Cognitive Science

The latest breakthroughs, innovations, and cool happenings at the cutting edge of the world of cognitive science. Updated daily.

Role of Metacognitive Confidence Judgments in Curiosity: Different Effects of Confidence on Curiosity Across Epistemic and Perceptual Domains

Abstract Previous research suggests that curiosity is sometimes induced by novel information one has no relevant knowledge about, but it is sometimes induced by new information about something that one is familiar with and has prior knowledge about. However, the conditions under which novelty or familiarity triggers curiosity remain unclear. Using metacognitive confidence judgments as […]

Published on June 25, 2024

Realistic About Reference Production: Testing the Effects of Domain Size and Saturation

Abstract Experiments on visually grounded, definite reference production often manipulate simple visual scenes in the form of grids filled with objects, for example, to test how speakers are affected by the number of objects that are visible. Regarding the latter, it was found that speech onset times increase along with domain size, at least when […]

Published on June 25, 2024

Aspectual Processing Shifts Visual Event Apprehension

Abstract What is the relationship between language and event cognition? Past work has suggested that linguistic/aspectual distinctions encoding the internal temporal profile of events map onto nonlinguistic event representations. Here, we use a novel visual detection task to directly test the hypothesis that processing telic versus atelic sentences (e.g., “Ebony folded a napkin in 10 […]

Published on June 25, 2024