Published in Cognition
Higher courts sometimes assess the constitutionality of law by working through a concrete case, other times by reasoning about the underlying question in a more abstract way. Prior research has found that the degree of concreteness or abstraction with which an issue is formulated can influence people's prescriptive views: For instance, people often...
Published in Cognition
Published in Cognition
We examined whether the perceptual organization of hierarchical structure, and specifically, the integration of local elements into a global shape, requires visual awareness, using a masked priming paradigm, sandwich masking to render the prime invisible, and two types of primes, many-element hierarchical patterns composed of many relatively small ...
Published in Cognition
This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man , across three age groups (5–6 years, 9–10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point sc...
Published in Cognition
Classic psychological theories have demonstrated the power and limitations of spatial representations, providing geometric tools for reasoning about the similarity of objects and showing that human intuitions sometimes violate the constraints of geometric spaces. Recent machine learning methods for deriving vector-space embeddings of words have beg...
Published in Cognition
Recent research suggests that graphic motor programs acquired through writing are part of letter representations and contribute to their recognition. Indeed, learning new letter-like shapes through handwriting gave rise to better recognition than learning through typing on a keyboard. However, handwriting and typing do not differ solely by the natu...
Published in Cognition
Once fiercely rejected, the notion of delay-dependent forgetting from long-term memory has recently resurfaced. By this notion, the duration of the study-test delay predicts the magnitude of memory degradation. Our Representation Theory of Forgetting adopts the notion of delay-dependent forgetting, alongside interference due to similarity of repres...
Published in Cognition
When asked to find a target dyad amongst non-interacting individuals, participants respond faster when the individuals in the target dyad are shown face-to-face (suggestive of a social interaction), than when they are presented back-to-back. Face-to-face dyads may be found faster because social interactions recruit specialized processing. However, ...
Published in Cognition
Affective vocalisations such as screams and laughs can convey strong emotional content without verbal information. Previous research using morphed vocalisations (e.g. 25% fear/75% anger) has revealed categorical perception of emotion in voices, showing sudden shifts at emotion category boundaries. However, it is currently unknown how further modula...
Published in Cognition
According to inferentialism, for an indicative conditional to be true, there must be a sufficiently strong inferential connection between its antecedent and its consequent. Previous experimental research has found support for inferentialism, but the materials used concerned a fairly abstract context, leaving open the question of how accurately the ...
