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By definition, individuals with absolute pitch (AP) can categorize an isolated musical note with near perfect accuracy without a reference pitch. This definition implies a uniformity of performance across people; however, in reality AP is a complex, multidimensional ability, shaped by both early and recent auditory experiences. In the present study we assess how individual differences in working memory, musical expertise, and language background relate to the accuracy with which an AP possessor can identify an isolated musical note. In a standard test of AP ability, all AP participants performed virtually perfectly. When tested on more challenging notes, drawn from less frequently experienced timbres and octave ranges, we found that working memory positively related to note categorization performance, though only among individuals who reported a tonal language background. This interaction between tonal language and working memory, however, may have been partly grounded by differences in musical expertise reported between tonal and non-tonal language. Supporting this possibility, in a follow-up analysis we observed a general interaction between working memory performance and musical expertise across all participants. Taken together, these results highlight the complexity of AP categorization when considered as an auditory skill rather than a native talent. The observation that working memory may be an important component of auditory processing in AP when the to-be-judged sounds are less easily categorized is consistent with recent theoretical accounts of how working memory and expertise relate to auditory recognition more broadly.

Our aim was to determine if deficits in intentional forgetting that are associated with depression and dysphoria (subclinical depression) could be explained, at least in part, by variations in working memory function. Sixty dysphoric and 61 non-dysphoric participants completed a modified version of the think/no-think (TNT) task and a measure of complex working memory (the operation span task). The TNT task involved participants learning a series of emotional cue–target word pairs, before being presented with a subset of the cues and asked to either recall the associated target (think) or to prevent it from coming to mind (no think) by thinking about a substitute target word. Participants were subsequently asked to recall the targets to all cues (regardless of previous recall instructions). As expected, after controlling for anxiety, we found that dysphoric individuals exhibited impaired forgetting relative to the non-dysphoric participants. Also as expected, we found that superior working memory function was associated with more successful forgetting. Critically, in the dysphoric group, we found that working memory mediated the effect of depression on intentional forgetting. That is, depression influenced forgetting indirectly via its effect on working memory. However, under conditions of repeated suppression, there was also a direct effect of depression on forgetting. These findings represent an important development in the understanding of impaired forgetting in depression and also suggest that working memory training might be a viable intervention for improving the ability of depressed individuals to prevent unwanted memories from coming to mind.

We discuss two relatively understudied yet important phenomena relevant to the ecologically crucial task of gathering reliable information from human faces. First, facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) predicts aggressiveness judgments and is associated with aggression-related behavior and life history outcomes. A significant body of research indicates fWHR is an honest evolutionary signal of propensity to aggression yet little is known about how or if this signal is preserved in judgments across race boundaries. Evidence for a universal relationship between increased fWHR and enhanced aggression perception has been found using Asian and white face stimuli, but race moderated the relationship between high fWHR and ratings in a pain ascription task using black and white faces. Second, we examine research on olfactory cues to face perception and focus particular attention on the possibility that face judgments may be influenced by putrescine, an organic compound found recently to heighten threat and escape-related cognitions in a single subliminal odor presentation study. Here we probe how fWHR and face race interact in aggression judgments during subliminal exposure to putrescine and a control condition. We present a standardized method of subliminal putrescine delivery and find null effects of putrescine on face judgments. Overall, our primarily white participants show a reduced difference in aggressiveness ratings to black faces from low to high levels of fWHR compared to the same contrast in white face stimuli, consistent with an account in which black faces are not perceived with the same configural precision as white faces.

The present study examined the effect of stimulus valence on two levels of selection in the cognitive system, selection of a task-set and selection of a response. In the first experiment, participants performed a spatial compatibility task (pressing left and right key according to the locations of stimuli) in which stimulus-response mappings were determined by stimulus valence. There was a standard spatial stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect for positive stimuli (flowers) and a reversed SRC effect for negative stimuli (spiders), but the same data could be interpreted as showing faster responses when positive and negative stimuli were assigned to compatible and incompatible mappings, respectively, than when the assignment was opposite. Experiment 2 disentangled these interpretations, showing that valence did not influence a spatial SRC effect (Simon effect) when task-set retrieval was unnecessary. Experiments 3 and 4 replaced keypress responses with joystick deflections that afforded approach/avoidance action coding. Stimulus valence modulated the Simon effect (but did not reverse it) when the valence was task-relevant (Experiment 3) as well as when it was task-irrelevant (Experiment 4). Therefore, stimulus valence influences task-set selection and response selection, but the influence on the latter is limited to conditions where responses afford approach/avoidance action coding.

An emerging area of research in cognitive science is the utilization of networks to model the structure and processes of the mental lexicon in healthy and clinical populations, like aphasia. Previous research has focused on only one type of word similarity at a time (e.g., semantic relationships), even though words are multi-faceted. Here, we investigate lexical retrieval in a picture naming task from people with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia and healthy controls by utilizing a multiplex network structure that accounts for the interplay between multiple semantic and phonological relationships among words in the mental lexicon. Extending upon previous work, we focused on the global network measure of closeness centrality which is known to capture spreading activation, an important process supporting lexical retrieval. We conducted a series of logistic regression models predicting the probability of correct picture naming. We tested whether multiplex closeness centrality was a better predictor of picture naming performance than single-layer closeness centralities, other network measures assessing local and meso-scale structure, psycholinguistic variables and group differences. We also examined production gaps, or the difference between the likelihood of producing a word with the lowest and highest closeness centralities. Our results indicated that multiplex closeness centrality was a significant predictor of picture naming performance, where words with high closeness centrality were more likely to be produced than words with low closeness centrality. Additionally, multiplex closeness centrality outperformed single-layer closeness centralities and other multiplex network measures, and remained a significant predictor after controlling for psycholinguistic variables and group differences. Furthermore, we found that the facilitative effect of closeness centrality was similar for both types of aphasia. Our results underline the importance of integrating multiple measures of word similarities in cognitive language networks for better understanding lexical retrieval in aphasia, with an eye towards future clinical applications.

While most studies on person recognition examine the face alone, recent studies have shown evidence for the contribution of the body and gait to person recognition beyond the face. Nevertheless, little is known on whether person recognition can be performed based on the body alone. In this study, we examined two sources of information that may enhance body-based person recognition: body motion and whole person context. Body motion has been shown to contribute to person recognition especially when facial information is unclear. Additionally, generating whole person context, by attaching faceless heads to bodies, has been shown to activate face processing mechanisms and may therefore enhance body-based person recognition. To assess body-based person recognition, participants performed a sequential matching task in which they studied a video of a person walking followed by a headless image of the same or different identity. The role of body motion was examined by comparing recognition from dynamic vs. static headless bodies. The role of whole person context was examined by comparing bodies with and without faceless heads. Our findings show that person recognition from the body alone was better in dynamic vs. static displays indicating that body motion contributed to body-based person recognition. In addition, whole person context contributed to body-based person recognition when recognition was performed in static displays. Overall these findings show that recognizing people based on their body alone is challenging but can be performed under certain circumstances that enhance the processing of the body when seeing the whole dynamic person.

Impressions of competence from faces predict important real-world outcomes, including electoral success and chief executive officer selection. Presumed competence is associated with social status. Here we show that subtle economic status cues in clothes affect perceived competence from faces. In nine studies, people rated the competence of faces presented in frontal headshots. Faces were shown with different upper-body clothing rated by independent judges as looking ‘richer’ or ‘poorer’, although not notably perceived as such when explicitly described. The same face when seen with ‘richer’ clothes was judged significantly more competent than with ‘poorer’ clothes. The effect persisted even when perceivers were exposed to the stimuli briefly (129 ms), warned that clothing cues are non-informative and instructed to ignore the clothes (in one study, with considerable incentives). These findings demonstrate the uncontrollable effect of economic status cues on person perception. They add yet another hurdle to the challenges faced by low-status individuals. Subtle economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces even when perceivers are warned that such cues are non-informative or are instructed and incentivized to ignore them. This bias puts low-income individuals at a disadvantage.

Humans interpret others’ behaviour as intentional and goal-directed, expecting others to take the most energy-efficient path to achieve their goals. Recent studies have shown that these expectations of efficient action provide a perceptual prediction of an ideal efficient trajectory, against which the observed action is evaluated, resulting in a distorted perceptual representation of unexpected inefficient actions. Here we show that these predictions rely on the inferred intentionality of the stimulus. Participants observed an actor reach for an object with a straight or arched trajectory. The actions were made efficient or inefficient by adding or removing an obstructing object. The action disappeared mid-trajectory and participants reported the last seen position of the hand on a touch screen. Replicating previous research, judgments of inefficient actions were biased toward the efficient prediction (straight trajectories upward to avoid the obstruction, arched trajectories downward towards the target) In two further experiments, we removed intentional cues by replacing the hand with a non-agentive ball (Exp 2), and by removing the biological profile of the motion by depicting it move at a constant speed (Exp 3). Perceptual biases were substantially reduced when intentional cues were removed. Predictions of efficient action are at least partially perceptually represented and influence perceptual judgments of others actions, biasing them towards these expectations. These predictions emerge from attributions of intentionality to the observed actor, triggered by the perception of agency and kinematics that follow biological motion profiles.

The human voice is a highly flexible instrument for self-expression, yet voice identity perception is largely studied using controlled speech recordings. Using two voice-sorting tasks with naturally varying stimuli, we compared the performance of listeners who were familiar and unfamiliar with the TV show Breaking Bad. Listeners organised audio clips of speech with (1) low-expressiveness and (2) high-expressiveness into perceived identities. We predicted that increased expressiveness (e.g., shouting, strained voice) would significantly impair performance. Overall, while unfamiliar listeners were less able to generalise identity across exemplars, the two groups performed equivalently well when telling voices apart when dealing with low-expressiveness stimuli. However, high vocal expressiveness significantly impaired telling apart in both the groups: this led to increased misidentifications, where sounds from one character were assigned to the other. These misidentifications were highly consistent for familiar listeners but less consistent for unfamiliar listeners. Our data suggest that vocal flexibility has powerful effects on identity perception, where changes in the acoustic properties of vocal signals introduced by expressiveness lead to effects apparent in familiar and unfamiliar listeners alike. At the same time, expressiveness appears to have affected other aspects of voice identity processing selectively in one listener group but not the other, thus revealing complex interactions of stimulus properties and listener characteristics (i.e., familiarity) in identity processing.

Crossmodal correspondence is of scientific and commercial interest in regard to the packaging of food and beverages. Research has shown that colors and shapes can be associated with certain aromas, but these interactions have been less extensively studied with authentic visual stimuli (i.e., packaging), nor with complex odors in a food matrix. This study sought to investigate odor-color-shape crossmodal interactions with complex odor stimuli (wine odors) and wine labels. The present research uses projective mapping with 3D shapes and colors, along with a wine label matching study, to test whether chardonnay odors of different character (buttery, citrus, floral, smoky, and vegetable) are associated with certain colors and shapes. In the projective mapping experiment, most chardonnay odors were grouped similarly, however, the vegetable-forward wine was more associated with sharper shapes than rounded ones. In the wine label experiment, the yellow labels tended to be better matched with all odors, except the vegetable-forward wine, which was matched equally to all colors. These findings indicate that regardless of chardonnay odor character, it is mostly associated with a yellow colored label. Interestingly, results also indicated that not all correspondences aligned with the most common color association of an odor character (i.e., vegetative was not strictly associated with green, smoky was not associated with brown, etc.). Significant correlations between stimuli liking and matching scores indicate much of the correspondences are explained by hedonics. Overall, the present research demonstrates evidence for odor-color-shape correspondences in complex odors and realistic visual stimuli, however not as strongly as in controlled environments and simplistic stimuli.

We encounter multisensory environmental oscillations that span a wide range of temporal frequencies. In both audition and touch, sensory cues comprising repeating events are perceived either as a continuous signal or as a stream of temporally discrete events (flutter), depending on the events’ repetition rate. At high repetition rates (>100Hz), auditory and tactile cues interact reciprocally in pitch processing: The frequency of a cue experienced in one modality systematically biases the perceived frequency of a cue experienced in the other modality. Here, we tested whether audition and touch also interact in the processing of low-frequency stimulation. Because some neural populations have been shown to represent both auditory and tactile flutter, we predicted reciprocal multisensory interactions in flutter perception. We also tested whether multisensory interactions occurred if the stimulation in one modality comprised click trains and the stimulation in the other modality comprised amplitude-modulated signals, given that these stimulus types may be supported by distinct neural representations. In a series of human psychophysical experiments, we found that auditory cues bias touch and tactile cues bias audition on a flutter discrimination task. Moreover, we observed similar interaction patterns regardless of stimulus type and whether the same stimulus types were experienced in the two modalities. Combined with earlier studies, our results suggest that the nervous system extracts and combines temporal rate information from multisensory environmental signals, regardless of stimulus type, in both the low- and high temporal frequency domains. This function likely reflects the importance of temporal frequency as a fundamental feature of our multisensory experience.

Cognitive control is applied in situations that require overriding a habitual and automatic response. The conflict monitoring hypothesis and the Expected Value of Control (EVC) theory as its extension posit a control system responsible for detecting conflicting occasions and adapting to them dynamically within a task. Here we evaluate this prediction in two versions of one of the most popular tasks in cognitive control, namely the Stroop task. We hypothesized that nearby-items interference combines with task interference in the multi-item version effectively turning it into a multi-task that may challenge cognitive control. Adopting an alternative methodology tracking within-task performance, we compared the classical multi-item version of the Stroop task and its single-item counterpart in adults and children. The results revealed a within-task performance decline only in the multi-item version of the task, in both incongruent and neutral conditions, modulated by the presumed maturity of the control system. These findings suggest capacity constraints in control implementation and allocation under conditions requiring parallel execution of multiple cognitive tasks. Task complexity and demands seem to modulate effects on performance. We discuss implications for cognitive control as well as substantial concerns regarding the calculation and use of indices of interference based on the commonly used multi-item version of the Stroop task.

In uncertain environments we must balance our need to gather information with our desire to reap rewards by exploiting current knowledge. Achieving this balance is further complicated in reactive environments where actions produce long-lasting change to the system. In four experiments, we investigate how people learn to make effective decisions from experience in a dynamic multiarmed bandit task. In contrast to the typical exploitation-dependent diminishing rewards found in previous studies, options were framed as skills that developed greater rewards the more they were chosen. In Experiment 1, we provide a proof of concept, and in Experiments 2-4 we explore the boundaries of participants' sensitivity to reactive dynamics. Our results suggest that most individuals can learn effective strategies for coping with these reactive environments. A two-part comparison of several competing psychological models supports several conclusions: (a) a sizable minority of individuals learned that their environment was reactive, (b) evidence suggests several distinct groups of individuals employed unique decision strategies, and (c) testing models with the simulation method reveals qualitative misfits that motivate future theory development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Most studies on person perception have primarily investigated static images of faces. However, real-life person perception involves also the body and often the gait of the whole person. Whereas some studies indicated that the face dominates the representation of the whole person, others have emphasized the additional contribution of the body and gait. Here, we compared models of whole person perception by asking whether a model that includes the body for static whole person stimuli and also the gait for dynamic whole person stimuli accounts better for the representation of the whole person than a model that takes into account the face alone. Participants rated the distinctiveness of static or dynamic displays of different people based on either the whole person, face, body, or gait. By fitting a linear regression model to the representation of the whole person based on the face, body and gait, we revealed that the face and body contribute uniquely and independently to the representation of the static whole person, and that gait further contributes to the representation of the dynamic person. A complementary analysis examined if these components are also valid dimensions of a whole person representational space. This analysis further confirmed that the body in addition to the face, as well as the gait are valid dimensions of the static and dynamic whole person representations, respectively. These data clearly show that whole person perception goes beyond the face and is significantly influenced by the body and gait.

Hierarchical structure and compositionality imbue human language with unparalleled expressive power and set it apart from other perception–action systems. However, neither formal nor neurobiological models account for how these defining computational properties might arise in a physiological system. I attempt to reconcile hierarchy and compositionality with principles from cell assembly computation in neuroscience; the result is an emerging theory of how the brain could convert distributed perceptual representations into hierarchical structures across multiple timescales while representing interpretable incremental stages of (de)compositional meaning. The model's architecture—a multidimensional coordinate system based on neurophysiological models of sensory processing—proposes that a manifold of neural trajectories encodes sensory, motor, and abstract linguistic states. Gain modulation, including inhibition, tunes the path in the manifold in accordance with behavior and is how latent structure is inferred. As a consequence, predictive information about upcoming sensory input during production and comprehension is available without a separate operation. The proposed processing mechanism is synthesized from current models of neural entrainment to speech, concepts from systems neuroscience and category theory, and a symbolic-connectionist computational model that uses time and rhythm to structure information. I build on evidence from cognitive neuroscience and computational modeling that suggests a formal and mechanistic alignment between structure building and neural oscillations, and moves toward unifying basic insights from linguistics and psycholinguistics with the currency of neural computation.

A fundamental component of interacting with our environment is the gathering and interpretation of sensory information. When investigating how perceptual information shapes the mechanisms of decision-making, most researchers have relied on the use of manipulated or unnatural information as perceptual input, resulting in findings that may not generalize to real-world scenes. Unlike simplified, artificial stimuli, real-world scenes contain low-level regularities (natural scene statistics) that are informative about the structural complexity of a scene, which the brain could exploit forde perceptual decision-making. In this study, participants performed an animal detection task on low, medium or high complexity scenes as determined by two biologically plausible natural scene statistics, contrast energy (CE) or spatial coherence (SC). In Experiment 1, stimuli were sampled such that CE and SC both influenced scene complexity. Diffusion modeling showed that both the speed of information processing and the required evidence are affected by the low-level scene complexity. Experiment 2a/b refined these observations by showing how the isolated manipulation of SC alone results in weaker but comparable effects on decision-making, whereas the manipulation of only CE has no effect. Overall, performance was best for scenes with intermediate complexity. Our systematic definition of natural scene statistics specifies how the complexity of natural scenes interacts with decision-making, and increases our understanding of how humans process information in real-world environments. We speculate that the computation of CE and SC could serve as an indication to adjust perceptual decision-making based on the complexity of the input.

To activate the human subjects sympathetic nervous system; we installed virtual flames in front of our moving stimuli; in conclusion, the perceived speed is highly boosted. The aforementioned observation could be a result of pupil dilation triggered by active sympathetic nervous system. Dilation that should grant the retinal peripheries greater accessibility to the external surroundings. Accessibility that should catalyze fulsome activation of these peripheries and its corresponding distinguished visual awareness, see reference 1 and 2, thus, awareness with boosted visual perceived speed.

Visual Abstract, The self is a distinct entity from the rest of the world, and actions and sensory feedback are our channels of interaction with the external world. This study examined how the sense of control influences people’s perception of sensorimotor input under the framework of categorical perception. Twenty human participants (18 males, two females) took part in both experiments. Experiment 1 showed that the sensitivity (d′) of detecting a 20% change in control from no change was higher when the changes occurred at the control-category boundary than within each category. Experiment 2 showed that the control categories greatly affected early attention allocation, even when the judgment of control was unnecessary to the task. Taken together, these results showed that our perceptual and cognitive systems are highly sensitive to small changes in control that build up to a determinant change in the control category within a relatively narrow boundary zone between categories, compared with a continuous, gradual physical change in control.

Interest in iconicity (the resemblance-based mapping between aspects of form and meaning) is in the midst of a resurgence, and a prominent focus in the field has been the possible role of iconicity in language learning. Here we critically review theory and empirical findings in this domain. We distinguish local learning enhancement (where the iconicity of certain lexical items influences the learning of those items) and general learning enhancement (where the iconicity of certain lexical items influences the later learning of non-iconic items or systems). We find that evidence for local learning enhancement is quite strong, though not as clear cut as it is often described and based on a limited sample of languages. Despite common claims about broader facilitatory effects of iconicity on learning, we find that current evidence for general learning enhancement is lacking. We suggest a number of productive avenues for future research and specify what types of evidence would be required to show a role for iconicity in general learning enhancement. We also review evidence for functions of iconicity beyond word learning: iconicity enhances comprehension by providing complementary representations, supports communication about sensory imagery, and expresses affective meanings. Even if learning benefits may be modest or cross-linguistically varied, on balance, iconicity emerges as a vital aspect of language. Published as:Nielsen, Alan K. S. & Dingemanse, Mark. 2021. Iconicity in Word Learning and Beyond: A Critical Review. Language and Speech. 64(1). 52–72. (doi:10.1177/0023830920914339)

Humans expect downwards moving objects to accelerate and upwards moving objects to decelerate. These results have been interpreted as humans maintaining an internal model of gravity. We have previously suggested an interpretation of these results within a Bayesian framework of perception: earth gravity could be represented as a Strong Prior that overrules noisy sensory information (Likelihood) and therefore attracts the final percept (Posterior) very strongly. Based on this framework, we use published data from a timing task involving gravitational motion to determine the mean and the standard deviation of the Strong Earth Gravity Prior. To get its mean, we refine a model of mean timing errors we proposed in a previous paper (Björn Jörges & López-Moliner, 2019), while expands the range of conditions under which it yields adequate predictions of performance. This underscores our previous conclusion that the gravity prior is likely to be very close to 9.81 m/s². To obtain the standard deviation, we identify different sources of sensory and motor variability reflected in timing errors. We then model timing responses based on quantitative assumptions about these sensory and motor errors for a range of standard deviations of the earth gravity prior, and find that a standard deviation of around 2 m/s² makes for the best fit. This value is likely to represent an upper bound, as there are strong theoretical reasons along with support empirical evidence for the standard deviation of the earth gravity being lower than this value.

Past research has shown that mimicry has a number of pro-social consequences for interaction partners. However, such research has almost exclusively focused on its effects among interaction dyads. As social interactions are often witnessed by third-party observers, the question arises which inferences perceivers draw from observing mimicry. In the present work, we apply a third-party perspective to mimicry and test whether observers perceive mimicking individuals as submissive. Experiment 1 confirmed our prediction and found that observers perceived a mimicking person as less dominant, and thus more submissive, than a mimicked person. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and ruled out possible demand effects. Experiment 3 showed that when an interaction partner does not mimic the movements initiated by another person, the interaction partner gains dominance in the eye of the observer. Experiment 4 demonstrates that the inferences that perceivers draw from observing mimicry partly rely on a mere action-response pattern. These findings have not only important implications for mimicry as a genuinely social phenomenon, but also for research on impression management and person perception.

We had shown that deep breathing had been able to effectively and timely alter visual and auditory bistable perception, see reference 1, 2. Deep breathing requires cognitive control, and therefore, in this study, we decide to investigate whether voluntary movements of human hands are able to govern the audiovisual perception using an integrative stimulus that’s built up with the aforementioned visual and auditory stimuli. Astoundingly, when the human subjects moves the pen towards the actual physical direction, even without touching the screen; the original materials of the audiovisual stimulus appear. Reversed perception, namely, illusory motion reversals and illusory word appear when the pen is moved in the opposite direction of the actual motion. Cognitive actions’ brain areas, namely, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, premotor cortex, and primary motor cortex may require high concentration of oxygenated hobgoblin red blood cells to achieve fulsome executive movements; and this could results in significant reduction of the concentrations of the oxygenated hobgoblin red blood cells in the visual and auditory cortices. Reductions that disallow one of two; the central versus the peripheral conscious brains dedicated for audiovisual perceptions, to rapidly alternate their conscious productions; and therefore, stoppage against bistable audiovisual perception will occur. We thus hypothesis that the DLPFC may send signals to deactivate the peripheral areas in the sensory brain regions when the cognitive action is harmonized with the actual material; but it may send a contrary signal to deactivate the central areas in the sensory brain regions when the cognitive action and the actual material are disharmonized.

We had previously discussed that hMT+ should have two distinct regions, one is connected to the central retina, and another is connected to the retinal peripheries; and both of these distinct regions generate different perceived speed. Namely, in the central region, the stimulus appears to move much slower, see references 1 & 2; in the peripheral region however, it appears to move faster and even with reversed direction, see reference 4. This article, however, provides evidence that repeated symmetric patterns are perceived to move much slower than repeated asymmetric patterns (RAP); additionally, asymmetric but not symmetric patterns tends to generate illusory motion reversals. Evidences which conclude that symmetric, but not asymmetric patterns are preferred to be processed by the central retina; an additional characteristic that adds further distinction between the central and the peripheral hMT+ regions.

Although it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonstrated that causality can also influence the experience of time. In causal reordering (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013, 2016) adults tend to report the causally consistent order of events rather than the correct temporal order. However, the effect has yet to be demonstrated in children. Across four preregistered experiments, 4- to 10-year-old children (N = 813) and adults (N = 178) watched a 3-object Michotte-style “pseudocollision.” While in the canonical version of the clip, object A collided with B, which then collided with object C (order: ABC), the pseudocollision involved the same spatial array of objects but featured object C moving before object B (order: ACB), with no collision between B and C. Participants were asked to judge the temporal order of events and whether object B collided with C. Across all age groups, participants were significantly more likely to judge that B collided with C in the 3-object pseudocollision than in a 2-object control clip (where clear causal direction was lacking), despite the spatiotemporal relations between B and C being identical in the two clips (Experiments 1-3). Collision judgments and temporal order judgments were not entirely consistent, with some participants—particularly in the younger age range—basing their temporal order judgments on spatial rather than temporal information (Experiment 4). We conclude that in both children and adults, rather than causal impressions being determined only by the basic spatial–temporal properties of object movement, schemata are used in a top-down manner when interpreting perceptual displays. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)\ud \ud

Social difficulties in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may originate from an impaired top-down modulation of sensory information that prevents the spontaneous attribution of intentions to observed behaviour. However, although autistic people remain able to explicitly reason about others’ mental states, the effect of abstract intention information on perceptual processes has remained untested. We show that ASD participants (n=23) exhibit a predictive perceptual bias in the perception of other’s actions in response to prior knowledge of an actor’s intentions (“I’ll take it”, “I’ll leave it”), but not in response to the motion of the action itself (reach, withdrawal). Neurotypicals (n=23) exhibit a predictive bias in action perception due to both explicit high-level intention and low-level motion information. Perception in ASD is not immune from top-down modulation. However, the information must be explicitly presented independently from the stimulus itself, and not inferred from cues inherent in the stimulus.

Our interactions with the visual world are guided by attention and visual working memory. Things that we look for and those we ignore are stored as templates that reflect our goals and the tasks at hand. The nature of such templates has been widely debated. A recent proposal is that these templates can be thought of as probabilistic representations of task-relevant features. Crucially, such probabilistic templates should accurately reflect feature probabilities in the environment. Here we ask whether observers can quickly form a correct internal model of a complex (bimodal) distribution of distractor features. We assessed observers’ representations by measuring the slowing of visual search when target features unexpectedly match a distractor template. Distractor stimuli were heterogeneous, randomly drawn on each trial from a bimodal probability distribution. Using two targets on each trial, we tested whether observers encode the full distribution, only one peak of it, or the average of the two peaks. Search was slower when the two targets corresponded to the two modes of a previous distractor distribution than when one target was at one of the modes and another between them or outside the distribution range. Furthermore, targets on the modes were reported later than targets between the modes that, in turn, were reported later than targets outside this range. This shows that observers use a correct internal model, representing both distribution modes using templates based on the full probability distribution rather than just one peak or simple summary statistics. The findings further confirm that performance in odd-one out search with repeated distractors cannot be described by a simple decision rule. Our findings indicate that probabilistic visual working memory templates guiding attention, dynamically adapt to task requirements, accurately reflecting the probabilistic nature of the input.

Over the past 15 years, there has been an explosion of new research on the role of the hippocampus in representation of information about time in memory. Much of this work was inspired by the ideas and research of Howard Eichenbaum, who made major contributions to our understanding of the neurobiology of episodic memory and the neural representation of time. In this paper, I will review evidence regarding the role of time in understanding hippocampal function. This review will cover a broad range of evidence from studies of humans and nonhuman animals with a narrative arc that follows Howard’s major discoveries. These studies demonstrate that the hippocampus encodes information in relation to an episodic context, and that time, as well as space, serves to define these contexts. Moreover, the research has shown that the hippocampus can encode temporal, spatial, and situational information in parallel. Building on this work, I present a new framework for understanding temporal structure in human episodic memory. I conclude by outlining current controversies and new questions that must be addressed by the field in the years to come.

The olfactory sense is a particularly challenging domain for cognitive science investigations of perception, memory, and language. Although many studies show that odors often are difficult to describe verbally, little is known about the associations between olfactory percepts and the words that describe them. Quantitative models of how odor experiences are described in natural language are therefore needed to understand how odors are perceived and communicated. In this study, we develop a computational method to characterize the olfaction-related semantic content of words in a large text corpus of internet sites in English. We introduce two new metrics: olfactory association index (OAI, how strongly a word is associated with olfaction) and olfactory specificity index (OSI, how specific a word is in its description of odors). We validate the OAI and OSI metrics using psychophysical datasets by showing that terms with high OAI have high ratings of perceived olfactory association and are used to describe highly familiar odors. In contrast, terms with high OSI have high inter-individual consistency in how they are applied to odors. Finally, we analyze Dravnieks’s (1985) dataset of odor ratings in terms of OAI and OSI. This analysis reveals that terms that are used broadly (applied often but with moderate ratings) tend to be olfaction-unrelated and abstract (e.g., “heavy” or “light”; low OAI and low OSI) while descriptors that are used selectively (applied seldom but with high ratings) tend to be olfaction-related (e.g., “vanilla” or “licorice”; high OAI). Thus, OAI and OSI provide behaviorally meaningful information about olfactory language. These statistical tools are useful for future studies of olfactory perception and cognition, and might help integrate research on odor perception, neuroimaging, and corpus-based linguistic models of semantic organization.

Many recent studies in numerical cognition have moved beyond the use of purely chronometric techniques in favor of methods which track the continuous dynamics of numerical processing. Two examples of such techniques include eye tracking and hand tracking (or computer mouse tracking). To reflect this increased concentration on continuous methods, we have collected a group of 5 articles that utilize these techniques to answer some contemporary questions in numerical cognition. In this editorial, we discuss the two paradigms and provide a brief review of some of the work in numerical cognition that has profited from the use of these techniques. For both methods, we discuss the past research through the frameworks of single digit number processing, multidigit number processing, and mental arithmetic processing. We conclude with a discussion of the papers that have been contributed to this special section and point to some possible future directions for researchers interested in tracking the continuous dynamics of numerical processing.

This article is to provide evidence that deep breathing had great influence on the perception of stimuli that trigger illusory motion perception. We had used two different stimuli; the first one can be considered as bistable rivalrous stimulus because it can trigger illusory motion reversals during its motion. The second stimulus is stationary, namely rotating snakes illusion, it is also bistable rivalrous stimulus because it has two states, stationary versus illusory motion. We had noticed that deep inhalation slows down the speed of the first stimulus and eliminates the illusory motion perception of the second stimulus. This might be because the amount of the hemoglobin red blood cells, possibly including the rich oxygenated ones, might be forcibly reduced in the brain during the intended inhalation, in turn, different parts in the brain, including hMT+ region, might be partially deactivated, see reference 1 and 2. Significant reduction against stimulus’ contrast is known to slow down the perceived speed, it also diminishes the activities of the retinal peripheries and their corresponding neurological connections that collectively build up the peripheral brain; we therefore suspect the peripheral hMT+ region to be inactivated by the deep inhalation. Strong exhalation, however, triggers illusory motion reversal for the first stimulus, and promotes illusory motion perception for the second stimulus; behavior that can be explained by the increased amount of the hemoglobin red blood cells that may activate different necessary regions in the peripheral brain. Astonishingly, we found that deep inhalation and exhalation sufficiently can control the aforementioned bistable visual perception.

We previously found that the retinal peripheries may not signal the human visual awareness when ‘spatial wrapping’ stimulus has very low contrast, or when the human subjects perform deep inhalation, see reference 19 and 20. In this study, we found that those techniques are able to significantly reduce the motion aftereffect (MAE) too. Namely, when we reduce the contrast of the MAE stimulator, the MAE is significantly reduced. Similarly, when we ask the subjects to perform deep inhalation in the end of viewing a ‘high contrast’ MAE stimulator, the MAE is drastically attenuated. The neurophysiological processes of the previous techniques are vastly different, as explained in our previous work. Namely, significant contrast reduction deactivates the retinal peripheries due to the following reasons; first, extremely low contrast stimulus constricts the pupil that disallows the retinal peripheries from receiving enough light rays to signal the brain actively, second, for extremely low contrast conditions, the center-surround antagonism process in the retinal peripheries might not signal the brain at all. Deep inhalation, however, may cause idle links between the retinal peripheries and their corresponding neurological pathways that eventually signal the visual awareness, a process that is also found to weaken the MAE.

The grouping of options into arbitrary categories influences adults’ decisions about allocating choices or resources among those options; this is called “partition dependence.” Partition dependence has been demonstrated in a wide range of contexts in adults and is often presented as a technique for designing choice architectures that nudge people towards better decisions. Whether children also make partition dependent decisions is unknown, as are potential patterns of developmental change. In this experiment ( N = 159), we examined whether children exhibit partition dependence using a novel resource allocation task. This novel task, distributing food tokens to zoo animals, did elicit partition dependence in our developmental sample. Both older children (ages 7-10 years) and younger children (ages 3-6 years) made partition dependent allocations, and younger children exhibited a larger partition dependence effect than did older children. This work provides the first evidence that children’s decisions, like adults’, are influenced by the arbitrary grouping of the options, and suggests that younger children may be more susceptible to this influence, at least in the context explored here.

While theories of consciousness differ substantially, the ‘conscious access hypothesis’, which aligns consciousness with the global accessibility of information across cortical regions, is present in many of the prevailing frameworks. This account holds that consciousness is necessary to integrate information arising from independent functions such as the specialist processing required by different senses. We directly tested this account by evaluating the potential for associative learning between novel pairs of subliminal stimuli presented in different sensory modalities. First, pairs of subliminal stimuli were presented and then their association assessed by examining the ability of the first stimulus to prime classification of the second. In Experiments 1–4 the stimuli were word-pairs consisting of a male name preceding either a creative or uncreative profession. Participants were subliminally exposed to two name-profession pairs where one name was paired with a creative profession and the other an uncreative profession. A supraliminal task followed requiring the timed classification of one of those two professions. The target profession was preceded by either the name with which it had been subliminally paired (concordant) or the alternate name (discordant). Experiment 1 presented stimuli auditorily, Experiment 2 visually, and Experiment 3 presented names auditorily and professions visually. All three experiments revealed the same inverse priming effect with concordant test pairs associated with significantly slower classification judgements. Experiment 4 sought to establish if learning would be more efficient with supraliminal stimuli and found evidence that a different strategy is adopted when stimuli are consciously perceived. Finally, Experiment 5 replicated the unconscious cross-modal association achieved in Experiment 3 utilising non-linguistic stimuli. The results demonstrate the acquisition of novel cross-modal associations between stimuli which are not consciously perceived and thus challenge the global access hypothesis and those theories embracing it.

The Cognitive Reflection Test, measuring intuition inhibition and cognitive reflection, has become extremely popular because it reliably predicts reasoning performance, decision-making, and beliefs. Across studies, the response format of CRT items sometimes differs, based on the assumed construct equivalence of tests with open-ended versus multiple-choice items (the equivalence hypothesis). Evidence and theoretical reasons, however, suggest that the cognitive processes measured by these response formats and their associated performances might differ (the nonequivalence hypothesis). We tested the two hypotheses experimentally by assessing the performance in tests with different response formats and by comparing their predictive and construct validity. In a between-subjects experiment (n = 452), participants answered stem-equivalent CRT items in an open-ended, a two-option, or a four-option response format and then completed tasks on belief bias, denominator neglect, and paranormal beliefs (benchmark indicators of predictive validity), as well as on actively open-minded thinking and numeracy (benchmark indicators of construct validity). We found no significant differences between the three response formats in the numbers of correct responses, the numbers of intuitive responses (with the exception of the two-option version, which had a higher number than the other tests), and the correlational patterns of the indicators of predictive and construct validity. All three test versions were similarly reliable, but the multiple-choice formats were completed more quickly. We speculate that the specific nature of the CRT items helps build construct equivalence among the different response formats. We recommend using the validated multiple-choice version of the CRT presented here, particularly the four-option CRT, for practical and methodological reasons. Supplementary materials and data are available at https://osf.io/mzhyc/ .

Trust serves as the foundation for social harmony and prosperity, but it is not always easy to build. When people see other groups as different, e.g., members of a different race or ethnicity, the perceived boundary often obstructs people from extending trust. This may result in interracial conflicts. The current research argues that individual differences in the lay theory of race can systematically influence the degree to which people extend trust to a racial outgroup in conflict situations. The lay theory of race refers to the extent to which people believe race is a malleable social construct that can change over time (i.e., social constructionist beliefs) versus a fixed essence that differentiates people into meaningful social categories (i.e., essentialist beliefs). In our three studies, we found evidence that social constructionist (vs. essentialist) beliefs promoted interracial trust in intergroup contexts, and that this effect held regardless of whether the lay theory of race was measured (Studies 1 and 3) or manipulated (Study 2), and whether the conflict was presented in a team conflict scenario (Study 1), social dilemma (Study 2), or a face-to-face dyadic negotiation (Study 3). In addition, results revealed that the lay theory's effect on interracial trust could have critical downstream consequences in conflict, namely cooperation and mutually beneficial negotiation outcomes. The findings together reveal that the lay theory of race can reliably influence interracial trust and presents a promising direction for understanding interracial relations and improving intergroup harmony in society.

The detection of conflict between incompatible impulses, thoughts, and actions is a ubiquitous source of motivation across theories of goal-directed action. In this overview, we explore the hypothesis that conflict is emotive, integrating perspectives from affective science and cognitive neuroscience. Initially, we review evidence suggesting that the mental and biological processes that monitor for information processing conflict—particularly those generated by the anterior midcingulate cortex—track the affective significance of conflict and use this signal to motivate increased control. In this sense, variation in control resembles a form of affect regulation in which control implementation counteracts the aversive experience of conflict. We also highlight emerging evidence proposing that states and dispositions associated with acceptance facilitate control by tuning individuals to the emotive nature of conflict, before proposing avenues for future research, including investigating the role of affect in reinforcement learning and decision making.

Accepted for publication in Cognitive Science; this is currently the pre-peer reviewed manuscript.Novelty is a pivotal player in cognition, and its contribution to superior memory performance is a widely accepted convention. On the other hand, mnemonic advantages for familiar information are also well documented. Here we examine the role of experimental distinctiveness as a potential explanation for these apparently conflicting findings. Across two experiments we demonstrate that conceptual novelty, an unfamiliar combination of familiar constituents, is sensitive to its experimental proportions: improved memory for novelty was observed when novel stimuli were relatively rare. Notably, no mnemonic advantage for conceptual novelty over familiarity was observed even when novel stimuli were extremely rare. Finally, memory levels for familiar items were similar across all experimental proportions, suggesting that encoding of familiar items is insensitive to distinctiveness manipulations. Together, these results imply that novelty does not always result in a mnemonic advantage. Instead, the effects of different aspects of novelty and familiarity should be explored orthogonally.

This article provides evidence that motion has the ability to stably fuse two different colored ‘spatially separated’ stimuli without impairments against the shape of those separated stimuli. Based on our observations, dilated pupils promote colours fusion; and the optimal fusion happens when the stimuli are moving in opposite direction of the actual physical motion, namely, when there is illusory motion reversal. The previous observations suggested that retinal peripheries have main contributions on the present illusion which we called; motion induced colours fusion ‘MICF’ illusion.

This article provides evidence that high-speed high-information visual stimulus is able to indefinitely dominate the visual awareness; at speed of 21 degrees/second. Greater speeds emphasize greater dominance duration for the motion stimulus, however, at 21 degrees/second the moving stimulus dominates the visual awareness exclusively and indefinitely. Astonishingly, no room for mixed precepts had been reported by the human subjects at that speed, as if, it’s the ultimate domination.

This article offers a novel design to distinguish between the peripheral and the central hearing. We found that the perceived speeds by peripheral sounds are much faster than central ones.

This article provides evidence that spatial attention (foveal perception) causes velocity deceleration and size enlargement of the moving objects. Since the traveling distance is constant, thus, we claim that spatial attention causes dilation to time and length.

We tried to entirely inactivate the peripheral fusiform face area, see description of the aforementioned brain area in reference 1. We were able to achieve great inactivation to the aforementioned area by using red background for the rabbit-duck rivalrous stimulus. We think that this inactivation had occurred for two reasons; first, because red color is very silent, and therefore greater request of oxygenated hemoglobin by V4 area. Second, the low contrast of the stimulus (black drawing on red background) constricts the pupil size, therefore, lesser light rays will reach to retinal peripheries, and its corresponding neurons in the FFA.

Our understanding of the visual system can be informed by examining errors in perception. In this vein, we present a novel illusion that we call the Wandering Circles in which stationary circles undergoing contrast polarity reversals (i.e., flicker), when viewed peripherally, appear to move about in a random fashion. Here we report the results of two psychophysical experiments in which participants rated the strength of the perceived illusory motion under varying stimulus conditions. The illusory motion percept was strongest when there was a light/dark alternation at the circle’s edge and when the edge faded smoothly to the background gray (i.e., a circular arrangement of the Craik-O’Brien-Cornsweet Illusion). Additionally, the percept of illusory motion is flicker-rate dependent, appearing when the circles flickered at 9.44Hz and 28.33Hz, and was virtually non-existent at 1.98Hz. The Wandering Circles differ from many other classic motion illusions as the light/dark alternation is perfectly balanced in time and position around the edges of the circle, and thus, there is no net directional local or global motion energy in the stimulus. Furthermore, the direction of the illusory motion does not seem to be in a particular direction. Thus, it appears that the perceived motion may rely on factors internal to the viewer such as top-down influences, asymmetries in luminance and motion perception across the retina, adaptation combined with positional uncertainty due to peripheral viewing, eye movements, and/or low contrast edges.

This article provides evidence that the retinal peripheries generate motion reversal perception. Restricted access of the light rays to retinal peripheries due to pupil constriction is found to significantly limit the perception of motion reversal. We used unfolded stimulus, namely, a linear stimulus instead one a radial one to easily validate our theory.

Current theories argue that hyper-sensitisation of social threat perception is central to paranoia. Affected people often also report misperceptions of group cohesion (conspiracy) but little is known about how paranoid ideation affects conspiracy thinking in live interactions. In a pre-registered experimental study, we used a large-scale game theory approach (n=1,165) to test whether the social cohesion of an opposing group affects paranoid attributions in a mixed online and lab-based sample. Participants spanning the full population distribution of paranoia played as proposers in a modified Trust Game against a lab-based panel. Participants were allocated a bonus and chose how much money to send to a pair of responders which was quadrupled before reaching the responders. Responders decided how much to return to the proposers through the same process. Participants played in one of two conditions: against a cohesive group who communicated and arrived at a joint decision, or a non-cohesive group who made independent decisions. After the exchange, proposers rated the extent to which the responders’ decisions were driven by (i) self-interest and (ii) intent to harm. Although the true motives are ambiguous, cohesive responders were reliably rated by participants as being more strongly motivated by intent to harm, indicating that group cohesion affects social threat perception. Highly paranoid participants attributed harmful intent more strongly overall but were equally reactive to social cohesion as other participants, suggesting paranoia involves a generally lowered threshold for social threat detection but an intact sensitivity for cohesion-related group characteristics.

Trustworthiness and dominance impressions summarize trait judgments from faces. Judgments on these key traits are negatively correlated to each other in impressions of female faces, implying less differentiated impressions of female faces. Here we test whether this is true across many trait judgments and whether less differentiated impressions of female faces originate in different facial information used for male and female impressions or different evaluation of the same information. Using multidimensional rating datasets and data-driven modeling, we show that (a) impressions of women are less differentiated and more valence-laden than impressions of men and find that (b) these impressions are based on similar visual information across face genders. Female face impressions were more highly intercorrelated and were better explained by valence (Study 1). These intercorrelations were higher when raters more strongly endorsed gender stereotypes. Despite the gender difference, male and female impression models-derived from separate trustworthiness and dominance ratings of male and female faces-were similar to each other (Study 2). Further, both male and female models could manipulate impressions of faces of both genders (Study 3). The results highlight the high-level, evaluative effect of face gender in impression formation-women are judged negatively to the extent their looks do not conform to expectations, not because people use different facial information across genders but because people evaluate the information differently across genders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

In this proposal, we try to virtually navigate inside the human brain to understand the neural mechanism of the perception of illusory snakes. To achieve this mission, we have to imagine the neural network of the visual motion perception during spontaneous saccadic eye movements; and digging into clear distinction between the foveal versus the peripheral visual receptive field remapping. We had previously discussed that conscious perception generated by the central retina has very different attributes than the visual awareness generated by the peripheral retina. It was clear that the central retina triggers visual perception which decelerates the apparent motion of the cyclic elements, and enlarge the size of these elements, see reference 2. The peripheral retina , however, not only accelerates the apparent motion, but it generates illusory motion reversals, see reference 19. Since there are clear discrepancies in the spatiotemporal characteristics between the central and the peripheral retina in the visual awareness, we hypothesized that the illusory rotating snakes might be due to asynchronized respective field remapping; namely, a rivalrous remapping processes of the central versus the peripheral retinal images. In another word, the respective field remapping process triggered by the central retina has different spatial and temporal feeds to the visual awareness than the retinal peripheries. Interestingly, it had been found that deactivating the retinal peripheries through significant reduction against the contrast of the stimulus (that may stop the retinal peripheries from signaling the brain) eliminates the rotating snakes illusion. Elimination that might evidence the role of active retinal peripheries in creating the perception of illusory snakes. Collectively, we think that illusory snakes is due to a rivalry between the central and the peripheral retina; and their corresponding conscious brains; and the saccades are nothing but to convey parts of the retinal image from the center to the peripheries, and vice versa. Namely, the illusory snakes is generated by a spontaneous saccadic rivalry between the fovea & its corresponding conscious brain competing with the peripheral retina & its corresponding conscious brain. Similarly, peripheral drift illusion that requires peripheral vision to be perceived, may not be generated without the aforementioned saccadic rivalry; namely, we think that the perception of that illusion may not be occurred without spontaneous saccade away from the fixational peripheral visual space, see also reference 1 and 5. That saccade is mostly due to spatial attention which conveys the retinal image from the retinal peripheries (the fixational visual space) to the central retina (the attentional visual space). Namely, we think that without the aforementioned conveyance, the perceived illusion may not be generated because the aforementioned spatiotemporal discrepancies will be terminated. Importantly, we investigated the contribution of the human medial temporal complex in producing the illusory motion conscious perception with three different mechanisms: Cognitive control, deep breathing, and the arrangements of the patterns of the building blocks. The aforementioned processes are found to alter the visual perception of rotating snakes stimulus. Inclusively, we distinguished between two distinct visual awareness, namely, the central versus the peripheral vision and we show how active vision which requires cognitive control but not passive vision can ultimately control the perception of the rotating snakes stimulus, namely, alternation between real and illusory visual awareness!

When an observer translates through space, a pattern of image motion, “optic flow”, is projected onto the back of each eye. If the translation is forwards, a radial pattern of optic flow results, with the center of the pattern specifying the direction of translation. It is commonly assumed that humans use optic flow in the visual guidance of walking and that the contribution of optic flow is proportional to its richness. A further assumption is that “heading” judgements (judgements of the direction of translation) and guidance of walking rely on the same visual information and thus the processes involved in the latter can be studied using the former. These assumptions underpin a very extensive body of psychophysical, behavioral, neurophysiological, clinical, computational modelling and imaging research. We measure the form of walking trajectories (using a standard perturbation design in Experiment 1) and the precision of heading judgements (Experiment 2) in four different visual environments. We find that neither the richness of optic flow nor the precision of heading judgements predicts walking trajectories. These results challenge the widely held assumptions about optic flow, perception of heading and the visual guidance of walking.

One popular and classic theory of how the mind encodes knowledge is an associative semantic network, where concepts and associations between concepts correspond to nodes and edges, respectively. A major issue in semantic network research is that there is no consensus among researchers as to the best method for estimating the network of an individual or group. We propose a novel method (U-INVITE) for estimating semantic networks from semantic fluency data (listing items from a category) based on a censored random walk model of memory retrieval. We compare this method to several other methods in the literature for estimating networks from semantic fluency data. In simulations, we find that U-INVITE can recover semantic networks with low error rates given only a moderate amount of data. U-INVITE is the only known method derived from a psychologically plausible process model of memory retrieval and one of two known methods that we found to be consistent estimators of this process: if semantic memory retrieval is consistent with this process, the procedure will eventually estimate the true network (given enough data). We conduct the first exploration of different methods for estimating psychologically valid semantic networks by comparing people’s similarity judgments of edges estimated by each network estimation method. To encourage best practices, we discuss the merits of each network estimation technique, provide a flow chart that assists with choosing an appropriate method, and supply code for others to employ these techniques on their own data.

In past research on imitation, some findings suggest that imitation is goal based, whereas other findings suggest that imitation can also be based on a direct mapping of a model's movements without necessarily adopting the model's goal. We argue that the 2 forms of imitation are flexibly deployed in accordance with the psychological distance from the model. We specifically hypothesize that individuals are relatively more likely to imitate the model's goals when s/he is distant but relatively more likely to imitate the model's specific movements when s/he is proximal. This hypothesis was tested in 4 experiments using different imitation paradigms and different distance manipulations. Experiment 1 served as a pilot study and demonstrated that temporal distance (vs. proximity) increased imitation of a goal relative to the imitation of a movement. Experiments 2 and 3 measured goal-based and movement-based imitation independently of each other and found that spatial distance (vs. proximity) decreased the rate of goal errors (indicating more goal imitation) compared with movement errors. Experiment 4 demonstrated that psychological distance operates most likely at the input-that is, perceptual-level. The findings are discussed in relation to construal level theory and extant theories of imitation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).