Can the prosocial benefits of episodic simulation transfer to different people and situational contexts?
Cognition. 2024 Mar;244:105718. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105718. Epub 2024 Jan 13.ABSTRACTPrevious research has found that episodic simulation of events of helping others can effectively enhance intentions to help the same person involved and the identical situational context as the imagined scenarios. This 'prosocial simulation effect' is argued to reflect, at least in part, associative memory mechanisms whereby the simulation is reactivated when in the same situation as that imagined. However, to date, no study has examined systematically whether this 'prosocial simulation effect' can be transferred to response scen...
Source: Cognition - January 14, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Ding-Cheng Peng Sarah Cowie David Moreau Donna Rose Addis Source Type: research
Statistical learning of syllable sequences as trajectories through a perceptual similarity space
Cognition. 2024 Mar;244:105689. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105689. Epub 2024 Jan 13.ABSTRACTLearning from sequential statistics is a general capacity common across many cognitive domains and species. One form of statistical learning (SL) - learning to segment "words" from continuous streams of speech syllables in which the only segmentation cue is ostensibly the transitional (or conditional) probability from one syllable to the next - has been studied in great detail. Typically, this phenomenon is modeled as the calculation of probabilities over discrete, featureless units. Here we present an alternative model, in which...
Source: Cognition - January 14, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Wendy Qi Jason D Zevin Source Type: research
Word meaning is complex: Language-related generalization differences in autistic adults
Cognition. 2024 Mar;244:105691. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105691. Epub 2024 Jan 12.ABSTRACTThe current study marries two important observations. First, there is a growing recognition that word meanings need to be flexibly extended in new ways as new contexts arise. Second, as evidenced primarily within the perceptual domain, autistic individuals tend to find generalization more challenging while showing stronger veridical memory in comparison to their neurotypical peers. Here we report that a group of 80 autistic adults finds it more challenging to flexibly extend the meanings of familiar words in new ways than a group...
Source: Cognition - January 13, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Nicole Cuneo Sammy Floyd Adele E Goldberg Source Type: research
Motivational drivers of costly information search
Cognition. 2024 Mar;244:105715. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105715. Epub 2024 Jan 11.ABSTRACTAcquiring information that aids decision-making is subject to a trade-off of accuracy versus cost, given that time, effort, or money are required to obtain decision-relevant information. Three studies (N = 2010) investigated the motivational dynamics shaping the priorities that govern this trade-off. Motivational orientations related to both the decision-making process and its outcome were examined. Regulatory focus theory describes two broad orientations to goal pursuit: promotion focus, prioritizing eager achievement, versus pr...
Source: Cognition - January 11, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Michalis Mamakos Galen V Bodenhausen Source Type: research
Stimulus awareness is necessary for both instrumental learning and instrumental responding to previously learned stimuli
Cognition. 2024 Mar;244:105716. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105716. Epub 2024 Jan 6.ABSTRACTInstrumental conditioning is a crucial part of adaptive behaviour, allowing agents to selectively interact with stimuli in their environment. Recent evidence suggests that instrumental conditioning cannot proceed without stimulus awareness. However, whether accurate unconscious instrumental responding can emerge from consciously acquired knowledge of the stimulus-action-outcome contingencies is unknown. We studied this question using instrumental trace conditioning, where participants learned to make approach/avoid decisions in tw...
Source: Cognition - January 7, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Lina I Skora Ryan B Scott Gerhard Jocham Source Type: research
Stimulus awareness is necessary for both instrumental learning and instrumental responding to previously learned stimuli
Cognition. 2024 Jan 6;244:105716. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105716. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTInstrumental conditioning is a crucial part of adaptive behaviour, allowing agents to selectively interact with stimuli in their environment. Recent evidence suggests that instrumental conditioning cannot proceed without stimulus awareness. However, whether accurate unconscious instrumental responding can emerge from consciously acquired knowledge of the stimulus-action-outcome contingencies is unknown. We studied this question using instrumental trace conditioning, where participants learned to make approach/avoid decisio...
Source: Cognition - January 7, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Lina I Skora Ryan B Scott Gerhard Jocham Source Type: research
Stimulus awareness is necessary for both instrumental learning and instrumental responding to previously learned stimuli
Cognition. 2024 Jan 6;244:105716. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105716. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTInstrumental conditioning is a crucial part of adaptive behaviour, allowing agents to selectively interact with stimuli in their environment. Recent evidence suggests that instrumental conditioning cannot proceed without stimulus awareness. However, whether accurate unconscious instrumental responding can emerge from consciously acquired knowledge of the stimulus-action-outcome contingencies is unknown. We studied this question using instrumental trace conditioning, where participants learned to make approach/avoid decisio...
Source: Cognition - January 7, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Lina I Skora Ryan B Scott Gerhard Jocham Source Type: research
Exposure to temporal variability promotes subsequent adaptation to new temporal regularities
Cognition. 2024 Jan 5;244:105695. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105695. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTNoise is intuitively thought to interfere with perceptual learning; However, human and machine learning studies suggest that, in certain contexts, variability may reduce overfitting and improve generalizability. Whereas previous studies have examined the effects of variability in learned stimuli or tasks, it is hitherto unknown what are the effects of variability in the temporal environment. Here, we examined this question in two groups of adult participants (N = 40) presented with visual targets at either random or fixed ...
Source: Cognition - January 6, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Orit Shdeour Noam Tal-Perry Moshe Glickman Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg Source Type: research
Implicature priming, salience, and context adaptation
We present experimental evidence that speaks against this hypothesis. With the help of novel baseline conditions, which were absent in previous studies on implicature priming, we observe that the results in the priming paradigm commonly used in the literature are inverse preference effects in the sense that robust priming effects are observed towards interpretations that are normally unexpected, and depending on the baseline expectation, each of the three prime types mentioned above may have priming effects. We furthermore investigated different types of alternative priming for so-called ad hoc implicatures and found that ...
Source: Cognition - January 5, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Paul Marty Jacopo Romoli Yasutada Sudo Richard Breheny Source Type: research
Implicature priming, salience, and context adaptation
We present experimental evidence that speaks against this hypothesis. With the help of novel baseline conditions, which were absent in previous studies on implicature priming, we observe that the results in the priming paradigm commonly used in the literature are inverse preference effects in the sense that robust priming effects are observed towards interpretations that are normally unexpected, and depending on the baseline expectation, each of the three prime types mentioned above may have priming effects. We furthermore investigated different types of alternative priming for so-called ad hoc implicatures and found that ...
Source: Cognition - January 5, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Paul Marty Jacopo Romoli Yasutada Sudo Richard Breheny Source Type: research
Testimony and observation of statistical evidence interact in adults' and children's category-based induction
Cognition. 2024 Jan 3;244:105707. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105707. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTHearing generic or other kind-relevant claims can influence the use of information from direct observations in category learning. In the current study, we ask how both adults and children integrate their observations with testimony when learning about the causal property of a novel category. Participants were randomly assigned to hear one of four types of testimony: generic, quantified "all", specific, or only labels. In Study 1, adults (N = 1249) then observed that some proportion of objects (10%-100%) possessed a causal ...
Source: Cognition - January 4, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Zoe Finiasz Susan A Gelman Tamar Kushnir Source Type: research
The spread of affective and semantic valence representations across states
We examined how these mechanistic accounts shape the spread of two formats of valence representation, feelings (affective valence) and knowledge (semantic valence), between states. In two pre-registered experiments (N = 585), we used a novel task in which participants move in a four-state maze, one of which contains an outcome. The participants provide self-reports of affective and semantic valence throughout the maze and after finishing it. Results show that the affective representation of negative valence is more localized in state-space than the semantic representation. We also found evidence for the relative reliance o...
Source: Cognition - January 4, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Orit Heimer Uri Hertz Source Type: research
Internal speech is faster than external speech: Evidence for feedback-based temporal control
Cognition. 2024 Jan 2;244:105713. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105713. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTA recent model of temporal control in speech holds that speakers use sensory feedback to control speech rate and articulatory timing. An experiment was conducted to assess whether there is evidence in support of this hypothesis by comparing durations of phrases in external speech (with sensory feedback) and internal speech (without sensory feedback). Phrase lengths were varied by including one to three disyllabic nouns in a target phrase that was always surrounded by overt speech. An inferred duration method was used to es...
Source: Cognition - January 4, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Sam Tilsen Source Type: research
Testimony and observation of statistical evidence interact in adults' and children's category-based induction
Cognition. 2024 Jan 3;244:105707. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105707. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTHearing generic or other kind-relevant claims can influence the use of information from direct observations in category learning. In the current study, we ask how both adults and children integrate their observations with testimony when learning about the causal property of a novel category. Participants were randomly assigned to hear one of four types of testimony: generic, quantified "all", specific, or only labels. In Study 1, adults (N = 1249) then observed that some proportion of objects (10%-100%) possessed a causal ...
Source: Cognition - January 4, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Zoe Finiasz Susan A Gelman Tamar Kushnir Source Type: research
The spread of affective and semantic valence representations across states
We examined how these mechanistic accounts shape the spread of two formats of valence representation, feelings (affective valence) and knowledge (semantic valence), between states. In two pre-registered experiments (N = 585), we used a novel task in which participants move in a four-state maze, one of which contains an outcome. The participants provide self-reports of affective and semantic valence throughout the maze and after finishing it. Results show that the affective representation of negative valence is more localized in state-space than the semantic representation. We also found evidence for the relative reliance o...
Source: Cognition - January 4, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Orit Heimer Uri Hertz Source Type: research
