Abstract Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent‐ordering patterns to indicate “who did what to whom,” yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language conventions, revealing apparent biases underpinning word order […]

Abstract People experiencing similar conditions may make different decisions, and their belief systems provide insight about these differences. An example of high‐stakes decision‐making within a complex social context is the Arab Spring, in which large numbers of people decided to protest and even larger numbers decided to stay at home. This study uses qualitative analyses […]

It is well-known that the human visual system is adapted to the statistical structure of natural scenes. Yet there are important classes of images – for example, medical images — that are not natural scenes, and therefore, that are expected to have statistical properties that deviate from the class of images that shaped the evolution […]