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The fundamental goal of perception is to aid in the achievement of behavioral objectives. This requires extracting and communicating useful information from noisy and uncertain sensory signals. At the same time, given the complexity of sensory information and the limitations of biological information processing, it is necessary that some information must be lost or discarded in the act of perception. Under these circumstances, what constitutes an 'optimal' perceptual system? This paper describes the mathematical framework of rate-distortion theory as the optimal solution to the problem of minimizing the costs of perceptual error subject to strong constraints on the ability to communicate or transmit information. Rate-distortion theory offers a general and principled theoretical framework for developing computational-level models of human perception (Marr, 1982). Models developed in this framework are capable of producing quantitatively precise explanations for human perceptual performance, while yielding new insights regarding the nature and goals of perception. This paper demonstrates the application of rate-distortion theory to two benchmark domains where capacity limits are especially salient in human perception: discrete categorization of stimuli (also known as absolute identification) and visual working memory. A software package written for the R statistical programming language is described that aids in the development of models based on rate-distortion theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have ushered in tremendous progress in understanding the neural basis of language. Most of our current knowledge on language and the brain, however, is derived from lab-based experiments that are far removed from everyday language use, and that are inspired by questions originating in linguistic and psycholinguistic contexts. In this paper we argue that in order to make progress, the field needs to shift its focus to understanding the neurobiology of naturalistic language comprehension. We present here a new conceptual framework for understanding the neurobiological organization of language comprehension. This framework is non-language-centered in the computational/neurobiological constructs it identifies, and focuses strongly on context. Our core arguments address three general issues: (i) the difficulty in extending language-centric explanations to discourse; (ii) the necessity of taking context as a serious topic of study, modeling it formally and acknowledging the limitations on external validity when studying language comprehension outside context; and (iii) the tenuous status of the language network as an explanatory construct. We argue that adopting this framework means that neurobiological studies of language will be less focused on identifying correlations between brain activity patterns and mechanisms postulated by psycholinguistic theories. Instead, they will be less self-referential and increasingly more inclined towards integration of language with other cognitive systems, ultimately doing more justice to the neurobiological organization of language and how it supports language as it is used in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of five experiments designed to investigate the effects of referential processing on sentence complexity. Gibson (Cognition, 68 (1998) 1) suggested that sentence complexity is related to the locality of integrations between dependent syntactic heads, and that an appropriate measure of locality is the number of new discourse referents intervening between the endpoints of those integrations. The experiments in this paper test, modify and extend Gibson''s (1998) claims. Each experiment manipulated noun phrases (NPs) in the subject positions of object-extracted relative clauses in order to determine how different types of NPs affected sentence complexity. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 used questionnaires to gauge sentence complexity, whereas Experiments 4 and 5 used self-paced reading. The results from Experiments 1, 2, 4 and 5 suggest that the complexity of the experimental items was more closely related to the Givenness status of the embedded subject in the Givenness Hierarchy than to whether the embedded subject was old or new to the discourse. Experiment 3 compared materials in which a quantifier was rotated through subject positions of a nested relative clause structure. The results of this experiment support a discourse-processing-based distance metric for computing locality and provide evidence against a pure similarity-based account of structural complexity such as proposed by Bever (Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis of linguistic structures. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language (pp. 279–362). New York: Wiley). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper investigates possible influences of the lexical resources of individual languages on the spatial organization and reasoning styles of their users. That there are such powerful and pervasive influences of language on thought is the thesis of the Whorf–Sapir linguistic relativity hypothesis which, after a lengthy period in intellectual limbo, has recently returned to prominence in the anthropological, linguistic, and psycholinguistic literatures. Our point of departure is an influential group of cross-linguistic studies that appear to show that spatial reasoning is strongly affected by the spatial lexicon in everyday use in a community (e.g. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1993). Linguistic and nonlinguistic coding of spatial arrays: explorations in Mayan cognition (Working Paper No. 24). Nijmegen: Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Cognitive Linguistics 6 (1995) 33). Specifically, certain groups customarily use an externally referenced spatial-coordinate system to refer to nearby directions and positions (“to the north”) whereas English speakers usually employ a viewer-perspective system (“to the left”). Prior findings and interpretations have been to the effect that users of these two types of spatial system solve rotation problems in different ways, reasoning strategies imposed by habitual use of the language-particular lexicons themselves. The present studies reproduce these different problem-solving strategies in speakers of a single language (English) by manipulating landmark cues, suggesting that language itself may not be the key causal factor in choice of spatial perspective. Prior evidence on rotation problem solution from infants (e.g. Acredolo, L.P. (1979). Laboratory versus home: the effect of environment on the 9-month-old infant''s choice of spatial reference system. Developmental Psychology, 15 (6), 666–667) and from laboratory animals (e.g. Restle, F. (1975). Discrimination of cues in mazes: a resolution of the place-vs.-response question. Psychological Review, 64, 217–228) suggests a unified interpretation of the findings: creatures approach spatial problems differently depending on the availability and suitability of local landmark cues. The results are discussed in terms of the current debate on the relation of language to thought, with particular emphasis on the question of why different cultural communities favor different perspectives in talking about space. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we propose a new mathematical model of retrieval of intentions from long-term memory. We model retrieval as a stochastic race between a plurality of potentially relevant intentions stored in long-term memory. Psychological theories are dominated by two opposing conceptions of the role of memory in temporally extended agency - as when a person has to remember to make a phone call in the afternoon because, in the morning, she promised she would do so. According to the Working Memory conception, remembering to make the phone call is explained in terms of the construction and maintenance of intentions in working-memory. According to the Long-Term Memory conception, we should explain the episode in terms of an ability to store intentions in long-term memory. The two conceptions predict different processing profiles. The aim of this paper is to present a new mathematical model of the type of memory mechanism that could realise the long-term memory representations of intentions necessary for the Long-Term Memory conception. We present and illustrate the formal model and propose a new type of experimental paradigm that could allow us to test which of the two conceptions provides the best explanation of the role of memory in temporally extended agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vocal signalling systems, as used by humans and various non-human animals, exhibit discrete and continuous properties that can naturally be used to express discrete and continuous information, such as distinct words to denote objects in the world and prosodic features to convey the emotions of the speaker. However, continuous aspects are not always expressed with the continuous properties of an utterance but are frequently categorised into discrete symbols. While the existence of symbols in communication is self-evident, the emergence of discretisation from a continuous space is not well understood. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of discrete symbols in regions with a continuous semantics by simulating the learning process of two agents that acquire a shared signalling system. The task is formalised as a reinforcement learning problem with a continuous form and meaning space. We identify two causes for the emergence of discretisation that do not originate in discrete semantics: 1) premature convergence to sub-optimal signalling conventions and 2) topological mismatch between the continuous form space and the continuous semantic space. The insights presented in this paper shed light on the origins of discrete symbols, whose existence is assumed by a large body of research concerned with the emergence of syntactic structures and meaning in language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporaneous cognitive psychology and cognitive science, literacy is not a central concept. In this paper, on the contrary, it is argued that both cognition and cognitive science are deeply influenced by literacy. Before addressing the experimental work on the structure of speech and spoken language, one of the major themes of Jacques Mehler's work, I recall his links with the Brussels Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and the important influence he had on the discipline and on our work. Most of the present paper is a discussion of the concept of the phoneme, its dependence on literacy, its role in language, and of the constant interactions between orthography and phonology in spoken language recognition. I argue that the phoneme is not a unit of perception, but a literate cognitive concept. In this way, I hope that cognitive science will overtly recognize the literacy heritage, the building of which it greatly contributes to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous developmental studies have revealed variation in children's ability to compute scalar inferences. While children have been shown to struggle with standard scalar inferences (e.g., with scalar quantifiers like "some") (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2001; Guasti et al., 2005; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003), there is also a growing handful of inferences that children have been reported to derive quite readily (Barner & Bachrach, 2010; Hochstein, Bale, Fox, & Barner, 2016; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016; Stiller, Goodman, & Frank, 2015; Tieu, Romoli, Zhou, & Crain, 2016; Tieu et al., 2017). One recent approach, which we refer to as the Alternatives-based approach, attributes the variability in children's performance to limitations in how children engage with the alternative sentences that are required to compute the relevant inferences. Specifically, if the alternative sentences can be generated by simplifying the assertion, rather than by lexically replacing one scalar term with another, children should be better able to compute the inference. In this paper, we investigated this prediction by assessing how children and adults interpret sentences that embed disjunction under a universal quantifier, such as "Every elephant caught a big butterfly or a small butterfly". For adults, such sentences typically give rise to the distributive inference that some elephant caught a big butterfly and some elephant caught a small butterfly (Crnič, Chemla, & Fox, 2015; Fox, 2007; Gazdar, 1979). Another possible interpretation, though not one typically accessed by adults, is the conjunctive inference that every elephant caught a big butterfly and a small butterfly (Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016). Crucially, for our purposes, it has been argued that both of these inferences can be derived using alternatives that are generated by deleting parts of the asserted sentence, rather than through lexical replacement, making these sentences an ideal test case for evaluating the predictions of the Alternatives-based approach. The findings of our experimental study reveal that children are indeed able to successfully compute this class of inferences, providing support for the Alternatives-based approach as a viable explanation of children's variable success in computing scalar inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans spontaneously attribute a wide range of traits to strangers based solely on their facial features. These first impressions are known to exert striking effects on our choices and behaviours. In this paper, we provide a theoretical account of the origins of these spontaneous trait inferences. We describe a novel framework ('Trait Inference Mapping') in which trait inferences are products of mappings between locations in 'face space' and 'trait space'. These mappings are acquired during ontogeny and allow excitation of face representations to propagate automatically to associated trait representations. This conceptualization provides a framework within which the relative contribution of ontogenetic experience and genetic inheritance can be considered. Contrary to many existing ideas about the origins of trait inferences, we propose only a limited role for innate mechanisms and natural selection. Instead, our model explains inter-observer consistency by appealing to cultural learning and physiological responses that facilitate or 'canalise' particular face-trait mappings. Our TIM framework has both theoretical and substantive implications, and can be extended to trait inferences from non-facial cues to provide a unified account of first impressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In language, a small number of meaningless building blocks can be combined into an unlimited set of meaningful utterances. This is known as combinatorial structure. One hypothesis for the initial emergence of combinatorial structure in language is that recombining elements of signals solves the problem of overcrowding in a signal space. Another hypothesis is that iconicity may impede the emergence of combinatorial structure. However, how these two hypotheses relate to each other is not often discussed. In this paper, we explore how signal space dimensionality relates to both overcrowding in the signal space and iconicity. We use an artificial signalling experiment to test whether a signal space and a meaning space having similar topologies will generate an iconic system and whether, when the topologies differ, the emergence of combinatorially structured signals is facilitated. In our experiments, signals are created from participants' hand movements, which are measured using an infrared sensor. We found that participants take advantage of iconic signal-meaning mappings where possible. Further, we use trajectory predictability, measures of variance, and Hidden Markov Models to measure the use of structure within the signals produced and found that when topologies do not match, then there is more evidence of combinatorial structure. The results from these experiments are interpreted in the context of the differences between the emergence of combinatorial structure in different linguistic modalities (speech and sign). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests a theory about the relationship between two important topics in moral philosophy and psychology. One topic is the function of normative language, specifically claims that one "ought" to do something. Do these claims function to describe moral responsibilities, encourage specific behavior, or both? The other topic is the relationship between saying that one "ought" to do something and one's ability to do it. In what respect, if any, does what one "ought" to do exceed what one "can" do? The theory tested here has two parts: (1) "ought" claims function to both describe responsibilities and encourage people to fulfill them (the dual-function hypothesis); (2) the two functions relate differently to ability, because the encouragement function is limited by the person's ability, but the descriptive function is not (the interaction hypothesis). If this theory is correct, then in one respect "ought implies can" is false because people have responsibilities that exceed their abilities. But in another respect "ought implies can" is legitimate because it is not worthwhile to encourage people to do things that exceed their ability. Results from two behavioral experiments support the theory that "ought" exceeds but implies "can." Results from a third experiment provide further evidence regarding an "ought" claim's primary function and how contextual features can affect the interpretation of its functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plural predications (e.g., "the boxes are heavy") are common sources of ambiguity in everyday language, allowing both distributive and collective interpretations (e.g., the boxes each are heavy vs. the boxes together are heavy). This paper investigates the role of context in the disambiguation of plural predication. We address the key phenomenon of "stubborn distributivity," whereby certain predicates (e.g., big, tall) are claimed to lack collective interpretations altogether. We first validate a new methodology for measuring the interpretation of plural predications. Using this method, we then analyze naturally-occurring plural predications from corpora. We find a role of context, but no evidence of a distinct class of predicates that resists collective interpretations. We further explore the role of context in our final experiments, showing that both the predictability of properties and the knowledgeability of the speaker affect disambiguation. This suggests a pragmatic account of how ambiguous plural predications are interpreted. In particular, stubbornly distributive predicates are so because the collective properties they name are unpredictable, or unstable, in most contexts; this unpredictability results in a noisy collective interpretation, something speakers and listeners recognize as ineffective for communicating efficiently about their world. We formalize the pragmatics of utterance disambiguation within the Bayesian Rational Speech Act framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is known to differ from adult-directed speech (ADS) in a number of ways, and it has often been argued that some of these IDS properties facilitate infants' acquisition of language. An influential study in support of this view is Kuhl et al. (1997), which found that vowels in IDS are produced with expanded first and second formants (F1/F2) on average, indicating that the vowels are acoustically further apart in IDS than in ADS. These results have been interpreted to mean that the way vowels are produced in IDS makes infants' task of learning vowel categories easier. The present paper revisits this interpretation by means of a thorough analysis of IDS vowels using a large-scale corpus of Japanese natural utterances. We will show that the expansion of F1/F2 values does occur in spontaneous IDS even when the vowels' prosodic position, lexical pitch accent, and lexical bias are accounted for. When IDS vowels are compared to carefully read speech (CS) by the same mothers, however, larger variability among IDS vowel tokens means that the acoustic distances among vowels are farther apart only in CS, but not in IDS when compared to ADS. Finally, we will show that IDS vowels are significantly more breathy than ADS or CS vowels. Taken together, our results demonstrate that even though expansion of formant values occurs in spontaneous IDS, this expansion cannot be interpreted as an indication that the acoustic distances among vowels are farther apart, as is the case in CS. Instead, we found that IDS vowels are characterized by breathy voice, which has been associated with the communication of emotional affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the emergence of lexicalized effects of word usage on word duration by looking at parallel changes in usage and duration over 130years in New Zealand English. Previous research has found that frequent words are shorter, informative words are longer, and words in utterance-final position are also longer. It has also been argued that some of these patterns are not simply online adjustments, but are incorporated into lexical representations. While these studies tend to focus on the synchronic aspects of such patterns, our corpus shows that word-usage patterns and word durations are not static over time. Many words change in duration and also change with respect to frequency, informativity and likelihood of occurring utterance-finally. Analysis of changing word durations over this time period shows substantial patterns of co-adaptation between word usage and word durations. Words that are increasing in frequency are becoming shorter. Words that are increasing/decreasing in informativity show a change in the same direction in duration (e.g. increasing informativity is associated with increasing duration). And words that are increasingly appearing utterance-finally are lengthening. These effects exist independently of the local effects of the predictors. For example, words that are increasing utterance-finally lengthen in all positions, including utterance-medially. We show that these results are compatible with a number of different views about lexical representations, but they cannot be explained without reference to a production-perception loop that allows speakers to update their representations dynamically on the basis of their experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages, compounding is a fundamental process for the generation of novel words. When this process is productive (as, e.g., in English), native speakers can juxtapose two words to create novel compounds that can be readily understood by other speakers. The present paper proposes a large-scale, data-driven computational system for compound semantic processing based on distributional semantics, the CAOSS model (Compounding as Abstract Operation in Semantic Space). In CAOSS, word meanings are represented as vectors encoding their lexical co-occurrences in a reference corpus. Given two constituent words, their composed representation (the compound) is computed by using matrices representing the abstract properties of constituent roles (modifier vs. head). The matrices are also induced through examples of language usage. The model is then validated against behavioral results concerning the processing of novel compounds, and in particular relational effects on response latencies. The effects of relational priming and relational dominance are considered. CAOSS predictions are shown to pattern with previous results, in terms of both the impact of relational information and the dissociations related to the different constituent roles. The simulations indicate that relational information is implicitly reflected in language usage, suggesting that human speakers can learn these aspects from language experience and automatically apply them to the processing of new word combinations. The present model is flexible enough to emulate this procedure, suggesting that relational effects might emerge as a by-product of nuanced operations across distributional patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of statistical information on behavior (either through learning or adaptation) is quickly becoming foundational to many domains of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, from language comprehension to visual development. We investigate a central problem impacting these diverse fields: when encountering input with rich statistical information, are there any constraints on learning? This paper examines learning outcomes when adult learners are given statistical information across multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously: from abstract, semantic categories of everyday objects to individual viewpoints on these objects. After revealing statistical learning of abstract, semantic categories with scrambled individual exemplars (Exp. 1), participants viewed pictures where the categories as well as the individual objects predicted picture order (e.g., bird1-dog1, bird2-dog2). Our findings suggest that participants preferentially encode the relationships between the individual objects, even in the presence of statistical regularities linking semantic categories (Exps. 2 and 3). In a final experiment we investigate whether learners are biased towards learning object-level regularities or simply construct the most detailed model given the data (and therefore best able to predict the specifics of the upcoming stimulus) by investigating whether participants preferentially learn from the statistical regularities linking individual snapshots of objects or the relationship between the objects themselves (e.g., bird_picture1-dog_picture1, bird_picture2-dog_picture2). We find that participants fail to learn the relationships between individual snapshots, suggesting a bias towards object-level statistical regularities as opposed to merely constructing the most complete model of the input. This work moves beyond the previous existence proofs that statistical learning is possible at both very high and very low levels of abstraction (categories vs. individual objects) and suggests that, at least with the current categories and type of learner, there are biases to pick up on statistical regularities between individual objects even when robust statistical information is present at other levels of abstraction. These findings speak directly to emerging theories about how systems supporting statistical learning and prediction operate in our structure-rich environments. Moreover, the theoretical implications of the current work across multiple domains of study is already clear: statistical learning cannot be assumed to be unconstrained even if statistical learning has previously been established at a given level of abstraction when that information is presented in isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Grey parrot, Griffin (Psittacus erithacus), previously taught English labels for various colors and shapes with respect to three-dimensional (3D) stimuli, was tested on his ability to transfer to very different two-dimensional (2D) images consisting of modal and amodal completion stimuli. For modal completion (aka subjective contours), Kanizsa figures were constructed using black 'pac-men' to form regular polygons on colored paper. For amodal completion, portions of variously colored regular 2D polygons were occluded by black circles or other black figures. For each task, Griffin provided a vocal English shape label for five possible shapes designated by their vertices (one, two, three, four, six). His accuracy was high for both amodal completed figures, including probe stimuli (28/38 correct) and modally completed figures (29/38 correct), with chance=0.20. The modally completed case (i.e., Kanizsa subjective figures) is of particular importance as there are no shared image parts between training and testing stimuli. We draw several conclusions from these results. First, a surface level completion process is fully operative insofar as Griffin was able to correctly identify shapes that differed considerably from training images. Second, because parrots can generalize from shapes of real objects to drawings where original image contours were clearly absent, the data provide a compelling example of shape invariance, indicating that visual shapes are processed far beyond that of their image description. Third, parrots with a repertoire of multiple vocal responses can be rigorously tested for visual competencies, an option as yet to be tried in other experimental animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than a decade of research has found strong evidence for P(if A, then C)=P(C|A) ("the Equation"). We argue, however, that this hypothesis provides an overly simplified picture due to its inability to account for relevance. We manipulated relevance in the evaluation of the probability and acceptability of indicative conditionals and found that relevance moderates the effect of P(C|A). This corroborates the Default and Penalty Hypothesis put forward in this paper. Finally, the probability and acceptability of concessive conditionals ("Even if A, then still C") were investigated and it was found that the Equation provides a better account of concessive conditionals than of indicatives across relevance manipulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Theory-of-mind (ToM) refers to knowledge and awareness of mental states in oneself and others. Various training programs have been developed to improve ToM in children.Objectives: In the present study, we conducted a quantitative review of ToM training programs that have been tested in controlled studies.Data Sources: A literature search was conducted using PubMed, PsycInfo, the Cochrane Library, and manual searches.Review Methods: We identified 32 papers with 45 studies or experiments that included 1529 children with an average age of 63 months (SD=28.7).Results: ToM training procedures were more effective than control procedures and their aggregate effect size was moderately strong (Hedges' g=0.75, CI=0.60-0.89, p<.001). Moderator analyses revealed that although ToM training programs were generally effective, ToM skill-related outcomes increased with length of training sessions and were significantly higher in active control studies.Conclusion: ToM training procedures can effectively enhance ToM in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of how adults interpret the actions of others have focused on the goals and intentions of actors engaged in object-directed actions. Recent research has challenged this assumption, and shown that movements are often interpreted as being for their own sake (Schachner & Carey, 2013). Here we postulate a third interpretation of movement-movement that represents action, but does not literally act on objects in the world. These movements are gestures. In this paper, we describe a framework for predicting when movements are likely to be seen as representations. In Study 1, adults described one of three scenes: (1) an actor moving objects, (2) an actor moving her hands in the presence of objects (but not touching them) or (3) an actor moving her hands in the absence of objects. Participants systematically described the movements as depicting an object-directed action when the actor moved objects, and favored describing the movements as depicting movement for its own sake when the actor produced the same movements in the absence of objects. However, participants favored describing the movements as representations when the actor produced the movements near, but not on, the objects. Study 2 explored two additional features-the form of an actor's hands and the presence of speech-like sounds-to test the effect of context on observers' classification of movement as representational. When movements are seen as representations, they have the power to influence communication, learning, and cognition in ways that movement for its own sake does not. By incorporating representational gesture into our framework for movement analysis, we take an important step towards developing a more cohesive understanding of action-interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are quintessentially social, yet much of cognitive psychology has focused on the individual, in individual settings. The literature on joint action is one of the most prominent exceptions. Joint-action research studies the sociality of our mental representations by examining how the tasks of other people around us affect our own task performance. In this paper we go beyond examining whether we represent others and their tasks, by asking whether we also automatically do their tasks with them, even if they require effortful executive functions. To this end we examine one of the core executive functions, shifting, in a new paradigm that allows us to investigate task-switching in a joint-action setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes someone the same person over time? There are (at least) two ways of understanding this question: A person can be the same in the sense of being very similar to how they used to be (similarity), or they can be the same in the sense of being the same individual (numerical identity). In recent years, several papers have claimed to explore the commonsense notion of numerical identity. However, we suggest here that these researchers have instead been studying similarity. We develop a novel method that uses simple intuitions about objects to illustrate these two notions of "same person", and then asks which concept applies to instances of personal change. Across 4 studies (N = 2446), we find that these previously documented intuitions are best understood as reflecting judgments about similarity, not identity (Experiments 1 and 2). We then use this method to explore the situations in which participants do perceive a change in numerical identity. We find that when a person's entire brain (Experiments 3 and 4) or soul (Experiment 4) has been replaced with that of another person, the majority of participants judge that numerical identity has changed. However, we also note that a substantial minority of participants denied that identity had changed, opening new questions about the role of the body in intuitive judgments of personal identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dual strategy model posits that reasoners rely on two information processing strategies when making inferences: The statistical strategy generates a rapid probabilistic estimate based on associative access to a wide array of information, and the counterexample strategy uses a more focused representation allowing for a search for potential counterexamples. In this paper, we focused on individual differences in strategy use as a predictor of performance on four reasoning tasks: Belief bias, base rate neglect, conjunction fallacy, and denominator neglect. Predictions from the strategy use model were contrasted with predictions from Dual Process Theories, which suggest that individual differences in performance reflect variations in cognitive ability. In each of four studies, a large number (N ≈ 200) completed one of the above reasoning tasks, a strategy use diagnostic questionnaire, and measures of IQ, cognitive reflection, and numeracy. In three of four studies, individual differences in strategy use predicted differences in reasoning performance when the effects of the other variables were eliminated. Bayesian analysis indicated that none of the individual differences measures predicted a significant portion of variance on the conjunction fallacy task, and that strategy use was a strong predictor on the remaining three tasks. This research suggests that the type of strategy that is adopted paves a road to successful reasoning that is independent of cognitive capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children’s evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children’s knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children’s source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children’s ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Adults and children readily construct action representations organized with respect to an ultimate goal. These representations allow one to predict the consequences of action, interpret and describe actions, and categorize action sequences. In this paper, we explore the ontogeny of hierarchically organized action representations, and its relation to infants'' ability to produce similar sequences. To do so, we examine infants'' perception and performance of a means-end sequence: pulling a cloth to retrieve a toy. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we demonstrate that 12-month-old infants understand that the initial step of the cloth-pulling sequence is directed toward the ultimate goal of attaining the toy, and use their knowledge of the causal constraints of the sequence to make this goal attribution. Ten-month-olds, however, appear transitional with respect to this understanding: their ability to identify the goal of the cloth-pulling sequence is related to their own ability to planfully solve a similar sequence. These findings are consistent with a burgeoning body of literature suggesting an intimate link between action production and perception, and suggest that this link is in place by at least 10 months of age. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Researchers working on children''s moral understanding maintain that the child''s capacity to distinguish morality from convention shows that children regard moral violations as objectively wrong (e.g. Nucci, L. (2001). Education in the moral domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, one traditional way to cast the issue of objectivism is to focus not on conventionality, but on whether moral properties depend on our responses, as with properties like icky and fun. This paper argues that the moral/conventional task is inadequate for assessing whether children regard moral properties as response-dependent. Unfortunately, children''s understanding of response-dependent properties has been neglected in recent research. Two experiments are reported showing that children are more likely to treat properties like fun and icky as response-dependent than moral properties like good and bad. Hence, this helps support the claim that children are moral objectivists. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The ‘fast and frugal’ approach to reasoning (Gigerenzer, G., & Todd, P. M. (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford University Press) claims that individuals use non-compensatory strategies in judgment – the idea that only one cue is taken into account in reasoning. The simplest and most important of these heuristics postulates that judgment sometimes relies solely on recognition. However, the studies that have investigated usage of the recognition heuristic have confounded recognition with other cues that could also lead to similar judgments. This paper tests whether mere recognition is actually driving the findings in support of the recognition heuristic. Two studies provide evidence that judgments do not conform to the recognition heuristic when these confounds are accounted for. Implications for the study of simple heuristics are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper introduces the notion of frequent frames, distributional patterns based on co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences, then investigates the usefulness of this information in grammatical categorization. A frame is defined as two jointly occurring words with one word intervening. Qualitative and quantitative results from distributional analyses of six different corpora of child directed speech are presented in two experiments. In the analyses, words that were surrounded by the same frequent frame were categorized together. The results show that frequent frames yield very accurate categories. Furthermore, evidence from behavioral studies suggests that infants and adults are sensitive to frame-like units, and that adults use them to categorize words. This evidence, along with the success of frames in categorizing words, provides support for frames as a basis for the acquisition of grammatical categories. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Consider the task of predicting which soccer team will win the next World Cup. The bookmakers may judge Brazil to be the team most likely to win, but also judge it most likely that a European rather than a Latin American team will win. This is an example of a non-aligned hierarchy structure: the most probable event at the subordinate level (Brazil wins) appears to be inconsistent with the most probable event at the superordinate level (a European team wins). In this paper we exploit such structures to investigate how people make predictions based on uncertain hierarchical knowledge. We distinguish between aligned and non-aligned environments, and conjecture that people assume alignment. Participants were exposed to a non-aligned training set in which the most probable superordinate category predicted one outcome, whereas the most probable subordinate category predicted a different outcome. In the test phase participants allowed their initial probability judgments about category membership to shift their final ratings of the probability of the outcome, even though all judgments were made on the basis of the same statistical data. In effect people were primed to focus on the most likely path in an inference tree, and neglect alternative paths. These results highlight the importance of the level at which statistical data are represented, and suggest that when faced with hierarchical inference problems people adopt a simplifying heuristic that assumes alignment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information is lexically encoded in the representation of verbs and some is not. In this paper, we propose that semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon, a sentence continuation study, and an on-line sentence processing study which confirm that both factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant information. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reports a series of self-paced reading time experiments designed to probe how the reference of pronominal expressions is resolved on-line in (Mandarin) Chinese. It is assumed that pronoun resolution is achieved by narrowing the candidate set of potential antecedents for a pronoun. The experimental evidence reported here indicates that two factors – syntactic prominence and the matching of lexical features (e.g. gender) – play a significant role in filtering this candidate set. It is shown that syntactic prominence and feature matching work in conjunction with each other rather than in a competitive, winner-take-all manner. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that syntactic prominence is sensitive to structural relations rather than exclusively to grammatical functions (such as subject and direct object) or semantic roles (such as agent and patient) as has been assumed in the psycholinguistic literature. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The present paper evaluates different hypotheses for explaining the living/nonliving things dissociation phenomenon in terms of feature type, considering the role of this dimension in the organization of conceptual semantic representations and in the activation of name representations. For this purpose we used Sloman and associates'' (Memory and Cognition 27(3) (1999) 526; Cognitive Science 22(2) (1998) 189) name centrality and conceptual centrality tasks and asked subjects to judge functional and perceptual/visual features of living and nonliving items. Conceptual centrality results are more in accordance with a “single feature-domain connection hypothesis” where visual features are more important than functional features for the representation of living things and no feature type advantage is found for nonliving things. Name centrality results show that functional features are more important than sensory/visual features overall, a result that is not predicted by any of the hypotheses considered. The fact that the two judgments diverge emphasizes their importance for evaluating the role of feature type in the living/nonliving dissociation. Implications for explaining this phenomenon are also discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A recent paper in this journal reports two event-related potential (ERP) experiments interpreted as supporting the domain specificity of the visual mechanisms implicated in processing faces (Cognition 83 (2002) 1). The authors argue that because a large neurophysiological response to faces (N170) is less influenced by the task than the response to objects, and because the response for human faces extends to ape faces (for which we are not expert), we should reject the hypothesis that the face-sensitivity reflected by the N170 can be accounted for by the subordinate-level expertise model of object recognition (Nature Neuroscience 3 (2000) 764). In this commentary, we question this conclusion based on some of our own ERP work on expert object recognition as well as the work of others. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are 'killed' (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. Extending 'evidentiary' experimental philosophy, this paper examines whether the 'zombie argument' against materialism is built on zombie intuitions. We examine the hypothesis that contextually defeated stereotypical inferences from the noun 'zombie' influence intuitions about 'philosophical zombies'. We document framing effects ('zombie' vs 'duplicate') predicted by the hypothesis. Findings undermine intuitions about the conceivability of 'philosophical zombies' and address the philosophical 'hard problem of consciousness'. Findings support a deflationary response: The impression that principled obstacles prevent scientific explanation of how physical processes give rise to conscious experience is generated by philosophical arguments that rely on epistemically deficient intuitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of proportional reasoning has long been recognized by psychologists and educators, yet we still do not have a good understanding of how humans mentally represent proportions. In this paper we present a psychophysical model of proportion estimation, extending previous approaches. We assumed that proportion representations are formed by representing each magnitude of a proportion stimuli (the part and its complement) as Gaussian activations in the mind, which are then mentally combined in the form of a proportion. We next derived the internal representation of proportions, including bias and internal noise parameters -capturing respectively how our estimations depart from true values and how variable estimations are. Methodologically, we introduced a mixture of components to account for contaminating behaviors (guessing and reversal of responses) and framed the model in a hierarchical way. We found empirical support for the model by testing a group of 4th grade children in a spatial proportion estimation task. In particular, the internal density reproduced the asymmetries (skewedness) seen in this and in previous reports of estimation tasks, and the model accurately described wide variations between subjects in behavior. Bias estimates were in general smaller than by using previous approaches, due to the model's capacity to absorb contaminating behaviors. This property of the model can be of especial relevance for studies aimed at linking psychophysical measures with broader cognitive abilities. We also recovered higher levels of noise than those reported in discrimination of spatial magnitudes and discuss possible explanations for it. We conclude by illustrating a concrete application of our model to study the effects of scaling in proportional reasoning, highlighting the value of quantitative models in this field of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children learn to extract number information from utterances using a variety of language-specific cues, but in some languages this information is encoded in features that display high variability in their realization. How does this affect their acquisition process? In this paper, we present an eye tracking study comparing 3.5- to 7.5-year-old children and adults' use of number information on the verb and the determiner of the subject noun phrase in Chilean Spanish, a dialect of Spanish with variable realization of plural morphology in the noun phrase (due to phonological weakening) and categorical realization of number on the verb. Our results suggest that, while adults can determine whether the subject refers to a plurality or a singleton set based on the morphology of the verb alone, even 5- to 7.5-year-old children do not and, instead, require information from the noun phrase determiner to make a decision. Children younger than 5 years, instead, cannot use number information on the verb and on the determiner to make a decision. This supports Miller and Schmitt's (2010, 2012) hypothesis that number morphology is not always mapped into syntactic and semantic features by younger children in varieties of Spanish where number is subject to variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The epidemiology of cognitive development is an approach essentially based on large observational studies, which examines individual differences in cognitive abilities throughout childhood and their determinants. Although different in terms of methodology and main interests from developmental psychology, cognitive epidemiology offers complementary viewpoints on cognitive development and addresses fundamental research questions of interest to developmental psychologists. The present paper depicts the contributions of the epidemiological approach to the field of cognitive development and highlights the methodological advances that have made such contributions possible. We discuss the stability and developmental trajectories of cognitive functions, their main predictors, the complex interplay between environmental and genetic predictors, and the relationships between the different domains of cognition from birth to adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assertions are our standard communicative devices for sharing and acquiring information. Recent studies seemingly provide converging evidence that assertions are subject to a factive norm: you are entitled to make an assertion only if it is true. However, these studies assume that we can treat participants' judgements about what an agent 'should say' as evidence of their intuitions about assertability. This paper argues that this assumption is incorrect, so the conclusions drawn in the aforementioned studies are unwarranted. We provide evidence that most people do not interpret statements about what one 'should say' as statements about assertability, but rather as statements about what is in the agent's interest to do. Measures for prompting the intended reading of the test question are identified, and their efficacy is tested. We found that when these measures are implemented, people's judgements consistently and overwhelmingly align with non-factive accounts of assertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People estimate numerical quantities (such as the calories of foods) on a day-to-day basis. Although these estimates influence behavior and determine wellbeing, they are prone to two important types of errors. Scaling errors occur when people make mistakes reporting their beliefs about a particular numerical quantity (e.g. by inflating small numbers). Belief errors occur when people make mistakes using their knowledge of the judgment target to form their beliefs about the numerical quantity (e.g. by overweighting certain cues). In this paper, we quantitatively model numerical estimates, and in turn, scaling and belief errors, in everyday judgment tasks. Our approach is unique in using insights from semantic memory research to specify knowledge for naturalistic judgment targets, allowing our models to formally describe nuanced errors in belief not considered in prior research. In Studies 1 and 2, we find that belief error models predict participant estimates and errors with very high out-of-sample accuracy rates, significantly outperforming the predictions of scaling error models. In fact, the best-fitting belief error models can closely mimic the inverse-S shaped patterns captured by scaling error models, suggesting that the types of responses previously attributed to scaling errors can be seen as errors of belief. In Studies 3 to 8, we find that belief error models are also able to predict people's responses in semantic judgment, free association, and verbal protocol tasks related to numerical judgment, and thus provide a good account of the cognitive underpinnings of judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). The authors discovered from comments on their open data that Studies 1 and 2 of their manuscript suffered from a serious flaw. There was a mistake in the Python code they used, and the items (vignettes) were not properly randomized across conditions. In Study 1 (which investigated the effect of cognitive load on moral judgment), all participants in the Load condition received one set of items, whereas all participants in the No Load condition received a different set of items. This meant that they cannot determine whether the difference they observed between the Load and No Load conditions was due to the manipulation (Load vs. No Load) or to a simple difference between items. Given these problems, the authors cannot guarantee that the conclusions of their paper are valid. Because of this error, the authors have requested retraction of their manuscript. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though we often "fear the worst", worrying that unexpectedly bad things will happen, there are times when we "hope for the best", imagining that unexpectedly good things will happen, too. The paper explores how the valence of the current situation influences people's imagining of unexpected future events when participants were instructed to think of "something unexpected". In Experiment 1, participants (N = 127) were asked to report unexpected events to everyday scenarios under different instructional conditions (e.g., asked for "good" or "bad" unexpected events), and manifested a strong negativity bias in response to non-valenced instructions (i.e., being asked to "think of the unexpected" with no valence given). They mainly reported quite "predictable" unexpected outcomes that were negative; however, a post-test (N = 31) showed that the scenarios used were predominantly positive. In Experiment 2 (N = 257), when participants were instructed to think of "something unexpected and bizarre", under the same instructional manipulations as Experiment 1, this negativity bias was replicated. In Experiment 3, using a design in which positive/negative materials were matched (verified by a pre-test, N = 60), it was found that when participants (N = 102) were given negative scenarios, they reported more positive events than they do when they are given positive scenarios. Though responding still retained an overwhelming negative bias, this result provided some evidence for a weaker valence-countering strategy; that is, where a negative scenario can lead to positive unexpected events being mentioned, and a positive scenario leads to negative unexpected events being reported. The implications of these results for people's projections of unexpected futures in their everyday lives is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to explain the unacceptability of certain long-distance dependencies - termed syntactic islands by Ross (1967) - syntacticians proposed constraints on long-distance dependencies which are universal and purely syntactic and thus not dependent on the meaning of the construction (Chomsky, 1977; Chomsky, 1995 a.o.). This predicts that these constraints should hold across constructions and languages. In this paper, we investigate the "subject island" constraint across constructions in English and French, a constraint that blocks extraction out of subjects. In particular, we compare extraction out of nominal subjects with extraction out of nominal objects, in relative clauses and wh-questions, using similar materials across constructions and languages. Contrary to the syntactic accounts, we find that unacceptable extractions from subjects involve (a) extraction in wh-questions (in both languages); or (b) preposition stranding (in English). But the extraction of a whole prepositional phrase from subjects in a relative clause, in both languages, is as good or better than a similar extraction from objects. Following Erteschik-Shir (1973) and Kuno (1987) among others, we propose a theory that takes into account the discourse status of the extracted element in the construction at hand: the extracted element is a focus (corresponding to new information) in wh-questions, but not in relative clauses. The focus status conflicts with the non-focal status of a subject (usually given or discourse-old). These results suggest that most previous discussions of islands may rely on the wrong premise that all extraction types behave alike. Once different extraction types are recognized as different constructions (Croft, 2001; Ginzburg & Sag, 2000; Goldberg, 2006; Sag, 2010), with their own discourse functions, one can explain different extraction patterns depending on the construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention - prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark's (2018) embodied inference; Seth's (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli's (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain's cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key source of support for the view that challenging people's beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some concepts are more essential for human communication than others. In this paper, we investigate whether the concept of agent-backgrounding is sufficiently important for communication that linguistic structures for encoding this concept are present in young sign languages. Agent-backgrounding constructions serve to reduce the prominence of the agent - the English passive sentence a book was knocked over is an example. Although these constructions are widely attested cross-linguistically, there is little prior research on the emergence of such devices in new languages. Here we studied how agent-backgrounding constructions emerge in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) and adult homesign systems. We found that NSL signers have innovated both lexical and morphological devices for expressing agent-backgrounding, indicating that conveying a flexible perspective on events has deep communicative value. At the same time, agent-backgrounding devices did not emerge at the same time as agentive devices. This result suggests that agent-backgrounding does not have the same core cognitive status as agency. The emergence of agent-backgrounding morphology appears to depend on receiving a linguistic system as input in which linguistic devices for expressing agency are already well-established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many syntactic theories posit a fundamental structural difference between intransitive verbs with agentive subjects (unergative verbs) and those with theme subjects (unaccusative verbs). This claim garners support from studies finding differences in the online comprehension of these verbs. The present experiments seek to replicate one such finding using the visual world paradigm (Koring, Mak, & Reuland, 2012). We control for several factors that were uncontrolled in previous studies. We find no differences in the processing of unergative and unaccusative sentences in logistic regressions and cluster analyses. However, in growth curve analyses, modeled closely on the original paper, we find differences between the verb conditions that appear to be statistically significant but are unstable across experiments. A resampling analysis reveals that the growth curve analyses are highly anticonservative, suggesting that the earlier finding was a false positive. We conclude that there is no strong evidence that unaccusatives are processed differently from unergatives. We suggest that growth curve analyses only be used with visual world paradigm data when the underlying assumptions of the analysis can be validated via resampling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our understanding of proportions can be both symbolic, as when doing calculations in school mathematics, or intuitive, as when folding a bed sheet in half. While an understanding of symbolic proportions is crucial for school mathematics, the cognitive foundations of this ability remain unclear. Here we implemented a computerized training game to test a causal link from intuitive (nonsymbolic) to symbolic proportional reasoning and other math abilities in 4th grade children. An experimental group was trained in nonsymbolic proportional reasoning (PR) with continuous extents, and an active control group was trained on a remarkably similar nonsymbolic magnitude comparison. We found that the experimental group improved at nonsymbolic PR across training sessions, showed near transfer to a paper-and-pencil nonsymbolic PR test, transfer to symbolic proportions, and far transfer to geometry. The active control group showed only a predicted far transfer to geometry. In a second experiment, these results were replicated with an independent cohort of children. Overall this study extends previous correlational evidence, suggesting a functional link between nonsymbolic PR on one hand and symbolic PR and geometry on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many species rely on the three-dimensional surface layout of an environment to find a desired goal following disorientation. They generally do so to the exclusion of other important spatial cues. Two influential frameworks for explaining that phenomenon are provided by geometric-module theories and view-matching theories of reorientation respectively. The former posit a module that operates only on representations of the global geometry of three-dimensional surfaces to guide behavior. The latter place snapshots, stored representations of the subject's two-dimensional retinal stimulation at specific locations, at the heart of their accounts. In this paper, I take a fresh look at the debate between them. I begin by making a case that the empirical evidence we currently have does not clearly favor one framework over the other, and that the debate has reached something of an impasse. Then, I present a new explanatory problem-the representation selection problem-that offers the prospect of breaking the impasse by introducing a new type of explanatory consideration that both frameworks must address. The representation selection problem requires explaining how subjects can reliably select the relevant representation with which they initiate the reorientation process. I argue that the view-matching framework does not have the resources to address this problem, while a certain type of theory within the geometric-module framework can provide a natural response to it. In showing this, I develop a new geometric-module theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human performance in complex multiple-task environments depends critically on the interplay between cognitive control and cognitive capacity. In this paper we propose a tractable computational model of how cognitive control and capacity influence the speed and accuracy of decisions made in the event-based prospective memory (PM) paradigm, and in doing so test a new quantitative formulation that measures two distinct components of cognitive capacity (gain and focus) that apply generally to choices among two or more options. Consistent with prior work, individuals used proactive control (increased ongoing task thresholds under PM load) and reactive control (inhibited ongoing task accumulation rates to PM items) to support PM performance. Individuals used cognitive gain to increase the amount of resources allocated to the ongoing task under time pressure and PM load. However, when demands exceeded the capacity limit, resources were reallocated (shared) between ongoing task and PM processes. Extending previous work, individuals used cognitive focus to control the quality of processing for the ongoing and PM tasks based on the particular demand and payoff structure of the environment (e.g., higher focus for higher priority tasks; lower focus under high time pressure and with PM load). Our model provides the first detailed quantitative understanding of cognitive gain and focus as they apply to evidence accumulation models, which - along with cognitive control mechanisms - support decision-making in complex multiple-task environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]