Cognitive Science[JOURNAL]
Sun
200 papers
Spatial Demonstratives and Perspective Taking in English and Japanese.
Gudde HB, Collier J, Coventry KR
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41869921 · Full text
There is much debate regarding the extent to which languages express the same spatial parameters or whether spatial communication is essentially diverse. In this paper, we explore "perspective taking" in spatial demonstr...
There is much debate regarding the extent to which languages express the same spatial parameters or whether spatial communication is essentially diverse. In this paper, we explore "perspective taking" in spatial demonstrative systems as a means of exploring between and within language variation. We test the effects of egocentric distance and addressee position on demonstrative production in speakers of two languages with two purportedly different demonstrative systems: English and Japanese. We find that speakers of both languages show perspective taking in their demonstrative use, with an overall increase in perspective taking in both languages when there was greater interaction between participants during the experimental task. We propose a framework unifying different theoretical accounts of demonstrative systems in which speakers of both languages choose a spatial reference frame prior to selecting from the available demonstrative terms in their language. Such an approach accounts for diversity while maintaining the same underlying processes between languages.
How Novices Interpret Generalizations and How Experts Use Them.
Coon J, Etz A, Scontras G … +1 more , Sarnecka BW
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41845919 · Publisher ↗
Generalizations, such as "ducks are birds" and "ducks carry avian flu," are a common way of conveying information about the world, yet their implied prevalence-how broadly they should be applied-can vary widely. To inter...
Generalizations, such as "ducks are birds" and "ducks carry avian flu," are a common way of conveying information about the world, yet their implied prevalence-how broadly they should be applied-can vary widely. To interpret how broadly a generalization should be applied, listeners rely on prior knowledge. Listeners who have considerable experience ("experts") with the subject being discussed may thus interpret a generalization differently than those without such experience ("novices"). In the present study, we investigated the ways in which experts and novices differ in how they interpret generalizations, using the esport League of Legends as a cultural microcosm. In the process, we investigated the extent to which expert listeners discount generalizations with which they disagree. We found that novices tended to interpret generalizations more broadly than experts, with only experts adjusting their interpretations based on the context. We also investigated whether expert speakers, when addressing novices, avoid generalizations that novices are likely to interpret differently. In line with research investigating the curse of knowledge and the challenge of designing utterances for specific audiences, we found that speakers did not adjust their use of generalizations when explicitly told that their audience was inexperienced. Taken together, these results point to novice listeners interpreting generalizations as applying more broadly than expert speakers intend. Future research can help clarify the practical impact of such a mismatch by examining how generalizations are used in relation to speakers' and listeners' goals.
The Association Between Space and Valence in Chinese Sighted and Blind Left-Handers.
Li H, Cao Y
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41845911 · Publisher ↗
The body-specificity hypothesis posits that individuals implicitly associate positive attributes more strongly with the space corresponding to their dominant hand and negative attributes with the nondominant side. Howeve...
The body-specificity hypothesis posits that individuals implicitly associate positive attributes more strongly with the space corresponding to their dominant hand and negative attributes with the nondominant side. However, the body-specificity effect is more pronounced in left-handers than in right-handers. A proposed mechanism is rooted in observational realities: left-handers observe predominantly right-handed others interacting more fluently with the right side (the observer's left side), potentially enhancing their own fluency with the left side and strengthening the association between "good" and the left. To test this account, we examined a large sample of Chinese sighted left-handers (N = 152; 57.89% female; mean age = 39.31) and blind left-handers (N = 144; 59.02% female; mean age = 37.50). Consistent with the observation-based account, the strength of the body-specificity effect was significantly weaker among blind participants than among sighted counterparts. We then pooled our data with available data on blind right-handers and found no reliable interaction effect between handedness and visual experience. However, this null finding is inconclusive given potential imbalances across cells and limited statistical power. Together, our results highlight a possible interaction between handedness and visual experience in shaping implicit space-valence mappings and motivate further, tightly controlled and well-powered cross-group research.
Multilevel Perceptual-Motor Coupling: From Action Understanding to Execution.
Du Z, Lu Y, Zhou C
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2026 · PMID 41841267 · Publisher ↗
Perceptual-motor coupling, fundamental to human cognition and behavior, plays a crucial role in dynamic interactive contexts ranging from basic motor control to complex action understanding. Recent evidence reveals how k...
Perceptual-motor coupling, fundamental to human cognition and behavior, plays a crucial role in dynamic interactive contexts ranging from basic motor control to complex action understanding. Recent evidence reveals how kinematic invariants-consistent patterns in human movement-serve as a common language between perception and action, enabling both movement execution and understanding. Through the lens of striking skills-a paradigmatic example that uniquely integrates multiple aspects of perceptual-motor interaction-this review synthesizes evidence for three distinct yet interacting levels of coupling. Level 1 coupling involves fundamental interactions between perceptual and motor processes through dual-stream visual processing, where kinematic invariants are initially extracted and processed. Level 2 encompasses sophisticated control mechanisms that maintain these invariant patterns during action execution through continuous sensorimotor integration. Level 3 coupling transforms these movement patterns into meaningful representations through the action observation network, enabling action understanding and prediction. Evidence indicates these levels operate simultaneously during real-world performance, with kinematic invariants being processed and utilized differently at each level while maintaining continuous interaction between levels. By synthesizing key theories such as the dual-stream model, model-based and online control, and common coding theory in relation to movement invariants, we provide an integrative understanding of perceptual-motor coupling applicable across various domains of human behavior. This multilevel perspective offers insights into the fundamental relationship between perception and action in human cognition, with implications spanning from everyday actions to specialized skills in sports. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Motor Skill and Performance Neuroscience > Behavior Philosophy > Action.
Hope in Early Childhood: Novel Methodology for Measuring Hope in 5- and 6-Year-Olds.
Fraser A, Calley A, Wang W … +2 more , Bryce C, Kennington K
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2026 · PMID 41826236 · Publisher ↗
Hope, as conceptualized by Snyder's Hope Theory, is a cognitive process that involves goal setting, pathway thinking, and agency. While hope has been widely studied in older children and adults, limited research exists o...
Hope, as conceptualized by Snyder's Hope Theory, is a cognitive process that involves goal setting, pathway thinking, and agency. While hope has been widely studied in older children and adults, limited research exists on measuring hope in early childhood. The present study addresses this gap by introducing two novel developmentally appropriate tasks-the Maze Task and the Egg Hunt Task-to assess hope in children aged 5 and 6. The Maze Task evaluates children's pathway thinking and agency through a series of structured mazes, analyzing perseverance, self-talk, emotional responses, and problem-solving strategies. The Egg Hunt Task, conducted 1 year later, refines the measurement by integrating verbal self-assessments and structured prompts based on the Children's Hope Scale. Preliminary results from both tasks suggest that hope is present in early childhood, with children demonstrating goal-directed behavior, flexible problem-solving behavior, and varying degrees of self-efficacy. Although some ceiling effects were observed, findings indicate that hope can be reliably measured before age 8. These novel methodologies contribute to the field by offering observational, interactive, age-appropriate alternatives to traditional self-report surveys. Future research should further refine these measures, explore the stability of hope across early development, and assess interventions that foster hope in young children. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Psychology > Emotion and Motivation.
Harnessing Uncertainty: Improvisation as a Model for Rapid Behavioral Expansion.
Laroche J, D'Ausilio A
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41814571 · Full text
While traditional sciences treat uncertainty as an obstacle to be minimized, this paper proposes an epistemic shift: viewing uncertainty as a resource to leverage. To enact this shift, we suggest adopting improvisation-w...
While traditional sciences treat uncertainty as an obstacle to be minimized, this paper proposes an epistemic shift: viewing uncertainty as a resource to leverage. To enact this shift, we suggest adopting improvisation-where novel behaviors are instantaneously assembled to meet unpredictable constraints-as a model for real-time adaptation and behavioral expansion. In this practice, uncertainty is not merely managed but deliberately injected to disrupt the determinism of habitual routines. By unveiling a wider space of potential paths, increasing uncertainty fosters behavioral exploration, discovery, and collective decision-making amidst dissent. This perspective resonates across scales: in neuroscience, neural uncertainty is increasingly recognized as a hallmark of cognition and volition; in artificial systems, cultivating the models' inherent indeterminism can disrupt their biased attraction toward users' expectations, boosting the open-endedness of human-model interactions and fostering cognitive emancipation. In an era of systemic unpredictability, exploring the functional utility of uncertainty through the lens of improvisation is a timely necessity for understanding natural, psychosocial, and artificial systems. We present a general overview of empirical support for this framework, the promises of this emerging perspective, and the future directions it calls for.
The Property in Intellectual Property: Reputation Is Harder to Share Than Ideas.
Darcy G, Karabegovic M, Mercier H
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41808320 · Publisher ↗
Intellectual property (IP) law is designed to protect the ownership of ideas and stimulate innovation, yet pervasive non-compliance suggests a deep divide between legal mandates and public moral intuitions. We argue that...
Intellectual property (IP) law is designed to protect the ownership of ideas and stimulate innovation, yet pervasive non-compliance suggests a deep divide between legal mandates and public moral intuitions. We argue that this divergence is primarily driven by the fact that moral intuitions about IP are driven by reputation misattribution-situations in which rightful creators are denied due credit while undeserving parties receive undue recognition. In Study 1, we experimentally manipulate key dimensions of reputation misattribution within plagiarism scenarios and find that even subtle changes in reputation misallocation lead to significant shifts in moral judgment. In Study 2, we extend these findings to a range of IP-related contexts, including pseudonymous publication, ghostwriting, and AI-generated content, demonstrating that reputation misallocation consistently predicts moral evaluations regardless of the legal status of the act. These results clarify why some IP violations are condemned more harshly or excused more readily than the law would suggest and highlight the potential for aligning legal frameworks with intrinsic moral expectations rooted in reputational fairness to enhance compliance and legitimacy in IP governance.
Correction to "Enhancing Flexible Transfer of Fractions: The Role of Sequential and Simultaneous Games With Multiple Representations".
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41808307 · Publisher ↗
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Variation in Interactive Gestures by Visual Occlusion and Topic Complexity: Evidence for a Subconscious Theory of Gesture.
Williamson TR, Kinsey K, Piasecki AE
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41808304 · Full text
Gestures are often categorized into types: iconics, metaphorics, and pantomimes (having representational relationships with spoken semantics), deictics (i.e., pointing), emblems (having their own conventional meaning), a...
Gestures are often categorized into types: iconics, metaphorics, and pantomimes (having representational relationships with spoken semantics), deictics (i.e., pointing), emblems (having their own conventional meaning), and beats (temporally coinciding with spoken content for emphasis). These originate from research often involving unnaturalistic paradigms where participants' gestures during responses (e.g., retelling a narrative) are recorded. Approaching these types implicitly requires a stance on why we gesture; a conscious aim to communicate or an unconscious effort to orchestrate speech. Focus on them has led to the understudying of the interactive role gestures can play, where intersubjective acknowledgment and information transfer are central. This paper has two main aims: to profile the interactive role of gesturing as a proportion of all gesturing and to investigate its relevance for why humans gesture. We report data from 48 28-min dyadic conversations with a naïve participant and a confederate, varying interlocutors' gesture visibility and conversation complexity. Our first, preregistered, analysis coded for the six traditional gesture categories, which resulted in ∼28% being uncodeable. Our second analysis asked whether these were interactive, which accounted for nearly 90% of uncoded gestures and a quarter of the entire database. Occluding gesture visibility significantly decreased the amount of interactive gestures participants made, resulting from a drop in interactive gestures made during simple conversations; complex topic interactive gesture frequency is stable between visually available and occluded conditions. Our data support both philosophies, but advocate for a subconscious account: that we gesture for the intrinsic motivations to express ourselves and to be understood.
The Multidimensional Nature of Semantic Transparency in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective: Evidence From Human Intuitions, Computational Estimates, and Processing Data for Chinese Compounds.
Chen J, Chersoni E, Marelli M … +1 more , Huang CR
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41808299 · Full text
Semantic transparency is a key construct for understanding how complex words are represented and processed, yet it has been conceptualized and operationalized in diverse ways across studies. In this study, we validate wh...
Semantic transparency is a key construct for understanding how complex words are represented and processed, yet it has been conceptualized and operationalized in diverse ways across studies. In this study, we validate whether semantic transparency exhibits multidimensional properties across different measures in Mandarin Chinese. We first construct a novel dataset consisting of 2675 nominal compounds, with a rich set of measures from human ratings, traditional distributional semantic models, and recent large language models. To investigate whether they inform the same aspects of this construct, we then examine the latent structure among these measures through exploratory factor analysis. Our factor analysis reveals that this construct is fundamentally multidimensional, with measures assessing the semantic contribution of each constituent and the semantic predictability of overall compounds representing distinct factors in the latent structure. These derived composite factors also predict lexical decision performance, with the factor representing second constituent contribution showing significant facilitatory effects. Our work extends the cross-linguistic validity of the multidimensionality hypothesis of this theoretical construct previously established in English and German to Chinese compounds. Additionally, we provide a valuable resource for future research on the representation and processing of compounds, together with methodological insights into using computational estimates to augment psycholinguistic datasets across dimensions of semantic transparency.
Cognitive Networks for Knowledge Modeling: A Gentle Introduction for Data- and Cognitive Scientists.
Haim E, Stella M
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2026 · PMID 41808239 · Full text
In this paper, we introduce the reader to the field of cognitive network science, that is, the application of network science methods to study human cognition and knowledge structures. Cognitive networks are representati...
In this paper, we introduce the reader to the field of cognitive network science, that is, the application of network science methods to study human cognition and knowledge structures. Cognitive networks are representations of associative knowledge between concepts in a cognitive system apt at acquiring, storing, processing and producing language, that is, the mental lexicon. In a cognitive network, nodes represent concepts with links expressing relations, such as semantic, syntactic, phonological and visual connections, for example, "canine" and "dog" (nodes) linked by "being synonyms" (link). Hence, cognitive networks represent associative knowledge in mathematical, measurable and quantifiable ways. Can such structure be used to gain insights over cognitive phenomena? We explore this research question by reviewing recent, pioneering key applications and limitations of cognitive networks across visual, auditory, and semantic language processing tasks, either in healthy or clinical populations. We also review applications of cognitive networks modeling language acquisition, reconstructing text content and assessing creativity or personality traits in individuals. Our paper also gently introduces the reader to mathematical notations, definitions and measures about single-layer and multiplex networks as well as hypergraphs. Last but not least, across phonological, semantic and syntactic networks, we guide the reader through relevant psychological frameworks, datasets and software packages that might all aid current and future cognitive network scientists. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory Psychology > Theory and Methods Linguistics > Cognitive.
Beyond the Lab: Cognitive Neuroscience in Real-World Contexts.
Kaufhold SP, Borzello M, Rossano F … +1 more , Kirsh D
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2026 · PMID 41807116 · Full text
Cognitive neuroscience has made remarkable advances by conducting rigorously controlled experiments inside the laboratory. However, the generalizability and real-world relevance of these findings remain limited, in part...
Cognitive neuroscience has made remarkable advances by conducting rigorously controlled experiments inside the laboratory. However, the generalizability and real-world relevance of these findings remain limited, in part due to fundamental, often unexamined, assumptions about how cognition operates across species and contexts. In this viewpoint, we critically evaluate three commonly held assumptions underlying current cognitive neuroscience practices: (1) laboratory animals serve as accurate representatives of their wild conspecifics; (2) animal models effectively mirror human cognitive processes; and (3) digital twins provide faithful, functionally equivalent representations of their real-world analogs. We argue that these assumptions, if left unexamined, risk narrowing our understanding of cognition by excluding the behavioral flexibility, environmental variability, and agency that natural settings afford. We advocate for an expanded notion of ecological validity to include the naturalness of both subjects and environments, and we highlight methodological shifts, such as the use of enriched experimental contexts, mobile neuroimaging, and immersive virtual environments. By reassessing these foundational assumptions, we advocate for an approach to cognitive neuroscience that better reflects the complexity of real-world behavior, species-specific cognition, and the environments, physical or virtual, in which cognition is embedded.
Attribution of Selfhood Based on Simple Behavioral Cues: Toward a Pars-Pro-Toto Account.
Pohl J, Nikolovska K, Küster D … +3 more , Maurelli F, Kappas A, Hommel B
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41805038 · Full text
While the necessity of a concept of "self" for understanding human behavior remains subject to debate, it evidently has significance in everyday life: Lay individuals ascribe selves to humans but also to animals and tech...
While the necessity of a concept of "self" for understanding human behavior remains subject to debate, it evidently has significance in everyday life: Lay individuals ascribe selves to humans but also to animals and technical systems, shaping their interactions accordingly. The literature suggests that there are distal behavioral cues eliciting this perception of selfhood and they may be as minimal as simple movement observed as causal. We aimed to identify which types of behavioral cues increase selfhood-attribution to other agents such as robots. Specifically, we compared behavior of nonhumanoid robots suggesting either the presence or absence of behavioral cues for one of the characteristics of causality, equifinality, behavioral efficiency, learning sensitivity, and context sensitivity. Results showed a consistent pattern of increased selfhood-attribution toward robots exhibiting any one of the examined minimal characteristics. Furthermore, most perceived sentient characteristics of the robot were triggered by any single characteristic's cue. These results reflect a Halo effect like pattern: Even a single perceived cue of selfhood-related characteristics may be sufficient to trigger a change in overall selfhood-attribution to robots. We suggest two versions of a Brunswikian model of selfhood-judgment, wherein selfhood is attributed based on the perception of (probably loosely defined) self-related characteristics. We propose that not all characteristics are directly perceived by their corresponding behavioral cues; rather, that the characteristics interact with each other and/or distal cues trigger the perception of more than one characteristic. We term this a Pars-Pro-Toto account as people go way beyond the perceived information when attributing selfhood.
Evidence Against Syntactic Encapsulation in Large Language Models.
McGee TA, Zhang Y, Blank IA
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41805029 · Full text
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in a variety of linguistic tasks. LLMs primarily combine information across words in a sentence using the attention mechan...
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in a variety of linguistic tasks. LLMs primarily combine information across words in a sentence using the attention mechanism, implemented by "attention heads:" these components assign numerical weights linking different words in the input to one another, capturing different relationships between these words. Some attention heads automatically learn to assign weights that accurately encode meaningful linguistic features including, importantly, heads that appear specialized for identifying particular syntactic dependencies. Are syntactic computations in such heads "encapsulated", i.e., impenetrable to the influence of non-syntactic information? Such encapsulated computations would be strikingly different from those of the human mind, where non-syntactic information sources (e.g., semantics) influence parsing from the earliest moments of online processing, and where syntax and semantics are tightly linked in the mental lexicon. Here, we tested whether the activity of "syntax-specialized" attention heads in transformer-based LLMs is modulated by one type of semantic information: plausibility. In each of three LLMs (BERT, GPT-2, and Llama 2), we first identified attention heads specialized for various dependency types; in nearly all cases tested, we then found that implausible semantic information reduces attention between the words that constitute the dependency for which a head is specialized. These results demonstrate that, even in attention heads that are the best a-priori candidates for syntactic encapsulation, syntactic information is penetrable to semantics. These data are broadly consistent with the integration of syntax and semantics in human minds.
A Metacognitive Appraisal of Quitting in Chess.
Purohit H, Srivastava N
Cogn Sci · 2026 Mar · PMID 41805017 · Publisher ↗
Decisions to stop or quit are often described as choices to switch to alternative activities once the current activity ceases to be rewarding. However, popular models of stopping-such as optimal foraging theory and recen...
Decisions to stop or quit are often described as choices to switch to alternative activities once the current activity ceases to be rewarding. However, popular models of stopping-such as optimal foraging theory and recent metacognitive frameworks-fail to fully capture the nuanced differences in behavior between quitting and stopping. While quitting is closely related to stopping, it remains a phenomenologically distinct experience. The absence of a clear, separate definition for quitting motivates the present study. We investigate the contextual and noncontextual factors influencing quitting decisions among chess players, utilizing a large dataset of games from an online chess platform. Our analysis reveals that players tend to persevere in higher skill brackets and against stronger opponents when they are performing poorly. Additionally, a history of quitting increases the likelihood of quitting in future games, although recent quitting episodes can have protective effects. We also find that quitting influences subsequent behavior, with players often playing more games after a recent quit. We discuss these findings within the broader context of resource-rational and metacognitive approaches. Finally, we provide a metacognitive account of quitting decisions with the aim to derive better models of complex decision-making.
The Cross-Linguistic Coordination of Overt Attention and Speech Production as Evidence for a Language of Vision.
Coco MI, Fernandes EG, Arai M … +1 more , Keller F
Cogn Sci · 2026 Feb · PMID 41732037 · Full text
A central question in cognition is how representations are integrated across different modalities, such as language and vision. One prominent hypothesis posits the existence of an abstract, prelinguistic "language of vis...
A central question in cognition is how representations are integrated across different modalities, such as language and vision. One prominent hypothesis posits the existence of an abstract, prelinguistic "language of vision" as a representational system that organizes meaning compositionally, enabling cross-modal integration. This hypothesis predicts that the language of vision operates universally, independent of linguistic surface features such as word order. We conducted eye-tracking experiments where participants described visual scenes in English, Portuguese, and Japanese. By analyzing spoken descriptions alongside eye-movement sequences divided into planning and articulation phases, we demonstrate that semantic similarity between sentences strongly predicts the similarity of associated scan patterns in all three languages, even across scenes and between sentences in different languages. In contrast, the effect of syntactic constraints was secondary and transient: it was restricted to within-language and within-scene comparisons, and temporally confined to the early planning phase of the utterance. Our findings support an interactive account of cross-modal coordination in which a universal language of vision provides stable semantic scaffolding, while syntax serves as a local constraint, primarily active during message linearization.
Thinking of Oneself as Someone: The Structure of Self-Representation.
Hauser J
Cogn Sci · 2026 Feb · PMID 41732034 · Full text
One question we can ask when investigating the nature of self-representation concerns the types of property that must figure in its content. Here, authors have claimed that self-representations must be about spatial, tem...
One question we can ask when investigating the nature of self-representation concerns the types of property that must figure in its content. Here, authors have claimed that self-representations must be about spatial, temporal, bodily, or mental properties. However, we can also ask a second question: how do we need to represent a property to self-represent it? I address this latter question. I argue that a distinction between egocentric and allocentric forms of representation-known from spatial cognition-also applies to representations of other kinds of property. I use examples drawn from animal cognition and developmental psychology to show how creatures allocentrically represent their temporal, bodily, and cognitive properties. These representations are minimal self-representations: they represent one's properties so that an explicit differentiation is made between the system and other objects (or between the system's actual and merely possible properties), they are directly linked to behavior and sensation, and they are immune to error through misidentification. The upshot is a view on which different creatures may self-represent more or fewer kinds of property. More substantive forms of self-representation (for instance, as exemplified by neurotypical adult human beings) then require integrated minimal self-representations of the right kinds of property.
The Effects of Cognitive Fatigue and Articulatory Suppression on Statistical Language Learning Depend on the Strength of Cognitive Resources.
Smalle EHM, Karantinou E, Möttönen R
Cogn Sci · 2026 Jan · PMID 41730120 · Full text
In adults, cognitive fatigue enhances statistical language learning-the ability to detect repeating hidden patterns in continuous speech, and a core component of implicit language acquisition. This supports the cognitive...
In adults, cognitive fatigue enhances statistical language learning-the ability to detect repeating hidden patterns in continuous speech, and a core component of implicit language acquisition. This supports the cognitive cost hypothesis, which proposes that the adult cognitive architecture, especially executive functions (EFs), constrains effortless language learning. In contrast, articulatory suppression impairs statistical language learning, suggesting the involvement of lower-level auditory-motor mechanisms in acquiring new linguistic knowledge from speech streams. This study examined whether the effects of cognitive fatigue and articulatory suppression on statistical language learning depend on individuals' cognitive resources (CRs). Specifically, we tested whether individual differences in late-developing EFs (1) are associated with statistical language learning ability and (2) modulate the effects of cognitive fatigue and articulatory suppression. Fifty Dutch-speaking first-year university students participated in a multisession statistical-learning experiment. EFs were assessed using three tasks measuring working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Cognitive fatigue was induced using a time-loaded dual N-back task at participants' maximum speed prior to speech exposure. Articulatory suppression was induced by instructing participants to whisper continuously while listening to the speech stream. Learning was assessed using a post-exposure two-alternative forced-choice recognition task, where participants selected between a pseudoword from the stream and a foil. Based on a factor and cluster analysis of EF scores, participants were grouped into high and low CR groups. In line with the cognitive cost hypothesis, the high CR group performed less well in statistical language learning than the low CR group but benefited from cognitive fatigue. Articulatory suppression impaired statistical learning in the low CR group only, suggesting they rely more on auditory-motor mechanisms. These findings demonstrate that cognitive functioning impacts statistical language learning, suggesting that the ability to acquire new linguistic knowledge from speech streams depends on the interaction between higher-level cognitive and lower-level auditory-motor mechanisms.
Theoretical Perspectives on the Minimal and Narrative Self in the Schizophrenia Spectrum: An Integrative Review.
Delcourt F, Cowan HR, Sibéoni J … +7 more , Allé MC, Rasmussen ACR, Ritunnano R, Giersch A, Lo Monte F, Englebert J, Pachoud B
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2026 · PMID 41699205 · Full text
The self and its disorders in schizophrenia have been studied extensively over recent decades. Much of this literature is grounded in a bipartite understanding of the self, distinguishing the pre-reflective, minimal self...
The self and its disorders in schizophrenia have been studied extensively over recent decades. Much of this literature is grounded in a bipartite understanding of the self, distinguishing the pre-reflective, minimal self from the reflective, narrative self. However, few studies have systematically examined the links between disturbances at these two levels of self. This integrative review addresses this gap by analyzing both theoretical and empirical contributions. Three theoretical models are described. The Structural model posits that minimal self-disorders hierarchically give rise to narrative self-disturbances and the schizophrenia phenotype, with a primarily pathogenic focus. The Dialectical model emphasizes reciprocal interactions between minimal and narrative self-disturbances, generating the schizophrenia phenotype with both pathogenic and salutogenic implications. The Contextual model highlights social, territorial, and biological dimensions of the self and its disorders in context. Empirical studies specifically addressing the mechanistic links between minimal and narrative self-disturbances remain scarce and preliminary. Overall, the literature appears preliminary and occasionally speculative, yet it suggests several promising avenues for future research and clinically relevant applications. This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Consciousness Psychology > Theory and Methods.
Psychological Value Theory: Predicting Initial Romantic Partner Choice From a General-Purpose, Computational Cognitive Model of Value-Based Choice.
Cohen DJ, White TD, Luo S
Cogn Sci · 2026 Feb · PMID 41697948 · Full text
Mate value is theorized to be a key driver of romantic partner choice, yet the cognitive mechanism underlying romantic partner choice remains poorly understood. Here, we assess whether initial romantic partner choice can...
Mate value is theorized to be a key driver of romantic partner choice, yet the cognitive mechanism underlying romantic partner choice remains poorly understood. Here, we assess whether initial romantic partner choice can be predicted by a general-purpose, computational cognitive model of value and choice. To do so, we enlist Psychological Value Theory (PVT), which predicts both choice and decision reaction time (RT) simultaneously. To establish the scientific controls necessary to test PVT's strong a priori predictions, we use discrete choice experiments. Experiment 1 tested choices between partners described by single features, while Experiment 2 investigated how the values of multiple features are integrated. PVT's predictions were highly accurate across both experiments, accounting for over 85% of the variance in choice and RT for groups and individuals. Critically, Experiment 2 revealed that people integrate multiple features via a Biased Average algorithm, where the most positive feature holds disproportionate influence. These findings indicate that initial romantic partner choice recruits a general-purpose, value-based decision mechanism, providing a computational framework that can be extended to model partner choice in more complex, real-world contexts.
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