Cognitive Science[JOURNAL]
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200 papers
The Co-Structuring of Gesture-Vocal Dynamics: An Exploration in Karnatak Music Performance.
Pearson L, Nuttall T, Pouw W
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41319266 · Full text
In music performance contexts, vocalists tend to gesture with hand and upper body movements as they sing. But how does this gesturing relate to the sung phrases, and how do singers' gesturing styles differ from each othe...
In music performance contexts, vocalists tend to gesture with hand and upper body movements as they sing. But how does this gesturing relate to the sung phrases, and how do singers' gesturing styles differ from each other? In this study, we present a quantitative analysis and visualization pipeline that characterizes the multidimensional co-structuring of body movements and vocalizations in vocal performers. We apply this to a dataset of performances within the Karnatak music tradition of South India, including audio and motion tracking data of 44 performances by three expert Karnatak vocalists, openly published with this report. Our results show that time-varying features of head and hand gestures tend to be more similar when the concurrent vocal time-varying features are also more similar. While for each performer we find clear co-structuring of sound and movement, they each show their own characteristic salient dimensions (e.g., hand position, head acceleration) through which movement co-structures with singing. Our time-series analyses thereby provide a computational approach to characterizing individual vocalists' unique multimodal vocal-gesture co-structuring profiles. We also show that co-structuring clearly reduces degrees of freedom of the multimodal performance such that motifs that sound alike tend to co-structure with gestures that move alike. The current method can be applied to any multimodally ensembled signals in both human and nonhuman communication, to determine co-structuring profiles and explore any reduction in degrees of freedom. In the context of Karnatak singing performance, the current analysis is an important starting point for further experimental study of gesture-vocal synergies.
Assessing Others' Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures.
Avcı C, Özer D, Eskenazi T … +1 more , Göksun T
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41306008 · Publisher ↗
As part of the multimodal language system, gestures play a vital role for listeners, by capturing attention and providing information. Similarly, disfluencies serve as a cue for the listeners about one's knowledge on a t...
As part of the multimodal language system, gestures play a vital role for listeners, by capturing attention and providing information. Similarly, disfluencies serve as a cue for the listeners about one's knowledge on a topic. In two studies, the first study with natural and the second study with controlled stimuli, we asked whether the combination of gestures and speech disfluencies would affect how listeners made feeling-of-another's-knowing (FOAK) judgments regarding speakers' knowledge states. In Study 1, we showed participants videos of speakers providing navigational instruction. We manipulated the speakers' use of gestures and speech disfluencies, whereas facial expressions, words, and additional visual cues (e.g., background, clothes, objects) naturally occurred. We found that fluent speech elicited higher FOAK ratings than disfluent speech, but no significant effect was found for gestures. In the follow-up Study 2, we examined the same disfluency-gesture interaction in a more controlled setting using video stimuli with an actress controlling for background, intonation, and word choice, as well as iconic and beat gesture types as gesture subcategories. Participants also filled out the Gesture Awareness Scale. Results were identical with the first study, in which only the disfluent speech received significantly lower FOAK ratings, revealing no effects of gesture use or type. These findings suggest that individuals may use certain communicative cues more than others, particularly in the context of assessing others' knowledge.
Influence of Visual and Action Experiences on Sensorimotor Simulation During Action Verb Processing: The Roles of Motor Perspective and Personal Pronouns.
Zhou T, Mou H, Liu L … +1 more , Wang Y
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41306005 · Publisher ↗
The theory of embodied simulation posits that semantic processing related to actions involves the simulation of sensorimotor experiences, similar to action recognition, which also activates the action observation network...
The theory of embodied simulation posits that semantic processing related to actions involves the simulation of sensorimotor experiences, similar to action recognition, which also activates the action observation network. Visual and action experiences obtained through vision and proprioception can facilitate the processing of action verbs via this simulation process. However, the differential effects of these two types of action representations on the processing of action verbs remain to be explored. This study uses an action-language priming paradigm and three behavioral experiments to explore how visual and action experiences from different perspectives affect sensorimotor simulation in action verb processing. Experiment 1 studied how action image perspectives (first-person vs. third-person) and image-word congruency affect action verb priming. Experiment 2 examined the role of the action agent in perspective priming. Experiment 3 investigated that motor experience congruency, jointly activated by visual perspective and personal pronouns, influences action verb processing. Experiment 1 showed faster action verb processing with the first-person perspective (1PP) during prime-target incongruency and non-mirrored conditions, indicating better action control and prediction, enhancing sensorimotor simulation. Experiment 2 found faster responses with the 1PP during incongruency, with no effect from the action agent on sensorimotor simulation. Experiment 3 showed faster reaction times for prime-target congruency than incongruency, with no effect of perspective congruency. These results show that action verb processing involves simulating sensorimotor experiences from specific perspectives, emphasizing the key role of action experience and offering new evidence for action verb representation theories.
Language-Invariant Strategies of Navigating Transitions in Joint Activities: Forms and Functions of Coordination Markers.
Morozova N, Stoll S, Bangerter A
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41306002 · Full text
Goal-directed tasks unfold in hierarchies of larger and smaller sub-tasks, and pursuing them jointly implies that participants must agree on whether they are continuing an ongoing sub-task (horizontal transition) or swit...
Goal-directed tasks unfold in hierarchies of larger and smaller sub-tasks, and pursuing them jointly implies that participants must agree on whether they are continuing an ongoing sub-task (horizontal transition) or switching to the next sub-task (vertical transition). Previous research indicates that humans employ short and efficient coordination markers as procedural conventions to distinguish horizontal (e.g., in English, with yeah and uh-huh) and vertical transitions (with okay, all right). However, it remains unclear (1) whether such words serve as potentially universal coordination devices and (2) which properties make some markers more suitable for horizontal versus vertical transition contexts. We hypothesized that horizontal transitions in ongoing sub-tasks are associated with higher dual-tasking interference between verbal coordination and the nonlinguistic task, therefore, constraining the lexicality of coordination markers. In our experimental study, we assessed how speakers of three typologically diverse languages (Swiss French, Vietnamese, and Shipibo-Konibo; N = 232) used coordination markers to navigate a joint LEGO-building task. We found that in each language, coordination markers comprise a system of transition-specific conventions and that participants strategically deployed markers with minimal lexical and acoustic forms (uh-huh, mm) and repetitions in horizontal transitions, while more lexicalized markers (e.g., okay) in vertical transitions. Our findings suggest that (1) coordination markers are potentially universal linguistic devices for navigating joint activities and (2) the forms of coordination markers might be shaped by the constraints of their primary interaction context (here, horizontal and vertical transitions). Our study provides new evidence of how interactional settings might selectively shape language use through the forces of convergent language evolution.
With or Without a System: How Category-Specific and System-Wide Cognitive Biases Shape Word Order.
Holtz A, Kirby S, Culbertson J
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41305994 · Full text
Certain recurrent features of language characterize the way a whole language system is structured. By contrast, others target specific categories of items within those wider systems. For example, languages tend to exhibi...
Certain recurrent features of language characterize the way a whole language system is structured. By contrast, others target specific categories of items within those wider systems. For example, languages tend to exhibit consistent order of heads and dependents across different phrases-a system-wide regularity known as harmony. While this tendency is generally robust, some specific syntactic categories appear to deviate from the trend. We examine one such case, the order of adjectives and genitives, which do not exhibit a typological tendency for consistent order with respect to the noun. Instead, adjectives tend to follow and genitives precede the noun. Across two silent gesture experiments, we test the hypothesis that these category-specific ordering tendencies reflect cognitive biases that favor (i) conveying objects before properties that modify them, but (ii) conveying expressions of possession before possessors. While our hypothesis is thus that these biases are semantic in nature-they impact preferences for how concepts are ordered-the claim is that they may have downstream effects on conventionalized syntax by contributing to an over-representation of postnominal adjectives and prenominal genitives. We find that these biases affect gesture order in contexts where no conventionalized system is in place. When a system is in place, participants learn that system, and category-specific biases do not impact their learning. Our results suggest that different contexts reveal distinct types of cognitive biases; some are active during learning and others are active during language creation.
Constraints on Exchange Edits During Noisy-Channel Inference.
Bader M, Meng M
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41289364 · Full text
According to the noisy channel framework of sentence processing, communication can succeed even when the input is corrupted because comprehenders rationally infer the speaker's intended meaning based on the prior probabi...
According to the noisy channel framework of sentence processing, communication can succeed even when the input is corrupted because comprehenders rationally infer the speaker's intended meaning based on the prior probability of the literal interpretation and the probability that the input has been corrupted by noise. To test whether and under what conditions comprehenders consider word exchanges as a possible source of corruption, we ran five experiments on processing three types of simple German sentences: subject-before-object sentences (SO), object-before-subject sentences (OS), and passive sentences. Critical sentences had implausible meanings, but could be "repaired" by exchanging function words or by exchanging nouns. Experiments 1 through 4 presented sentences along with yes-no questions to probe interpretation. Implausible SO and passive sentences consistently elicited few nonliteral interpretations, whereas many nonliteral interpretations were given to implausible OS sentences. This was true regardless of whether word exchanges had to cross a main verb or an auxiliary, and it was more pronounced if the overall proportion of implausible sentences was low. We conclude that when answering yes-no questions, word exchanges are considered with function words of the same syntactic category, but not with nouns, and only when they result in a more likely syntactic structure. Experiment 5 showed that when explicitly asked to correct implausible sentences, comprehenders use noun exchanges frequently. We propose that the results for both yes-no questions and explicit corrections follow if the prior probability assigned to implausible sentences differs between tasks.
The Bias-and-Expertise Model: A Bayesian Network Model of Political Source Characteristics.
Young DJ, de-Wit LH
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41261846 · Full text
Perceptions of source credibility may play a role in major societal challenges like political polarization and the spread of misinformation as citizens disagree over which sources of political information are credible an...
Perceptions of source credibility may play a role in major societal challenges like political polarization and the spread of misinformation as citizens disagree over which sources of political information are credible and sometimes trust untrustworthy sources. Cognitive scientists have developed Bayesian Network models of how people integrate perceptions of source credibility when learning from information provided by sources, but these models do not involve the crucial source characteristic in politics: bias. Biased sources make claims that align with a particular political agenda, whether or not they are true. We present a novel Bayesian Network model which integrates perceptions of a source's bias as well as their expertise. We demonstrate the model's validity for predicting how people will update beliefs and perceptions of bias and expertise in response to testimony across two studies, the second being a preregistered conceptual replication and extension of the first.
Coming Up Next: The Extent of the Perceptual Window in Comic Reading.
Kirtley C, Murray C, Vaughan PB … +1 more , Tatler BW
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41261841 · Full text
Recent models of sequential narratives suggest that readers form predictions about upcoming panels as they read. However, previous work has considered these predictions only in terms of currently viewed information. In t...
Recent models of sequential narratives suggest that readers form predictions about upcoming panels as they read. However, previous work has considered these predictions only in terms of currently viewed information. In the current studies, we investigate to what extent readers are using information from un-fixated panels in comic stories. Using the moving-window paradigm, we studied whether reading behavior was disrupted when upcoming panels were unavailable to the reader, in short comic strips (Experiment 1) and multipage comics (Experiment 2). Both studies showed the greatest disruption to reading when all peripheral information was removed, but such changes persisted when only partial peripheral information was available. The results indicate that readers are making use of information from at least two panels ahead of the current fixation location. We consider these findings in relation to the PINS model of comic reading, and how the role of peripheral information might be further explored.
The Mechanistic Framework of Alignment: A Unified Model.
Wynn CJ, Branigan HP, Borrie SA
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41220131 · Full text
Conversational alignment, also known as accommodation, entrainment, interpersonal synchrony, and convergence, is defined as the tendency for interlocutors to exhibit similarity in their communicative behaviors. There hav...
Conversational alignment, also known as accommodation, entrainment, interpersonal synchrony, and convergence, is defined as the tendency for interlocutors to exhibit similarity in their communicative behaviors. There have been many theories and explanations set forth as to why alignment occurs and, accordingly, the mechanisms that underlie it. To date, however, alignment research has been largely siloed, with different research teams often examining alignment through the lens of a single theoretical account. Considering causal mechanisms in tandem offers a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the dynamic nature of alignment, its purposes, and its consequences. Accordingly, we propose the Mechanistic Framework of Alignment (MFA), a qualitative conceptual model that integrates existing theories of conversational alignment into one unified framework. To explain this framework, we first review five alignment mechanisms, discussing the underlying assumptions, contributions, and supporting evidence for each. We then introduce two overarching factors-conversational goal and alignment type-that are critical for understanding when and how these mechanisms give rise to aligned behavior. Illustrative examples demonstrate how the relative weightings of each mechanism interact with these contextual variables. Finally, we conclude with directions for how future research can extend and refine this framework and how the MFA can support future work in this area.
Shared and Distinct Phonemic Features in Sound-Shape and Sound-Size Correspondences: A Study of Mandarin Chinese.
Chen YC, Zhao M, Chang YH … +1 more , Huang PC
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41220120 · Publisher ↗
Certain speech sounds are consistently associated with visual properties such as shape and size, a phenomenon known as crossmodal correspondences. Well-established examples demonstrate that the vowel /u/ is often linked...
Certain speech sounds are consistently associated with visual properties such as shape and size, a phenomenon known as crossmodal correspondences. Well-established examples demonstrate that the vowel /u/ is often linked to rounder and larger objects, while /i/ is associated with more angular and smaller ones. However, most previous research utilized English pseudowords, leaving a gap in our understanding of how these correspondences manifest in tonal languages. The current study extends the investigation to Mandarin Chinese, a tonal language, to examine the roles of vowels, consonants, and lexical tones in sound-shape and sound-size correspondences. Participants heard consonant-vowel-tone syllables and rated each on a 5-point scale with rounder/more angular shapes or larger/smaller icons at opposite ends. The results confirmed the established vowel effect: /u/ was associated with rounder and larger patterns than /i/. Results for consonants demonstrated that the voiced-unvoiced contrast predicted sound-shape judgments, while the aspirated-unaspirated contrast, which is less prominent in English, influenced sound-size judgments. Lexical tones also revealed systematic effects, with Tone 1 (flat), Tone 2 (rising), Tone 3 (falling-rising), and Tone 4 (falling) progressively matched from rounder to more angular shapes, while Tones 1 and 2 were linked to larger sizes than Tones 3 and 4. These phonemic features reliably predicted crossmodal correspondences even when controlling for acoustic properties, suggesting robust mappings between phonemic and visual representations. This study highlights the common vowel effects across Mandarin and English while revealing unique influences of consonants and lexical tones, underscoring the role of language experience in shaping crossmodal correspondences.
Humans Select Subgoals That Balance Immediate and Future Cognitive Costs During Physical Assembly.
Binder FJ, Mattar MG, J Kirsh D … +1 more , Fan JE
Cogn Sci · 2025 Nov · PMID 41190416 · Full text
From building a new piece of furniture to replacing a lightbulb, people must often figure out how to assemble an object from its parts. Although these physical assembly problems take on many different forms, they also po...
From building a new piece of furniture to replacing a lightbulb, people must often figure out how to assemble an object from its parts. Although these physical assembly problems take on many different forms, they also pose common challenges. Chief among these is the question of how to break a complex problem down into subproblems that are easier to solve. What principles determine why some strategies for decomposing a problem are favored over others? Here, we investigate the decisions that people make when considering different visual subgoals in the context of attempting to build a series of virtual block towers. We hypothesized that people favor subgoals achieving a balance between how much progress the subgoals would help achieve toward the final goal and how effortful they would be to solve. We tested this hypothesis by defining several computational models of planning and subgoal selection, then evaluating how well these models predicted human planning and subgoal selection behavior on the same problems. Our results suggest that participants rapidly differentiated the computational costs of otherwise similarly ambitious subgoals, and used these judgments to drive subgoal selection. Moreover, our findings are consistent with the possibility that participants were not only sensitive to the immediate computational costs associated with solving the very next subgoal, but also future costs that might be incurred when attempting the rest of the problem. Taken together, these results contribute to our understanding of how humans make efficient use of cognitive resources to solve complex, grounded planning problems.
Inner Speech Decoding: A Comprehensive Review.
Almufareh MF, Kausar S, Humayun M … +2 more , Tehsin S, Farooq A
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2025 · PMID 41177674 · Publisher ↗
Inner speech decoding is the process of identifying silently generated speech from neural signals. In recent years, this candidate technology has gained momentum as a possible way to support communication in severely imp...
Inner speech decoding is the process of identifying silently generated speech from neural signals. In recent years, this candidate technology has gained momentum as a possible way to support communication in severely impaired populations. Specifically, this approach promises hope for people with a variety of physical or neurological disabilities who need alternative means of verbal expression. This review covers recording modalities that range from the noninvasive EEG to the high-density electrocorticography and discusses how linear discriminant analysis, deep convolutional networks, and hybrid fusion of EEG with fMRI are integrated into machine learning strategies to infer covert speech. This review synthesizes evidence to suggest that small vocabularies, under controlled conditions, can yield relatively reasonable accuracy while further refining the decoding outcome via context-based approaches. The impact of sensor quality, training data size, and domain adaptation is illustrated by focusing on public datasets of imagined or articulated speech. Throughout the article, the methodological standards emerging across laboratories will be discussed, emphasizing that effective inner speech recognition involves high-quality preprocessing, subject calibration, and informed modeling choices balanced against computational power for interpretability. In addition to technical advancements, this review also examines the ethical, societal, and regulatory challenges surrounding inner speech decoding, including brain data privacy, neural rights, informed consent, and user trust. Addressing these interdisciplinary issues is critical for the responsible development and real-world adoption of such technologies. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Computation Computer Science and Robotics > Machine Learning.
From Human Child to Grey Parrot: Exploring a Common Model of Word Meaning Extension Across Species.
Fishkin M, Chang S, Xu Y
Cogn Sci · 2025 Oct · PMID 41147627 · Full text
Word meaning extension refers to the process by which a single word form develops multiple related meanings. Prior studies demonstrate that meaning extension at diverse timescales, from decades-long historical change and...
Word meaning extension refers to the process by which a single word form develops multiple related meanings. Prior studies demonstrate that meaning extension at diverse timescales, from decades-long historical change and to month-long changes in child overextension, is accounted for by models grounded in conceptual relations across knowledge types. Whether this framework generalizes to other species remains an open question. We address this question with a probabilistic model of overextension based on various knowledge types to predict word choice of nonhuman animals. As a starting point, we compared cases of overextension from Apollo - a grey parrot who has acquired some English words - to the cases of overextension documented in child language acquisition. We apply an established model of child overextension to a novel parrot dataset of over 200 referent-utterance pairs (e.g., bead-"ball") collected from Apollo's YouTube channel and test whether the child model can predict parrot word choice. Our results show that Apollo's overextension can be predicted by the multimodal model of child overextension better than baseline models that rely on frequency or sound similarity. We also find independent evidence supporting the role of different knowledge types from Alex, a grey parrot, who features prominently in prior research on animal acquisition of human language. Our findings suggest that a common model might account for the cognitive ability of word overextension identifiable in a species that diverged from humans about 320 million years ago. We discuss potential limitations and future research directions that may further strengthen the current findings.
The Compass of Commitment: Control Mechanisms Underpinning the Sense of Individual and Joint Commitment.
Kaufmann A, Fanghella M, Michael J
Cogn Sci · 2025 Oct · PMID 41146608 · Full text
The sense of commitment directs us toward our goals, shielding us from distractions and temptations, and thereby facilitates a wide range of cooperative activities and institutions characteristic of our species. Building...
The sense of commitment directs us toward our goals, shielding us from distractions and temptations, and thereby facilitates a wide range of cooperative activities and institutions characteristic of our species. Building upon recent research, this paper identifies cognitive, motivational, and social factors that elicit or enhance the sense of commitment. It surveys studies on cognitive and motivational mechanisms, including control mechanisms, that may support the sense of commitment. This research is organised into a framework that enables us to relate these distinct mechanisms to one another. It also allows us to formulate novel hypotheses about how these mechanisms may interact to help us stay on course toward our goals .
The Relationship Between Surprisal and Prosodic Prominence in Conversation Reflects Intelligibility-Oriented Pressures.
Clark TH, Poliak M, Regev T … +3 more , Haskins AJ, Robertson C, Gibson E
Cogn Sci · 2025 Oct · PMID 41144721 · Full text
Conversation is a dynamic, multimodal activity involving the exchange of complex streams of information like words, prosody, gesture, eye contact, and backchannels. Understanding how these different channels interact in...
Conversation is a dynamic, multimodal activity involving the exchange of complex streams of information like words, prosody, gesture, eye contact, and backchannels. Understanding how these different channels interact in naturalistic scenarios is essential for understanding the mechanisms governing human communication. Past studies suggested that the duration of words is tied to their predictability in context, but it remains unclear whether this relationship is speaker-oriented (e.g., retrieval or production-based) or due to listener-oriented, intelligibility-based pressures (i.e., emphasizing unpredictable words to ease comprehension). This study aims to examine the relationship between predictability and additional acoustic variables, to test how much intelligibility-oriented principles impact conversation. We use the GPT-2 large language model to assess the relationship between surprisal, a measure of unpredictability, and several variables known to play an important role in conversation-the prosodic features of duration, intensity, and pitch. We perform this analysis on the CANDOR corpus of naturalistic spoken video call conversation between strangers in English. In keeping with previous results using n-gram predictability, we find that GPT-2 surprisal predicts significantly higher values for duration. Moreover, surprisal also predicts maximum pitch and pitch range even when controlling for duration, with mixed evidence for an effect of surprisal on intensity. Additionally, we investigated listener backchannels (short interjections like "yeah" or "mhm") and found that listener backchannels tended to be accompanied and followed by a spike in the surprisal of speakers' words. Finally, we demonstrate a divergence between the effect of context window size on the model fit of surprisal to maximum pitch and to other variables. The results provide additional support for intelligibility-based accounts, which hold that language production is sensitive to a pressure for successful communication, not just speaker-oriented pressures. Our data and analysis code are shared: https://osf.io/sqpn6/?view_only=e4d9e36c68b54863bc781e359463e1fe.
Are Transposed-Phoneme Effects Observed When Listening to Sentences?
Dufour S, Mirault J, Grainger J
Cogn Sci · 2025 Oct · PMID 41140042 · Publisher ↗
In the present study, we asked a simple question: Can transposed-phoneme effects, previously found with nonwords presented in isolation, be observed when the transposed-phoneme nonwords are embedded in a sequence of spok...
In the present study, we asked a simple question: Can transposed-phoneme effects, previously found with nonwords presented in isolation, be observed when the transposed-phoneme nonwords are embedded in a sequence of spoken words that, apart from the transposed-phoneme nonwords, formed a correct sentence? The results are clear-cut. We found no evidence for a transposed-phoneme effect during spoken sentence processing either in a nonword detection task (Experiments 1-3) or in a correct/incorrect decision task (Experiment 4), where "correctness" could either concern individual words (i.e., the presence of a nonword in the sequence) or the entire sequence (i.e., a grammatical decision). Hence, the presence of nonwords in spoken sentences was not harder to detect whether they were created by transposing (e.g., /ʃoloka/) or substituting (e.g., /ʃoropa/) two consonants in the corresponding base-words (e.g., /ʃokola/ chocolat "chocolate"). In contrast, a robust transposed-letter effect was observed during sentence reading (Experiment 5), using the same word/nonword sequences and the same correct/incorrect decision task as in Experiment 4. We discuss the possibility that the greater seriality imposed by spoken sentences in the processing of spoken words leads to a more precise encoding of phoneme order, thus cancelling the transposed-phoneme effect. Sentence reading, on the other hand, would involve more parallel processing, hence the robust transposed-letter effect found with written sentences.
Time Spent Thinking in Online Chess Reflects the Value of Computation.
Russek EM, Acosta-Kane D, van Opheusden B … +2 more , Mattar MG, Griffiths TL
Cogn Sci · 2025 Oct · PMID 41137861 · Full text
Human planning tends to be efficient, focusing on a relatively small number of options when considering future paths. Recent proposals have suggested that this efficiency reflects intelligent deployment of the limited re...
Human planning tends to be efficient, focusing on a relatively small number of options when considering future paths. Recent proposals have suggested that this efficiency reflects intelligent deployment of the limited resources available for planning. A prediction of this and related proposals is that when individuals spend time thinking should depend on the benefits and costs of additional computation. We tested this hypothesis by measuring how much time humans spent thinking before acting in over 12 million online chess games. Players spent more time thinking in board positions where additional computation was more beneficial. This relationship was greater in stronger players, and was strengthened by considering only the information available to the player at the time of choice. A simple model based on measuring the actual cost of spending time thinking in online chess was able to capture qualitative features of this relationship. These results provide evidence that the amount of time humans spend thinking is appropriately sensitive to the value of computation.
Individualization Without Internalization.
van Dijk L
Cogn Sci · 2025 Oct · PMID 41131793 · Full text
What is that "inner" voice that keeps you up at night or that tells you to stop as you reach for another chocolate? Advances in embodied cognitive science raise doubts about explaining the "self" as the result of interna...
What is that "inner" voice that keeps you up at night or that tells you to stop as you reach for another chocolate? Advances in embodied cognitive science raise doubts about explaining the "self" as the result of internalizing our shared world. On that emerging view, there is nothing to transport from outside to inside the skull. But, if not an inner state of mind, then how should we understand the experience of a self? This paper develops a relational approach to individualization by aligning ecological thinking with practice theory through Meadian considerations. On this account, we continuously experience a meaningful world, filled with possibilities for action, tied to things in places and practices. Practices are intergenerational processes in which materials get organized by what we do, while in turn organizing us. Becoming a "self" requires learning to attend to such communal organizations as one's relation to the world expands across development. As we learn to engage various such organizations skillfully, we can experience them responding to us. Situated across practices, the "self" develops as a reciprocal relation between multiple timescales: notably between communal practices and a person's skilled activities. When we close our eyes and our thoughts come to the fore, we experience this reciprocal relation directly. To get this relational self into view, psychology needs to get out of our heads and study the worldly conditions that make us.
Visual Statistical Learning in Children Aged 3-9 Years.
Rogachev A, Logvinenko T, Rebreikina A … +1 more , Sysoeva O
Cogn Sci · 2025 Oct · PMID 41131791 · Publisher ↗
Visual statistical learning (visual SL) is the ability to implicitly extract statistical patterns from visual stimuli. Visual SL could be assessed using online measures, evaluating reaction times (RTs) to stimuli during...
Visual statistical learning (visual SL) is the ability to implicitly extract statistical patterns from visual stimuli. Visual SL could be assessed using online measures, evaluating reaction times (RTs) to stimuli during task performance, and offline measures, which assess recognition of the presented patterns. We examined 96 children aged 3-9 years using a visual SL task that included online and offline measures. In the online phase, children viewed sequences of cartoon aliens presented one at a time, organized into triplets. The task was to press a button to two target stimuli: one predictable (the last alien in the triplet), and one unpredictable (the first in the triplet). In the offline phase, children performed a two-alternative-forced choice task, where they viewed two triplets and selected the one matching the sequence from the online phase. In online measures, we observed a gradual increase in RT for unpredictable stimulus and a slight decrease in RT for predictable stimulus over the experiment, with fewer errors for predictable stimulus, indicating an SL effect. In offline measures, the SL effect was also observed, though less robust: recognition rates for correct triplets exceeded chance level only for triplets containing predictable stimuli. Notably, while online measures remained stable across age, offline recognition rates increased with age, suggesting a link to the development of cognitive functions needed for explicit task performance. We propose that SL is not purely an implicit process but rather an active learning process shaped by experimental task requirements and goal setting.
Characterizing the Large-Scale Structure of Multimodal Semantic Networks.
Marjieh R, van Rijn P, Sucholutsky I … +3 more , Lee H, Jacoby N, Griffiths TL
Cogn Sci · 2025 Oct · PMID 41131782 · Full text
Humans organize semantic knowledge into complex networks that encode relations between concepts. The structure of those networks has broad implications for human cognitive processes, and for theories of semantic developm...
Humans organize semantic knowledge into complex networks that encode relations between concepts. The structure of those networks has broad implications for human cognitive processes, and for theories of semantic development. Evidence from large lexical networks such as those derived from word associations suggest that semantic networks are characterized by high sparsity and clustering while maintaining short average paths between concepts, a phenomenon known as a "small-world" network. It has also been argued that those networks are "scale-free," meaning that the number of connections (or degree) between concepts follows a power-law distribution, whereby most concepts have few connections, while a few have many. However, the scale-free property is still debated, and the extent to which the lexical evidence reflects the naturally occurring semantic regularities of the environment has not been investigated systematically. To address this, we collected and analyzed semantic descriptors, human evaluations, and similarity judgments from four large datasets of naturalistic stimuli across three modalities (visual, auditory, and audio-visual) comprising 7916 stimuli and 610,841 human responses. By connecting concepts that co-occur as descriptors of the same stimuli, we construct "multimodal" semantic networks. We show that these networks exhibit a clear small-world structure with a degree distribution that is best captured by a truncated power law (i.e., the most-connected concepts are less common than predicted by a perfect power law). We further show that these networks are predictive of human sensory judgments on these domains, as well as reaction times in an independent lexical decision task. Finally, we show that multimodal networks also share overlapping themes with previously analyzed lexical networks, which upon a more rigorous reanalysis are revealed to be truncated too. Our findings shed new light on the origins of the structure of semantic networks by tying it to the semantic regularities of the environment.
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