Psychological Review

Perception and action rely on integrating or binding different features of stimuli and responses. Such bindings are short-lived, but they can be retrieved for a limited amount of time if any of their features is reactivated. This is particularly true for stimulus-response bindings, allowing for flexible recycling of previous action plans. A relation to learning of stimulus-response associations suggests itself, and previous accounts have proposed binding as an initial step of forging associations in long-term memory...

Questions on early sapiens cognition, the cognitive abilities of our ancestors, are intriguing but notoriously hard to tackle. Leaving no hard traces in the archeological record, these abilities need to be inferred from indirect evidence, informed by our understanding of present-day cognition. Most of such attempts acknowledge the role that culture, as a faculty, has played for human evolution, but they underrate or even disregard the role of distinct cultural traditions and the ensuing diversity, both in present-day humans and as a dimension of past cognition...

Spatial distributional semantic models represent word meanings in a vector space. While able to model many basic semantic tasks, they are limited in many ways, such as their inability to represent multiple kinds of relations in a single semantic space and to directly leverage indirect relations between two lexical representations. To address these limitations, we propose a distributional graphical model that encodes lexical distributional data in a graphical structure and uses spreading activation for determining the plausibility of word sequences...

The N -back task is often considered to be a canonical example of a task that relies on working memory (WM), requiring both maintenance of representations of previously presented stimuli and also processing of these representations. In particular, the set-size effect in this task (e.g., poorer performance on three-back than two-back judgments), as in others, is often interpreted as indicating that the task relies on retention and processing of information in a limited-capacity WM system. Here, we consider an alternative possibility: that retention in episodic memory (EM) rather than WM can account for both set-size and lure effects in the N-back task...

For over 35 years, the violation-of-expectation paradigm has been used to study the development of expectations in the first 3 years of life. A wide range of expectations has been examined, including physical, psychological, sociomoral, biological, numerical, statistical, probabilistic, and linguistic expectations. Surprisingly, despite the paradigm's widespread use and the many seminal findings it has contributed to psychological science, so far no one has tried to provide a detailed and in-depth conceptual overview of the paradigm...

The representation of complex phenomena via combinations of simple discrete features is a hallmark of human cognition. But it is not clear exactly how (or whether) discrete features can effectively represent the complex probabilistic fabric of the environment. This article introduces information-theoretic tools for quantifying the fidelity and efficiency of a featural representation with respect to a probability model. In this framework, a feature or combination of features is "faithful" to the extent that knowing the value of the features reduces uncertainty about the true state of the world...

People's decisions often deviate from classical notions of rationality, incurring costs to themselves and society. One way to reduce the costs of poor decisions is to redesign the decision problems people face to encourage better choices. While often subtle, these nudges can have dramatic effects on behavior and are increasingly popular in public policy, health care, and marketing. Although nudges are often designed with psychological theories in mind, they are typically not formalized in computational terms and their effects can be hard to predict...

The additive utility theory of discounting is extended to probability and commodity discounting. Because the utility of a good and the disutility of its delay combine additively, increases in the utility of a good offset the disutility of its delay: Increasing the former slows the apparent discount even with the latter, time-disutility, remaining invariant, giving the magnitude effect. Conjoint measurement showed the subjective value of money to be a logarithmic function of its amount, and subjective probability-the probability weighting function-to be Prelec's (1998)...

Induction-the ability to generalize from existing knowledge-is the cornerstone of intelligence. Cognitive models of human induction are largely limited to toy problems and cannot make quantitative predictions for the thousands of different induction arguments that have been studied by researchers, or to the countless induction arguments that could be encountered in everyday life. Leading large language models (LLMs) go beyond toy problems but fail to mimic observed patterns of human induction. In this article, we combine rich knowledge representations obtained from LLMs with theories of human inductive reasoning developed by cognitive psychologists...

Most of us have experienced moments when we could not recall some piece of information but felt that it was just out of reach. Research in metamemory has established that such judgments are often accurate; but what adaptive purpose do they serve? Here, we present an optimal model of how metacognitive monitoring (feeling of knowing) could dynamically inform metacognitive control of memory (the direction of retrieval efforts). In two experiments, we find that, consistent with the optimal model, people report having a stronger memory for targets they are likely to recall and direct their search efforts accordingly, cutting off the search when it is unlikely to succeed and prioritizing the search for stronger memories...

When faced with distraction, we can focus more on goal-relevant information (targets) or focus less on goal-conflicting information (distractors). How people use cognitive control to distribute attention across targets and distractors remains unclear. We address this question by developing a novel Parametric Attentional Control Task that can "tag" participants' sensitivity to target and distractor information. We use these precise measures of attention to develop a novel process model that can explain how participants control attention toward targets and distractors...

The multicomponent nature of executive functions (EF) has long been recognized, pushing for a better understanding of both the commonalities and the diversity between EF components. Despite the advances made, the operationalization of performance in EF tasks remains rather heterogeneous, and the structure of EF as modeled by confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) is still a topic of debate (Karr et al., 2018). The present work demonstrates these two issues are related, showing how different operationalizations in task-based performance indicators impact the resulting models of EF structure with CFA...

People often form polarized beliefs, imbuing objects (e.g., themselves or others) with unambiguously positive or negative qualities. In clinical settings, this is referred to as dichotomous thinking or "splitting" and is a feature of several psychiatric disorders. Here, we introduce a Bayesian model of splitting that parameterizes a tendency to rigidly categorize objects as either entirely "Bad" or "Good," rather than to flexibly learn dispositions along a continuous scale. Distinct from the previous descriptive theories, the model makes quantitative predictions about how dichotomous beliefs emerge and are updated in light of new information...

Developing an accurate model of another agent's knowledge is central to communication and cooperation between agents. In this article, we propose a hierarchical framework of knowledge assessment that explains how people construct mental models of their own knowledge and the knowledge of others. Our framework posits that people integrate information about their own and others' knowledge via Bayesian inference. To evaluate this claim, we conduct an experiment in which participants repeatedly assess their own performance (a metacognitive task) and the performance of another person (a type of theory of mind task) on the same image classification tasks...

Decades of findings in psychology suggest that human belief is thoroughly irrational. At best, beliefs might be formed by heuristic processes that predictably lead to suboptimal outcomes. At worst, they are slaves to motivated reasoning, which allows people to come to whichever conclusions they prefer. In this article, we suggest that belief updating, narrowly construed, may be a rational process that is uniquely sensitive to evidence and cognitively impenetrable to desires or incentives. Before any updating can occur, however, a series of processes mediate between information in the world and subjectively compelling evidence...

This article describes UMA (Unified Model of Arithmetic), a theory of children's arithmetic implemented as a computational model. UMA builds on FARRA (Fraction Arithmetic Reflects Rules and Associations; Braithwaite et al., 2017), a model of children's fraction arithmetic. Whereas FARRA-like all previous models of arithmetic-focused on arithmetic with only one type of number, UMA simulates arithmetic with whole numbers, fractions, and decimals. The model was trained on arithmetic problems from the first to sixth grade volumes of a math textbook series; its performance on tests administered at the end of each grade was compared to the performance of children in prior empirical research...

Auditory perceptual deficits are widely observed among children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Yet, the nature of these deficits and the extent to which they explain speech and language problems remain controversial. In this study, we hypothesize that disruption to the maturation of the basilar membrane may impede the optimization of the auditory pathway from brainstem to cortex, curtailing high-resolution frequency sensitivity and the efficient spectral decomposition and encoding of natural speech...

Individual differences in processing speed and executive attention have both been proposed as explanations for individual differences in cognitive ability, particularly general and fluid intelligence (Engle et al., 1999; Kail & Salthouse, 1994). Both constructs have long intellectual histories in scientific psychology. This article attempts to describe the historical development of these constructs, particularly as they pertain to intelligence. It also aims to determine the degree to which speed and executive attention are theoretical competitors in explaining individual differences in intelligence...

Face matching consists of the ability to decide whether two face images (or more) belong to the same person or to different identities. Face matching is crucial for efficient face recognition and plays an important role in applied settings such as passport control and eyewitness memory. However, despite extensive research, the mechanisms that govern face-matching performance are still not well understood. Moreover, to date, many researchers hold on to the belief that match and mismatch conditions are governed by two separate systems, an assumption that likely thwarted the development of a unified model of face matching...

The ecological approach to psychology has been a main antecedent of embodied and situated approaches to cognition. The concept of affordances in particular has gained currency throughout psychological science. Yet, contemporary ecological psychology has seemed inaccessible to outsiders and protective of its legacy. Indeed, some prominent ecological psychologists have presented their approach as a "package deal"-a principled and unified perspective on perception and action. Looking at the history of the field, however, we argue that ecological psychology has developed in rich and pluriform ways...