Cognitive Science最新文献

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.

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.