Huichao Ji & Brian Scholl report a new type of categorical memory distortion: spontaneous motion extrapolation depends on whether a moving ball is shown during *swinging* vs. *tossing*, or *bouncing* vs. *rolling*. Memory is biased by 'visual verbs'!

(Background) Humans naturally link magnitudes like number and space, and previous studies hinted that number and action might be linked early in life — but never tested at birth.

Maybe there are two distinct kinds of belief: they either represent facts (It's rainy) or express identity (My son is the best). We find instead that many beliefs simultaneously represent facts and express identity (but few beliefs do neither).

Which mechanism explains children’s episodic thinking: constructive episodic simulation, self-projection, or scene construction?

Ever wonder if prioritizing a task makes it easier to switch back to it? A new study suggests the opposite is true, especially in older bilinguals when switching-back to a contextually dominant language after a brief switch-out to another language.

New paper! How do outcome preferences bias predictions? Using drift-diffusion modeling, we show that outcome preferences bias both thresholds for prediction and evidence accumulation itself—revealing multiple cognitive routes to wishful predictions.

Wait, air is not composed of matter….or is it? Deciding whether scientific claims are true can be tricky because our formal scientific understanding co-exists alongside a more intuitive everyday understanding – posing a coordination problem.

🎉 Congratulations to the 2025 Cognition Outstanding Reviewer Award recipients: Recognized for exceptional clarity, depth, and insight, their reviews set the highest standard and advance our field through thoughtful, rigorous evaluation. This year’s recipients:🥁

How do memories of a past good deed shape future prosocial behavior? Vandenbol & Geurten explored the relation between episodic memory and helpful behavior in preschoolers.

Anticipating embarrassment? You might reach for your foreign language. Across three languages and five countries, bilinguals preferred to use their foreign language to speak about embarrassing topics, as it increased emotional distance. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"There is a power law of joint communicative effort and it reflects communicative work" 📢New paper from: Sara Bögels (sarabogels.bsky.social), Tianyi Li, Marlou Rasenberg, Lotte Eijk, Ivan Toni, & Wim Pouw (wimpouw.bsky.social) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/10 A new paper by shirilevari.bsky.social shows that sound symbolism highlights the properties that distinguish referents from their competitors: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A🧵

Aligning eye tracking and free recall time series, we found that increased saccades predict episodic (vs. non-episodic) by 0.5 s. Just out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, led by Ryan Barker with the inimitable @drjenryan.bsky.social. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We are remarkably good at recognizing natural auditory “textures”, such as the soothing sound of a running brook or fire crackling in a chimney. But do you think you could remember the exact rain texture that opens “Riders on the Storm”?

How do general cognitive abilities shape our language skills? Our new study in Cognition examines how perceptual speed, working memory, and cognitive control mediate the link between statistical learning and language abilities.

New paper in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, where we show how attention impacts political choices. With an eye-tracking study, we find that people's votes aren't set in stone - they take longer to vote on divisive issues and can be swayed by gaze manipulations. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

New in Cognition: In politics, people are not always truth seekers. Often, we reach conclusions because they fit with preferred narratives: we are biased by ideological motivations. Are some people better equipped to overcome such bias than others?

How early do children grasp mathematical patterns? In a new Cognition paper, Ciccione et al. show that 5–6-year-olds can intuitively extend lines, curves and oscillating patterns, revealing rich proto-mathematical intuitions before schooling.

How do people decide whether to stay with a good thing or leave in search of something better? In her new paper, @theazalabak.bsky.social explores how model-based planning guides foraging decisions in structured environments. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

⚠️ New paper! Why do words sound so similar? In an agent-based model + communication game, we show that production/comprehension pressures trade off to shape lexicon structure. In @cognitionjournal.bsky.social w/ @simonkirby.bsky.social & Jenny Culbertson. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New evidence for linguistic relativity: Across English and Dutch, we find that English grammar obliges speakers to use more low-certainty modals (may, might) and, in turn, discount future rewards more steeply.

New in Cognition: Episodic Recall after VR navigation with naturalistic leg/head movement (immersive) vs handheld joystick (restricted). Sabharwal-Siddiqi et al. (sameerss.bsky.social adekstreme.bsky.social) tests the dependence of episodic memory on body movement and spatiotemporal encoding.

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...