Published in Cognition
When we encounter a stranger for the first time, we spontaneously attribute to them a wide variety of character traits based on their facial appearance. There is increasing consensus that learning plays a key role in these first impressions. According to the Trait Inference Mapping (TIM) model, first impressions are the products of mappings between...
Published in Cognition
Information in speech and music is often conveyed through changes in fundamental frequency (f0), perceived by humans as "relative pitch". Relative pitch judgments are complicated by two facts. First, sounds can simultaneously vary in timbre due to filtering imposed by a vocal tract or instrument body. Second, relative pitch can be extracted in two ...
Published in Cognition
In a seminal study, Dehaene et al. (2006) found evidence that adults and children are sensitive to geometric and topological (GT) concepts using a novel odd-one-out task. However, performance on this task could reflect more general cognitive abilities than intuitive knowledge of GT concepts. Here, we developed a new 2-alternative forced choice (2-A...
Published in Cognition
In a series of recently published studies purportedly on the "additive-area heuristic," Yousif & Keil (2019, 2020) argue for a systematic distortion in the perception of the cumulative area of an item array and further claim that previous findings of numerical cognition and magnitude perception in general are "at risk" (Yousif & Keil, 2021). This c...
Published in Cognition
Park (2021) has described "flawed stimulus design(s)" in our recent studies on area perception. Here, we briefly respond to those critiques. While the rigorous, computational approaches taken by Park (and others) certainly have value, we believe that our approach - one that focuses the perceptual reality of quantity rather than the physical reality...
Published in Cognition
The utility of a given experience, like interacting with a particular friend or tasting a particular food, fluctuates continually according to homeostatic and hedonic principles. Consequently, to maximize reward, an individual must be able to escape or attain outcomes as preferences change, by switching between actions. Recent work on human and art...
Published in Cognition
The present experiments support two conclusions about the capacity limit of working memory (WM). First, they provide evidence for the Binding Hypothesis, WM capacity is limited by interference between bindings but not items. Second, they show that episodic LTM contributes substantially to binding memory when the capacity of WM is stretched to the l...
Published in Cognition
Curious information-seeking is known to be a key driver for learning, but characterizing this important psychological phenomenon remains a challenge. In this article, we argue that solving this challenge requires qualifying the relationships between metacognition and curiosity. The idea that curiosity is a metacognitive competence has been resisted...
Published in Cognition
Over the last two decades, a plethora of research using a large variety of measures and paradigms has demonstrated how people often tend to dehumanize members of certain outgroups. When trait-based measures were used, ingroup members showed to attribute less human positive and negative characteristics to members of the outgroup. Enock, Flavell, Tip...
Published in Cognition
One of the most important dimensions along which we evaluate others is their propensity to value our welfare: we like people who are disposed to incur costs for our benefit and who refrain from imposing costs on us to benefit themselves. The evolutionary importance of social valuation in our species suggests that humans have cognitive mechanisms th...
