Cognition

In the field of numerical cognition, ordinality, or the sequence of numerals, has received much less attention than cardinality, or the number of items in a set. Therefore it is unclear whether the numerical effects generated from ordinality and cardinality tasks are associated, and whether they relate to math achievement and more domain-general variables in similar ways. To address these questions, sixty adults completed ordinality, cardinality, visual-spatial working memory, inhibitory control and math achievement tasks. The numerical distance effect from the cardinality task and the reverse distance effect from the ordinality task were both relatively reliable but not statistically significantly associated with one another. Additionally, both distance effects predicted independent unique variance in math scores, even when visual-spatial working memory and inhibitory control were included in the regression model. These findings provide support for dissociation in the mechanisms underlying cardinal and ordinal processing of number symbols and thereby highlight the critical role played by ordinality in symbolic numerical cognition.

The mappings between the words of a language and their meanings are arbitrary. There is, for example, nothing inherently dog-like about the word dog. And yet, building on prior evidence (e.g., Brook, 1970; Piaget, 1967), the six studies reported here (N=1062) suggest that both children and (at least to some extent) adults see a special "fit" between objects and their names, as if names were particularly suitable or appropriate for the objects they denote. These studies also provide evidence for a novel proposal concerning the source of these nominal fit beliefs. Specifically, beliefs about nominal fit may be a byproduct of the heuristic processes that people use to make sense of the world more generally (Cimpian & Salomon, 2014a). In sum, the present studies provide new insights into how people conceive of language and demonstrate that these conceptions are rooted in the processes that underlie broader explanatory reasoning.

In a series of papers we have argued that the distinction between lemma and lexeme levels of representation in lexical access may be unnecessary. We pointed out that the evidence cited in support of this view is not incompatible with alternative accounts that do not assume a lemma level of representation. Furthermore, we argued that there are neuropsychological observations and results from tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiments that appear to be problematic for the lemma/lexeme distinction. Roelofs et al. [Roelofs, A., Meyer, A.S., Levelt, W.J.M., 1998. A case for the lemma/lexeme distinction in models of speaking: comment on Caramazza and Miozzo (1997). Cognition 69, 219-230.] have challenged our conclusions by attempting to demonstrate that (1) a model that incorporates the lemma/lexeme distinction can account for the putatively problematic neuropsychological and TOT data; (2) there are other data that appear to be problematic for a type of model that does not include a lemma level of representation. In the present paper we respond to these criticisms by showing (1) that the neuropsychological and TOT data still represent a challenge for the lemma/lexeme distinction, and (2) that the other evidence cited by Roelofs et al. is not incompatible with lexical theories that assume only one lexical layer.

We provide a cognitive analysis of how children represent belief using mental files. We explain why children who pass the false belief test are not aware of the intensionality of belief. Fifty-one 3½- to 7-year old children were familiarized with a dual object, e.g., a ball that rattles and is described as a rattle. They observed how a puppet agent witnessed the ball being put into box 1. In the agent's absence the ball was taken from box 1, the child was reminded of it being a rattle, and emphasising its being a rattle it was put back into box 1. Then the agent returned, the object was hidden in the experimenter's hands and removed from box 1, described as a "rattle," and transferred to box 2. Children who passed false belief had no problem saying where the puppet would look for the ball. However, in a different condition in which the agent was also shown that the ball was a rattle they erroneously said that the agent would look for the ball in box 1, ignoring the agent's knowledge of the identity of rattle and ball. Their problems cease with their mastery of second-order beliefs (she thinks she knows). Problems also vanish when the ball is described not as a rattle but as a thing that rattles. We describe how our theory can account for these data as well as all other relevant data in the literature.

Visual features are the general building blocks for attention, perception, and working memory. Here, I explore the factors which can quantitatively predict all the differences they make in various paradigms. I tried to combine the strengths of experimental and correlational approaches in a novel way by developing an individual-item differences analysis to extract the factors from 16 stimulus types on the basis of their roles in eight tasks. A large sample size (410) ensured that all eight tasks had a reliability (Cronbach's α) of no less than 0.975, allowing the factors to be precisely determined. Three orthogonal factors were identified which correspond respectively to featural strength (i.e., how close a stimulus is to a basic feature), visual strength (i.e., visual quality of the stimulus), and spatial strength (i.e., how well a stimulus can be represented as a spatial structure). Featural strength helped substantially in all the tasks but moderately less so in perceptual discrimination; visual strength helped substantially in low-level tasks but not in high-level tasks; and spatial strength helped change detection but hindered ensemble matching and visual search. Jointly, these three factors explained 96.4% of all the variances of the eight tasks, making it clear that they account for almost everything about the roles of these 16 stimulus types in these eight tasks.

Many people are guided by religious beliefs, but judgments of religiously and secularly motivated individuals remain unclear. We investigated reasoning about religiously versus secularly motivated characters among 5- to 10-year-olds and adults. In Study 1, theist and non-theist children reported similar attitudes toward theists; however, large differences emerged between theist and non-theist adults. Study 2 obtained similar results using a continuous, rather than forced choice, measure of preference. Additionally, Studies 2-3 tested two explanations for the stronger influence of religious background on adults' versus children's responses. Study 2 did not find strong evidence for the theistic majority account, which posits that the greater perceived prevalence of theists as compared with non-theists influenced children's responses more than adults' responses. The results of Study 3 were consistent with the intuition account, which argues that non-theist adults had effortfully overridden the teleological intuitions that may have influenced children's responses in Studies 1-2 and potentially led children to prefer characters whose beliefs were in line with children's own intuitions. The degree to which teleological intuitions persisted implicitly among adults predicted those adults' pro-theist preferences. These findings offer connections between religious judgments and other areas of social cognition, such as social preferences and teleology.

Sortal terms, such as table or horse, are nouns akin to basic-level terms. According to some theories, the meaning of sortals provides conditions for telling objects apart (individuating objects, e.g., telling one table from a second) and for identifying objects over time (e.g., determining that a particular table at one time is the same table at another). A number of psychologists have proposed that sortal concepts likewise provide psychologically real conditions for individuating and identifying things. However, this paper reports five experiments that cast doubt on these psychological claims. Experiments 1-3 suggest that sortal concepts do not determine when an object ceases to exist and therefore do not decide when the object can no longer be identical to a later one. Experiments4-5 similarly suggest that sortal concepts do not provide determinate conditions for individuating objects. For example, they do not always decide whether a room contains one table or two. All five experiments feature ordinary objects undergoing ordinary changes.

We tested toddlers' and adults' predictive use of English subject-verb agreement. Participants saw pairs of pictures differing in number and kind (e.g., one apple, two cookies), and heard sentences with a target noun naming one of the pictures. The target noun was the subject of a preceding agreeing verb in informative trials (e.g., Wherearethe good cookies?), but not in uninformative trials (Do you see the good cookies?). In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds and adults were faster and more likely to shift their gaze from distractor to target upon hearing an informative agreeing verb. In Experiment 2, 2.5-year-olds were faster to shift their gaze from distractor to target in response to the noun in informative trials, and were more likely to be fixating the target already at noun onset. Thus, toddlers used agreeing verbs to predict number features of an upcoming noun. These data provide strong new evidence for the broad scope of predictive processing in online language comprehension.