psychological state can be shared. Whereas much is known about the basic sensorimotor and cognitive mechanisms of social alignment, representations of “sharedness” at the meta-cognitive level remain unclear. One reason for this lack of clarity is the genuine difficulties involved in attending to the attention of multiple individual minds. As an alternative, I argue that individuals can use collective meta-attention, or attention to the attention of collective minds, as a cognitively frugal and epistemically robust way to track the presence of a shared experience. I also discuss the implications of the proposal for other shared mental states such as shared emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and goals.

We codesigned and evaluated a brief intervention combining two fraction games: Fraction Ball (played on a basketball court) and Bottle Caps Bonanza (played on a tabletop shuffleboard). Using participatory design principles, we engaged teachers and students in codesigning playful learning experiences aimed at improving knowledge transfer and adding fractions with unlike denominators. Students were randomly assigned within seven treatment classrooms to practice fractions with different denominators on one board simultaneously (N = 87) versus practicing on separate boards sequentially (N = 79). Three comparison classrooms (N = 75) only took the pretest and posttest. Our preregistered models suggested significant impacts on multiple aspects of fraction knowledge, including far transfer and overall fraction knowledge, when comparing both treatment groups to the comparison group. The simultaneous condition performed higher on untimed fraction addition with unequal denominators, though this difference was not statistically significant (b = 0.21, p = .05). Furthermore, students with higher prior knowledge benefited more from the simultaneous condition. We conclude that this playful and accessible intervention can effectively improve students’ fraction knowledge.

In a recent article in Cognitive Science, Rogachev et al. (2025) presented a cross-sectional investigation of visual statistical learning (SL) in children aged 3–9 years and concluded that implicit SL remains stable across early childhood. They cited our longitudinal study (Tóth-Fáber et al., 2024) as supporting this conclusion. Here, we clarify that this interpretation is incorrect. Using a longitudinal design tracking the same individuals from ages 7 to 14, we demonstrated a reliable developmental decline in implicit SL, along with substantial interindividual variability. We further showed that executive functions measured at age 14 predict individual developmental trajectories of SL, indicating a dynamic reorganization of learning systems with maturation. Importantly, tasks used to measure SL inevitably recruit multiple cognitive processes, and differences in these task demands can substantially influence observed developmental trajectories. We argue that longitudinal and cross-sectional designs yield qualitatively different evidence about developmental change. Longitudinal evidence and relatively process-pure measures are, therefore, essential for accurately characterizing developmental dynamics in SL.

Generosity is widely regarded as one of the most praiseworthy virtues. However, when individuals engage in generous acts, such behavior can sometimes lead to unintended consequences, such as overshadowing the reputations of others. Across two studies (N = 512), we examined how 8- to 12-year-old children and adults evaluate generous sharing when it undermines a peer's reputation, and whether this evaluation is moderated by the social relationship between the individuals involved. Participants were presented with a vignette in which an actor shared more than a peer—who was either a friend or a stranger—resulting in the peer's reputation being either harmed or not. Results showed that children evaluated the actor's sharing more negatively and were less willing to befriend with the actor when it harmed the peer's reputation compared to when it did not, and this effect was not influenced by the social relationship between the actor and the peer (Study 1a). Further studies, which modified the materials and included a larger sample encompassing adults, consistently found that social relationship did not affect children's or adults’ evaluations of reputation-harming sharing (Studies 1b and 2). The findings demonstrate that children in middle childhood evaluate sharing behavior with attention not only to the act's generosity, but also to the broader social implications it may carry.

Cognitive neuroscience faces a measurement problem: core features of the human mind cannot be directly observed in the brain. For example, intentions are efficacious in behavior generation yet cannot be reduced to the sub-personal quantities of neural activity without losing their purpose-driven, normative character. This instrumental limitation is fundamental yet remains insufficiently recognized. To bring this issue to the forefront and reorient the field toward a solution, this brief commentary argues that theories of the mind–brain relation must meet the “Participation Criterion”: they must specify what measurable difference the presence of mental efficacy produces compared to its absence. When the Participation Criterion is accepted alongside the measurement problem, a feasible solution arises: the dynamical relevance of unobservable mental efficacy may manifest indirectly as increased unpredictability of observable brain activity, quantifiable via information-theoretic entropy. The concept of “irruption” is introduced to specifically formalize this efficacy-derived part of unexplained variability, thereby reframing context-dependent “noise” in the brain as a key signature of the intentional mind at work. The theoretical proposal offers new avenues for research in cognitive science and clinical interventions.

The present study examines how real-world event knowledge and grammatical aspect guide event comprehension. Specifically, we tested whether real-world knowledge about the likelihood of state-change (e.g., wine glasses usually crack when dropped but plastic cups do not) modulates the object state representations that people construct while reading perfective and imperfective sentences. Participants read “rebus” sentences in perfective and imperfective aspect, presented one word at a time, self-paced. In each sentence, the object was replaced by an image of the object that is either likely or unlikely to undergo state-change (e.g., Carlos was dropping/dropped a *wine glass*/*plastic cup* …), depicted in their initial (intact) or end (changed) states. Reaction times to images indicate that real-world knowledge about the likelihood of state-change is recruited when comprehenders construct mental models of events described as completed (perfective aspect, e.g., dropped) as well as events described as ongoing (imperfective aspect, e.g., was dropping). Results also indicate that perfective aspect increases the accessibility of both the initial and end states of objects, compared to imperfective aspect. Overall, these results demonstrate that both non-linguistic information grounded in real-world event knowledge as well as linguistic cues about the temporal structure of events guide how comprehenders dynamically update mental representations of object states in real-time.

We are often preoccupied with the future, experiencing dread at the thought of future misery and savoring the thought of future pleasure. Prior lab studies have found that these anticipatory emotions influence decision-making. In this article, using economic survey data to estimate individual differences in anticipatory emotions, we find that the tendency to feel displeasure from anticipating future losses outweighs the pleasure from anticipating equal gains. We then relate asymmetries in anticipatory emotions to key economic preferences, finding that people with more strongly asymmetric anticipatory emotions are more risk-avoidant (because they obtain more disutility from contemplating downside risk) and more impatient (because they want to minimize the time spent contemplating risks). We conclude by considering how asymmetries in anticipatory emotions may be linked to a range of intertemporal and risky choice phenomena. Overall, our framework explains why risk-avoidance and impatience are linked, and we provide suggestive evidence for this explanation.