📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does? In short, yes!

A new paper shows that the inferred value of an unchosen option spreads to related items in memory. In other words: even outcomes you never experienced can generalize to guide future decisions.

Ever feel like time flies when you're juggling too much? It's not just a feeling. Our new study shows that holding more items in memory literally warps how your brain encodes and reproduces short durations. ⌛️🧠 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Changes in our feelings, or "affective surprise," may act as a learning signal that influences what we remember. Large magnitude deviations in experienced valence during encoding relate to better long-term associative memory.

New paper exploring the flexibility of control mechanisms in bilinguals is out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social l! w/ @kalinkatimmer.bsky.social, Jakub Szewczyk, and Zofia Wodniecka. We ask if language context can affect language control in bilinguals. authors.elsevier.com/a/1meRF2Hx32... 👇🧵

"Grounding distractor inhibition in action control: Implicit distractor-location learning is viewer dependent" 📢New paper from: Litian Chen, Freek van Ede, Chris Jungerius, Heleen A. Slagter www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper: the effect of adding branches in risky prospects is context-dependent. More branches boost choice when comparing two risky gains—but not when a sure option is present, and the effect reverses in separate evaluation.

Does language merely express pre-existing event concepts, or does it provide the tools needed to build them? Some accounts argue that abstract two-participant events (who does what to whom) can only be learned through acquiring a language, by mastering transitive syntax.

Do language users really represent abstract syntactic structures and rules? Or can constraints on linguistic form be fully explained by communicative function and general cognitive pressures?

Numbers influence our decisions. In VR, participants processed a number and then freely chose where to walk. The results did? Small numbers → left. Large numbers → right Not just choices: walking paths also deviated depending on number magnitude.

From cracking nuts to holding a smartphone, simple actions like handgrip are evolutionarily conserved but not cognitively neutral. Physical exertion weakens inhibitory control, allowing irrelevant information to intrude into working memory, a key mental cost of physical effort.

"Task switching promotes switch readiness: Evidence from forced and voluntary task switching" 📢New paper from: Jonathan Mendl, Daniel Bratzke, & Gesine Dreisbach www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

You can learn to act on what you barely see. Action training boosts grasping and contrast sensitivity for degraded stimuli—without increasing awareness—showing that learning is driven by sensory encoding, not conscious perception. Read more here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Phonemic awareness predicts reading only when children understand the alphabetic principle. In a nationwide longitudinal study (N>800k), alphabetic knowledge—not PA alone—emerges as the strongest predictor of reading fluency. #ReadingScience www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/10 🧵 When groups make moral decisions, they support actions that maximize overall outcomes more than individuals do (e.g., sacrifice 1 to save 5). New paper by Bertram Gawronski, Marta Rokosz, Michal Stefanczyk, & Michał Białek discusses why this happens. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Human cognition is interactive, with information flowing in both bottom-up (from sensory to conceptual levels) and top-down directions. Are these pathways present early in life or do they emerge later, e.g. with experience or brain maturation?

Out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social with @jaeminhwang.bsky.social, David Sobel (@candmlab.bsky.social), and @jessicas.bsky.social! Most studies of infants’ fairness expectations focus on resource distribution, but in everyday life, we engage in many different kinds of resource exchanges.

Choose one of three doors. One hides a reward. After a losing door is revealed, would you switch? Humans usually don’t. Neither do fish. Testing the Monty Hall dilemma, we found fish stick to their first choice, revealing a shared cognitive fallacy. 🚪🐟

New in Cognition: Meaning can travel without shared lexicon. In a preregistered study, Italian speakers created new German-sounding words that guided German speakers toward the intended meaning - revealing cross-linguistic form–meaning

The term "Native Speaker" is ubiquitous in cognitive science, but it lacks empirical validity. Our new paper argues that essentialist labels like “native speaker” distort inquiry, introduce bias, and perpetuate exclusion.

Emotional learning can strengthen memory while blurring information about when events. Across 17 experiments, items from a threat-conditioned category were misattributed to the conditioning phase—even when actually encoded before or after it.

What makes a language different to a dialect? Is mutually intelligible key? Objective definitions have evaded linguists. This research uses psychological indices of language processing to ask if Neapolitan is processed like a language.

Zero-sum thinking about social and economic problems hinders the discovery of effective solutions, while positive-sum thinking helps it. Democrats and Republicans are systematically prone to both types of thinking, only around different issues.

1/13 New paper with @wimdeneys.bsky.social accepted at @cognitionjournal.bsky.social 🥳 Is creativity intuitive? 👩‍🎨 A 🧵👇

Babies are active information agents! Using gaze-contingent eye tracking, infants learned that they could make on-screen objects move with their gaze, and they preferred these controllable objects over matched objects that moved on their own.

Language isn’t optimized just for efficiency. This study shows that phonological surprisal systematically marks vivid meanings—slowing processing but strengthening memory. Surprisal isn’t noise; it’s how language directs attention. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Can you recognize 2 written words at exactly the same time? Anupindi et al. found that participants can recognize only 1 of 2 unrelated words that were flashed briefly and masked (e.g. bottle + corn). That is consistent with a simple serial model.

Intuitive physics can be instantiated within perception. The Online Processing of Dynamics model argues that mass and velocity are jointly encoded. Initial mass cues shift perceived post-impact velocity, and those velocity shifts feedback to reshape mass estimation.

My co-authors and I are happy to present our framework "Collective Intelligence as Collective Information Processing (CIP)." Here we propose decomposing different information processing mechanisms to unify disparate phenomena traditionally classified as "collective intelligence."

XPRAG is growing up! When it turned 20, we celebrated with a workshop www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nuP... and a SI in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... Now that it's turning 25, @irastamon.bsky.social @richardbreheny.bsky.social & Nicole Gotzner are giving us a journal!

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...