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?

Babies learn more when people violate their expectations about typical social behavior! Just as when objects behave surprisingly, infants exhibit enhanced learning when people behave in surprising ways. 🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A child language acquisition model, trained on real child-directed speech, that learns to map utterances to logical meaning representations. It can infer meanings and parses for long-range dependencies, like found in object wh-questions. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Evaluating commercial game design decisions via the scientification of games: Asymmetrical task switching accuracy predicts self-reported fun in Ghost Blitz" 📢 New paper from: Benjamin James Dyson www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Communicative pressures shape language during communication (not learning): Evidence from case-marking in artificial languages" 📢 New paper from: Kenny Smith & Jennifer Culbertson www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"The effect of orthography on the visual processing of affixed words: Evidence from Bengali" 📢 New paper from: Hilary Wynne, Beinan Zhou, Sandra Kotzor, & Aditi Lahiri www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 My new paper with Daphne Bavelier & @cshawngreen.bsky.social found that common tasks used to measure planning don’t correlate—⚠️ meaning they’re likely not measuring the same skill. Published in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social Read it here 👉 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #Psychology #EFs

Obidziński, Bażela & mateuszhohol.bsky.social of @mcll-uj.bsky.social found that gist-based memory, more than exact recall, is more strongly associated with math reasoning, enhancing our limited understanding of the relationship between long-term memory and math skills.

"Context-dependent role of confidence in information-seeking" 📢New paper from: Hélène Van Marcke & Kobe Desender www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Herding cats: children and adults infer collective decision speed from team size and diversity, but disagree about whether consensus strength matters more than team size" 📢New paper from: Emory Richardson, Hannah Hok, Alex Shaw, & Frank Keil www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Children care not just who gets punished, but whether punishment is fair—and emotionally helpful. In 2 studies, children expected equal punishment for equal transgressions and perceived punished wrongdoers as feeling relieved #ChildDev #MetaNorms #MoralEmotions www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...