New paper in Cognition! Does body function constrain what we can embody? Using VR, we gave children & adults arms that reached further or less far than their own. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

How do we maintain visual information in short-term memory? One influential proposal is that such storage relies on the same sensory representations that support perception itself.

1/ Relational ability — the ability to compare situations and discover common relations — is key to our capacity for higher-order cognition. But when and how does this ability emerge? Our new paper in Cognition tackles this question.

"Random generation is what comes to mind in naturalistic settings" 📢New paper from: Lucas Castillo (lcastillo.bsky.social), Pablo León-Villagrá (pleonv.bsky.social), Johanna Falbén, Nick Chater, & Adam Sanborn (asanborn.bsky.social) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Words that look like their meanings (e.g., “bubbles", “bed", “look") are processed faster and more accurately on lexical decision tasks.

"Gaze patterns reveal attention-based modulation of lure discrimination" 📢New paper from: Tarek Amer, Jordana Wynn, Margaret Porterfield, Daniel Schacter, & Lila Davachi www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @tarekamer.bsky.social ky.social @jordwynn.bsky.social @liladavachi.bsky.social

A computational theory of Aha! moments! New paper explaining why Aha! moments occur & why they feel so good. TLDR: They are a form of meta-cognitive prediction errors i.e. they occur when we surprise ourselves about our own abilities! @rachitdubey.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Memorable images don’t just last longer in memory—they get in better. Our EEG study shows that image memorability enhances the early formation of visual working memory representations, rather than changing later stable maintenance. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social by Ombline Rérolle and Leila Selimbegovic. How do we perceive dehumanized others? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Deepest Thanks to Fondation Ostad Elahi – éthique et solidarité humaine, for funding this work!

How does the brain tell something is “alive” just by the way it moves? Using visual adaptation, this study suggests the existence of a neural mechanism for perceiving “life” from the movements of other people and even animals 👇.

How do we search in the real world? In our new paper in Cognition, we used immersive VR to study visual search beyond standard 2D screens — and found that people learn not just where to look, but how to look.

Not all prior knowledge influences what we see in the same way. Studying motion extrapolation, i.e. the ability to infer an object position from its past trajectory, this work highlights that implicit knowledge reshapes perception itself, while explicit knowledge adjusts how much we trust our senses

Faces behind us can be perceived as more intense, particularly for negative emotions, as egocentric spatial position biases emotion perception—even without turning. This may reflect a bias prioritizing potential threats located behind the observer. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thrilled to share that our new paper is now out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social: "Who knows what? Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information Search," with @oliviermorin.bsky.social , @hugoreasoning.bsky.social & @tadegquillien.bsky.social! Link: tinyurl.com/ykyhxcc6

Human cultures vary in how they talk and think about space: some rely on body-centered (egocentric) reference frames, others on environment-centered (geocentric) ones.

We’re excited to feature new research uncovering the neural underpinnings of dependency length processing—a core quantitative syntactic feature—during natural language comprehension!

Monkeys solve an abstract-category delayed match-to-sample task through slow, capacity-limited, sequential checking, whereas crows rely on fast, parallel, anticipatory processing with reduced working-memory load. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🎉Our paper was just accepted in Cognition!🎉 Title: Training “Zero” in Preschoolers: Fast Referential Learning, Slow Relational Integration Authors: Yanfei Yu, Marianna Thorne, David Barner @cognitionjournal.bsky.social @drbarner.bsky.social

Why do languages share common properties? Adults learned novel quantifiers satisfying semantic universals faster than those violating them. This suggests that learnability helps explain why certain meanings are lexicalized across cultures.

New paper with Ben Morris and Alex Shaw out last week in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! We find that children are sensitive to who has better evidence when evaluating how people behave in disagreements. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/3

Spanish nouns like agua and área challenge grammar rules—and the brain agrees. Pupillometry shows gender violations trigger responses for regular nouns, but not dual-gender ones. Gender processing is flexible and context-driven. Read more here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Finally, special thanks to the reviewers at @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, whose advice completely transformed the paper for the better, and if you'd like to read more related by the authors, check out: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... doi.org/10.1016/j.ch...

"The role of body ownership in postural control: A virtual full body illusion study" 📢New paper from: Maria Pyasik, Enrico Zingarelli, Silvia Giusiano, Andrea Cavallo, & Lorenzo Pia www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📢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.