When we detect a behaviorally relevant target, our memory for concurrent information improves—a phenomenon known as the Attentional Boost Effect (ABE).

Just in: @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that blind adults and children who have symbols for large numbers, and use 1:1 correspondence to count, do not extend a similar 1:1 strategy to a set-matching task, which assesses their knowledge of Hume’s principle. A 🧵: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In a new paper in Cognition, @marshallgreen.bsky.social and Michael Pratte examine how perceptual confidence is derived from our internal representations. #CognitiveScience #Perception #Metacognition www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7

Even when emotions aren’t relevant to a task, they still guide our focus. Using a Posner cueing task for exogenous attention orientation —a paradigm designed to isolate reflexive attention— we discovered the TEASC effect:

We think about others’ thoughts about our thoughts to navigate romance, sarcasm, gossip, and nuclear standoffs. But recursive mentalizing is hard. In a model contest, I show that under pressure our inner vision goes blurry, not blind. #TheoryOfMind

In our study, we investigated how people evaluate everyday socio-political arguments in the context of their prior beliefs about the topics being discussed.

"Learning to be confident: How agents learn confidence based on prediction errors"! Now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social led by @pierreledenmat.bsky.social Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓ #AcademicSky #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

"How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment" 📢New paper from: @vladchituc.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, & Brian Scholl www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We often argue about what’s true, without ever asking what we mean by ”truth”. Different ideas of truth can derail a debate long before facts are discussed. In this work, we use conceptual scaling to explore how people understand truth. (1/7)

When do people self-handicap? We model self-handicapping in terms of rational signaling, showing how it depends on assumptions about whether observers are naive or sophisticated. More in thread!

(1/7)📢 New paper by Vera Hoorens, felixhermans.bsky.social, and Susanne Bruckmüller in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social : “Why Boys Cry and Don’t Cry. The Contextual-Statistical (ConStat) Approach to the Perceived Validity of Generics”. A small 🧵and link to the paper below!

How do background voices derail our thoughts? Our study shows that distracting words disrupt deliberate memory retrieval not necessarily by grabbing attention, but because they are processed incidentally, forcing us to suppress their meaning.

Highlighting “women and children” as victim is ubiquitous, but what psychological consequences does this phrase have? Across 6 experiments with over 3000 participants, we show that “women and children” amplifies moral outrage and explore why.

What makes an event memorable? Obviously its content is decisive – reading a novel is probably more memorable than watching paint dry. But is there something beyond the specific elements of an event that might predict how likely we are to recall it? 🧵👇

Did this study uncover a new fountain of youth? By investigating semantic memory networks across the lifespan, it was found that creativity helps preserve memory organization & retrieval process flexibility in older adults. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @sergioagnoli.bsky.social

"Learn what is detectable, detect what is useful: acquisition of German plural as a classification problem" 📢New paper from: Sergei Monakhov, Holger Diessel, & Brisca Balthes www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Visual adaptation is viewed as a test of whether a feature is represented by the visual system. In a new paper, Sam Clarke and I push the limits of this test. We show spatially selective, putatively "visual" adaptation to a clearly non-visual dimension: Value! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Why do we stick with our goals, even when better alternatives appear? Our new paper shows that self-commitment, even in individual tasks, carries an intrinsic social dimension.

Pareidolia is the perception of meaningful structure in meaningless visual patterns; for example, you might see a human face in a tree trunk.

In written language, demonstratives such as 'this' and 'that' allow writers to produce coherent texts and readers to build up a consistent mental model of the message that is conveyed. But what makes a writer decide to use one demonstrative (e.g., this) over another (e.g., that)?

What happens after an event boundary? We find worse memory for post-boundary items, but better source memory—a cost-benefit pattern explained by shifts in attention allocation. Our work expands Event Segmentation Theory to the start of new events.

Just out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! Cross-modal #serialdependence in audio-visual temporal perception. We found that the effect of prior choices (attractive in unimodal conditions) can 'flip' - and become repulsive when switching between modalities. authors.elsevier.com/c/1lg2l2Hx2-...

Our study tackles inconsistent findings on young children’s probabilistic reasoning. We tested 3- to 5-year-olds’ reasoning skills with a simple, engaging task designed to control for competing reasoning strategies.

How can we prevent people from believing in false information they read online? This study tested the effectiveness of one potential method, psychological inoculation, in improving discernment between repeated true and false news headlines.

In a second, we form expectations about the likely traits and behaviors of people we meet. How does this ability develop? How do others’ perceived gender factor into it? I’m thrilled to share a new paper now in press at Cognition with @andreicimpian.bsky.social and‪ @lucaspbutler.bsky.social. 1/6

"Deaf homesigners can create the foundations of phonetics and phonology without an adult linguistic model" 📢 New paper from: Sotaro Kita, Diane Brentari, & Susan Goldin-Meadow www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Are your eyes following your thoughts? We show internal coupling depends on spatial references, imagery skills, and working memory, suggesting eye movements support internal attention and reflect mental image quality during visual imagery. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"A question of perspective: Target- vs. perceiver-specific dimensions of mind perception" 📢 New paper from: Nele Bögemann, Lasana Harris lasanaharris.bsky.social & Steffen Nestler www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Children are able to differentiate fake from real news even before exposure to fake news on social media. This ability improves with age and even more so with cognitive reflection or the disposition to question an initial intuition andrewshtulman.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Self-portrait of a stranger: Self-face representation and interoception in depersonalization experiences" 📢New paper from: Lara Maister & Anna Ciaunica www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Environmental change... Belief uncertainty... Arousal... Pupil dilation... Two separable effects...

Can we infer how much someone knows, even when we can't tell what they know?

In a double prevention scenario, a double preventer prevents a preventer from preventing an outcome. What do people think caused the outcome? A recent study finds it depends on the order in which events happen. We give an explanation for this result:

Does culture shape how we look, gesture, and interact? A new study uses wearable eye-tracking to explore how Japanese and Dutch participants coordinate gaze and action during collaboration. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Action chunking as conditional policy compression" 📢 New paper from: Lucy Lai, Ann Huang, & Samuel Gershman sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🩰What makes contemporary dance enjoyable? A new study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics @ae.mpg.de‬ investigates what people like about contemporary dance—using live performances, motion capture, and audience questionnaires. 👇

"Rules in the Mist: Emerging Probabilistic Rules in Uncertain Categorization" Authors: Nicolás Marchant, Guillermo Puebla, & Sergio E. Chaigneau Read it here: doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

👀 Simple actions trick your memory—your brain auto-simulates what comes next and stores it as true. But with complex actions? You stay sharp. Predictive minds, selective errors. #FalseMemories #MemoryScience Read more here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"We propose a unified quantitative model that integrates decision-making and communication, revealing how verbal framing of probabilistic expression both reflects and shapes beliefs in speakers and listeners." Read more here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Does overnight memory consolidation support next-day learning?" 📢 New paper from: Anna Guttesen (annaavali.bsky.social), Marcus Harrington (@harrington-mo.bsky.social), Gareth Gaskell (mggaskell.bsky.social), & Scott Cairney (sacairney.bsky.social) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Can AI models “smell”? Our new paper in Cognition investigates whether language models can understand our “muted sense”—olfaction—just by reading text. We show that natural language contains hidden, recoverable information about how humans perceive odors.

Not one but two cognitive control mechanisms, post-conflict slowing and selective suppression, resolve repeating response conflicts in the Simon task, supported by confound-minimized task design and spatiotemporal analysis of mouse cursor movements. 🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“People Evaluate Idle Collaborators Based on their Impact on Task Efficiency” 📢 New paper from: Elizabeth Mieczkowski, Cameron Rouse Turner, Natalia Vélez, & Tom Griffiths www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... TL;DR: Sometimes it's acceptable not to help with group work 🧵👇

A sense of familiarity often guides everyday decisions from memory (i.e., choosing a restaurant). We show that familiarity can capture a wider range of decision phenomena than previously proposed, but recollection needs to step in to explain decisions against the familiarity principle.

Suppose Tom loses control of his body, and his bodily motions then cause an accident. Would it be right to say “Tom caused the accident?” A new paper explores the role that language plays in these links between agency and causation! 🔗👇

"Diffindo! Precise language comprehension in older adulthood revealed by event-related brain potential studies of domain knowledge" New from: Melissa Troyer (mtroyer.bluesky.social), Elizabeth Stine-Morrow, & Kara Federmeier (kfederme.bluesky.social) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵👇(1/7)

New published paper with Ham Huang and @actlab.bsky.social! @cognitionjournal.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

📢 We’re now on LinkedIn! 💼 Follow us for publication updates, journal news, and more from our community of authors and editors. 🔗 linkedin.com/company/cognition-journal

How we perceive and remember the age of a person's face impacts first impressions, romantic attraction, legal testimony, and hiring decisions. Here we asked, are there *biases* in our memory for facial age?