Abstract Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task-dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word’s referent. A primary finding of literature […]

Abstract While action selection strategies in well-defined domains have received considerable attention, little is yet known about how people choose what to do next in ill-defined tasks. In this contribution, we shed light on this issue by considering everyday tasks, which in many cases have a multitude of possible solutions (e.g., it does not matter […]

Abstract One of the most prominent social influences on human decision making is conformity, which is even more prominent when the perceptual information is ambiguous. The Bayes optimal solution to this problem entails weighting the relative reliability of cognitive information and perceptual signals in constructing the percept from self-sourced/endogenous and social sources, respectively. The current […]