For billions of bilinguals, many communicative acts involve a choice between languages. Here, we evaluate the theory that bilinguals choose a language to regulate their emotional reactions. We present four experiments demonstrating that language choice could be guided by anticipated emotional impact. Across several languages (Chinese, English, and Spanish), 1083 bilinguals from China, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Spain preferred a foreign language to speak about embarrassing topics, and this preference was associated with expecting fewer serious emotional and interpersonal consequences. Language preference was a function of native-ness rather than its associated culture, as the effect was evident even when languages were crossed (English native/Spanish foreign, Spanish native/English foreign). Foreign language use increases emotional distance, and bilinguals prefer using a foreign language over a native language to avoid feeling the embarrassment of discussing aversive topics. Hence, language choice could be an emotional regulation tool for bilinguals.
{"title":"Embarrassment guides language choice","authors":"Becky K.Y. Lau , Veronica Vazquez-Olivieri , Claire Guang , Boaz Keysar","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106355","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106355","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>For billions of bilinguals, many communicative acts involve a choice between languages. Here, we evaluate the theory that bilinguals choose a language to regulate their emotional reactions. We present four experiments demonstrating that language choice could be guided by anticipated emotional impact. Across several languages (Chinese, English, and Spanish), 1083 bilinguals from China, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Spain preferred a foreign language to speak about embarrassing topics, and this preference was associated with expecting fewer serious emotional and interpersonal consequences. Language preference was a function of native-ness rather than its associated culture, as the effect was evident even when languages were crossed (English native/Spanish foreign, Spanish native/English foreign). Foreign language use increases emotional distance, and bilinguals prefer using a foreign language over a native language to avoid feeling the embarrassment of discussing aversive topics. Hence, language choice could be an emotional regulation tool for bilinguals.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"268 ","pages":"Article 106355"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145514599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-11DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106352
Laurel Perkins, Tim Hunter
Language acquisition involves drawing systematic generalizations from messy data. On one hypothesis, this is facilitated by a domain-general bias for children to “regularize” their input, sharpening the statistical distributions in their input towards more systematic extremes. We introduce a general computational framework for modeling a different explanation: on this view, children expect that their data are a noisy realization of a restrictive underlying grammatical system. We implement a learner that evaluates a choice among composite context-free grammars, in which a restricted set of “core” rules, comprising the particular grammatical processes that the learner is currently trying to acquire, operate alongside a less restricted set of “noise” rules, representing other independent processes that have yet to be learned, and conspire to introduce distortions into the data. Our Noisy Grammar Learner partitions its data into portions that serve as evidence for one of the possible core grammars in its hypothesis space, and portions generated by these noise processes. It does so without knowing in advance how much noise occurs or what its properties are. We compare our learner to a common implementation of the general regularization bias approach, and show that both can account for children’s behavior in a representative artificial language learning experiment. However, we find that only our approach succeeds on two naturalistic case studies in early syntax acquisition: learning the rules governing canonical word-order and case-marking, given natural language data with “noise” from non-canonical sentence types. We show that our learner succeeds because its architecture allows a natural way to express linguistically-motivated expectations about the character of those rules. This suggests that, in certain domains, successful learning from messy data may be enabled by a hypothesis space comprising restrictive grammatical options.
{"title":"Modeling regularization in language acquisition as noise-tolerant grammar selection","authors":"Laurel Perkins, Tim Hunter","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106352","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106352","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Language acquisition involves drawing systematic generalizations from messy data. On one hypothesis, this is facilitated by a domain-general bias for children to “regularize” their input, sharpening the statistical distributions in their input towards more systematic extremes. We introduce a general computational framework for modeling a different explanation: on this view, children expect that their data are a noisy realization of a restrictive underlying grammatical system. We implement a learner that evaluates a choice among composite context-free grammars, in which a restricted set of “core” rules, comprising the particular grammatical processes that the learner is currently trying to acquire, operate alongside a less restricted set of “noise” rules, representing other independent processes that have yet to be learned, and conspire to introduce distortions into the data. Our <em>Noisy Grammar Learner</em> partitions its data into portions that serve as evidence for one of the possible core grammars in its hypothesis space, and portions generated by these noise processes. It does so without knowing in advance how much noise occurs or what its properties are. We compare our learner to a common implementation of the general regularization bias approach, and show that both can account for children’s behavior in a representative artificial language learning experiment. However, we find that only our approach succeeds on two naturalistic case studies in early syntax acquisition: learning the rules governing canonical word-order and case-marking, given natural language data with “noise” from non-canonical sentence types. We show that our learner succeeds because its architecture allows a natural way to express linguistically-motivated expectations about the character of those rules. This suggests that, in certain domains, successful learning from messy data may be enabled by a hypothesis space comprising restrictive grammatical options.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"268 ","pages":"Article 106352"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145479069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-11DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106373
Olaf Borghi , Ben M. Tappin , Kaat Smets , Manos Tsakiris
People often favour information aligned with their ideological motives. Can our tendency for directional motivated reasoning be overcome with cognitive control? It remains contested whether cognitive control processes, such as cognitive reflection and inhibitory control, are linked to a greater tendency to engage in politically motivated reasoning, as proposed by the “motivated reflection” hypothesis, or can help people overcome it, as suggested by cognitive science research. In this pre-registered study (N = 504 UK participants rating n = 4963 news messages), we first provide evidence for motivated reasoning on multiple political and non-political topics. We then investigated the associations of the two cognitive control variables cognitive reflection and inhibitory control with motivated reasoning. We find that associations between cognitive control processes and motivated reasoning are likely small. On political topics specifically, we find that a negative association with cognitive reflection is more likely than a positive association. This finding is contrary to predictions from the popular motivated reflection hypothesis. Results for inhibitory control are inconclusive. We discuss how these findings relate to interdisciplinary literature from cognitive and political psychology.
{"title":"Mind over bias: How is cognitive control related to politically motivated reasoning?","authors":"Olaf Borghi , Ben M. Tappin , Kaat Smets , Manos Tsakiris","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106373","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106373","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>People often favour information aligned with their ideological motives. Can our tendency for directional motivated reasoning be overcome with cognitive control? It remains contested whether cognitive control processes, such as cognitive reflection and inhibitory control, are linked to a greater tendency to engage in politically motivated reasoning, as proposed by the “motivated reflection” hypothesis, or can help people overcome it, as suggested by cognitive science research. In this pre-registered study (<em>N</em> = 504 UK participants rating <em>n</em> = 4963 news messages), we first provide evidence for motivated reasoning on multiple political and non-political topics. We then investigated the associations of the two cognitive control variables cognitive reflection and inhibitory control with motivated reasoning. We find that associations between cognitive control processes and motivated reasoning are likely small. On political topics specifically, we find that a negative association with cognitive reflection is more likely than a positive association. This finding is contrary to predictions from the popular motivated reflection hypothesis. Results for inhibitory control are inconclusive. We discuss how these findings relate to interdisciplinary literature from cognitive and political psychology.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"268 ","pages":"Article 106373"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145479070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-10DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106338
Cole Robertson , Seán G. Roberts , Asifa Majid , Tammy Lu , Philip Wolff , Robin I.M. Dunbar
Speaking a language that obliges the future tense for linguistic Future Time Reference (FTR) may cause speakers to devalue future outcomes. Evidence suggests such grammars make speakers less “future-oriented”: less likely, for example, to invest, eat healthily, or support costly climate change mitigation efforts. This has been explained using the notion that the future tense (e.g., will) encodes temporal notions of distance and/or precision; its obligatory use is therefore hypothesized to cause speakers to perceive delayed outcomes as less valuable. We argue that this causal account is not supported by extant evidence. Rather, we hypothesize the obligation to use low-certainty modal verbs (e.g., may) causes speakers to construe delayed outcomes as risky and therefore less valuable. We tested this in speakers of Dutch (which does not oblige FTR marking) and English (which does). English speakers used more low-certainty modal verbs, which in turn caused them to place a relatively lower value on future outcomes; at the same time, future tense had no effect, in terms of either distance or precision, on reward value construals (Study 1). When bilinguals were tested in English and Dutch, increased relative use of low-certainty modals again caused English speakers to devalue future outcomes, addressing possible cultural confounds (Study 2). English and Dutch speakers were tested on a non-linguistic probability estimation task; higher modal verb use in English caused lower probability estimates relative to Dutch speakers on matched visual stimuli—supporting the modal account that the obligation to use low-certainty language impacts judgments about probability (Study 3). Relative to matched US nationals, corporate executives from countries which speak languages that, like Dutch, do not oblige future statements to be grammatically marked, used fewer low-certainty modal verbs and more present tense FTR statements, while there was no difference in future tense use (Study 4)—broadly supporting the modal account by suggesting the modal differences characteristic of English and Dutch are widespread. Together, these results indicate that, relative to Dutch, English FTR requires speakers to use more low-certainty modals, and that this negatively biases construals of probability, which in turn leads to increased discounting (Studies 1–3), and that this cross-linguistic contrast may be general (Study 4). The studies provide evidence for linguistic relativity by identifying cross-linguistic effects of FTR grammar on discounting via low-certainty modals. However, the hypothesis that obligatory tenses impacted discounting via temporal notions was not supported, suggesting numerous reported results should be re-evaluated using the causal framework we propose.
{"title":"Low-certainty modals not future tenses cause increased psychological discounting in English relative to Dutch","authors":"Cole Robertson , Seán G. Roberts , Asifa Majid , Tammy Lu , Philip Wolff , Robin I.M. Dunbar","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106338","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106338","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Speaking a language that obliges the future tense for linguistic Future Time Reference (FTR) may cause speakers to devalue future outcomes. Evidence suggests such grammars make speakers less “future-oriented”: less likely, for example, to invest, eat healthily, or support costly climate change mitigation efforts. This has been explained using the notion that the future tense (e.g., <em>will</em>) encodes temporal notions of distance and/or precision; its obligatory use is therefore hypothesized to cause speakers to perceive delayed outcomes as less valuable. We argue that this causal account is not supported by extant evidence. Rather, we hypothesize the obligation to use low-certainty modal verbs (e.g., <em>may</em>) causes speakers to construe delayed outcomes as risky and therefore less valuable. We tested this in speakers of Dutch (which does not oblige FTR marking) and English (which does). English speakers used more low-certainty modal verbs, which in turn caused them to place a relatively lower value on future outcomes; at the same time, future tense had no effect, in terms of either distance or precision, on reward value construals (Study 1). When bilinguals were tested in English and Dutch, increased relative use of low-certainty modals again caused English speakers to devalue future outcomes, addressing possible cultural confounds (Study 2). English and Dutch speakers were tested on a non-linguistic probability estimation task; higher modal verb use in English caused lower probability estimates relative to Dutch speakers on matched visual stimuli—supporting the modal account that the obligation to use low-certainty language impacts judgments about probability (Study 3). Relative to matched US nationals, corporate executives from countries which speak languages that, like Dutch, do not oblige future statements to be grammatically marked, used fewer low-certainty modal verbs and more present tense FTR statements, while there was no difference in future tense use (Study 4)—broadly supporting the modal account by suggesting the modal differences characteristic of English and Dutch are widespread. Together, these results indicate that, relative to Dutch, English FTR requires speakers to use more low-certainty modals, and that this negatively biases construals of probability, which in turn leads to increased discounting (Studies 1–3), and that this cross-linguistic contrast may be general (Study 4). The studies provide evidence for linguistic relativity by identifying cross-linguistic effects of FTR grammar on discounting via low-certainty modals. However, the hypothesis that obligatory tenses impacted discounting via temporal notions was not supported, suggesting numerous reported results should be re-evaluated using the causal framework we propose.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"267 ","pages":"Article 106338"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145497203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-10DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106370
Sara Bögels , Tianyi Li , Marlou Rasenberg , Lotte Eijk , Ivan Toni , Wim Pouw
A drive towards efficiency seems to regulate communicative processes and ultimately language change. In line with efficiency principles, signed, spoken, and/or gestural utterances tend to reduce in overall effort over repeated referrals in referential tasks. Although theories generally assume multimodality and interaction, this process has mostly been operationalized as individual effort in a single communicative modality. Here we seek to understand reduction of communicative effort in its natural environment, i.e. during multimodal and collaborative face-to-face dialogues about displaced referents. We ascertain that the reduction in joint effort (y) over repeated referrals (x) follows a negative power relationship, y = a*x^c, where a and c are constants. This reduction in communicative effort is multimodal, occurring across gesture, speech, prosody, and turn taking, and it is interactive, based on joint effort. The pattern is robust, being confirmed through reanalyses of published datasets about (individual) effort reduction. Crucially, the pattern is communicatively relevant. The coefficient of the power relationship predicts change and convergence in interlocutors' conceptualizations of the communicative referents over the interaction. The negative power relationship reflects therefore how effort translates into mutual understanding - a process we call communicative work. We suggest that the power function captures an exploration-exploitation trade-off during human dialogue which emerges from multiscale processes. Joint conceptualization of novel referents benefits from early conceptual exploration followed by later exploitation of selected signals. The current report proposes a novel ‘power law of joint communicative work’ that is relevant for linguistic theory, agent-based modeling, and experimental psychology.
{"title":"There is a power law of joint communicative effort and it reflects communicative work","authors":"Sara Bögels , Tianyi Li , Marlou Rasenberg , Lotte Eijk , Ivan Toni , Wim Pouw","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106370","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106370","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A drive towards efficiency seems to regulate communicative processes and ultimately language change. In line with efficiency principles, signed, spoken, and/or gestural utterances tend to reduce in overall effort over repeated referrals in referential tasks. Although theories generally assume multimodality and interaction, this process has mostly been operationalized as individual effort in a single communicative modality. Here we seek to understand reduction of communicative effort in its natural environment, i.e. during multimodal and collaborative face-to-face dialogues about displaced referents. We ascertain that the reduction in joint effort (y) over repeated referrals (x) follows a negative power relationship, y = a*x^c, where a and c are constants. This reduction in communicative effort is multimodal, occurring across gesture, speech, prosody, and turn taking, and it is interactive, based on joint effort. The pattern is robust, being confirmed through reanalyses of published datasets about (individual) effort reduction. Crucially, the pattern is communicatively relevant. The coefficient of the power relationship predicts change and convergence in interlocutors' conceptualizations of the communicative referents over the interaction. The negative power relationship reflects therefore how effort translates into mutual understanding - a process we call communicative <em>work</em>. We suggest that the power function captures an exploration-exploitation trade-off during human dialogue which emerges from multiscale processes. Joint conceptualization of novel referents benefits from early conceptual exploration followed by later exploitation of selected signals. The current report proposes a novel ‘power law of joint communicative work’ that is relevant for linguistic theory, agent-based modeling, and experimental psychology.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"268 ","pages":"Article 106370"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145479068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-08DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106371
Mélissa Vandenbol , Marie Geurten
The directive function of episodic memory – using past experiences to guide current behavior – plays a crucial role in human decision-making. Research suggests that children who recall a past good deed are more likely to act prosocially. However, the emergence of this relation remains unexplored in early preschool years. To address this question, 134 French-speaking preschoolers (24–47 months) were recruited and assigned to either a “good deed” condition, in which they actively helped a female accomplice hide a birthday gift, or a “neutral” condition, in which they were asked to watch the accomplice hide the gift. One week later, after their memory of the previously experienced event was assessed, they were put in a situation requiring them to provide help (i.e., the experimenter dropped some cards and had to pick them up). Their prosocial response was recorded. Generalized Linear Analyses revealed that, in the good deed condition, children with more detailed memories were more likely to help the experimenter. This effect was not found in the neutral condition. Interestingly, children also appeared to be less likely and slower to provide help as they grew older, suggesting a developmental shift in their memory-based decisions: younger children rely on fast, automatic decisional processes while older children engage in a slower, more deliberate decisional balance.
{"title":"Remembering before acting: The role of episodic memory in future prosocial behavior in preschoolers","authors":"Mélissa Vandenbol , Marie Geurten","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106371","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106371","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The directive function of episodic memory – using past experiences to guide current behavior – plays a crucial role in human decision-making. Research suggests that children who recall a past good deed are more likely to act prosocially. However, the emergence of this relation remains unexplored in early preschool years. To address this question, 134 French-speaking preschoolers (24–47 months) were recruited and assigned to either a “good deed” condition, in which they actively helped a female accomplice hide a birthday gift, or a “neutral” condition, in which they were asked to watch the accomplice hide the gift. One week later, after their memory of the previously experienced event was assessed, they were put in a situation requiring them to provide help (i.e., the experimenter dropped some cards and had to pick them up). Their prosocial response was recorded. Generalized Linear Analyses revealed that, in the good deed condition, children with more detailed memories were more likely to help the experimenter. This effect was not found in the neutral condition. Interestingly, children also appeared to be less likely and slower to provide help as they grew older, suggesting a developmental shift in their memory-based decisions: younger children rely on fast, automatic decisional processes while older children engage in a slower, more deliberate decisional balance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"267 ","pages":"Article 106371"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145467182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-07DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106372
Aislinn Keogh , Jennifer Culbertson , Simon Kirby
Cross-linguistically, lexicons tend to be more phonetically clustered than required by the phonotactics of the language; that is, words within a language are more similar to each other than they need to be. In this study, we investigate how this property evolves under the influence of competing communicative pressures: a production-side pressure to re-use more easily articulated sounds, and a comprehension-side pressure for distinctiveness of wordforms. In an exemplar-based computational model and a communication experiment using a miniature artificial language, we show that natural-language-like levels of clustering emerge from a trade-off between these pressures. With only one pressure at work, the resulting lexicons tend to inhabit an extreme region of the possible design space: production pressures alone give rise to maximally clustered lexicons, while comprehension pressures alone give rise to maximally disperse lexicons. We also test whether clustering emerges more strongly for high-frequency items, but our results lend support only to a weak relationship between frequency and clustering. Overall, this study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that mechanisms operating at the level of individual language users and individual episodes of communication can give rise to emergent structural properties of language.
{"title":"The lexicon adapts to competing communicative pressures: Explaining patterns of word similarity","authors":"Aislinn Keogh , Jennifer Culbertson , Simon Kirby","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106372","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106372","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cross-linguistically, lexicons tend to be more phonetically clustered than required by the phonotactics of the language; that is, words within a language are more similar to each other than they need to be. In this study, we investigate how this property evolves under the influence of competing communicative pressures: a production-side pressure to re-use more easily articulated sounds, and a comprehension-side pressure for distinctiveness of wordforms. In an exemplar-based computational model and a communication experiment using a miniature artificial language, we show that natural-language-like levels of clustering emerge from a trade-off between these pressures. With only one pressure at work, the resulting lexicons tend to inhabit an extreme region of the possible design space: production pressures alone give rise to maximally clustered lexicons, while comprehension pressures alone give rise to maximally disperse lexicons. We also test whether clustering emerges more strongly for high-frequency items, but our results lend support only to a weak relationship between frequency and clustering. Overall, this study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that mechanisms operating at the level of individual language users and individual episodes of communication can give rise to emergent structural properties of language.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"267 ","pages":"Article 106372"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145467183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-04DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106367
Thea R. Zalabak, Laura A. Bustamante, Wouter Kool
In order to maximize reward, humans need to balance engaging with currently available sources of reward and searching for better ones. Optimal foraging theory provides a formal but simple mathematical choice rule to make such stay/leave decisions, contrasting expected and experienced rewards. However, this rule (given by the Marginal Value Theorem; MVT) describes a strategy that does not consider the structure of the environment. In other words, it does not leave room for planning during foraging. Yet, the real world is replete with such opportunities. Therefore, we developed a new structured foraging task to study how people employ goal-directed planning during foraging. Specifically, we explore the extent to which participants incorporate an internal model of the task structure during stay/leave decisions. We find that behavior in this task follows the basic principles of the MVT, but that its structure invites people to also consider the value of alternative reward options when deciding to leave their current one. Importantly, this behavior is pronounced in more goal-directed participants. Computational modeling suggests that incorporating this alternative information is beneficial, but to an extent dictated by choice stochasticity. This study provides a novel method for studying decision making in structured environments, and has implications for understanding how foraging and planning interact.
{"title":"Model-based planning in structured foraging environments","authors":"Thea R. Zalabak, Laura A. Bustamante, Wouter Kool","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106367","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106367","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In order to maximize reward, humans need to balance engaging with currently available sources of reward and searching for better ones. Optimal foraging theory provides a formal but simple mathematical choice rule to make such stay/leave decisions, contrasting expected and experienced rewards. However, this rule (given by the Marginal Value Theorem; MVT) describes a strategy that does not consider the structure of the environment. In other words, it does not leave room for planning during foraging. Yet, the real world is replete with such opportunities. Therefore, we developed a new structured foraging task to study how people employ goal-directed planning during foraging. Specifically, we explore the extent to which participants incorporate an internal model of the task structure during stay/leave decisions. We find that behavior in this task follows the basic principles of the MVT, but that its structure invites people to also consider the value of alternative reward options when deciding to leave their current one. Importantly, this behavior is pronounced in more goal-directed participants. Computational modeling suggests that incorporating this alternative information is beneficial, but to an extent dictated by choice stochasticity. This study provides a novel method for studying decision making in structured environments, and has implications for understanding how foraging and planning interact.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"267 ","pages":"Article 106367"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145453644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-04DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106358
Sameer Sabharwal-Siddiqi , Andrew S. McAvan , Eva M. Robinson , Michael Starrett , Joshua D. Garren , Jingyi Zheng , Matthew D. Grilli , Eve A. Isham , Arne D. Ekstrom
It remains unclear how episodic memories, our memories for past events, are generated from the rich sensory details encompassing everyday experience. Here, 40 healthy young participants navigated in a large-scale virtual environment under two conditions: an immersive-ambulatory condition, in which participants walked on a treadmill with full-body motion and head turns, or a restricted-movement condition, in which participants used a hand-held joystick to control gaze and position in virtual-reality while standing still. Participants then freely recalled their experience navigating in the virtual town. Analysis of verbal narratives revealed a double dissociation such that ambulation resulted in more detailed episodic elaborations, particularly those grounded in a first-person perspective, whereas restricted movement promoted more generalized spatial elaborations, particularly those not anchored to participants' point of view. These findings suggest that bodily cues contribute to the construction of episodic memory, while their absence may redirect attention toward external features of the environment. Participants also judged the relative direction of landmarks (space) and reproduced the amount of time they had spent navigating (time); however, objective indicators of spatiotemporal memory did not vary based on condition and, with one exception, did not correlate with subjective measures of memory quality. Together, these results suggest that the construction of vivid episodes is not necessarily tied to the precision of spatial and temporal encoding.
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Pub Date : 2025-11-03DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106360
Shiri Lev-Ari
There is robust evidence that people associate certain sounds with meanings, yet the prevalence and importance of sound symbolism in natural language remains debated. This paper proposes that some failures to detect sound symbolic patterns stem from mischaracterizing how sound symbolism operates. Many studies examine whether words with similar meanings have similar sounds. Yet if words shared sounds with lexical competitors, sound symbolism could hinder processing and not persist. Instead, this paper proposes that sound symbolism highlights features that distinguish referents from their competitors. To test this, the study revisits size sound symbolism in English. Front vowels are associated with small size and back vowels with large size. It has also been suggested that voiceless stops are associated with small size whereas voiced stops with large size. Prior studies found that size adjectives in English are sound symbolic, but the general vocabulary is not. This paper instead analyzes words whose definitions suggest relative size in context—e.g., classifying terrella (“a little Earth”) as small, despite its absolute size. Words were extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary if their definitions included a size adjective (e.g., small, large), and retained if language models judged them as referring to objects relatively small or large in context. Results show that words for relatively small referents contain more front over back vowels and more voiceless over voiced stops than words for relatively large referents. These findings suggest that sound symbolism highlights referents' distinctiveness, and that prior conceptual and methodological approaches might have obscured sound symbolic patterns and benefits. This reframing has implications for language evolution, acquisition, and processing, and suggests new directions for future research on iconicity in language.
{"title":"Sound symbolism highlights relative distinctiveness: Evidence from English vocabulary","authors":"Shiri Lev-Ari","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106360","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106360","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>There is robust evidence that people associate certain sounds with meanings, yet the prevalence and importance of sound symbolism in natural language remains debated. This paper proposes that some failures to detect sound symbolic patterns stem from mischaracterizing how sound symbolism operates. Many studies examine whether words with similar meanings have similar sounds. Yet if words shared sounds with lexical competitors, sound symbolism could hinder processing and not persist. Instead, this paper proposes that sound symbolism highlights features that distinguish referents from their competitors. To test this, the study revisits size sound symbolism in English. Front vowels are associated with small size and back vowels with large size. It has also been suggested that voiceless stops are associated with small size whereas voiced stops with large size. Prior studies found that size adjectives in English are sound symbolic, but the general vocabulary is not. This paper instead analyzes words whose definitions suggest relative size in context—e.g., classifying <em>terrella</em> (“a little Earth”) as small, despite its absolute size. Words were extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary if their definitions included a size adjective (e.g., small, large), and retained if language models judged them as referring to objects relatively small or large in context. Results show that words for relatively small referents contain more front over back vowels and more voiceless over voiced stops than words for relatively large referents. These findings suggest that sound symbolism highlights referents' distinctiveness, and that prior conceptual and methodological approaches might have obscured sound symbolic patterns and benefits. This reframing has implications for language evolution, acquisition, and processing, and suggests new directions for future research on iconicity in language.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"267 ","pages":"Article 106360"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145446315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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