Humans can rapidly extract object and category information from an image despite surprising limitations in detecting changes to the individual parts of that image. In this article we provide evidence that the construction of a perceptual whole, or Gestalt, reduces awareness of changes to the parts of this object. This result suggests that the…

Gaissmaier and Schooler (2008) [Gaissmaier, W., & Schooler, L. J. (2008). "The smart potential behind probability matching." "Cognition, 109," 416-422] argue that probability matching, which has traditionally been viewed as a decision making error, may instead reflect an adaptive response to environments in which outcomes potentially follow…

Humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli. A consequence of this automatic vigilance for negative valence is that negative words elicit slower responses than neutral or positive words on a host of cognitive tasks. Some researchers have speculated that negative stimuli elicit a general suppression of motor activity, akin to the freezing…

It has been proposed that the ability to make sense of other agents' behavior relies on the activation of internal mechanisms that map action perception onto action execution. In this study we explored the constraints on this ability introduced by eyeheight-scaled information in the optic array. Short and tall participants provided maximum…

Intuition denotes the ability to judge stimulus properties on the basis of information that is activated in memory, but not consciously retrieved. In three experiments we show that participants discriminated better than chance fragmented line drawings depicting meaningful objects (coherent fragments) from fragments consisting of randomly displaced…

Variables influencing inferences about a stranger's goal during an unsolicited social interaction were explored. Experiment 1 developed a procedure for identifying cues. Experiments 2 and 3 assessed the relative importance of various cues (space, time, characteristics of oneself, characteristics of the stranger, and the stranger's behavior) for…

The aim of the present study is to ascertain whether in a social context the kinematic parameters are influenced by the stance of the participants. In particular, we consider two basic modes of social cognition, namely cooperation and competition. Naive subjects were asked either to cooperate or to compete with a partner (a professional female…

This research examines the development of children's understanding that people's judgments may be skewed by relationships, and that situational factors may make it difficult to be impartial. One hundred and seventy-one adults and children between kindergarten and eighth grade heard stories about judges in contests with objective or subjective…

How do we construct abstract ideas like justice, mathematics, or time-travel? In this paper we investigate whether mental representations that result from physical experience underlie people's more abstract mental representations, using the domains of space and time as a testbed. People often talk about time using spatial language (e.g., a "long"…

Introduced the hypothesis-assessment model, claiming that the strength of inductive argument is determined by the same factors that affect hypothesis plausibility in the everyday social milieu. Describes experiments conducted to assess argument strength. Discusses strengths and limitations of the proposed hypothesis-assessment model. (MOK)

A decade ago, Bechara et al. [Bechara, A., Damasio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. "Cognition, 50," 7-15] published a paper in Cognition, introducing a Gambling Task which was designed to mimic everyday decision-making. Since then, the task has been…

Examined whether different lexicalization patterns of motion events in English and Spanish predicted how college student speakers performed in recognition memory and similarity judgment tasks. Found no language effect in recognition memory after either linguistic or non-linguistic encoding, nor in similarity judgments after non-linguistic…