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Learning to avoid danger by observing others can be relatively safe, because it does not incur the potential costs of individual trial and error. However, information gained through social observation might be less reliable than information gained through individual experiences, underscoring the need to apply observational learning critically. In order for observational learning to be adaptive it...
The aim of the present study was to understand what factors influence infants' problem-solving behaviours on the multiple-string task. The main question focused on why infants usually solve the single string-pulling task at 12months at the latest, whereas most 16-month-old infants still cannot solve the task when several strings are presented, only one of which is attached to the desired object. We...
The ability to understand and generate hierarchical structures is a crucial component of human cognition, available in language, music, mathematics and problem solving. Recursion is a particularly useful mechanism for generating complex hierarchies by means of self-embedding rules. In the visual domain, fractals are recursive structures in which simple transformation rules generate hierarchies of...
In choices between uncertain options, information search can increase the chances of distinguishing good from bad options. However, many choices are made in the presence of other choosers who may seize the better option while one is still engaged in search. How long do (and should) people search before choosing between uncertain options in the presence of such competition? To address this question,...
A nonverbal primitive number sense allows approximate estimation and mental manipulations on numerical quantities without the use of numerical symbols. In a recent randomized controlled intervention study in adults, we demonstrated that repeated training on a non-symbolic approximate arithmetic task resulted in improved exact symbolic arithmetic performance, suggesting a causal relationship between...
Two prominent theories offer different perspectives on the role of harm in moral cognition. Dyadic morality suggests that harm-related concerns are pervasive, whereas moral pluralism suggests that these concerns apply only to canonically harmful violations (e.g., murder), and not impure violations (e.g., suicide). Rottman et al. (2014) contrast these two theories by examining moral judgments of suicide...
Bilingualism research has established language non-selective lexical access in comprehension. However, the evidence for such an effect in production remains sparse and its neural time-course has not yet been investigated. We demonstrate that German-English bilinguals performing a simple picture-naming task exclusively in English spontaneously access the phonological form of –unproduced– German words...
This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme –le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme –zhe. The perfective morpheme –le...
Previous work on Relative Clause attachment has overlooked a crucial grammatical distinction across both the languages and structures tested: the selective availability of Pseudo Relatives. We reconsider the literature in light of this observation and argue that, all else being equal, local attachment is found with genuine Relative Clauses and that non-local attachment emerges when their surface identical...
It has been hypothesized that humans are able to track other’s mental states efficiently and without being conscious of doing so using their implicit theory of mind (iToM) system. However, while iToM appears to operate unconsciously recent work suggests it does draw on executive attentional resources (Schneider, Lam, Bayliss, & Dux, 2012) bringing into question whether iToM is engaged efficiently...
Older adults have difficulty understanding spoken language in the presence of competing voices. Everyday social situations involving multiple simultaneous talkers may become increasingly challenging in later life due to changes in the ability to focus attention. This study examined whether individual differences in cognitive function predict older adults’ ability to access sentence-level meanings...
Hand position in the visual field influences performance in several visual tasks. Recent theoretical accounts have proposed that hand position either (a) influences the allocation of spatial attention, or (b) biases processing toward the magnocellular visual pathway. Comparing these accounts is difficult as some studies manipulate the distance of one hand in the visual field while others vary the...
Many people judge suicide to be immoral. We have found evidence that these moral judgments are primarily predicted by people’s belief that suicide taints the soul and by independent concerns about purity. This finding is inconsistent with accounts that define morality as fundamentally based upon harm considerations. In this commentary, we respond to a critique of our finding, and we provide further...
People often believe that significant life events happen for a reason. In three studies, we examined evidence for the view that teleological beliefs reflect a general cognitive bias to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that individual differences in mentalizing ability predicted both the tendency to believe in fate (Study 1) and to infer...
We know that from mid-childhood onwards most new words are learned implicitly via reading; however, most word learning studies have taught novel items explicitly. We examined incidental word learning during reading by focusing on the well-documented finding that words which are acquired early in life are processed more quickly than those acquired later. Novel words were embedded in meaningful sentences...
Though a clear interaction between finger and number representations has been demonstrated, what drives the development of this intertwining remains unclear. Here we tested early blind, late blind and sighted control participants in two counting tasks, each performed under three different conditions: a resting condition, a condition requiring hands movements and a condition requiring feet movements...
Previous work has suggested that learners are sensitive to phonetic similarity when learning phonological patterns (e.g., Steriade, 2001/2008; White, 2014). We tested 12-month-old infants to see if their willingness to generalize newly learned phonological alternations depended on the phonetic similarity of the sounds involved. Infants were exposed to words in an artificial language whose distributions...
We investigated the retrieval of location information, and the deployment of attention to these locations, following (described) event-related location changes. In two visual world experiments, listeners viewed arrays with containers like a bowl, jar, pan, and jug, while hearing sentences like “The boy will pour the sweetcorn from the bowl into the jar, and he will pour the gravy from the pan into...
Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), but grammatical...
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