Cognitive Science最新文献

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.

This theoretical article examines the relationship between self-regulated learning and task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) through the lens of metacognition. Grounded in Winne's COPES (conditions, operations, products, evaluations, and standards) model of self-regulated learning, we propose an interaction model emphasizing metacognitive monitoring and control. This model suggests the metacognitive cycle inherent to self-regulated learning can increase meta-awareness and mitigate prolonged experiences of TUTs. Learners can potentially redirect their focus by engaging in iterative cycles of metacognitive monitoring and control when thoughts inevitably drift toward TUTs. Foundational concepts explored include metacognition, meta-awareness, and the COPES facets. By synthesizing theoretical connections, processes are proposed through which learners’ self-regulatory capacities may influence TUT experiences via enhanced meta-awareness. This lays the groundwork to guide future inquiries on self-regulation dynamics underlying effective learning. Empirical research is recommended to investigate the viability of this theorized mechanism linking self-regulation processes to experiences of TUT and research agendas following from this theoretical framework are outlined.

The human mind can segment continuous streams of activity in the world into meaningful, discrete units known as events. However, not all events are created equal. We draw a distinction between bounded events (e.g., folding a handkerchief) that have a predictable structure that develops in distinct stages (i.e., a beginning, middle, and end) and a well-defined endpoint, and unbounded events (e.g., waving a handkerchief) that lack such a well-defined structure and endpoint. We predict that event boundedness affects attention allocation patterns over the course of the event. Here, we tested this prediction using a dwell time paradigm by measuring the time participants spent on each still frame of an activity. We found that event endpoints attracted increased attention compared to midpoints; importantly, this increase was significantly greater when people viewed bounded events compared to unbounded events. In addition, event endpoints attracted increased attention compared to event beginnings, but this pattern also interacted with event boundedness (Experiment 1). These results replicated even when a linguistic preview of the events was introduced (Experiment 2). We conclude that abstract internal event structure (specifically, event boundedness) affects attention allocation during online event apprehension.

Speech-on-speech listening involves selectively attending to a target talker while ignoring a simultaneous competing talker. Spatially separating the talkers improves performance, a phenomenon known as spatial release from masking (spatial RM). The same is true of spectral separation, that is, filtering the talkers into non-overlapping frequency bands (spectral RM). The relative benefit of spatial versus spectral RM is currently unknown. Furthermore, it is unclear how listeners’ ability to exploit spatial versus spectral cues is related to individual differences in cognition. The resource-limit account suggests that cognitive resources are required to support the processing of degraded speech, implying the strongest cognition/performance relationship when RM is limited or absent. However, an alternative claim, referred to as the data-limit account, suggests that cognitive resources cease to be useful when the target is severely degraded. In this study, participants (N = 240) completed a selective listening task in which they transcribed the speech of one of two simultaneously presented talkers. The speech was filtered into interleaved or overlapping frequency bands (spectral RM vs. no spectral RM) and presented dichotically or collocated (a proxy for spatial RM vs. no spatial RM). A battery of cognitive tasks was administered to assess working memory/attention. Spectral RM provided at least as much benefit as spatial RM, with the best performance when both RM types were present. Cognitive scores were significantly positively correlated with RM benefits. However, the weakest correlation between cognitive scores and performance was observed in the no-RM condition. The results therefore support an account of speech-on-speech listening that lies on a continuum from data-limited to resource-limited processing as a function of the quality of the target speech signal.

This study presents the first large-scale empirical analysis of how ghosts and spirits were debated during China's early twentieth-century secular transformation. Using a novel dataset of over 2000 digitized texts—including newspapers, periodicals, and essays from 1890 to 1949—we combine close reading, AI-assisted annotation, and statistical modeling to examine rhetorical strategies surrounding supernatural belief. We find a clear asymmetry: critics emphasized theoretical arguments (e.g., science, rationality, education), while defenders relied more on empirical or anecdotal evidence. These patterns reflect broader institutional and cognitive shifts, including the rise of science as a dominant epistemology and the increasing use of psychological explanations to pathologize belief. While reformist elites often cast ghost belief as superstition, we also identify agnostic, cautious, and reconciliatory positions. By situating these debates within the broader context of Chinese cultural modernization, the study sheds new light on how supernatural belief became a contested domain and offers fresh tools for studying the cultural evolution of religious cognition.

Language comprehension unfolds incrementally, requiring listeners to continually predict and revise interpretations. Comprehenders across very diverse languages show a consistent preference for agents, anticipating the agent (“the doer” of an action) more strongly than the patient (“the undergoer”). An unresolved question is how the preference develops in children given incomplete utterances and argument omission in their input. Here, we approach this question by quantifying the incremental predictability of semantic roles (agents vs. patients), probing specifically what kind of contextual information impacts ease of learning. We use transcribed utterances from child-directed speech in three languages, differing in critical conditions of word order and argument omission: Tagalog (verb-initial), English (verb-medial), and Turkish (verb-final). To quantify incremental predictability at each position in the sentence, we use a computational model trained on naturalistic child-directed speech, which is first validated against experimental data in each language. Our results show that agents are highly predictable irrespective of sentence position or language, requiring barely any contextual information. In contrast, patient prediction requires additional information, varying by language. These findings suggest that the assignment of agent roles in child-directed speech is an easier task across typologically distinct languages, possibly reflecting the more general preference for agents outside language. Patients, by contrast, appear to be contextually induced roles that develop in ways that are largely shaped by the affordances of each language.

Psycholinguistic theories traditionally assume similar cognitive mechanisms across different speakers. However, more recently, researchers have begun to recognize the need to consider individual differences when explaining human cognition. An increasing number of studies have investigated how individual differences influence human sentence processing. Implicitly, these studies assume that individual-level effects can be replicated across experimental sessions and different assessment methods such as eye-tracking and self-paced reading. However, this assumption is challenged by the Reliability Paradox. Thus, a crucial first step for a principled investigation of individual differences in sentence processing is to establish their measurement reliability, that is, the correlation of individual-level effects across multiple measurement occasions and methods. In this work, we present the first naturalistic eye movement corpus of reading data with four experimental sessions from each participant (two eye-tracking sessions and two self-paced reading sessions). We deploy a two-task Bayesian hierarchical model to assess the measurement reliability of individual differences in a range of psycholinguistic phenomena that are well-established at the population level, namely, effects of word length, lexical frequency, surprisal, dependency length, and number of to-be-integrated dependents. While our results indicate high reliability across measurement occasions for the word length effect, it is only moderate for higher-level psycholinguistic predictors such as lexical frequency, dependency distance, and the number of to-be-integrated dependencies, and even low for surprisal. Moreover, even after accounting for spillover effects, we observe only low to moderate reliability at the individual level across methods (eye-tracking and self-paced reading) for most predictors, and poor reliability for predictors of syntactic integration. These findings underscore the importance of establishing measurement reliability before drawing inferences about individual differences in sentence processing.

This series of studies investigated the interplay between the Sense of Control, continuous action control, and eye-movement behavior in dynamic and uncertain environments. Across three experiments, we used a custom-designed environment combined with eye-tracking to examine how action goal pursuit and visual strategies were adapted to deal with motor perturbations of varying predictability. Participants steered a spaceship, avoiding walls and obstacles while contending with random input noise and predictable horizontal drift. We found that changes in fixation distances to a reference point, the spaceship, indicated the type of action control employed. Input noise was associated with decreasing distances in fixations already close to the spaceship, addressing immediate demands for maintaining the spaceship's trajectory. In contrast, fixations allocated within the outer vicinity of the spaceship featured even longer distances in response to drift, suggesting visual exploration and proactive planning. That is, reactive strategies of action control were characterized by immediate responses to unpredictable disturbances, whereas proactive strategies reflected anticipatory adjustments to predictable changes. Furthermore, judgments about the own Sense of Control were closely tied to participants' ability to anticipate and adapt to environmental features. Invisible perturbations led to control loss and reduced task performance, but predictable perturbations allowed participants to maintain a high Sense of Control and still successfully solve the task. These results highlight how cognitive processes and sensorimotor control interact to navigate uncertain environments by flexibly balancing reactive and proactive strategies of action control.

Plants sense and respond to information present in their surrounding environment. Recent work has sought to characterize the limits of these information processing abilities. Here, we present evidence that the movements of Mimosa pudica plants are mediated by the number of illumination events to which they have been exposed. The plants were repeatedly presented with 2 days in which light was provided for half of the day, followed by a third day in which light was not provided. The nyctinastic movements of the plants shifted to follow this light–light–dark pattern. During early, dark hours prior to light onset, the plants moved more on days in which light was likely to be provided and less on days in which light was unlikely. This movement tendency was not present during the initial weeks of the study. The plants altered their movement patterns over 15 days in a fashion that is well fit by a logarithmic function. To test whether plant movement was based on temporal factors, rather than event enumeration, we altered the lengths of day–night cycles in the second and third phases of the study. After accommodating their motion to follow a 3 × 24-h light–light–dark cycle, the plants immediately generalized their performance after an abrupt shift to a 3 × 20-h cycle. In Study Phase 3, the day length was randomly varied between 10 and 32 h after every light–light–dark cycle. The plants exhibited key movement patterns when randomly selected day durations were between 12 and 24 h. Although higher levels of variability were apparent, the movement levels of the plants seemed to be modulated by the number of light exposure events. The results provide evidence that plants, and perhaps other non-neuronal tissues, may be capable of processing enumeration-related information, although replication with additional controls is needed.