Cognition

A 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 estimate the durations of target phrases produced internally...

From auditory perception to general cognition, the ability to play a musical instrument has been associated with skills both related and unrelated to music. However, it is unclear if these effects are bound to the specific characteristics of musical instrument training, as little attention has been paid to other populations such as audio engineers and designers whose auditory expertise may match or surpass that of musicians in specific auditory tasks or more naturalistic acoustic scenarios. We explored this possibility by comparing students of audio engineering (n = 20) to matched conservatory-trained instrumentalists (n = 24) and to naive controls (n = 20) on measures of auditory discrimination, auditory scene analysis, and speech in noise perception...

The ability to prepare for mutually exclusive possible events in the future is essential for everyday decision making. Previous studies have suggested that this ability develops between the ages of 3 and 5 years, and in young children is primarily limited by the ability to represent the set of possible outcomes of an event as "possible". We tested an alternative hypothesis that this ability may be limited by the ability to represent the set of possible actions that could be taken to prepare for those possible outcomes...

Although there is substantial evidence for an innate 'number sense' that scaffolds learning about mathematics, whether the underlying representations are based on discrete or continuous perceptual magnitudes has been controversial. Yet the nature of the computations supported by these representations has been neglected in this debate. While basic computation of discrete non-symbolic quantities has been reliably demonstrated in adults, infants, and non-humans, far less consideration has been given to the capacity for computation of continuous perceptual magnitudes...

Although sexual assault is widely accepted as morally wrong, not all instances of sexual assault are evaluated in the same way. Here, we ask whether different characteristics of victims affect people's moral evaluations of sexual assault perpetrators, and if so, how. We focus on sex robots (i.e., artificially intelligent humanoid social robots designed for sexual gratification) as victims in the present studies because they serve as a clean canvas onto which we can paint different human-like attributes to probe people's moral intuitions regarding sensitive topics...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The Database of Exemplars (DOE) account of moral cognition emerged in part to explain how wrongless harms could arise (Royzman & Borislow, 2022; henceforth, RB) in spite of being denied by most traditional models (Schein & Gray, 2018; Turiel, 1983; Shweder, 1997; Haidt, 2012). Herein, we defend this account against a set of results that have been claimed to disprove it (Kurthy & Sousa, this issue; henceforth, KS). We argue that DOE is in line with all the findings KS perceive as uniquely supportive of their own account (appraising an act as unjust engenders a judgment of wrong) while RB's findings (Royzman & Borislow, 2022, Studies 2 and 3) do challenge KS under varied conceptions of what it would take for an agent to be or appear unjust in his or her treatment of others, affirming that wrongless injustice is an empirical fact that one must strive to explain and that DOE helps us explain...

Syllables are one of the fundamental building blocks of early language acquisition. From birth onwards, infants preferentially segment, process and represent the speech into syllable-sized units, raising the question of what type of computations infants are able to perform on these perceptual units. Syllables are abstract units structured in a way that allows grouping phonemes into sequences. The goal of this research was to investigate 4-to-5-month-old infants' ability to encode the internal structure of syllables, at a target age when the language system is not yet specialized on the sounds and the phonotactics of native languages...

Humans and some other animals can autonomously generate action choices that contribute to solving complex problems. However, experimental investigations of the cognitive bases of human autonomy are challenging, because experimental paradigms typically constrain behaviour using controlled contexts, and elicit behaviour by external triggers. In contrast, autonomy and freedom imply unconstrained behaviour initiated by endogenous triggers. Here we propose a new theoretical construct of adaptive autonomy, meaning the capacity to make behavioural choices that are free from constraints of both immediate external triggers and of routine response patterns, but nevertheless show appropriate coordination with the environment...

Despite the importance of uncertainty in decision-making, few published studies have examined how individuals make moral judgments under uncertainty. Across four experiments (N = 445), we examined whether a relatively small shift in probability affected participants' judgments of both moral acceptability and choice. Overall, reading dilemmas where the characters were either certain or likely to die, the probability of the sacrificed individual and the group at risk dying both had independent effects on participants' responses...

Considering recent findings that breathing influences cognitive processes, two experiments explored the relationship between breathing and visuo-spatial attention. In Experiment 1, a lateralized probe detection task was inserted into the breathing cycles of 21 healthy adults to probe effects of breathing on the distribution of spatial attention. In Experiment 2 (N = 26), the Posner cueing task measured breathing-contingent detection speed for lateralized probes after endogenous or exogenous cueing...

Pleasure in music has been linked to predictive coding of melodic and rhythmic patterns, subserved by connectivity between regions in the brain's auditory and reward networks. Specific musical anhedonics derive little pleasure from music and have altered auditory-reward connectivity, but no difficulties with music perception abilities and no generalized physical anhedonia. Recent research suggests that specific musical anhedonics experience pleasure in nonmusical sounds, suggesting that the implicated brain pathways may be specific to music reward...

Scientific ideas can be difficult to access if they contradict earlier-developed intuitive theories; counterintuitive scientific statements like "bubbles have weight" are verified more slowly and less accurately than closely-matched intuitive statements like "bricks have weight" (Shtulman & Valcarcel, 2012). Here, we investigate how context and instruction influences this conflict. In Study 1, college undergraduates (n = 100) verified scientific statements interspersed with images intended to prime either a scientific interpretation of the statements or an intuitive one...

Ensemble coding - the rapid extraction of a perceptual average - has been proposed as a potential mechanism underlying face learning. We tested this proposal across five pre-registered experiments in which four ambient images of an identity were presented in the study phase. In Experiments 1 and 2a-c, participants were asked whether a test image was in the study array; these experiments examined the robustness of ensemble coding. Experiment 1 replicated ensemble coding in an online sample; participants recognize images from the study array and the average of those images...

Human reasoning has been shown to be biased in a variety of situations. While most studies have focused on samples of WEIRD participants (from Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic societies), the sparse non-WEIRD data on the topic suggest an even stronger propensity for biased reasoning. This could be explained by a competence issue (people lack the ability to integrate logical knowledge into their reasoning) or a performance issue (people possess the logical knowledge but do not know it is relevant)...

Language can affect cognition, but through what mechanism? Substantial past research has focused on how labeling can elicit categorical representation during online processing. We focus here on a particularly powerful type of language-relational language-and show that relational language can enhance relational representation in children through an embodied attention mechanism. Four-year-old children were given a color-location conjunction task, in which they were asked to encode a two-color square, split either vertically or horizontally (e...

Much of our thinking focuses on deciding what to do in situations where the space of possible options is too large to evaluate exhaustively. Previous work has found that people do this by learning the general value of different behaviors, and prioritizing thinking about high-value options in new situations. Is this good-action bias always the best strategy, or can thinking about low-value options sometimes become more beneficial? Can people adapt their thinking accordingly based on the situation? And how do we know what to think about in novel events? Here, we developed a block-puzzle paradigm that enabled us to measure people's thinking plans and compare them to a computational model of rational thought...

Newborn infants have been shown to extract temporal regularities from sound sequences, both in the form of learning regular sequential properties, and extracting periodicity in the input, commonly referred to as a regular pulse or the 'beat'. However, these two types of regularities are often indistinguishable in isochronous sequences, as both statistical learning and beat perception can be elicited by the regular alternation of accented and unaccented sounds. Here, we manipulated the isochrony of sound sequences in order to disentangle statistical learning from beat perception in sleeping newborn infants in an EEG experiment, as previously done in adults and macaque monkeys...

The ability to communicate about exact number is critical to many modern human practices spanning science, industry, and politics. Although some early numeral systems used 1-to-1 correspondence (e.g., 'IIII' to represent 4), most systems provide compact representations via more arbitrary conventions (e.g., '7' and 'VII'). When people are unable to rely on conventional numerals, however, what strategies do they initially use to communicate number? Across three experiments, participants used pictures to communicate about visual arrays of objects containing 1-16 items, either by producing freehand drawings or combining sets of visual tokens...

Metacontrast masking is one of the most widely studied types of visual masking, in which a visual stimulus is rendered invisible by a subsequent mask that does not spatially overlap with the target. Metacontrast has been used for many decades as a tool to study visual processing and conscious perception in adults. However, there are so far no infant studies on metacontrast and it remains unknown even whether it occurs in infants. The present study examined metacontrast masking in 3- to 8-month-old infants (N = 168) using a habituation paradigm...