Published in Cognition
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...
Published in Cognition
Familiar and unfamiliar voice perception are often understood as being distinct from each other. For identity perception, theoretical work has proposed that listeners use acoustic information in different ways to perceive identity from familiar and unfamiliar voices: Unfamiliar voices are thought to be processed based on close comparisons of acoust...
Published in Cognition
A writing system is a graphic code, i.e., a system of standardized pairings between symbols and meanings in which symbols take the form of images that can endure. The visual character of writing implies that written characters have to fit constraints of the human visual system. One aspect of this optimization lays in the graphic complexity of the c...
Published in Cognition
Humans can tell when they find a task difficult. Subtle uncertainty behaviors like changes in motor speed and muscle tension precede and affect these experiences. Theories of animal metacognition likewise stress the importance of endogenous signals of uncertainty as cues that motivate metacognitive behaviors. However, while researchers have investi...
Published in Cognition
There has been surprisingly little examination of how recall performance is affected by processing demands induced by retrieval cues, how manipulations at encoding interact with processing demands during maintenance or due to the retrieval cue, and how these are affected with aging. Here, we investigate these relationships by examining the fidelity...
Published in Cognition
Walker and Gopnik (2017) suggest they have solved a longstanding problem in comparative and developmental psychology: How to provide an unambiguous measure of analogical reasoning in nonverbal subjects. We argue that this test, much like many others that purport to measure analogical reasoning in nonverbal subjects, does not distinguish between the...
Published in Cognition
Published in Cognition
This study investigated how the experience of different reward distributions would shape the utility functions that can be inferred from economic choice. Despite the generally accepted notion that utility functions are not insensitive to external references, the exact way in which such changes take place remains largely unknown. Here we benefitted ...
Published in Cognition
There is growing interest in the visual and attentional processes recruited when human observers view social scenes containing multiple people. Findings from visual search paradigms have helped shape this emerging literature. Previous research has established that, when hidden amongst pairs of individuals facing in the same direction (leftwards or ...
Published in Cognition
There's a difference between someone instantaneously saying "Yes!" when you ask them on a date compared to "…yes." Psychologists and economists have long studied how people can infer preferences from others' choices. However, these models have tended to focus on what people choose and not how long it takes them to make a choice. We present a ration...
