Month: October 2021

Linguistic Distributional Knowledge and Sensorimotor Grounding both Contribute to Semantic Category Production

Abstract The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre-registered category production study, we asked participants […]

Published on October 13, 2021

Children’s Ideas About What Can Really Happen: The Impact of Age and Religious Background

Abstract Five- to 11-year-old U.S. children, from either a religious or secular background, judged whether story events could really happen. There were four different types of stories: magical stories violating ordinary causal regularities; religious stories also violating ordinary causal regularities but via a divine agent; unusual stories not violating ordinary causal regularities but with an […]

Published on October 13, 2021

Dynamics Versus Development in Numerosity Estimation: A Computational Model Accurately Predicts a Developmental Reversal

Abstract Perceptual judgments result from a dynamic process, but little is known about the dynamics of number-line estimation. A recent study proposed a computational model that combined a model of trial-to-trial changes with a model for the internal scaling of discrete numbers. Here, we tested a surprising prediction of the model—a situation in which children’s […]

Published on October 13, 2021