Pub Date : 2026-01-16DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106445
Margaret Kandel , Nan Li , Jesse Snedeker
Interactive processing is a central feature of human cognition, whereby top-down and bottom-up pathways pass information between different levels of representation. In this study, we investigated how these interactive mechanisms develop by asking whether interactive processing arises early in life or emerges later, with experience or as the brain matures. In a visual world eye-tracking study, we tested whether four and five year-old children show evidence of top-down interactivity during language comprehension. We found that young children, like adults, can use top-down cues from the sentence context to constrain processing of the bottom-up language input during spoken word recognition, allowing them to avoid activating word candidates that initially match the input but are semantically incongruent with the context. Furthermore, we found that the children used top-down cues to pre-activate the phonological representations of predictable words before they appeared in the input. These findings illustrate that the pathways necessary for interactive processing are robust and active by early childhood, suggesting that the mechanisms of interactive processing are intrinsic and fundamental properties of the mind's architecture.
{"title":"Evidence for top-down constraints and form-based prediction in 4–5 year-olds' lexical processing","authors":"Margaret Kandel , Nan Li , Jesse Snedeker","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106445","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106445","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Interactive processing is a central feature of human cognition, whereby top-down and bottom-up pathways pass information between different levels of representation. In this study, we investigated how these interactive mechanisms develop by asking whether interactive processing arises early in life or emerges later, with experience or as the brain matures. In a visual world eye-tracking study, we tested whether four and five year-old children show evidence of top-down interactivity during language comprehension. We found that young children, like adults, can use top-down cues from the sentence context to constrain processing of the bottom-up language input during spoken word recognition, allowing them to avoid activating word candidates that initially match the input but are semantically incongruent with the context. Furthermore, we found that the children used top-down cues to pre-activate the phonological representations of predictable words before they appeared in the input. These findings illustrate that the pathways necessary for interactive processing are robust and active by early childhood, suggesting that the mechanisms of interactive processing are intrinsic and fundamental properties of the mind's architecture.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"271 ","pages":"Article 106445"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145979899","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 : 2026-01-14DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106444
Savithry Namboodiripad , Ethan Kutlu , Anna Babel , Molly Babel , Melissa Baese-Berk , Paras B. Bassuk , Adeli Block , Reinaldo Cabrera Pérez , Matthew T. Carlson , Sita Carraturo , Andrew Cheng , Lauretta S.P. Cheng , Philip Combiths , Ruthe Foushee , Anne Therese Frederiksen , Devin Grammon , Rachel Hayes-Harb , Eve Higby , Kelly Kendro , Elena Koulidobrova , Kelly Elizabeth Wright
Essentialist categorizations of language users, such as native speaker, are widely used but lack empirical validity and reinforce social inequities. This article focuses on the nativeness construct, critically examining how its centrality in social-scientific research distorts scholarly inquiry, introduces bias in educational and clinical assessments, and perpetuates exclusion in academia. We argue that such labels impose artificial homogeneity, devalue linguistic diversity, and contribute to systemic biases in society. By reifying social divisions, essentialist categorizations can exclude marginalized groups, perpetuate linguistic discrimination, and hinder scientific progress. We advocate for a shift away from essentialist proxies and toward more contextually grounded and empirically driven characterizations of language use. A reflexive and interdisciplinary approach is necessary to dismantle these harmful frameworks and promote more accurate, inclusive, and equitable research. Our argument is relevant not just to the cognitive sciences, but to any scholarship which involves describing or understanding language. Ultimately, rejecting essentialist assumptions will lead to more nuanced understandings of language, identity, and social belonging, fostering both scientific and societal transformation by promoting justice and accuracy across social-scientific disciplines.
{"title":"Finding our ROLE: How and why to reframe essentialist approaches to language","authors":"Savithry Namboodiripad , Ethan Kutlu , Anna Babel , Molly Babel , Melissa Baese-Berk , Paras B. Bassuk , Adeli Block , Reinaldo Cabrera Pérez , Matthew T. Carlson , Sita Carraturo , Andrew Cheng , Lauretta S.P. Cheng , Philip Combiths , Ruthe Foushee , Anne Therese Frederiksen , Devin Grammon , Rachel Hayes-Harb , Eve Higby , Kelly Kendro , Elena Koulidobrova , Kelly Elizabeth Wright","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106444","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106444","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Essentialist categorizations of language users, such as <span>native speaker</span>, are widely used but lack empirical validity and reinforce social inequities. This article focuses on the <span>nativeness</span> construct, critically examining how its centrality in social-scientific research distorts scholarly inquiry, introduces bias in educational and clinical assessments, and perpetuates exclusion in academia. We argue that such labels impose artificial homogeneity, devalue linguistic diversity, and contribute to systemic biases in society. By reifying social divisions, essentialist categorizations can exclude marginalized groups, perpetuate linguistic discrimination, and hinder scientific progress. We advocate for a shift away from essentialist proxies and toward more contextually grounded and empirically driven characterizations of language use. A reflexive and interdisciplinary approach is necessary to dismantle these harmful frameworks and promote more accurate, inclusive, and equitable research. Our argument is relevant not just to the cognitive sciences, but to any scholarship which involves describing or understanding language. Ultimately, rejecting essentialist assumptions will lead to more nuanced understandings of language, identity, and social belonging, fostering both scientific and societal transformation by promoting justice and accuracy across social-scientific disciplines.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"271 ","pages":"Article 106444"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145979902","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 : 2026-01-14DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106438
Christian Agrillo, Alessandra Pecunioso
Exploring cognitive fallacies is a key pursuit for neuroscientists as they offer a unique window into the foundations of how we think and make decisions. The Monty Hall dilemma (MHD) is a probability puzzle in which a person is offered a choice among three doors, behind one of which is a prize. After the person selects one door, the remaining door without the prize is revealed. The person is now given the option to either keep their original choice or switch to the other door. Most people stick with the initial choice, even though switching would offer a higher chance of winning. Here, we observed that a distantly related species, such as fish, shows a human-like behavior in the MHD, as they consistently maintained their first option. Our study suggests that the mechanisms behind misjudging two-stage decision-making involving conditioned probabilities may also be shared by smaller, non-cortical brains.
{"title":"A cognitive fallacy in a fish? Glass catfish, like humans, make sub-optimal choices in the Monty Hall dilemma","authors":"Christian Agrillo, Alessandra Pecunioso","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106438","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106438","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Exploring cognitive fallacies is a key pursuit for neuroscientists as they offer a unique window into the foundations of how we think and make decisions. The Monty Hall dilemma (MHD) is a probability puzzle in which a person is offered a choice among three doors, behind one of which is a prize. After the person selects one door, the remaining door without the prize is revealed. The person is now given the option to either keep their original choice or switch to the other door. Most people stick with the initial choice, even though switching would offer a higher chance of winning. Here, we observed that a distantly related species, such as fish, shows a human-like behavior in the MHD, as they consistently maintained their first option. Our study suggests that the mechanisms behind misjudging two-stage decision-making involving conditioned probabilities may also be shared by smaller, non-cortical brains.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"271 ","pages":"Article 106438"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145979901","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 : 2026-01-14DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106413
Franziska Friemel , Tim Rohe
The causal inference problem in multisensory perception poses a fundamental challenge to our brains in a multisensory environment: how to decide whether sensory stimuli originate from a common source and should be integrated, or from distinct sources and should be segregated. The brain addresses this problem by inferring causal structure from the spatiotemporal disparity of multisensory stimuli. However, it remains unclear whether the brain handles causal inference implicitly, or whether it requires effortful and explicit cognitive processing. This study investigated how human observers (N = 47) implicitly infer causal structure when judging the auditory distance of two sequential audiovisual stimuli. In this distance task, we combined representational similarity analysis and multidimensional scaling to retrieve participants' auditory spatial representations. We then compared visual biases on auditory representations (i.e., the ventriloquist effect) to visual biases in three classical auditory localisation and causal judgment tasks. We found that visual biases in the distance task were less influenced by the spatial disparity of the audiovisual stimuli compared to the classical tasks. This pattern was best fitted by a computational stochastic-fusion model. Only in the joint localisation and causal task, small spatial disparity increased the visual bias as predicted by a computational Bayesian causal inference model. Our results suggest that causal inference requires explicit cognitive processing that observers only apply if the causal structure of stimuli is directly relevant to the task. Otherwise, the brain relies on simpler automatic decision strategies such as stochastic fusion.
{"title":"Implicit causal inference in audiovisual spatial representations","authors":"Franziska Friemel , Tim Rohe","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106413","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106413","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The causal inference problem in multisensory perception poses a fundamental challenge to our brains in a multisensory environment: how to decide whether sensory stimuli originate from a common source and should be integrated, or from distinct sources and should be segregated. The brain addresses this problem by inferring causal structure from the spatiotemporal disparity of multisensory stimuli. However, it remains unclear whether the brain handles causal inference implicitly, or whether it requires effortful and explicit cognitive processing. This study investigated how human observers (<em>N</em> = 47) implicitly infer causal structure when judging the auditory distance of two sequential audiovisual stimuli. In this distance task, we combined representational similarity analysis and multidimensional scaling to retrieve participants' auditory spatial representations. We then compared visual biases on auditory representations (i.e., the ventriloquist effect) to visual biases in three classical auditory localisation and causal judgment tasks. We found that visual biases in the distance task were less influenced by the spatial disparity of the audiovisual stimuli compared to the classical tasks. This pattern was best fitted by a computational stochastic-fusion model. Only in the joint localisation and causal task, small spatial disparity increased the visual bias as predicted by a computational Bayesian causal inference model. Our results suggest that causal inference requires explicit cognitive processing that observers only apply if the causal structure of stimuli is directly relevant to the task. Otherwise, the brain relies on simpler automatic decision strategies such as stochastic fusion.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"271 ","pages":"Article 106413"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145979904","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 : 2026-01-14DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106441
Bertram Gawronski , Marta Rokosz , Michal M. Stefanczyk , Michał Białek
Using the CNI model to quantify three factors underlying moral-dilemma judgments, Rokosz et al. (2025) found that groups show greater concerns about outcomes than individuals, but do not differ in terms of norm adherence and general action tendencies. In a commentary on this work, Baron and Skovgaard-Olsen (2026) argue that (a) groups show less “nonsensical” judgments and (b) analyses controlling for this difference reveal that groups additionally show weaker concerns about moral norms. The current reply identifies conceptual and empirical problems with Baron and Skovgaard-Olsen's (2026) arguments. Expanding on this discussion, we present an alternative reanalysis of Rokosz et al.'s (2025) data to gauge the robustness of their findings against model specifications. Our reanalysis revealed (a) robust evidence that groups are more concerned about outcomes than individuals and (b) some evidence for differential concerns about moral norms, but this evidence is less reliable in that it depends on data-analytic choices.
{"title":"Many heads are more utilitarian than one, but are they also less deontological? Reply to Baron and Skovgaard-Olsen (2026)","authors":"Bertram Gawronski , Marta Rokosz , Michal M. Stefanczyk , Michał Białek","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106441","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106441","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using the CNI model to quantify three factors underlying moral-dilemma judgments, Rokosz et al. (2025) found that groups show greater concerns about outcomes than individuals, but do not differ in terms of norm adherence and general action tendencies. In a commentary on this work, Baron and Skovgaard-Olsen (2026) argue that (a) groups show less “nonsensical” judgments and (b) analyses controlling for this difference reveal that groups additionally show weaker concerns about moral norms. The current reply identifies conceptual and empirical problems with Baron and Skovgaard-Olsen's (2026) arguments. Expanding on this discussion, we present an alternative reanalysis of Rokosz et al.'s (2025) data to gauge the robustness of their findings against model specifications. Our reanalysis revealed (a) robust evidence that groups are more concerned about outcomes than individuals and (b) some evidence for differential concerns about moral norms, but this evidence is less reliable in that it depends on data-analytic choices.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"271 ","pages":"Article 106441"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145979898","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 : 2026-01-13DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106434
Mia Radovanovic , Jaemin Hwang , David M. Sobel , Jessica A. Sommerville
Concerns about fair resource exchanges are pervasive across development. However, existing work has focused primarily on resource distributions. The present experiments investigated whether 14- to 17-month-old North American infants demonstrate expectations for fair resource collection events, in contrast to expectations for resource distribution events. We found that infants' expectations for equal resource collections emerged by 16 months of age, whereas infants at all ages tested expected equal resource distributions. These findings suggest infants possess a broader, early-emerging understanding of fairness as it applies across resource exchanges, while highlighting a slight decalage in reasoning about resource collection versus distribution events.
{"title":"Origins of understanding fair resource collection","authors":"Mia Radovanovic , Jaemin Hwang , David M. Sobel , Jessica A. Sommerville","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106434","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106434","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Concerns about fair resource exchanges are pervasive across development. However, existing work has focused primarily on resource distributions. The present experiments investigated whether 14- to 17-month-old North American infants demonstrate expectations for fair resource collection events, in contrast to expectations for resource distribution events. We found that infants' expectations for equal resource collections emerged by 16 months of age, whereas infants at all ages tested expected equal resource distributions. These findings suggest infants possess a broader, early-emerging understanding of fairness as it applies across resource exchanges, while highlighting a slight decalage in reasoning about resource collection versus distribution events.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"271 ","pages":"Article 106434"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145979900","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 : 2026-01-13DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106440
Fritz Günther , Aliona Petrenco , Daniele Gatti
In verbal communication, speakers must encode meanings into signs such as words. Within a given language community, the correspondence between word forms and meanings can become conventionalized. However, speakers from different language communities cannot rely on these shared conventions. Here, we investigate whether purely verbal communication using single words is still possible in such a context, enabled by generalized form-meaning mappings. In a pre-registered experiment, we presented Italian speakers with words and instructed them to come up with corresponding German translations. The resulting German-like pseudowords were then shown to German speakers, who were asked to guess the original words. Supporting our hypotheses, results showed that the German participants’ guesses were semantically closer to the original words than to randomly selected control words. These findings highlight the remarkable human ability to spontaneously create and interpret meaningful signals, even across language boundaries and without relying on an established mutually-known lexicon.
{"title":"Cross-linguistic zero-shot communication via ad-hoc pseudowords","authors":"Fritz Günther , Aliona Petrenco , Daniele Gatti","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106440","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106440","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In verbal communication, speakers must encode meanings into signs such as words. Within a given language community, the correspondence between word forms and meanings can become conventionalized. However, speakers from different language communities cannot rely on these shared conventions. Here, we investigate whether purely verbal communication using single words is still possible in such a context, enabled by generalized form-meaning mappings. In a pre-registered experiment, we presented Italian speakers with words and instructed them to come up with corresponding German translations. The resulting German-like pseudowords were then shown to German speakers, who were asked to guess the original words. Supporting our hypotheses, results showed that the German participants’ guesses were semantically closer to the original words than to randomly selected control words. These findings highlight the remarkable human ability to spontaneously create and interpret meaningful signals, even across language boundaries and without relying on an established mutually-known lexicon.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"271 ","pages":"Article 106440"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145979903","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 : 2026-01-09DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106443
Yue Ji , Anna Papafragou
Event cognition is sensitive to whether an event is bounded (has a well-defined endpoint, e.g. build a sandcastle) or unbounded (lacks such an endpoint; e.g., play with sand). Boundedness interfaces with telicity in language: telic verb phrases denote events that include an inherent or natural endpoint while atelic verb phrases denote events that lack such an endpoint. Given that languages encode telicity in different ways, could these cross-linguistic differences influence the perception of event boundedness? We address this question by comparing English and Mandarin native speakers. We show that the two groups differ in their use of telicity in event descriptions (Experiment 1) but perform similarly when rating the likelihood of an event having a natural endpoint (Experiment 2) or attending to the temporal structure of bounded vs. unbounded events in a perceptual task (Experiment 3). These findings reveal commonalities in the representation of the temporal profile of events despite cross-linguistic differences.
{"title":"Representation of event boundedness in English and Mandarin speakers","authors":"Yue Ji , Anna Papafragou","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106443","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106443","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Event cognition is sensitive to whether an event is bounded (has a well-defined endpoint, e.g. build a sandcastle) or unbounded (lacks such an endpoint; e.g., play with sand). Boundedness interfaces with telicity in language: telic verb phrases denote events that include an inherent or natural endpoint while atelic verb phrases denote events that lack such an endpoint. Given that languages encode telicity in different ways, could these cross-linguistic differences influence the perception of event boundedness? We address this question by comparing English and Mandarin native speakers. We show that the two groups differ in their use of telicity in event descriptions (Experiment 1) but perform similarly when rating the likelihood of an event having a natural endpoint (Experiment 2) or attending to the temporal structure of bounded vs. unbounded events in a perceptual task (Experiment 3). These findings reveal commonalities in the representation of the temporal profile of events despite cross-linguistic differences.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"271 ","pages":"Article 106443"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145928637","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 : 2026-01-09DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106439
Shachar Hochman , Mattan S. Ben-Shachar , Roi Cohen Kadosh , Avishai Henik
Numerical bias is the spontaneous tendency to base decisions on numerical rather than equally available non-numerical information. We introduce the Congruent Learning–Incongruent Probe (CLIP) task, a computerised paradigm for indexing numerical bias in adults. The task presents digit pairs that vary in numerical value and physical size, organised into blocks. In feedback-based learning trials, digits are congruent (larger number in larger font) and participants learn which stimulus is “correct” for that block. In subsequent no-feedback probe trials (test trials), the same pairs are presented incongruently, revealing whether choices are spontaneously driven by numerical or physical dimensions. A sample of 129 adults completed a multi-day battery to validate the CLIP task. Drift–diffusion modelling indicated substantial individual differences in numerical bias. Higher numerical bias correlated positively with maths fluency and quantitative reasoning, paralleling child findings on spontaneous focus on numerosity (SFON) and maths competence. To establish convergent validity, we also administered a numerical Stroop task that requires suppressing numerical information; individuals with stronger numerical bias showed larger interference and facilitation effects. These findings validate the CLIP task as a reliable measure of numerical bias and, more broadly, highlight how variability in spontaneous numerical processing shapes cognitive-control demands, illuminating the interplay between domain-specific biases and executive function.
{"title":"A novel task for measuring numerical bias among adults","authors":"Shachar Hochman , Mattan S. Ben-Shachar , Roi Cohen Kadosh , Avishai Henik","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106439","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106439","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Numerical bias is the spontaneous tendency to base decisions on numerical rather than equally available non-numerical information. We introduce the Congruent Learning–Incongruent Probe (CLIP) task, a computerised paradigm for indexing numerical bias in adults. The task presents digit pairs that vary in numerical value and physical size, organised into blocks. In feedback-based learning trials, digits are congruent (larger number in larger font) and participants learn which stimulus is “correct” for that block. In subsequent no-feedback probe trials (test trials), the same pairs are presented incongruently, revealing whether choices are spontaneously driven by numerical or physical dimensions. A sample of 129 adults completed a multi-day battery to validate the CLIP task. Drift–diffusion modelling indicated substantial individual differences in numerical bias. Higher numerical bias correlated positively with maths fluency and quantitative reasoning, paralleling child findings on spontaneous focus on numerosity (SFON) and maths competence. To establish convergent validity, we also administered a numerical Stroop task that requires suppressing numerical information; individuals with stronger numerical bias showed larger interference and facilitation effects. These findings validate the CLIP task as a reliable measure of numerical bias and, more broadly, highlight how variability in spontaneous numerical processing shapes cognitive-control demands, illuminating the interplay between domain-specific biases and executive function.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"271 ","pages":"Article 106439"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2026-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145928635","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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