Cognition

People sometimes do things that they think are morally wrong. We investigate how actors' perceptions of the morality of their own behaviors affects observer evaluations. In Study 1 (n = 302), we presented participants with six different descriptions of actors who routinely engaged in a morally questionable behavior and varied whether the actors thought the behavior was morally wrong. Actors who believed their behavior was wrong were seen as having better moral character, but their behavior was rated as more wrong...

Group membership is not always voluntary and can be imposed within a social context; moreover, those with power disproportionately shape group membership. We asked if children and adults view group membership as imposed by the powerful. We undertook four studies (465 children ages 4-9, 150 adults): Studies 1-2 used novel minimal groups; Study 3 used 'cool' and 'uncool'; Study 4 used novel ethnic groups. In the first three studies, children saw groups varying in power asserting that a non-categorized individual ought to belong to one of the operating groups in the context...

What changes people's judgments on moral issues, such as the ethics of abortion or eating meat? On some views, moral judgments result from deliberation, such that reasons and reasoning should be primary drivers of moral change. On other views, moral judgments reflect intuition, with reasons offered as post-hoc rationalizations. We test predictions of these accounts by investigating whether exposure to a moral philosophy course (vs. control courses) changes moral judgments, and if so, via what mechanism(s). In line with deliberative accounts of morality, we find that exposure to moral philosophy changes moral views...

Philosophers and theologians have long distinguished between acts a good person is obliged to do, and those that are supererogatory-going above and beyond what is required. Across three studies (N = 796), we discovered a striking developmental difference in intuitions about such acts: while adults view supererogatory actions as morally better than obligatory actions, children view fulfilling obligations as morally better. This difference did not stem from differing views of what is obligatory-children agreed that supererogatory acts were not required...

Statistical learning is a powerful mechanism that extracts even subtle regularities from our information-dense worlds. Recent theories argue that statistical learning can occur through multiple mechanisms-both the conventionally assumed automatic process that precipitates unconscious learning, and an attention-dependent process that brings regularities into conscious awareness. While this view has gained popularity, there are few empirical dissociations of the hypothesized implicit and explicit forms of statistical learning...

Valence, the representation of a stimulus in terms of good or bad, plays a central role in models of affect, value-based learning theories, and value-based decision-making models. Previous work used Unconditioned Stimulus (US) to support a theoretical division between two different types of valence representations for a stimulus: the semantic representation of valence, i.e., stored accumulated knowledge about the value of the stimulus, and the affective representation of valence, i.e., the valence of the affective response to this stimulus...

Linguists from across sub-disciplines have noted that congruence (i.e., form-function mapping) across languages in contact seems to affect acquisition and play a role in language emergence (e.g. Creole genesis). However, because congruence is often confounded with other variables (e.g., frequency, language type, speakers' proficiency levels, perceptual salience, semantic transparency), it remains unclear whether congruence per se benefits learners. In this paper, we provide an experimental test of the effects of congruence on acquisition through an artificial language-learning experiment involving English (L1) and two artificial languages (Flugerdu and Zamperese)...

Humans are often termed "cognitive misers" for their aversion to mental effort. Both in and outside the laboratory people often show preferences for low-effort tasks and are willing to forgo financial reward to avoid more demanding alternatives. Mental effort, however, does not seem to be ubiquitously avoided: people play crosswords, board games, and read novels, all as forms of leisure. While such activities undoubtedly require effort, the type of cognitive demands they impose appear markedly different from the tasks typically used in psychological research on mental effort (e...

While past work has focused on the representational format of mental imagery, and the similarities of its operation and neural substrate to online perception, surprisingly little has tested the boundaries of the level of detail that mental imagery can generate. To answer this question, we take inspiration from the visual short-term memory literature, a related field which has found that memory capacity is affected by the number of items, whether they are unique, and whether and how they move. We test these factors of set size, color heterogeneity, and transformation in mental imagery through both subjective (Exp 1; Exp 2) and objective (Exp 2) measures - difficulty ratings and a change detection task, respectively - to determine the capacity limits of our mental imagery, and find that limits on mental imagery are similar to those for visual short-term memory...

What does it mean to reason well? One might argue that good reasoning means that the outcome of the reasoning process is correct: reaching the right belief. Alternatively, good reasoning might refer to the reasoning process itself: following the right epistemic procedures. In a preregistered study, we investigated children's (4-9-year-olds) and adults' judgments of reasoning in China and the US (N = 256). Participants of all age groups evaluated the outcome when the process was kept constant - they favored agents who reached correct over incorrect beliefs, and they evaluated the process when the outcome was kept constant - they preferred agents who formed their beliefs using valid over invalid procedures...

Previous research has identified three mechanisms that guide visual attention: bottom-up feature contrasts, top-down tuning, and the trial history (e.g., priming effects). However, only few studies have simultaneously examined all three mechanisms. Hence, it is currently unclear how they interact or which mechanisms dominate over others. With respect to local feature contrasts, it has been claimed that a pop-out target can only be selected immediately in dense displays when the target has a high local feature contrast, but not when the displays are sparse, which leads to an inverse set-size effect...

The current research investigated structural priming in Tagalog, a symmetrical voice language containing rich verbal morphology that results in changes in mapping between syntactic positions and thematic roles. This grammatically rare feature, which results in multiple transitive structures that are balanced in terms of the grammatical status of their arguments, provides the opportunity to test whether word order priming is sensitive to the voice morphology of the verb. In three sentence priming experiments (Ns = 64), we manipulated whether the target-verb prompt carried the same voice as the verb in the prime sentence...

Event boundaries and temporal context shape the organization of episodic memories. We hypothesized that attentional fluctuations during encoding serve as "events" that affect temporal context representations and recall organization. Individuals encoded trial-unique objects during a modified sustained attention task. Memory was tested with free recall. Response time variability during the encoding tasks was used to characterize "in the zone" and "out of the zone" attentional states. We predicted that: 1) "in the zone", vs...

BACKGROUND: Language development is a highly interactive activity. However, most research on linguistic environment has focused on the quantity and complexity of linguistic input to children, with current models showing that complexity facilitates language in both typically developing (TD) and autistic children. AIMS: After reviewing existing work on caregiver engagement of children's utterances, we aim to operationalize such engagement with automated measures of linguistic alignment, thereby providing scalable tools to assess caregivers' active reuse of their children's language...

While a substantial body of work has shown that cognitive effort is aversive and costly, a separate line of research on intrinsic motivation suggests that people spontaneously seek challenging tasks. According to one prominent account of intrinsic motivation, the learning progress motivation hypothesis, the preference for difficult tasks reflects the dynamic range that these tasks yield for changes in task performance (Kaplan & Oudeyer, 2007). Here we test this hypothesis, by asking whether greater engagement with intermediately difficult tasks, indexed by subjective ratings and objective pupil measurements, is a function of trial-wise changes in performance...

Misinformation can negatively impact people's lives in domains ranging from health to politics. An important research goal is to understand how misinformation spreads in order to curb it. Here, we test whether and how a single repetition of misinformation fuels its spread. Over two experiments (N = 260) participants indicated which statements they would like to share with other participants on social media. Half of the statements were repeated and half were new. The results reveal that participants were more likely to share statements they had previously been exposed to...

There is considerable conceptual overlap between Level-2 Visual Perspective Taking (VPT-2) and Belief Reasoning; both cognitive processes require us to represent another's viewpoint and experience of reality while inhibiting our own egocentric representations. This study investigated if these facets of mentalising are distinct from one another in the general adult population. To do so, we developed a novel "Seeing-Believing Task" with which to compare VPT-2 and true belief (TB) reasoning directly - one in which both judgement types refer to the same state of reality, requiring identical responses, and where self and other perspectives can be dissociated...

The capacity to evaluate logical arguments intuitively is a fundamental assumption of recent dual-process theories. One observation supporting this effect is the standard conflict effect on incongruent arguments under belief instruction. Conflict arguments are evaluated less accurately than non-conflict arguments, arguably because logic is intuitive and automatic enough to interfere with belief judgments. However, recent studies have challenged this interpretation by finding the same conflict effects when a matching heuristic cues the same response as logic, even on arguments with no logically valid structures...

Visual explanations play an integral role in communicating mechanistic knowledge about how things work. What do people think distinguishes such pictures from those that are intended to convey how things look? To explore this question, we used a drawing paradigm to elicit both visual explanations and depictions of novel machine-like objects, then conducted a detailed analysis of the semantic information conveyed in each drawing. We found that visual explanations placed greater emphasis on parts of the machines that move or interact to produce an effect, while visual depictions emphasized parts that were visually salient, even if they were static...

Over development, children acquire symbols to represent abstract concepts such as time and number. Despite the importance of quantity symbols, it is unknown how acquiring these symbols impacts one's ability to perceive quantities (i.e., nonsymbolic representations). While it has been proposed that learning symbols shapes nonsymbolic quantitative abilities (i.e., the refinement hypothesis), this hypothesis has been understudied, especially in the domain of time. Moreover, the majority of research in support of this hypothesis has been correlational in nature, and thus, experimental manipulations are critical for determining whether this relation is causal...