Previous studies have confirmed stem morphemes (e.g., book) are identified in any position (e.g., in both bookmark and textbook) but prefixes and suffixes (e.g., re- in replay and -er in player) cannot be recognized when moved from their typical word-initial or word-final locations. However, English words with multiple affixes (e.g., unresolved, mindfulness) suggest there must be...
In the present study, we tested three hypotheses about relationships between reflective thinking, intuitive thinking (both measured using the Cognitive Reflection Test; CRT), and belief in God or gods (BiG) in university students across 19 culturally and geographically diverse countries (n = 7,771). In support of our first hypothesis, we found a negative relationship between...
Listeners generally map continuous acoustic information onto categories in a gradient manner with varying individual differences. Typically, such individual differences in speech categorization have been characterized by the mean slope of the response function, as quantified through the visual analog scaling (VAS) task. However, recent evidence suggests that categorization...
The present studies use a novel approach to characterize how memory representations are updated with repetition. These studies use the free recall paradigm, which boasts greater memory advantages for spaced repetitions (Melton. Journal of Verbal Learning and Memory, 9, 596–606. 1970; Madigan. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8, 828–835. 1969). However, a single...
As a foundation of social interaction, interpersonal coordination is boosted in prosocial contexts but undermined by negative situations. Exactly how social factors shape coordination is, however, unknown. Previous literature demonstrates that for coordination to emerge people must attend to their interaction partners. This evidence, however, draws from sterile laboratory studies...
Perception changes rapidly and implicitly as a function of passive exposure to speech that samples different acoustic distributions. Past research has shown that this statistical learning generalizes across talkers and, to some extent, new items, but these studies involved listeners’ active engagement in processing statistics-bearing stimuli. In this study, we manipulated the...
Human memory is reconstructive and thus fundamentally imperfect. One of its critical flaws is false recall—the erroneous recollection of unstudied items. Despite its significant implications, false recall poses a challenge for existing computational models of serial recall, which struggle to provide item-specific predictions. Across six experiments, each involving 100 young...
Numerous studies have investigated whether phonological activation in the bilingual lexicon is selective or non-selective, using the classic masked priming paradigm that manipulates the phonological relatedness between primes and targets across two languages. The priming effects, however, are mixed: some studies reported reduced reaction times due to the homophone primes, while...
In tasks that measure serial-order memory, it is common to observe a “fill-in tendency”—when a person skips an item, the next item they report is more likely to be the skipped item (a fill-in response) than the next list item (an infill response). They tend to “fill in” the blank they skipped. The fill-in tendency has informed the modeling of serial-order memory—it presents...
When talking, speakers naturally produce hand movements (co-speech gestures) that contribute to communication. Evidence in Dutch suggests that the timing of simple up-and-down, non-referential “beat” gestures influences spoken word recognition: the same auditory stimulus was perceived as CONtent (noun, capitalized letters indicate stressed syllables) when a beat gesture occurred...
Finding an optimal decision-making strategy requires a careful balance between the competing demands of accuracy and urgency. In experimental settings, researchers are typically interested in whether people can optimise this trade-off, typically operationalised as reward rate, with evidence accumulation models serving as the key framework to determine whether people are...
Long-standing theories in emotion perception, such as basic emotion theory, argue that we primarily perceive others’ emotions through facial expressions. However, compelling evidence shows that other visual contexts, such as body posture or scenes, significantly influence the emotions perceived from faces and vice versa. We used meta-analysis to synthesise and quantify these...
A wave of criticisms and replication failures is currently challenging claims about the scope of unconscious perception and cognition. Such failures to find unconscious processing effects at the population level may reflect the absence of individual-level effects, or alternatively, the averaging out of individual-level effects with opposing signs. Importantly, only the first...
Encoding information in reference to the self leads to improved memory, a phenomenon termed the self-reference effect. Learning vocabulary in a foreign language (L2) is a challenging memory task, because learning thousands of words is necessary to achieve listening and reading comprehension. The current study examined the efficacy of self-reference encoding for L2 vocabulary...
We tested whether naturally occurring visual variability—specifically, typefaces—would help people generalize word learning to typefaces they had never seen before. In Chinese, thousands of unique written characters must be learned item by item, and differentiated from similar-looking characters. Participants (n = 190) with no previous Chinese experience learned 24 Chinese...
Semantic knowledge plays an active role in many well-known false memory phenomena, including those emerging from the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) task. Indeed, in this experimental paradigm, humans tend to falsely recognize newly presented words via activation of other previously shown stimuli. In the present study we aimed to test what happens in cases in which no apparent...
Traditional measures of response times (RTs) capture the summed duration of multiple latent and overt processes, including motor-response execution. The present research assessed the functional independence of the decisional components unfolding before vs after the onset of the muscular activation in the context of a lexical decision task requiring manual button-press responses...
Theories of adaptive (and cognitive) control assume that selecting target information in the context of highly salient distractors depends on limited-capacity resources. Building on this assumption, theories of language-control associations propose that the opportunities afforded by bilingualism to engage such effortful selection, such as when speaking in a nondominant language...
Recent research has shown that the compositional meaning of a compound is routinely constructed by combining meanings of constituents. However, this body of research has focused primarily on Germanic languages. It remains unclear whether this same computational process is also observed in Chinese, a writing system characterised by less systematicity of the meanings and functions...
Whether it is the first day of school or a new job, individuals often find themselves in situations where they must learn the structure of existing social relationships. However, the mechanisms through which individuals evaluate the strength and nature of these existing relationships – social-relational inference – remain unclear. We posit that linguistic features of...
People judge repeated statements as more true than new ones. This repetition-based truth effect is a robust phenomenon when statements are ambiguous. However, previous studies provided conflicting evidence on whether repetition similarly affects truth judgments for plausible and implausible statements. Given the lack of a formal theory explaining the interaction between...
Recent studies have investigated resting-state, or baseline, pupil size as a general measure of cognitive abilities, based on the earlier finding that larger pupils might be predictive of higher general intelligence or working memory capacity. However, evidence for such relationships has been mixed, and all previous studies thus far have focused on adult samples. The present...