It appears simple that every entity in our perceptual array is a thing (object) or stuff (substance). Yet, a recent article by Paulun and colleagues reveals that there are many puzzles to be solved about how we perform this seemingly simple perception.
A long-standing question in cognitive sciences concerns the specific contribution of linguistic and sensorimotor experience in shaping conceptual knowledge. A new study by Xu et al. shows that large language models (LLMs) represent a powerful tool to advance this debate, helping to disentangle the relative contribution of different experiential modalities.
Metacognition improves significantly over childhood, but the mechanisms underlying this development are poorly understood. We first review recent research demonstrating that disagreement prompts competent responses by young children across several metacognitive domains (confidence monitoring, information search, and source monitoring). We then propose a mechanistic model of how disagreement facilitates metacognition. We localize one main source of children's metacognitive limitations in their still-developing capacities to reason about alternative possibilities, which manifest in an overly narrow focus on one hypothesis. Disagreement increases the child's likelihood of representing alternative hypotheses, thereby promoting improved metacognitive reasoning. The broader proposal is that, through repeated experiences of disagreement, children become better at representing alternative possibilities even when reasoning on their own, leading to metacognitive development.
Effort plays a crucial role in shaping behavior. We propose that physical effort - and its perception - modulates people's engagement across different stages of behavioral regulation: before, during, and after engagement. We demonstrate that individuals tend to avoid effort before engagement, minimize effort during task performance, and derive a sense of reward from effort after engagement due to an effort-justification mechanism. This dynamic and stage-specific approach moves beyond static models of effort (de)valuation, offering a more nuanced understanding of how effort shapes behavior. Focusing on physical activity, we explore how these specific effort-related mechanisms could promote physical activity by fostering conditions where individuals engage in active behaviors because of the potential rewards effort brings, despite its associated cost.
Insects navigate by integrating a geocentric velocity vector, allowing them to track their position relative to a distant nest. Recent advances reveal in detail the key neural mechanisms supporting this behavior, offering new insight into how complex spatial cognition is implemented in brain circuits.
In a recent series of experiments, Boger and Firestone ask: How do we perceive style?'. Their findings suggest that style perception relies on basic perceptual processes involved in differentiating image content from its context. Their research highlights that we need to understand both content and style processing to fully understand perception.
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