Cognitive Science最新文献

Language is passed across generations through cultural transmission. Prior experimental work, where participants reproduced sets of non-linguistic sequences in transmission chains, shows that this process gives rise to two characteristic statistical properties of language that enhance its learnability: the statistical coherence of words and the Zipfian distribution of word frequencies. In this study, we extend this work in three ways. First, we replicate and strengthen previous findings using a browser-based experimental procedure with a smaller dataset, demonstrating the robustness of these findings and creating a methodological platform for future research. Second, we show that learners are sensitive to the sequence information that emerges through cultural transmission by showing that reaction times are faster for higher transitional probabilities. These findings suggest that the learning of fine-grained sequence information drives the emergence of statistically coherent units with a Zipfian frequency distribution. Third, we ask whether another cross-linguistic property of language, Zipf's law of Abbreviation, emerges over cultural transmission. We find that the law is present in the sets produced by participants but that it does not evolve over transmission. We discuss how these findings support the proposal that production pressures alone may be sufficient to explain the consistently weak frequency–length correlation observed in natural language.

It is assumed that in order to acquire a language, children must be exposed to a language during the critical period, which generally lasts until puberty. Here, we report on Cena, an emergent sign language that has developed among a small group of deaf people in an isolated town in the state of Piauí, Brazil. Starting three generations ago, it has developed into a fully functioning communicative system with all characteristics of a typical human language even though Cena developed in a linguistic vacuum. What makes Cena interesting is that we are reasonably certain that Cena had no external input from the national sign language, Libras, or any other language during its formation. Cena challenges the assumption that to acquire the first language, the child must be exposed to a fully developed language. It developed from homesigns to an emergent sign language that is used for all aspects of village life. Cena also lends credence to the interactional model of language acquisition, which considers the interactions between the child and the caregivers to be the crucial element. The nativist model of language acquisition, which assumes a universal system underlying language, also plays a part. Through interaction, what arose is a system with characteristics essential to all human language.

Petitionary prayers—requests made to a deity for specific outcomes—are widely practiced across religious traditions. While their efficacy remains a subject of theological debate, they exhibit remarkable resilience to disconfirmation. In three pre-registered studies—a field study in China and two global surveys via Prolific—we examined how religious believers (Christians, Muslims, local deity worshippers, and Hindus) update beliefs and behaviors in response to prayer successes or failures for both hypothetical co-religionists and themselves. Results indicate that belief updates generally follow a Bayesian pattern, with increases after prayer successes and decreases after failures, though with an asymmetry favoring belief reinforcement. Notably, participants from the Prolific sample exhibit sensitivity to the prior probability of prayed-for events, attributing greater belief increases to improbable outcomes. Muslims predict belief increases even after failed prayers, consistent with doctrines framing hardships as divine tests. Across traditions, believers estimate continued prayer regardless of past outcomes, with monotheists displaying stronger resilience. These findings illuminate the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that buffer religious beliefs against counter-evidence, contributing to debates on the evidential vulnerability of religious credence and its parallels with epistemically self-sealing belief systems.

Both deafness and sign language experience impact the distribution of visual attention, and either factor could affect reading span size, the area around fixation from which useful information is obtained. In contrast to the typical asymmetrical span (smaller on the left), deaf signers have a larger leftward span than skill-matched hearing readers. We investigated whether this enhanced span is due to changes in visual attention associated with early deafness or sign language experience (right-handed signs fall in the left periphery). A gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm was used to assess the leftward reading span of hearing early signers, deaf early signers, and hearing nonsigners with similar reading abilities. The size of the leftward span for deaf and hearing signers was the same (10 characters) and was larger than that of hearing nonsigners (4 characters). Thus, sign language experience appears to be at least one source of the larger leftward span in deaf signers. However, deaf signers were more efficient readers than both hearing groups (faster reading rate, more skipped words, fewer regressions), suggesting that their greater reading efficiency does not stem solely from a larger leftward span.

Spatial representation and reasoning are important in cognition, yet they are challenging for children. Research has shown that comparison can support learning about common spatial structure and that using common labels can facilitate this process. Here, we show that a comparable pattern holds for learning about differences. That is, contrastive labels can promote comparison-based learning of key spatial differences. In two experiments, 5- to 7-year-old children were asked to learn a key engineering principle—namely, that diagonal braces confer stability in building structures. Two factors were varied between subjects: the alignability of the training exemplars, and whether a contrastive label was used. Learning was assessed through a variety of transfer tasks, both immediately and after a delay of 2−5 days. The results showed that children in the high-alignment condition performed better than those in the low-alignment condition, replicating previous findings. Further, children who received the contrasting brace label performed better than those who did not. This suggests that hearing contrastive language can invite structural alignment and reveal differences that inform children's learning. We discuss broader implications for cognition and education.

The relationship between spatial and temporal processing remains a topic of ongoing debate. While several theories propose an asymmetrical influence of space on time, others suggest a bidirectional relationship with shared cognitive resources. This study introduces a novel paradigm that compares a single-task baseline with a distracting “dual-task” condition to deconstruct the nature of this interplay. Participants reproduced either the duration or the spatial configuration of visual sequences in which one (single task) or two dimensions (distracting dual task) were presented. Results revealed a significant general processing cost, with performance worsening for both time and space judgments when the other dimension was present. More interestingly, results also revealed content-dependent interference between the two dimensions, with the magnitude of the irrelevant dimension systematically modulating judgments of the target dimension. The evidence for bidirectional, content-dependent interference challenges the notion of a purely asymmetrical relationship. Overall, by dissociating general processing costs from specific interference, we provide a more nuanced model of the highly interconnected, bidirectional relationship between space and time.

Citizens in countries around the world dramatically overestimate the size of minority demographic groups and underestimate the size of majority groups. Media outlets and researchers have concluded that this pattern of errors is a result of characteristics of individual and societal distortions, such as the level of threat the group is imagined to pose and the amount of exposure someone has with the group. More recent work suggests that this error is a direct consequence of the psychological transformation of estimates under uncertainty. However, no work to date has provided an explanation for how distortion and uncertainty might jointly interact to produce people's estimates. The goal of the current paper is to reconcile distortion and uncertainty-based accounts by providing a model that applies Bayesian inference to incorrect source information (presumed to result from external misinformation, or societal or individual distortions). We then apply that model to a broad set of international survey data and explore the cross-national structure of misestimation in expressed beliefs across a wide variety of topics. The results suggest that people are overall less and differently impacted by distortions than previous research has found, and that these distortions are often widely shared across quite distinct countries and groups.

Previous studies show that people believe that a name belongs to a person if the person's face shape (FS) matches the lip shape formed when pronouncing the name. This represents a cross-modal mapping effect between name pronunciation (NP) and FS. Considering that approximately 84.55% of Chinese people have a two-character name, the present study specifically investigates which character of double-character Chinese names plays a more critical role in the mapping relationship with the FS. We conducted four experiments that used disyllabic names with pronunciations involving contrasting lip shapes. The interval between the pronunciation of the name's first and final characters was set at either 0 or 1000 ms. Two presentation orders were used: presenting the name before the face image and the face image before the name. We found that the NP–FS mapping persists when the lip shapes of the initial and final syllables of a name differ, while the final syllable determinetavs the mapping. This underscores the significant role of the final syllable in driving NP–FS mapping, which supports the hypothesis that names must be completely encoded for recognition before being integrated with facial perception.

Verbal fluency tasks reveal clustering and switching patterns traditionally explained by strategic search or stochastic processes like Lévy or random walks. However, previous comparisons ignored how search processes interact with semantic structure, leaving unclear whether model performance reflects strategic mechanisms or fortuitous alignment with semantic organization. This study developed and validated a novel Area Restricted Search (ARS) agent-based model of semantic memory retrieval, then systematically compared it against Lévy Walk (LW) and Random Walk (RW) models to investigate when different search mechanisms succeed under varying structural conditions. The model implements incremental decision-making based on local information, without predetermined switching points or complete semantic space access. Semantic structure parameters were treated as free variables during optimization, allowing examination of process–structure interactions across diverse configurations. Performance was evaluated against 50 participants across three semantic categories using clustering, switching, and temporal variables. Two simulations examined model fit and adaptability to varying semantic structures. Different mechanisms require distinct semantic configurations: ARS performed well in moderate clustering, LW in sparse arrangements, and RW under dense clustering, but RW generated response distributions different from participants. However, when semantic density was constrained while varying cluster dispersion, ARS maintained human-like performance across multiple configurations, while LW showed limited flexibility, and RW consistently failed to get close to participants' response distributions. These findings show that human-like semantic memory retrieval across diverse contexts requires strategic mechanisms capable of dynamic adaptation to varying semantic organizations, rather than universal superiority of any single approach or of models based on context-independent stochastic processes.

When we investigate busy visual scenes, how do we estimate the number of objects that we see? Most work on number perception answers this question by focusing on properties of the to-be-estimated set of objects—their number, their size, their relative position, and so on. Here, in contrast, we show that perceived number is influenced by extraneous visual information. In six experiments, participants were shown “crowds” of dots that filled “seats” in a visual grid, asking whether the perceived number is influenced not only by the number of occupied seats, but also the number of unoccupied seats. When only about 15%–30% of the “seats” were filled, people perceived fewer dots (compared to displays without any grid). We further demonstrated that this illusion depends on the proportion of occupied seats. When most “seats” were filled, the illusion reversed: People perceived the grid displays as having more dots. This effect is continuous, switching directions at around the 50% occupancy mark. Moreover, this “crowd size illusion” is phenomenologically robust: It is evident in simple visual displays, even when the observer is aware they are being tricked. We discuss these findings in light of the recent hypothesis that the number system represents number in a part–whole format.