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The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music AbstractA comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferences about the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, with many available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstanding interest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here, we report the Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, an open-access corpus of vocal music (n = 1007 song excerpts), with accompanying metadata detailing each song’s region of origin, language (of 413 languages represented here), and one of 10 behavioral contexts (e.g., work, storytelling, mourning, lullaby, dance). The corpus is designed to sample both broadly, with a large cross-section of societies and languages; and deeply, with many songs representing three well-studied language families (Atlantic-Congo, Austronesian, and Indo-European). This design facilitates direct comparison of musical and vocal features across cultures, principled approaches to sampling stimuli for experiments, and evaluation of models of the cultural evolution of song. In this paper we describe the corpus and provide two proofs of concept, demonstrating its utility. We report (1) a conceptual replication of previous findings that the acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their behavioral contexts, including in previously unstudied contexts (e.g., children’s play songs); and (2) similarities in acoustic content of songs across cultures are predictable, in part, by the relatedness of those cultures.

19.07.2025 03:25 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

When Success Is Surprising: Children’s Ability to Use Surprise to Infer Competence AbstractHow do we learn who is good at what? Building on the idea that humans draw rich inferences from others’ emotional expressions, here we ask whether others’ surprised reactions to performance outcomes can elicit inferences about competence. Across three experiments, participants were asked to choose “who is better” in scenarios where two students performed identically on the same task but their teacher expressed surprise to only one of them. In Experiment 1 (n = 60, adults) and Experiment 2 (n = 90, 6- to 8-year-old children), participants’ responses were modulated by not only the students’ performance outcomes (success or failure) but also the teacher’s response to the outcomes (surprise or no surprise). Specifically, participants preferentially chose the student who did not elicit the teacher’s surprise as more competent when both students succeeded, but chose the student who elicited surprise when both failed. Experiment 3a (n = 150, 4- to 8-year-olds) replicated this pattern in 6- to 8-year-olds as a group—but not in 4- to 5-year-olds—with increasing robustness with age. Finally, this pattern was significantly reduced in Experiment 3b where the teacher’s surprise was directed at an irrelevant event rather than the student’s performance (n = 90, 6- to 8-year-olds). Taken together, these results suggest that even non-valenced emotional reactions to performance outcomes—being surprised at someone’s success or failure—can inform inferences about valenced qualities such as competence. More broadly, the current findings demonstrate that emotional expressions we observe in our daily lives can lead to nuanced yet consequential social judgments.

19.07.2025 03:25 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Considering What We Know and What We Don’t Know: Expectations and Confidence Guide Value Integration in Value-Based Decision-Making AbstractWhen making decisions, we often have more information about some options than others. Previous work has shown that people are more likely to choose options that they look at more and those that they are more confident in. But should one always prefer options one knows more about? Intuition suggests not. Rather, how additional information impacts our preferences should depend critically on how valuable we expect the options to be. Here, we formalize this intuition in a Bayesian sequential sampling model where attention and confidence influence the precision of momentary evidence. Our model makes a key prediction: attention and confidence both increase choice probability for better-than-average options, and both decrease choice probability for worse-than-average options. We confirm this prediction in two experiments in which we independently manipulate value and attention. Our results offer a novel perspective on prior work on the role of attention and confidence in decision-making, showing that people rely on contextual knowledge and uncertainty estimates to adaptively learn about their options and make better decisions.

08.07.2025 03:20 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Sharing the World—A Social Aspect of Consciousness AbstractMoving through our environment generates multiple changes in my sensations. But I do not experience the environment as changing. My conscious perceptual experience is of a stable environment through which I move. This perception is created by intricate neural computations that automatically take account of my movements. The stable environment that I experience is independent of my actions. As a result, I experience it as objective: a set of facts about the world that constrain my movements. Because it is objective I expect that it will also constrain the movements of others in the same way, whether these are rocks rolling down a hill or animals foraging for food. This experience of objectivity creates a shared understanding of the world that enhances our interactions with others. Our perceptual experiences, while personal, are shaped by our model of the world, and since others are modelling the same world, their models will be very similar. Interactions with others will further increase this similarity. The models create a form of common knowledge. This common knowledge is an inherent feature of our basic conscious perception, even when we’re not actively reflecting on or deliberately sharing our experiences. The common knowledge created by our conscious perception of the world enables the coordination of behaviour which is a critical precursor for the evolution of cooperative behaviour.

08.07.2025 03:20 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Deafness, Hearing Loss and the Development of Mental State Reasoning Skills: A Review AbstractIndividuals with hearing loss have a diverse spectrum of auditory experiences, shaped by the degree of hearing loss and interventions. The study of social cognition in deaf children and more generally, children with hearing loss, contributes to a nuanced understanding of how learning experiences influence social and cognitive development. Research suggests that limited access to language may influence conceptual development in theory of mind or the development of information processing skills required in mental state reasoning. In this article, we briefly review decades of research on social-cognitive development of children with hearing loss acquired in infancy, discuss how access to language-mediated communication contributes to the emergence and expression of understanding other minds and highlight some implications for effective interventions.

08.07.2025 03:20 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The State-Before-Event Inference Emerges Across Tenses AbstractIn language, comprehenders often need to infer the temporal order of events to construct a mental model of a complex situation. Dynamicity differences are a key predictor of these inferences: Non-dynamic states are reliably inferred to precede dynamic events. In two studies, we test two theoretical explanations for this phenomenon through temporal order judgments for past-under-past and future-under-future relative clauses in English: According to a tense-mediated account of temporal anchoring, people rely on the conceptual distinction between a more salient reference time—often a dynamic event—and a less salient anchored situation—often a static state. The temporal relationship between the two is determined at the linguistic level by tense meaning: For the past tense, the relationship should be one of anteriority, and for the future tense, it should be one of posteriority. However, the future tense has often been placed closer to modals than to tenses, relegating the question of temporal order to other mechanisms. Alternatively, from a purely cognitive perspective, salience differences between states and events are sufficient to infer temporal order, with states acting as temporal backgrounds for more salient events, regardless of tense. Our results support such a cognitive mechanism: In both experiments, states are backgrounded relative to events. Differences between the experiments furthermore support modal accounts of the semantics of the future.

04.06.2025 03:20 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Rapid Synthesis of Integral Stimuli AbstractIntegral stimuli (e.g., colors varying in saturation and brightness) are classically considered to be processed holistically (i.e., as undifferentiated stimulus wholes); people analyze such stimuli into their consistent dimensions only with substantial time, effort, training, or instruction (Foard & Kemler, 1984). In contrast, Combination Theory (Wills et al., 2015) argues that the dimensions of integral stimuli are quickly combined. Through an investigation of the effects of stimulus presentation time, we support Combination Theory over the classical holistic-to-analytic account. Specifically, using colored squares varying in saturation and brightness, we demonstrate that the prevalence of single-dimension classification increases as stimulus presentation time is reduced. We conclude that integral stimuli are not slowly analyzed, they are quickly synthesized.

04.06.2025 03:20 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

A Rational Framework for Group-Based Selective Social Learning AbstractSocial learning can be a powerful tool, allowing us to acquire knowledge and adaptive behaviours while bypassing many of the costs of learning through direct experience. However, not everyone’s behaviour is equally valuable to learn from, as other people’s goals or preferences may differ dramatically from our own. In this paper, we consider the problem of selectively learning from others on the basis of direct and indirect inferences about their task-relevant preferences. Specifically, we focus on the setting where a social learner must generalise preference judgements across individuals using shared features and other cues, and so develop a formal account that can reconcile a seemingly disparate empirical picture of group-based selective social learning. Across three behavioural experiments, we demonstrate that people are sensitive to the contextual significance of group identity cues when choosing who to learn from in partially observed environments. We show that this behaviour cannot be accounted for by a range of simpler heuristic strategies.

23.05.2025 03:31 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Relative Value Encoding in Large Language Models: A Multi-Task, Multi-Model Investigation AbtractIn-context learning enables large language models (LLMs) to perform a variety of tasks, including solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Given their potential use as (autonomous) decision-making agents, it is important to understand how these models behave in RL tasks and the extent to which they are susceptible to biases. Motivated by the fact that, in humans, it has been widely documented that the value of a choice outcome depends on how it compares to other local outcomes, the present study focuses on whether similar value encoding biases apply to LLMs. Results from experiments with multiple bandit tasks and models show that LLMs exhibit behavioral signatures of relative value encoding. Adding explicit outcome comparisons to the prompt magnifies the bias, impairing the ability of LLMs to generalize from the outcomes presented in-context to new choice problems, similar to effects observed in humans. Computational cognitive modeling reveals that LLM behavior is well-described by a simple RL algorithm that incorporates relative values at the outcome encoding stage. Lastly, we present preliminary evidence that the observed biases are not limited to fine-tuned LLMs, and that relative value processing is detectable in the final hidden layer activations of a raw, pretrained model. These findings have important implications for the use of LLMs in decision-making applications.

23.05.2025 03:31 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

23.05.2025 03:31 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Children Learn Best From Their Peers: The Crucial Role of Input From Other Children in Language Development AbstractLanguage input is crucial for language learning, with child-directed speech being a strong predictor of language development. Yet, in many non-industrialized rural societies, children are less exposed to this type of input. Instead, children encounter frequent child-surrounding speech from third-party interactions. Little is known about whether and how children learn language from this type of input. By analyzing naturalistic data from children growing up in the Shipibo-Konibo community in the Peruvian Amazon, we demonstrate that despite a high prevalence of child-surrounding input, child-directed input best predicts children’s production patterns defined as unigrams. We provide first evidence for remarkable similarities between child-surrounding speech and children’s own speech patterns. In addition, we demonstrate that a specific type of input best predicts children’s production frequencies across the domains of surrounding and directed input: speech from other children. Together, these findings expand our perspective beyond dyadic adult-child interactions, supporting the view that child-surrounding speech and especially speech from other children provide important learning opportunities.

07.05.2025 03:43 — 👍 8 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1

Beliefs About the Development of Mental Life ABSTRACTCaregiving relationships with infants and children are among the most common and most complex human social interactions. Adults’ perceptions of children’s mental capacities have important consequences for the well-being of children in their care—particularly in the first few years of life, when children’s communication skills are limited and caregivers must infer children’s rapidly developing thoughts, feelings, and needs. In a series of studies, we assessed how US adults conceptualize the development of the human mind over the first five years of life. Exploratory factor analysis identified four core capacities that anchored participants’ representations of the developing human mind: bodily sensation (e.g., hunger, pain), negative affect (e.g., distress, frustration), social connection (e.g., love, learning from others), and cognition and control (e.g., planning, self-control). Participants believed that these capacities were present to different degrees at birth, followed different developmental trajectories, and were driven by different developmental mechanisms, such as biological “preprogramming,” physical maturation, passive observation, and social learning. The current studies shed light on this fascinating and understudied aspect of “mind perception” among US adults, in turn highlighting possibilities for theory-based interventions to encourage developmentally appropriate parenting behaviors.

07.05.2025 03:43 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

On the Persistence of Discourse Predictions: The Facilitative Effect of Discourse Markers Diminishes in the Presence of Intervening Material ABSTRACTThe current study investigates for how long readers maintain expectations about an upcoming discourse relation. We use the pair of discourse markers On the one hand (OT1H) and On the other hand (OTOH) to test the facilitative effect of OT1H on the processing of OTOH and the sensitivity of this effect to the presence of intervening material. Results from a story continuation study indicate that intervening material slightly weakens the effect of OT1H on offline representations of the discourse. Results from a self-paced reading and two eye-tracking studies suggest that the presence of intervening material diminishes the facilitative effect of OT1H in online processing. These results support memory-based models of processing by showing that discourse dependencies, while they are built as fine-grained representations, are not unbounded in real-time processing.

07.05.2025 03:43 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Social Contexts Requiring Adjudication Self- and Peer-Interest Differentially Alter Risk Preferences Across Adolescence ABSTRACTAdolescence is a period of escalated rates of risk taking and a dynamic social landscape with peers taking on an important role in shaping one’s decisions. Choosing to engage in risk rarely impacts only the decision maker, but also those around them. With a cohort of typically developing adolescent and young adult friend dyads (N = 128, 11–22 years), the current study investigates how peer-relevant social contexts influence risk preferences at different ages using a computational decision making task. We adapted a computational expected utility model to account for weighing the friend’s outcome as part of one’s utility calculation when deciding between assigning the risky option to oneself or one’s friend. Compared to participants’ baseline risk preferences absent of any friend involvement, we found age-related changes in risk taking when the preferred option can only be assigned to oneself or one’s friend but not to both. Exploratory, data-driven analyses using behavioral measures and the computationally derived risk preference parameter revealed that overall, early adolescence is a period in which individuals assigned more weight to their friends’ outcomes and were willing to forego personal benefits to a greater extent. Active observation by friends had no additional, age-dependent impact on participants’ risky choices. These results indicate early adolescence to be a period of sensitivity to social contexts evoking prosocial gestures that are costly to oneself.

07.05.2025 03:43 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Spontaneous Encoding of Event Roles in Hominids ABSTRACTWhen observing social interactions, humans rapidly and spontaneously encode events in terms of agents, patients and causal relations. This propensity can be made visible empirically with the switch cost paradigm, a reaction time experiment and well-established tool of cognitive psychology. We adapted the paradigm for non-human primates to test whether non-linguistic animals encoded event roles in the same way. Both human and non-human participants were requested to attend to different social interactions between two artificially coloured (blue or green) actors and to target the actor masked by a specified colour (e.g., blue), regardless of her role. We found that when we switched the targeted colour mask from agents to patients (or vice versa) the processing time significantly increased in both hominid species (i.e., human and chimpanzee), suggesting that event roles were spontaneously encoded and subsequently interfered with our simplistic colour search task. We concluded that the propensity to encode social events in terms of agents and patients was a common feature of hominid cognition, as demonstrated in several human and one chimpanzee participant, pointing towards an evolutionarily old and phylogenetically shared cognitive mechanism central to language processing.

07.05.2025 03:43 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Towards Human-Like Emergent Communication via Utility, Informativeness, and Complexity AbstractTwo prominent, yet contrasting, theoretical views are available to characterize the underlying drivers of language evolution: on the one hand, task-specific utility maximization; on the other hand, task-agnostic communicative efficiency. The latter has recently been grounded in an information-theoretic tradeoff between communicative complexity and informativeness, known as the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. Here, we integrate these two views and propose an information-constrained emergent communication framework that trades off utility, informativeness, and complexity. To train agents within our framework, we develop a method, called Vector-Quantized Variational Information Bottleneck (VQ-VIB), that allows agents to interact using information-constrained discrete communication embedded in a continuous vector space. We test this approach in three domains and show that pressure for informativeness facilitates faster learning and better generalization to novel domains. At the same time, limiting complexity yields better alignment with actual human languages. Lastly, we find that VQ-VIB outperforms previously proposed emergent communication methods; we posit that this is due to the semantically-meaningful communication embedding space that VQ-VIB affords. Overall, our work demonstrates the role of cognitively-motivated optimality principles in inducing aspects of human-like communication among artificial agents.

09.04.2025 03:16 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Scientific and Cultural Cost of Convenience Sampling in the Face of Rising Language Endangerment: Highlighting the Role of Language Acquisition AbstractWe live in an unprecedented era of language endangerment and loss. In the midst of this crisis, it is becoming more and more evident that the psychological and cognitive sciences know very little about how most of the world’s languages are acquired, represented, and processed. Therefore, the opportunity to understand our most important and defining species-specific trait is being rapidly lost. In this Perspective, we highlight the extent of this problem, focusing on a key group at the heart of language transmission and loss—child language learners. We show that, due to sampling biases, very little is known about how children learn much of the vast corners of the linguistic design space, and that our opportunity to do so this is fast running out. We end by arguing for the greater integration of the academy, government, and community in addressing this problem.

09.04.2025 03:16 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Early Production of Imperceptible Words by Infants and Toddlers Born Deaf or Blind AbstractWe investigate the roles of linguistic and sensory experience in the early-produced visual, auditory, and abstract words of congenitally-blind toddlers, deaf toddlers, and typically-sighted/hearing peers. We also assess the role of language access by comparing early word production in children learning English or American Sign Language (ASL) from birth, versus at a delay. Using parental report data on child word production from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, we found evidence that while children produced words referring to imperceptible referents before age 2, such words were less likely to be produced relative to words with perceptible referents. For instance, blind (vs. sighted) children said fewer highly visual words like “blue” or “see”; deaf signing (vs. hearing) children produced fewer auditory signs like hear. Additionally, in spoken English and ASL, children who received delayed language access were less likely to produce words overall. These results demonstrate and begin to quantify how linguistic and sensory access may influence which words young children produce.

09.04.2025 03:16 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1

Interference of Implicit Causality in Relative Clause Processing AbstractDifferences in the processing of subject and object relative clauses have been explained by a combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors, such as a general subject advantage based on syntactic constraints, effects of animacy, and…

15.03.2025 03:05 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Children’s Understanding of Topological Relations AbstractA core aim of developmental cognitive science is to uncover the basic building blocks of human thought. For instance, work revealing that even young children, adults without formal education, and distant animal species are sensitive to basic…

15.03.2025 03:05 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Approximating Human-Level 3D Visual Inferences With Deep Neural Networks AbstractHumans make rich inferences about the geometry of the visual world. While deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve human-level performance on some psychophysical tasks (e.g., rapid classification of object or scene categories), they often fail in tasks…

25.02.2025 04:33 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Prosodic Cues Support Inferences About the Question’s Pedagogical Intent AbstractQuestions may be asked with an intent to acquire new information from the recipient (i.e., information-seeking questions) or with the intent to teach (i.e., pedagogical questions). Understanding how the questions’ recipients infer the intent of…

25.02.2025 04:33 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Double Standard of Ownership AbstractOwners are often blamed when their property causes harm but might not receive corresponding praise when their property does good. This suggests a double standard of ownership, wherein owning property poses risks for moral blame that are not…

25.02.2025 04:33 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Investigating Sensitivity to Shared Information and Personal Experience in Children’s Use of Majority Information AbstractChildren and adults alike rely on others to learn about the world, but also need to be able to determine the strength of both their own evidence as well as the evidence that other people provide, particularly when different sources of information…

20.02.2025 03:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Pragmatics as Social Inference About Intentional Action AbstractPragmatic inferences are based on assumptions about how speakers communicate: speakers are taken to be cooperative and rational; they consider alternatives and make intentional choices to produce maximally informative utterances. In principle,…

20.02.2025 03:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Learning in Interactive Decision-Making: The Interplay Between Cognitive Abilities and the Strategic Environment AbstractA remarkable feature of human intelligence is the ability to optimize our decisions based on the potential actions of others. This ability, i.e., strategic sophistication, is crucial in strategic interactions, where we need to predict others’…

01.02.2025 03:55 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Use of Statistical and Acoustic Cues for Speech Segmentation in French-Learning 7-Month-Old Infants and French-Speaking Adults AbstractYoung infants can segment continuous speech with acoustic as well as statistical cues. Understanding how these cues interact can be informative about how infants solve the segmentation problem. This study investigates the use of acoustic and…

01.02.2025 03:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Beliefs About the Speaker’s Reasoning Ability Influence Pragmatic Interpretation: Children and Adults as Speakers AbstractThe cooperative principle states that communicators expect each other to be cooperative and adhere to rational conversational principles. Do listeners keep track of the reasoning sophistication of the speaker and incorporate it into the inferences…

23.01.2025 04:31 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

On the Perception of Moral Standing to Blame AbstractIs everyone equally justified in blaming another’s moral transgression? Across five studies (four pre-registered; total N = 1,316 American participants), we investigated the perception of moral standing to blame—the appropriateness and legitimacy…

23.01.2025 04:31 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Infinite Mixture Chaining: An Efficiency-Based Framework for the Dynamic Construction of Word Meaning AbstractThe lexicon is an evolving symbolic system that expresses an unbounded set of emerging meanings with a limited vocabulary. As a result, words often extend to new meanings. Decades of research have suggested that word meaning extension is…

10.01.2025 03:59 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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