The human mind automatically divides continuous experience into meaningful events (event segmentation). Despite abundant evidence that some kinds of situation changes (e.g., action, goal, or location changes) contribute to event segmentation, a component of experience that is critical for understanding and predicting others' behavior, emotion, is rarely investigated. In two experiments, we sought to

Victims of wrongdoing sometimes forgive to repair relationships with the wrongdoer. But how does forgiveness do this? Some have argued that forgiveness changes the way the wrongdoing is remembered. We empirically adjudicate two competing accounts of how forgiveness is related to memory. The episodic fading account states that forgiveness alters both the episodic and the affective characteristics of

words challenge embodied cognition theories due to their lack of direct connections to the sensory and bodily world. To address this, some theories propose that abstract words are represented through emotional and social information. We tested these theories across seven experiments using semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks in two languages. In Experiment 1, we investigated the effects

Understanding the neurocognitive basis of cognitive control and its relationship with general cognitive ability is a key challenge in individual differences research. This study investigates midfrontal theta connectivity as a neurocognitive marker for individual differences in cognitive control. Using electroencephalography, we examined midfrontal global theta connectivity across three distinct cognitive

Cue-Approach Training (CAT) is a paradigm that enhances preferences without external reinforcements, suggesting a potential role for internal learning processes. Here, we developed a novel Bayesian computational model to quantify anticipatory response patterns during the training phase of CAT. This phase includes individual items, and thus, this marker potentially reflects internal learning signals

Lay people routinely appeal to "beliefs" in explaining behavior; psychologists do so as well (for instance, in explaining belief polarization and learning). Across three studies (N = 1,843, U.S.-based adults), we challenge the assumption that "belief" picks out a single construct in people's theory of mind. Instead, laypeople attribute different kinds of beliefs depending on whether the beliefs play

Boredom is a common and unpleasant experience associated with a range of problematic correlates and consequences. We examine a catalyst and its putative remedy all but neglected in the psychological science of emotion, and boredom in particular: the living environment. Specifically, we proposed and tested that "artificial" (e.g., urban) environments elicit boredom and that natural environments may

People vary drastically in their intellectual humility (i.e., their ability to recognize gaps in their knowledge). Little is known about how intellectual humility develops or why some children might demonstrate more intellectual humility than others. The present study examines the possibility of parent-to-child transmission of intellectual humility. Parents (N = 108; 88% college graduates; 56% with

People tend to align their policy attitudes with the stereotypical attitudes of their political group (e.g., conservatives supporting gun rights, liberals supporting abortion rights). However, ingroups sometimes adopt positions that contradict such stereotypes (e.g., some liberals endorse gun rights, some conservatives endorse abortion rights). How does learning about these counter-stereotypical endorsements

Often the only source of information for learning a new word is its surrounding language context. For example, even if one has never seen a rambutan, it is possible to learn that "rambutan" is a kind of fruit just from hearing "I like sweet, juicy rambutans." What processes unfold at the moment upon encountering a new word in context that lead to successful word learning? We conducted three experiments

Working memory is a short-term storage space for cognitive information with a highly limited capacity. Due to this limited capacity, many theories address the issue of how items compete in working memory. The present study assesses whether the relative salience of items is automatically important or whether the deployment of working memory is more flexible than that. Some recent studies have suggested

People are regularly conceptualized at varying levels of resolution, sometimes characterized by their idiosyncratic features while at other times seen as mere tokens of their social groups. Decades of research have sought to understand when perceivers will draw upon each of these types of representations, detailing the perceiver- and target-related features that may decrease reliance on stereotypes

Core to kindness, compassion, or consideration of others is the ability to move beyond one's own perspective to imagine how someone else would think or feel. We reasoned that subtle shifts in language may facilitate this process, hypothesizing that speakers who adopted a generalized perspective (generic you, we) versus an individual (me) or specific (another's name) perspective would be viewed by children

Maintaining attention to a task is essential for accomplishing it. However, attentional state fluctuates from moment to moment, and task-irrelevant information may compete for processing. What are the consequences of attentional fluctuations for what we remember? Do fluctuations in sustained attention vary the spotlight of selective attention, prioritizing task-relevant at the expense of task-irrelevant

Groups frequently encounter situations where someone must "take one for the team"-that is, one member must undertake a task for the benefit of the group. When such tasks recur, how should the burdens be shared? This question becomes particularly complex when the cost of performing the task varies among members, creating a trade-off between efficiency and equity. For instance, always assigning the task

Pertaining to goal orientation and achievement, agency is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and behavior. Accordingly, detecting and quantifying linguistic encoding of agency are critical for the analysis of human actions, interactions, and social dynamics. Available agency-quantifying computational tools rely on word-counting methods, which typically are insensitive to the semantic context in

Can readers process multiple words simultaneously, and are there cultural differences in attentional bottleneck in lexical processing? To answer these questions, we asked participants to view two words and categorize only one (single-task) or both words (dual-task), using Korean word pairs that frequently co-occur and are semantically related. We hypothesized that the coactivation of related words

Vivid visual mental imagery is thought to influence perceptual processing, but much of the current knowledge on this comes from one highly cited, though underpowered (N = 8) study from 2007, which found that more vivid imagery increases interference between imagined and perceptual content. However, that study has not been repeated since. We therefore conducted a conceptual (Experiment 1) and direct

Mental speed theories of intelligence suggest that people are smarter because they are faster. We argue that attention control plays an important and fundamental role in mediating the relationship between basic sensory processes and more complex cognitive processes such as fluid intelligence. One of the most successful paradigms for establishing a mental speed theory of intelligence is the inspection

Psychosis is characterized by salient conflicts between reality and one's experience of it. Many people in the general population experience similar conflicts, albeit to a lesser extent-including during déjà vu, in which one is struck by the feeling that they have lived through the present moment before, despite not being able to pinpoint why or knowing that this cannot be true. The cognitive processes

Classical serial models view the process of producing a text as a chain of discrete pauses during which the next span of text is planned and bursts of activity during which this text is output onto the page or computer screen. In contrast, parallel models assume that by default planning of the next text unit is performed in parallel with previous execution. We instantiated these two views as Bayesian

Collective action is a powerful force driving social change but often sparks contention about what actions are acceptable means to effect social change. We investigated double standards in judging collective action-that is, whether observers judge the same protest actions to be more acceptable depending on who the protesters are and what they are protesting. In two studies, we used item response theory

Terrorism represents one of the most commonly studied types of threat in the social and political psychology literature. Of particular note, many studies (along with national polls) have shown that the threat of Islamist fundamentalism increases the appeal of conservativism. However, there are some important-and unresolved-questions regarding these threat-driven "shifts to the right." Our primary focus

Past research has focused on emotion regulation (ER) as an intrapersonal endeavor (managing one's own emotions), leaving many questions unanswered about interpersonal emotion regulation (IER; receiving support from another person to regulate one's emotions). This study sought to understand the effects of two common IER strategies (corumination, codistraction) by comparing them with each other and their

While trying to complete arduous tasks (e.g., emails, grading), our attention is often mired by the desire to disengage. Opportunity cost theories of mental effort argue that rather than our "sense of effort" being a cognitive limitation, it is an adaptive signal which repels us from unrewarding tasks toward worthwhile alternatives; in short, this signal ensures our cognitive resources are not spent

While the influence of scene-object semantic congruency on object perception is well established, the direction of the influence remains controversial. We address this issue by presenting an innovative approach that uses a vector-space semantic model to quantify scene-object congruency as a continuous variable. By exploring a wide range of congruency values and using multiple experimental tasks, we

Recent statistical learning views of reading posit that writing systems present to their readers a wide range of statistical regularities which are leveraged to process printed texts. While substantial research has focused on the "vertical" correlations between orthographic, phonological, and semantic units in a given writing system, here we employ information-theoretic measures to further consider

The central tendency effect emphasizes the use of priors by the brain for perceptual optimization within a Bayesian framework. This study explores the impact of blindness on central tendency and prior utilization in a distance estimation auditory task by testing a group of early blinds, late blinds, and sighted participants. The results showed that early blind individuals exhibit a general impairment

Leaders' behavior can powerfully alter group outcomes. In a programmatic series of preregistered studies, we provide the first rigorous test of whether and why leaders behave differently toward groups of men versus women. In a within-subjects pilot study (N = 336) and in between-subjects Study 1 (N = 368), American adults said they would lead groups of men (vs. women) in a more dominant (e.g., intimidating

Effective linguistic communication depends upon many different cognitive processes working together in concert. Yet, our computational models of these processes are often developed in isolation, without considering how these processes fit together. In this work, we study a simplified variant of the popular board game Codenames, which highlights the integration of two important processes: (1) lexical

Managing the trade-off between stability (robustness to interference) and flexibility (readiness to adapt to change) places considerable demands on human attention, cognitive control, and meta-control processes. However, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms driving stability-flexibility adaptation in multitasking contexts, and such mechanisms have implications for effective task completion

Motor planning forms a critical bridge between psycholinguistic and motoric models of word production. While syllables are often considered the core speech motor planning unit, growing evidence hints at suprasyllabic planning that may correspond to words, but firm experimental support is still lacking. We use differential adaptation to altered auditory feedback to provide novel, straightforward evidence

Continuous flow and evidence accumulation models have recently been combined to provide an integrated account of decision and motor mechanisms engaged in choice reaction time tasks. According to this account, muscle activation is essentially determined by the evidence accumulation decision variable through a continuous decision-to-motor transmission of information. However, it remains unclear whether

Whether it's choosing a tennis serve or escaping a predator, the ability to behave randomly provides a range of adaptive benefits. Decades of work explore how people both produce and detect randomness, revealing profound nonrandom biases and heuristics in our mental representations of randomness. But how is randomness realized in the mind? Do individuals have a "one-size-fits-all" conception of randomness

Policies, the mappings from states to actions, require memory. The amount of memory is dictated by the mutual information between states and actions or the policy complexity. High-complexity policies preserve state information and generally lead to greater rewards compared to low-complexity policies, which require less memory by discarding state information and exploiting environmental regularities

There is increasing evidence that moral and emotional rhetoric spreads widely on social media and is associated with intergroup conflict, polarization, and the spread of misinformation. However, this literature is largely correlational, making it unclear why moral and emotional content drives sharing and conflict. In this research, we examine the causal impact of moral-emotional content on sharing

Children often have to choose between two or more probabilistically rewarded options. How early in life do they learn to choose adaptively? Connecting research on ecologically rational probability matching in adulthood with research on the benefits of cognitive immaturity in childhood, we compared children's (3-11 years; N = 362) and adults' (N = 121) repeated choice behavior in a child-friendly probability

Whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (automatically revealed) social group attitudes can change has been a central topic of psychological inquiry over the past decades. Here, we take a novel approach to answering these longstanding questions by leveraging data collected via the Project Implicit International websites from 1.4 million participants across 33 countries, five social group

What makes a word memorable? An important claim from past work is that words are encoded by their meanings and not their forms. If true, then, following rational analysis, memorable words should uniquely pick out a particular meaning, which means they should have few or no synonyms, and they should be unambiguous. Across two large-scale recognition-memory experiments (2,222 target words and > 600 participants

Every action demands some effort, and its level influences decision making. Existing data suggest that in some decision contexts, effort devalues outcomes, but in other contexts, effort enhances outcome valuation. Here, we describe an empirical study and propose a model that incorporates negative, positive, and mixed impacts of effort on outcomes in different decision contexts and different participants

Lee and Schlegelmilch (2025) reanalyzed data from Zaman, Yu, and Verheyen (2023), arguing that the role of perception in generalization is overemphasized and that higher level cognitive processes (in the form of a similarity-based rule) provide a better account. In this reply, we make the argument that their reanalysis contains flaws and inconsistencies and present additional evidence for consideration

Stimulus generalization, or the transfer of learned responses between stimuli, is a critical ability for adaptation to everyday life. In a typical experiment, generalization is assessed by measuring responses to stimuli varying along a physical dimension. Variations in the gradient of learned responses are usually interpreted as differences in the underlying cognitive process of generalization. A recent

The other ethnicity effect (OEE) refers to the common finding that individuals generally perform better in recognizing faces from their own ethnicity than from others. Wan et al. (2017) identified a subset of individuals with a marked difficulty in recognizing other ethnicity faces, termed other ethnicity blindness (OEB). This study further examines the prevalence of OEB in two large samples of Asian

Adults often titrate the degree of their cognitive effort in an economical manner: they "think hard" when the reward benefits of a task exceed its difficulty costs. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether and how children and adolescents adjust their cognitive effort according to multiple cues about its worthwhileness, including in novel environments where these cues must be learned through experience

Natural scenes contain a multitude of cues that can support spatial perception, making it difficult to study. Here, in a series of preregistered behavioral studies, we quantify scene-specific spatial representations that generalize over tasks, stimulus durations, and participants. We presented 156 scene images at varying durations (125, 250, 1,000 ms) to independent groups of participants who either

We investigate how 3- to 5-year-old U.S. and Canadian children (N = 189) and U.S. adults (N = 241) balance the number of endorsements for a given option with the quality of the informants' source of information when deciding which of two boxes contains the better option. When choosing between two different boxes endorsed by groups of equal sizes, both children (Experiments 1-3) and adults (Experiment

Black women professionals face pressure to alter their natural hair (i.e., naturally textured hair and/or styles associated with Black individuals), undermining their identity-safety in the workplace. An identity-safety cue can signal social fit, or an environment that values attributes associated with one's identity, and foster identity-safety among Black women. Integrating social identity threat

The last 25 years of research have revealed that recalling the past with others changes memory. A key finding is that former group members show increased memory overlap or collective memory. Beyond memory content, we ask whether collaborative recall changes the organization of memory. How we organize information has far-reaching consequences on learning and remembering, and research has produced sophisticated

In order to maintain stability across saccades, the visual system must keep track of nonspatial information bound to each location (object-location binding). Here, we investigated whether saccade target status affects the reference frame of trans-saccadic object-location binding. Previous studies examining the reference frame of object-location binding showed that peripheral, nonsaccade target objects

Black individuals often feel unheard and misunderstood by White people during conversations about race. These experiences could be due in part to a perceived disconnect between their own and White people's views on race. In the current research (N = 1,470 Black Americans), we developed and tested a new scale to capture this potential mechanism-racial shared reality (RSR)-which we conceptualize as Black

Black Americans remain underrepresented in organizations. Although extensive research demonstrates that inadequate representation undermines inclusion, few studies have assessed the psychological processes through which this relationship emerges. Across three online experiments, we investigate the role of social comparison perceptions-concerns about being assimilated, or likened, to another ingroup

In evaluating changing attributes (e.g., work output, pollution levels), perceivers care not only about an attribute's level but its rate of change. Two employees likely have different value in the eyes of a supervisor if they take different amounts of time to complete the same work. Ten studies in the main article (and five in the Supplemental Materials) document and explore a monitoring frequency

All measures of behavior have a temporal context. Changes in behavior over time often take a similar form: monotonically decreasing or increasing toward an asymptote. Whether these behavioral dynamics are the object of study or a nuisance variable, their inclusion in models of data makes conclusions more complete, robust, and well-specified, and can contribute to theory development. Here, we demonstrate

A growing literature has shown that people tend to make faster decisions when choosing between two high-intensity or high-utility options than when choosing between two less-intensity or low-utility options. However, the underlying cognitive mechanisms of this effect of overall value (OV) on response times (RT) remains controversial, partially due to inconsistent findings of OV effects on accuracy

The severity and pervasiveness of anti-fat prejudice and discrimination have led to calls for interventions to address them. However, intervention studies to combat anti-fat prejudice have often been stymied by ineffective approaches, small sample sizes, and the lack of standardization in measurement. To that end, we conducted two mega-experiments totaling 28,240 participants and 50 conditions where

Recent analyses of social media activity indicate that outgroup animosity drives user engagement more than ingroup favoritism, with content that derogates the outgroup tending to generate more viral responses online. However, it is unclear whether those findings are due to most people's underlying preferences or structural features of the social media landscape. To address this uncertainty, we conducted

Predicting the location of moving objects in noisy environments is essential to everyday behavior, like when participating in traffic. Although many objects provide multisensory information, it remains unknown how humans use multisensory information to localize moving objects, and how this depends on expected sensory interference (e.g., occlusion). In four experiments, we systematically investigated

Judgments of attractiveness have many important social outcomes, highlighting the need to understand how people form these judgments. One aspect of appearance that impacts perceptions of attractiveness is facial femininity/masculinity (sexual dimorphism). However, extant research has focused primarily on White, Western, heterosexual participants' preferences for femininity/masculinity in White faces

Individual differences in working memory predict a wide range of cognitive abilities. However, little research has been done on whether working memory continues to predict task performance after repetitive learning. Here, we tested whether working memory ability continued to predict long-term memory (LTM) performance for picture sequences even after participants showed massive learning. In Experiments

Emotion perception is a fundamental aspect of our lives because others' emotions may provide important information about their reactions, attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Following the seminal work of Ekman, much of the research on emotion perception has focused on facial expressions. Recent evidence suggests, however, that facial expressions may be more ambiguous than previously assumed and that