Essays
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Understanding Biological Motion - van Boxtel, Jeroen J. A.
The ultimate goal of biological motion perception is to be able to understand actions so as to provide an answer to the question, “Who did what to whom and why?” This inference capacity enables humans to go beyond the surface appearance of behavior in order to successfully interact with others and with the environment. In addition to its functional importance, understanding biological motion bridges several major fields, including perception, reasoning, and social cognition. However, despite its paramount role in human perception and cognition, only limited progress has so far been made in understanding biological motion. After reviewing the relevant literature, this essay argues that future research needs to identify the contributions of three basic processes involved in understanding biological motion: perception of animacy, causality, and intention. The involvement of these basic processes needs to be investigated both in the typical healthy population as well as in populations with mental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. We also suggest that a productive research approach should focus on more interactive actions of the sort often observed in the natural social environment, rather than solely using the single‐actor displays that have been typical in previous work. It is further emphasized that there is a need for a theoretical and computational framework within which these different types of processing can be united. We propose that the predictive coding framework provides a good candidate. -
Two‐Systems View of Children's Theory‐of‐Mind Understanding - Low, Jason
Theory‐of‐mind research reveals a puzzling pattern of young children showing implicit “mindreading” success in indirect false‐belief tasks well before they can pass explicit tasks where they are asked to make direct predictions about the mistaken agent's belief or behavior. Relevant theorizing has either boosted indirect responses (e.g., eye movements) as showcasing infants' and young children's innate psychological reasoning system or scoffed at indirect responses as reflecting only a shallow causal understanding of behavior. This essay describes new theorizing suggesting that we have not one but two mindreading systems—an implicit efficient system (shared by infants, children, and adults) that supports spontaneous responses such as eye gazing and an explicit flexible system (constructed from age 4 onward) that supports direct verbal responses. This view has inspired cutting‐edge research documenting signature limits on the kinds of input that the efficient mindreading system processes. New research shows that the efficient system is set to help young children and adults minimally track facts relating to agents and objects, but not relations between agents and propositions. The flexible system—supporting understanding of belief as such—guides children's direct verbal inferences in a wide range of perspective‐taking situations that include ascribing how people interpret a particular object. Future research into the question of how human beings mindread in fast‐moving situations will need insight into whether there are systematic patterns of limits on implicit understanding that converge across age groups, multiple paradigms, and diverse populations. -
Theory of Mind and Behavior - Brandone, Amanda C.
The capacity to understand and reason about the unobservable mental states (e.g., thoughts, desires, and beliefs) of oneself and others, known as theory of mind (ToM), is central to human social cognition. Multidisciplinary interest in ToM stems from its potentially unique human nature, the role it plays in our ability to engage in complex social interactions, and its impairment in psychiatric and developmental disorders, such as autism. Through more than 30 years of research, we have learned a great deal about how and when children come to reason about others in terms of their mental states. This essay reviews foundational research on the development of ToM reasoning during childhood; outlines cutting‐edge findings on the infant origins and neural correlates of ToM; and finally discusses key issues for future research, including reconciling infant competence with evidence of protracted conceptual development in early childhood, expanding our neuroscientific understanding of ToM and its development, and shedding light on the use and individual variability of ToM in everyday life. Pursuing these goals will address important theoretical questions and provide critical new insight into the origins, development, neural basis, and social and behavioral consequences of ToM. -
Theory of Mind - Wellman, Henry
Humans are a social species. We not only live socially, but also think socially, accumulating myriad thoughts and knowledge about our social world. A hallmark of this human social cognition is an everyday theory of mind––our ordinary human understanding that persons (self and others) have internal mental states––desires, beliefs, feelings, hopes—that crucially shape their actions and lives. I review classic and current knowledge on the nature and importance of theory of mind. Theory of mind is achieved and changes over human development; so, I emphasize that we must understand its development. Fortunately, development of this everyday theory of mind is an intriguing story in its own right, and a great portion of the research on theory of mind is developmental research with typical and atypical infants and children. -
The Reading Brain: The Canary in the Mind - Wolf, Maryanne
The development of the seemingly simple cultural invention of reading alters the brain of each literate individual, propulses the intellectual development of the species, and provides human beings with a history of past knowledge as a foundation for future thought. Understanding how this happened in the species provides unexpected lessons for how children learn, how teachers teach, and how the brain learns anything new. Understanding the intrinsic plasticity of the reading brain circuit provides a cautionary tale for examining the cognitive impact of different media on how we read and how we think. -
The Psychological Impacts of Cyberlife Engagement - Kwan, Virginia S. Y.
This essay synthesizes scientific research across two decades on the influence of cyberlife engagement on cognitive processes, mental and physical health, and interpersonal interactions, highlighting the increasingly pervasive presence of digital innovation in society. New possibilities afforded by the integration of technology in commerce, relationships, therapy, and education are discussed, as are prevalent topics of interest within cyberpsychological research. We present an analysis of the positivity with which information and communication technology is portrayed in scientific literature since its emergence in society and discuss important future directions of study as technology's presence and influence continue to grow on an exponential scale. Last, we present current voids in cyberpsychological research, focusing particularly on the question of digital culture, or the impact of cyberlife engagement on global cultures as both geographical and custom‐based barriers are traversed with increasing ease. -
The Neurobiology and Physiology of Emotions: A Developmental Perspective - Kahle, Sarah S.
This essay discusses the physiological and neural activity associated with emotion processes, with a focus on the development of this activity in children. We review some conceptual issues about the distinctions between the components of emotion, including the physiology associated with emotions themselves, attempts to regulate emotions, and trait or state patterns of responding. Foundational work examining autonomic nervous system activity is summarized, and we highlight recent work that attempts to investigate emotion processes in multiple systems. We then suggest that two fruitful avenues of future research include the examination of the neurobiology and physiology of social emotions, and further investigation into the temporal dynamics of emotion processes. -
The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognition - Bialystok, Ellen
In spite of early warnings of dire consequences of bilingualism for children's cognitive development, research in the past 50 years has revealed that bilingualism is in fact a positive developmental experience. These benefits were more recently shown to extend across the life span. New research is incorporating neuroimaging to determine the brain bases of these effects and exploring the possibility that the beneficial effects of bilingualism can compensate for degeneration of other cognitive functions that are associated with dementia, thereby postponing symptom onset. -
Speech Perception - Vouloumanos, Athena
Speech perception is the process by which listeners presented with a distribution of audible frequencies modulated in amplitude (loudness) and spectral (the frequency set) content across time turn this sound into a coherent unit of perception that is interpreted as language. Classic studies established that speech is not perceived by simply mapping sets of invariant acoustic properties onto different speech sounds. In fact, speech perception is robust even when the acoustic signal has been dramatically distorted. Current approaches focus on understanding how we perceive speech by investigating the neural basis of processing different physical aspects of the speech signal, the encoding of acoustic information in the speech signal at different time scales, the developmental of speech perception, and the multimodal representation of speech. Understanding how humans perceive speech will require the expertise of psychologists, neuroscientists, and engineers. -
Spatial Attention - Cave, Kyle R.
Visual perception requires selective filtering. The process of selecting a portion of the visual input according to its location is described as spatial attention. Spatial attention has been measured with a wide variety of experimental techniques, including spatial cuing, spatial probes, distractor interference, ERP, and SSVEP. The results show that spatial attention sometimes takes the form of a gradient, with strong facilitation of processing within a central region and less facilitation and perhaps even inhibition in the surround. The positioning of the attentional gradient is controlled in part by a bottom‐up system that directs attention to locations that differ from surrounding locations in basic features. There is also top‐down direction of attention, which favors locations with features matching a defined target. A variety of different experiments have demonstrated that attention can be allocated to a particular location in the visual field, but another set of experiments show that attention can be allocated to a visual object, and that attention that is directed to one part of an object can spread to other parts of the same object. It is difficult to determine whether spatial attention and object‐based attention are controlled by the same system or by separate systems. Determining the boundaries between different attentional systems should become easier with the use of ERP data to provide precise timing information about attentional processes, and fMRI to localize the brain regions controlling attention and to measure attentional modulation of perceptual processing activity. -
Social‐Emotional Responding: A Perspective from Developmental Psychology - Malti, Tina
Social‐emotional responding (SER) refers to (i) an individual's awareness and understanding of emotional experiences in the self and others, (ii) expression of emotions, and (iii) emotion regulation capacities. The normative development of these responses is considered a central component of human development. This is because SER underlies our capacities to express other‐oriented behaviors and cope with challenges of everyday life in adaptive and socially responsible ways. The goal of this essay is to identify emerging trends in this area of developmental research. We first discuss central conceptual issues in social‐emotional development and present a conceptual framework from developmental psychology to study SER. Next, we identify current shortcomings in research on SER. We focus on three central components of SER: self‐conscious emotions, other‐oriented emotions, and emotion regulation. On the basis of our analyses of the current gaps, we highlight three promising attempts to solve some of the current shortcomings in this literature: attempts to understand developmental relations among self‐conscious emotions, other‐oriented emotions, and emotion regulation capacities; attempts to identify psychological, neural, and behavioral mechanisms underlying social‐emotional responding, and; the application of this knowledge to interventions that concern children and families. -
Social Aspects of Memory - Hirst, William
No one doubts that memories are shaped by the social context in which they are formed or later remembered. In this essay we focus on how the social context of remembering and memorizing with others shapes the way both the speaker and listener remember the past, what we refer to as collaborative remembering. In addressing the mnemonic consequences of collaborative remembering, we discuss 1) how it shapes what is occurrently remembered in the group and 2) how it affects both what the speaker and listener subsequently remember. In terms of the former, we discuss the robust collaborative inhibition literature; in terms of the latter, we discuss the social contagion, retrieval induced‐forgetting and socially shared retrieval‐induced forgetting literature. In conclusion, we highlight areas in need of future research within the area of “social aspects of memory”: 1) whether the mnemonic effects of collaborative remember propagate across a group, that is, to move beyond dyadic interactions and examine larger groups; 2) examining the evolutionary advantages of human memory being susceptible to the influence of others; and, in turn, 3) how this mnemonic susceptibility may help foster social bonds. -
Setting One's Mind on Action: Planning Out Goal Striving in Advance - Gollwitzer, Peter M.
Ineffective goal striving may be overcome using a simple self‐regulation strategy: preparing goal striving in advance by forming implementation intentions (i.e., making if‐then plans). This strategy helps to cope with the classic challenges to goal striving: getting started, staying on track, not overextending oneself, and disengaging from faulty means. Interestingly, these beneficial effects are observed no matter whether hindrances from within (e.g., ego depletion) or outside (e.g., social influence) the person are to be dealt with. In this essay, the processes on which the beneficial effects of implementation intentions are based will be discussed by pointing to relevant research using cognitive task paradigms and assessing brain data. Moreover, recent findings are reported demonstrating that implementation intentions can be used to curb reflexive cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses that interfere with a person's focal goal pursuit. In closing this essay, a behavior change intervention (i.e., mental contrasting with implementation intentions) is introduced that establishes the prerequisites for implementation intention effects to occur, and research areas in psychology are pointed to that could benefit from conducting implementation intention research. -
Retrieval‐Based Learning: Research at the Interface between Cognitive Science and Education - Nunes, Ludmila D.
This essay reviews research on retrieval‐based learning, which refers to the general finding that practicing active retrieval enhances long‐term, meaningful learning. The idea that retrieval promotes learning has existed for centuries, and the first experiments demonstrating retrieval practice effects were carried out near the beginning of experimental research on learning and memory. Interest in retrieval practice was sporadic during the past century, but the topic has received intense interest in recent years as part of a broader movement to integrate research from cognitive science with educational practice. The essay provides a selective review of foundational research and contemporary work that has been aimed at deepening our theoretical knowledge about retrieval practice and integrating retrieval‐based learning within educational activities and settings. -
Resource Limitations in Visual Cognition - Liverence, Brandon M.
Visual attention and visual working memory are two of the core resources that support visual perception. Foundational research has demonstrated that these resources are highly limited, but an active debate concerns exactly how they are limited. While many classic studies suggested that these resources are fundamentally discrete, with fixed capacity of 3–4 objects maximum, a number of recent studies have argued that these resources are fundamentally continuous, with no fixed upper‐bound to the number of objects that can be attended or remembered. This entry reviews the state of this debate, and shows how convergence between these (often separate) areas of research is a major emerging trend in the field of visual cognition. -
Regulatory Focus Theory - Higgins, E. Tory
Regulatory focus theory was the child of self‐discrepancy theory and the parent of regulatory fit theory. Self‐discrepancy theory distinguishes between self‐regulation in relation to hopes and aspirations (ideals) versus self‐regulation in relation to duties and obligations (oughts). It proposes that ideal versus ought self‐regulation are two different motivational systems for approaching pleasure and avoiding pain. In regulatory focus theory, promotion concerns with ideals (growth and advancement more generally) and prevention concerns with oughts (safety and security more generally) are motivational states that not only vary across individuals (personality) but also can be situationally induced. Regulatory focus theory proposes that the motivational state of being at “0” has negative valence in promotion (“0”as a nongain in relation to “+1”) but positive valence in prevention (“0” as a nonloss in relation to “−1”). Finally, giving rise to regulatory fit theory, regulatory focus theory distinguishes between the eager strategies that fit promotion and the vigilant strategies that fit prevention. Foundational research supporting each of these proposals is reviewed, and then more recent cutting‐edge research is described, including how this distinction is revealed in the behavior of nonhuman animals and how different tactics (e.g., risky vs conservative) can serve either promotion‐eagerness or prevention‐vigilance under different circumstances. Finally, I discuss two key issues for future research: whether promotion and prevention are competing motivations or can work together as partners, and whether there is support for the promotion–prevention distinction in everyday life beyond the laboratory. -
Regulation of Emotions Under Stress - Shallcross, Amanda J.
Stressful life events (SLEs) are frequently associated with a range of deleterious mental and physical health outcomes. However, some individuals exhibit resilience, defined as maintained or even improved health in the wake of SLEs. How and why might this be the case? Given that SLEs give rise to negative emotions, which in turn contribute to mental and physical illness, promising answers to questions about resilience lie in research on people's ability to manage their emotions, or, emotion regulation. This essay focuses on emerging empirical evidence that suggests that two seemingly opposite emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and emotional acceptance, are particularly effective for managing negative emotions, which, in turn, may confer resilience. By integrating theory with extant empirical evidence, we offer a model that aims to reconcile how these two strategies—one that involves minimizing emotions (cognitive reappraisal) and the other that involves engaging with emotions (emotional acceptance)—are each associated with resilience. Specifically, we propose that these strategies are not contradictory, but rather complementary. We additionally discuss broader implications for the links among stress, emotion regulation, and health, as well as key issues for future research at the intersection of social and clinical psychology, medicine, and public health. -
Neuroeconomics - Levy, Ifat
In recent years, researchers in economics, psychology, and neuroscience have joined forces in the study of decision‐making processes to form the new discipline of neuroeconomics. Neuroscientists turned to theories in economics and psychology to make sense of the increasing amounts of neurobiological data. At the same time, economists and psychologists turned to neuroscience for mechanistic constraints on their theories. Neuroeconomics studies tackle a host of topics, from financial choices through reinforcement learning to social decision making. Combining behavioral techniques with brain imaging in humans and electrophysiological recordings in animals, as well as complementary techniques, this interdisciplinary research has already generated new insights about the neural architecture of decision making. The neural mechanisms of some of the behavioral decision processes are increasingly understood, but many challenges remain. Extending neuroeconomics research to psychiatric disorders and incorporating new research tools are promising avenues for future studies. -
Neural and Cognitive Plasticity - Mercado III, Eduardo
Modern humans spend much of their early lives participating in formal educational programs designed to increase their cognitive competencies. Despite this concerted effort to maximize individuals intellectual capacities, scientists and educators know relatively little about the neural factors that determine when and how learning experiences lead to improvements in cognitive abilities. Current theories of how brains are changed by learning focus on incremental adjustments to connections between neurons that are driven by increases in neural activity. This article summarizes past theoretical and experimental research on the relationship between neural plasticity and experience‐dependent changes in cognition, briefly describes recent technological advances in measuring and inducing brain plasticity mechanisms, and outlines key questions that researchers must address to provide a more complete understanding of the factors that enable people to learn new cognitive skills. Answering such questions will require the combined efforts of neuroscientists, psychologists, and educational researchers, as well as the development of new technologies for monitoring neural changes in humans and other animals as they learn to perform a variety of cognitive tasks. -
Multitasking - Irwin, Matthew
Multitasking has become increasingly prevalent, especially as we continue to incorporate more and more new media technologies into our daily activities. This essay first identifies trends in the availability and use of media devices in daily life and multitasking behaviors related to such trends. Second, given the general consensus that multitasking impairs performance outcomes, recent multitasking trends call for greater research attention to the subject. We outline the historical perspectives on cognitive structures and processes related to a human's general ability to multitask, culminating with the more recent threaded cognition theory. Third, we present two new research directions on multitasking. One is the exploration of long‐term consequences of multitasking behaviors, such as their impacts on cognitive functions, and dynamic changes in individuals' needs and multitasking behavioral changes over time; the other is a cognitive dimensional framework for defining multitasking, which may offer a means to reconcile findings across various multitasking research paradigms, and also to guide designs of multitasking technologies and environments. Finally, looking to the future, we propose several ways to advance the research on multitasking. -
Motivational Changes Across Adulthood: The Role of Goal Representations for Adult Development and Aging - Freund, Alexandra M.
The importance of goals for understanding behavior and performance over time and across situations, for a sense of purpose and psychological well‐being, has been acknowledged in the areas of motivation and lifespan development for more than a quarter‐century (Baltes & Baltes, 1990). More recently, the field of motivated cognition has pointed to the role of the cognitive representation of goals for self‐regulation, affect, and goal achievement (Fujita & Carnevale, 2012). Owing to the decline in the perceived availability of goal‐relevant resources across adulthood, I argue that the representation of goals and their effects on behavior, performance, and well‐being changes across adulthood. More specifically, I propose that goal representations change dynamically as a response to—and help managing—the developmental gains and losses regarding (i) the orientation toward achieving gains, maintaining performance, or avoiding losses, and (ii) the focus on the means or the outcome of goal pursuit. -
Motivation Science - Kruglanski, Arie W.
Traditionally, research on the psychology of motivation has addressed two separate questions: the What of motivation and the How of motivation. The former concerns the nature of the various motives that propel human behavior, and the latter the general process whereby any motive exerts its effects. This essay reviews historical and contemporary research in each of the foregoing categories. We highlight cutting edge concepts and findings in motivation science and identify emerging trends and future challenges. -
Models of Revealed Preference - Adams, Abi
Revealed preference theory is concerned with what we can learn about the process by which economic agents make decisions using simply the features of the world that we observe: choices. Different economic models place different restrictions on these choices. The revealed preference literature derives these restrictions and then puts them to use. Research effort has recently been extended far beyond the axiomatic characterization of neoclassical models of choice to consider data‐consistency and preference‐recoverability for a wide class of models. This essay places these recent developments in context, giving a brief introduction to the revealed preference approach before elaborating on recent research that has dramatically extended the domain and ambition of the discipline. We address the widening of the scope of revealed preference theory to new classes of models, which have introduced novel techniques, and challenges, to the discipline, before charting emerging trends within the areas of identification and power, which have arisen as revealed preference has emerged as an empirical method. -
Models of Duality - Krishna, Anand
Duality models generally assume that human psychology is based on two separate systems of information processing. These systems have specific characteristics that differentiate them from one another. Such models are increasingly common in social psychology today. A selection of duality models is discussed and categorized according to three factors: the type of mental representation used in the specified processes (experiential vs. nonexperiential), the methods of processing (associative vs. propositional), and the differing degree of automaticity (based on the aspects of efficiency, awareness, intentionality, and controllability) of the processes. In addition, models' statements about the superiority of one process over the other are enumerated. Foundational models of attribution, stereotyping, persuasion, and more general models are explained in an overview. Central aspects of these foundational models are extracted and applied in a discussion of current duality models in general social psychology, as well as newer dual‐process models of attitudes, moral judgments, and self‐regulation. Models positing a process superior in information processing are contrasted with models positing two processes with different specializations in information processing, and the implications of improved integration and specialization are discussed. -
Misinformation and How to Correct It - Cook, John
The increasing prevalence of misinformation in society may adversely affect democratic decision making, which depends on a well‐informed public. False information can originate from a number of sources including rumors, literary fiction, mainstream media, corporate‐vested interests, governments, and nongovernmental organizations. The rise of the Internet and user‐driven content has provided a venue for quick and broad dissemination of information, not all of which is accurate. Consequently, a large body of research spanning a number of disciplines has sought to understand misinformation and determine which interventions are most effective in reducing its influence. This essay summarizes research into misinformation, bringing together studies from psychology, political science, education, and computer science.