Recent work in cognitive and systems neuroscience has suggested that the hippocampus might support planning, imagination, and navigation by forming cognitive maps that capture the abstract structure of physical spaces, tasks, and situations. Navigation involves disambiguating similar contexts, and the planning and execution of a sequence of decisions to reach a goal. Here, we examine hippocampal activity patterns in humans during a goal-directed navigation task to investigate how contextual and goal information are incorporated in the construction and execution of...

Reaction time (RT) data are often pre-processed before analysis by rejecting outliers and errors and aggregating the data. In stimulus-response compatibility paradigms such as the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT), researchers often decide how to pre-process the data without an empirical basis, leading to the use of methods that may hurt rather than help data quality. To provide this empirical basis, we investigated how different pre-processing methods affect the reliability and validity of this task. Our literature review revealed 108 different pre-processing pipelines...

Memory is a reconstructive process with biases toward remembering events in line with prior higher orderbeliefs. This can result in events being remembered as more positive or negative than they actually were.While positive recall biases may contribute to well-being, negative recall biases may promote internalizingsymptoms, such as social anxiety. Adolescence is characterized by increased salience of peers and peakincidence of social anxiety. Symptoms often wax and wane before becoming more intractable duringadulthood. Open questions remain regarding expression of...

Implicit measures were initially assumed to assess stable individual differences, but other perspectives posit that they reflect context-dependent processes. This pre-registered research investigates whether the processes contributing to responses on the race Implicit Association Test are temporally stable and reliably measured using multinomial processing tree modeling. We applied two models-the Quad model and the Process Dissociation Procedure-to six datasets (N = 2,036), each collected over two occasions, examined the within-measurement reliability and...

Research in the multidisciplinary field of neuroeconomics has mainly been driven by two influential theories regarding human economic choice: prospect theory, which describes decision-making under risk, and reinforcement learning theory, which describes learning for decision-making. We hypothesized that these two distinct theories guide decision-making in a comprehensive manner. Here, we propose and test a decision-making theory under uncertainty that combines these highly influential theories. Collecting many gambling decisions from laboratory monkeys allowed for...

High anxiety may be related insufficient sensitivity to changing reinforcement during operant learning. Whether such findings are specific to anxiety is unclear given a wider literature relating negative affect to abnormal learning and the possibility that relationships are not consistent across incentive types (i.e. punishment and reward) and outcomes (i.e., positive or negative). In two separate samples ( = 76; = 49), participants completed an operant learning task with positive, negative, and neutral socio-affective feedback, designed to assess adaptive...

To act adaptively in a complex and dynamic social landscape, humans must continually make inferences about who might be connected to whom. How do they solve this fundamental problem of social link prediction: inferring the existence of unobserved or potential relationships in their social network from noisy, limited information? We propose that people generate principled inferences by learning cognitive maps that systematically abstract over direct relations (friends) and multistep relations (e.g., friends-of-friends). We show that such abstracted cognitive maps enable...

Complex span tasks are perhaps the most widely used paradigm to measure working memory capacity (WMC). Researchers assume that all types of complex span tasks assess domain-general WM. However, most research supporting this claim comes from factor analysis approaches that do not examine task performance at the item level, thus not allowing comparison of the characteristics of verbal and spatial complex span tasks. Item response theory (IRT) can help determine the extent to which different complex span tasks assess domain-general WM. In the current study, spatial and...

Forward planning is crucial to maximize outcome in complex sequential decision-making scenarios. In this cross-sectional study, we were particularly interested in age-related differences of forward planning. We presumed that especially older individuals would show a shorter planning depth to keep the costs of model-based decision-making within limits. To test this hypothesis, we developed a sequential decision-making task to assess forward planning in younger (age 60 years; n = 27) adults. By using reinforcement learning modelling, we inferred planning depths from...

When exposed to perceptual and motor sequences, people are able to gradually identify patterns within and form a compact internal description of the sequence. One proposal of how sequences can be compressed is people’s ability to form chunks. We study people’s chunking behavior in a serial reaction time task. We relate chunk representation with sequence statistics and task demands, and propose a rational model of chunking that rearranges and concatenates its representation to jointly optimize for accuracy and speed. Our model predicts that participants should chunk more...

Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the particular sequence in which the shapes occurred and/or their group-level structure. After accounting for developmental improvements in overall memory, all ages remembered specific transitions, while memory for group...

Depressive symptoms are associated with negative expectations and reduced belief updating by positive information. Cognitive immunization, the devaluation of positive information, has been argued to be central in this relationship and predictive processing models suggest that more positive information is associated with greater cognitive immunization. In an online experiment, N=347 healthy participants took part in a performance task with standardized feedback that was either mildly, moderately, or extremely positive. Effects of the feedback positivity on cognitive...

A habitual avoidance component may enforce the persistence of maladaptive avoidance behavior in anxiety disorders. Whether habitual avoidance is acquired more strongly in anxiety disorders is unclear. Individuals with current social anxiety disorder, panic disorder and/or agoraphobia (n = 62) and healthy individuals (n = 62) completed a devaluation paradigm with extensive avoidance training, followed by the devaluation of the aversive outcome. In the subsequent test phase, habitual response tendencies were inferred from compatibility effects. Neutral...

Globalizing economies and long-distance trade rely on individuals from different cultural groups to negotiate agreement on what to give and take. In such settings, individuals often lack insight into what interaction partners deem fair and appropriate, potentially seeding misunderstandings, frustration, and conflict. Here, we examine how individuals decipher distinct rules of engagement and adapt their behavior to reach agreements with partners from other cultural groups. Modeling individuals as Bayesian learners with inequality aversion reveals that individuals, in...

Pavlovian bias is an innate motivational tendency to approach rewards and remain passive in the face of punishment. The relative reliance on Pavlovian valuation has been found to increase when the perceived control over environmental reinforcers is compromised, leading to behavior resembling learned helplessness (LH). In our study, we used a version of an orthogonalized Go-NoGo reinforcement learning task to examine the relative reliance on Pavlovian and instrumental valuation during and after an intermittent loss of control over rewards and losses. Sixty healthy young...

Cognitive decline often accompanies natural aging, which results in younger adults outperforming older adults, on average, on tasks requiring attention, memory, or mental flexibility skills. This performance gap between age groups persists even after people train on these tasks, but it remains unclear whether the gap persists when individuals, rather than groups, are compared at different training levels. In this paper, we analyzed 9,923 users between 18-90 years old (63% over 60) who performed a variety of cognitive tasks on an online cognitive training platform. We...

People are able to stop actions before they are executed, and proactively slow down the speed of going in line with their expectations of needing to stop. Such slowing generally increases the probability that stopping will be successful. Surprisingly though, no study has clearly demonstrated that the speed of stopping (measured as the stop-signal reaction time, SSRT) is reduced by such proactive adjustments. In addition to a number of studies showing non-significant effects, the only study that initially had observed a clear effect in this direction found that it was...

Why do we divide (‘chunk’) long tasks into a series of shorter subtasks? A popular view is that limits in working memory (WM) prevent us from simultaneously maintaining all task relevant information in mind. We therefore chunk the task into smaller units so that we only maintain information in WM that is relevant to the current unit. In contrast to this view, we show that long tasks that are not constrained by WM limits are nonetheless chunked into smaller units. Participants executed long sequences of standalone but demanding trials that were not linked to any WM...

Confidence is suggested to be a key component in psychiatry and manifests at various hierarchical levels, from confidence in a decision (local confidence), to confidence about performance (global confidence), to higher-order traits such as self-beliefs. Most research focuses on local confidence, but global levels may relate more closely to symptoms. Here, using a transdiagnostic framework, we tested the relationships between self-reported psychopathology, local and global confidence, and higher-order self-beliefs in a general population sample (N = 489). We show...

The ability to weigh a reward against the cost of acquiring it is critical for decision-making. While the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been implicated in tracking both mental effort demands and net value of rewards, these findings primarily come from choice paradigms that confound increased task difficulty with decreased reward probability. To resolve this issue, we designed novel tasks that kept probability of success – and therefore probability of reward – constant between levels of effort demand. In two experiments, participants completed a novel effort-based...

Striatal dopamine is important to paranoid attributions, although its computational role in social inference remains elusive. We employed a simple game theoretic paradigm and computational model of intentional attributions to investigate the effects of dopamine D2/D3 antagonism on ongoing mental state inference following social outcomes. Haloperidol, compared to placebo, enhanced the impact of partner behaviour on beliefs about harmful intent, and increased learning from recent encounters. These alterations caused significant changes to model covariation and...

Judgments surrounding resource acquisition and valuation are ubiquitous in daily life. How do humans decide what something is worth to themselves or someone else? One important cue to value is that of resource quantity. As described by economists, the principle of diminishing marginal utility (DMU) holds that as resource abundance increases, the value placed on each unit decreases; likewise, when resources become more scarce, the value placed on each unit rises. While prior research suggests that adults make judgments that align with this concept, it is unclear whether...

There are two main approaches to how statistical patterns are extracted from sequences: The transitional probability approach proposes that statistical learning occurs through the computation of probabilities between items in a sequence. The chunking approach, including models such as PARSER and TRACX, proposes that units are extracted as chunks. Importantly, the chunking approach suggests that the extraction of full units weakens the processing of subunits while the transitional probability approach suggests that both units and subunits should strengthen. Previous...

Humans frequently benefit others strategically to elicit future cooperation. While such forms of calculated reciprocity are powerful in eliciting cooperative behaviors even among self-interested agents, they depend on advanced cognitive and behavioral capacities such as prospection (representing and planning for future events) and extended delay of gratification. In fact, it has been proposed that these constraints help explain why calculated reciprocity exists in humans and is rare or even absent in other animals. The current study investigated the cognitive foundation...

Working memory (WM) training typically leads to large performance gains in the practiced tasks, but transfer of these gains to other contexts is elusive. One possible explanation for the inconsistent findings of past research is that transfer may only occur when cognitive strategies acquired during training can also be applied in the transfer tasks. Therefore, we systematically varied the content domains and WM operations assessed by training and transfer tasks and, thereby, the extent to which similar cognitive strategies could be applied. We randomly assigned 171...

The affordances task serves as an important tool for the assessment of cognition and visuomotor functioning, and yet its test-retest reliability has not been established. In the affordances task, participants attend to a goal-directed task (e.g., classifying manipulable objects such as cups and pots) while suppressing their stimulus-driven, irrelevant reactions afforded by these objects (e.g., grasping their handles). This results in cognitive conflicts manifesting at the task level and the response level. In the current study, we assessed the reliability of the...

A large part of research on visual working memory (VWM) has traditionally focused on estimating its maximum capacity. Yet, humans rarely need to load up their VWM maximally during natural behavior, since visual information often remains accessible in the external world. Recent work, using paradigms that take into account the accessibility of information in the outside world, has indeed shown that observers utilize only one or two items in VWM before sampling from the external world again. One straightforward interpretation of this finding is that, in daily behavior,...

We shift our gaze even when we orient attention internally to visual representations in working memory. Here, we show the bodily orienting response associated with internal selective attention is widespread as it also includes the head. In three virtual reality experiments, participants remembered 2 visual items. After a working memory delay, a central color cue indicated which item needed to be reproduced from memory. After the cue, head movements became biased in the direction of the memorized location of the cued memory item-despite there being no items to orient...

Human actions sometimes aim at preventing an event from occurring. How these to-be-prevented events are represented, however, is poorly understood. Recent proposals in the literature point to a possible divide between effect-producing, operant actions, and effect-precluding, prevention actions, suggesting that the control of operant actions relies on codes of environment-related effects whereas prevention actions do not. Here we report two experiments on this issue, showing that spatial features (Experiment 1) as well as temporal features (Experiment 2) of...

Assimilation is the process by which one judgment tends to approach some aspect of another stimulus or judgment. This effect has been known for over half a century in various domains such as the judgment of weight or sound intensity. However, the assimilation of judgments of durations have been relatively unexplored. In the current article, we present the results of five experiments in which participant s were required to judge the duration of a visual stimulus on each trial. In each experiment, we manipulated the pattern of durations they experienced in order to...

Failures to obtain rewards influence both the direction (choosing what to do) and intensity (response vigor) of subsequent motivated behavior. For instance, in risky decision-making, losses can induce faster responses (‘intensity’) and sometimes increase risk-taking (‘direction’), which may lead to detrimental consequences. Pauses might reduce these motivational influences of prior outcomes. To examine this question, participants (from the general population on Prolific.co in 2022 and 2023) alternated between a guess game, in which they won or lost money, and a choice...

The ability to use knowledge to guide the completion of goals is a critical cognitive skill, but 3-year-olds struggle to complete goals that require multiple steps. This study asked whether 3-year-olds could benefit from “plan chunking” to complete multistep goals. Thirty-two U.S. children (range = 35.75-46.59 months; 18 girls; 9 white, 3 mixed race, 20 unknown; tested between July 2020 and April 2021) were asked to complete “treasure maps,” retrieving four colored map pieces by pressing specific buttons on a “rainbow box.” Children completed more of the four-step...

What is the link between eye movements and sensory learning? Although some theories have argued for an automatic interaction between what we know and where we look that continuously modulates human information gathering behavior during both implicit and explicit learning, there exists limited experimental evidence supporting such an ongoing interplay. To address this issue, we used a visual statistical learning paradigm combined with a gaze contingent stimulus presentation and manipulated the explicitness of the task to explore how learning and eye movements interact....

Many controversies arise from differences in how people resolve moral dilemmas by following deontological moral rules versus consequentialist cost-benefit reasoning (CBR). This article explores whether and, if so, how these seemingly intractable differences may arise from experience and whether they can be overcome through moral learning. We designed a new experimental paradigm to investigate moral learning from consequences of previous decisions. Our participants (N=387) faced a series of realistic moral dilemmas between two conflicting choices: one prescribed by...

Prospective memory (PM) tasks require remembering to perform a deferred action and can be associated with predictable contexts. We present a theory and computational model, prospective memory decision control (PMDC), of the cognitive processes by which context supports PM. Under control conditions, participants completed lexical decisions. Under PM conditions, participants had the additional PM task of responding to letter strings containing certain syllables. Stimuli were presented in one of two colors, with color potentially changing after each set of four trials. A...

In reinforcement learning tasks, people learn the values of options relative to other options in the local context. Prior research suggests that relative value learning is enhanced when choice contexts are temporally clustered in a blocked sequence compared to a randomly interleaved sequence. The present study was aimed at further investigating the effects of blocked versus interleaved training using a choice task that distinguishes among different contextual encoding models. Our results showed that the presentation format in which contexts are experienced can lead to...

The ability to use past experience to effectively guide decision-making declines in older adulthood. Such declines have been theorized to emerge from either impairments of striatal reinforcement learning systems (RL) or impairments of recurrent networks in prefrontal and parietal cortex that support working memory (WM). Distinguishing between these hypotheses has been challenging because either RL or WM could be used to facilitate successful decision-making in typical laboratory tasks. Here we investigated the neurocomputational correlates of age-related decision-making...

Throughout the day, humans show natural fluctuations in arousal that impact cognitive function. To study the behavioural dynamics of cognitive control during high and low arousal states, healthy participants performed an auditory conflict task during high-intensity physical exercise (N= 39) or drowsiness (N= 33). In line with the pre-registered hypothesis, conflict and conflict adaptation effects were preserved during both altered arousal states. Overall task performance was markedly poorer during low arousal, but not for high arousal. Modelling behavioural...

One of the ongoing controversies in interval timing concerns whether human time perception relies on multiple distinct mechanisms. This debate centres around whether subsecond and suprasecond timing may be attributed to a single semi-uniform mechanism or separate and interacting mechanisms. Whereas past studies offer valuable insights, this study overcomes previous limitations by adopting multiple convergent statistical approaches in a design with strong statistical power. We conducted two online experiments involving participants reproducing temporal intervals ranging...

Retrieval practice performed shortly upon the encoding of information benefits recall of the retrieved information but causes forgetting of nonretrieved information. Here, we show that the forgetting effect on the nonretrieved information can quickly evolve into recall enhancement when retrieval practice is delayed. During a time window of twenty minutes upon the encoding of information, the forgetting effect observed shortly after encoding first disappeared and then turned into recall enhancement when the temporal lag between encoding and retrieval practice was...

Peer punishment can help groups to establish collectively beneficial public goods. However, when humans condition punishment on other factors than poor contribution, punishment can become ineffective and group cooperation deteriorates. Here we show that this happens in pluriform groups where members have different socio-demographic characteristics. In our public good provision experiment, participants were confronted with a public good from which all group members benefitted equally, and in-between rounds they could punish each other. Groups were uniform (members shared...

Leading models of human planning posit that planning relies on learned forward predictions, from a given state to the outcomes that typically follow it. Here, however, we show that in many situations planning can be made more efficient by relying on backward predictions, from a given outcome to the states that typically precede it. This holds specifically in environments where the number of states an agent may occupy increases with time (i.e., in diverging environments), because in such environments, backward predictions can be more compactly represented than forward...

The domain of cognitive control has been a major focus of experimental, neuroscience, and individual differences research. Currently, however, no theory of cognitive control successfully unifies both experimental and individual differences findings. Some perspectives deny that there even exists a unified psychometric cognitive control construct to be measured at all. These shortcomings of the current literature may reflect the fact that current cognitive control paradigms are optimized for the detection of within-subject experimental effects rather than individual...

Decisions made under uncertainty often are considered according to their perceived subjective value. We move beyond this traditional framework to explore the hypothesis that conceptual representations of uncertainty influence risky choice. Results reveal that uncertainty concepts are represented along a dimension that jointly captures probabilistic and valenced features of the conceptual space. These uncertainty representations predict the degree to which an individual engages in risky decision-making. Moreover, we find that most individuals have two largely distinct...

Matrix reasoning tasks are among the most widely used measures of cognitive ability in the behavioral sciences, but the lack of matrix reasoning tests in the public domain complicates their use. Here we present an extensive investigation and psychometric validation of the matrix reasoning item bank (MaRs-IB), an open-access set of matrix reasoning items. In a first study, we calibrate the psychometric functioning of the items in the MaRs-IB in a large sample adults participants (N=1501). Using additive multilevel item structure models, we establish that the MaRs-IB...

Humans exhibit distinct risk preferences when facing choices involving potential gains and losses. These preferences are believed to be subject to neuromodulatory influence, particularly from dopamine and serotonin. As neuromodulators manifest circadian rhythms, this suggests decision making under risk might be affected by time of day. Here, in a large subject sample collected using a smartphone application, we found that risky options with potential losses were increasingly chosen over the course of the day. We observed this result in both a within-subjects design (N...

In cost-benefit decision-making, women and men often show different trade-offs. However, surprisingly little is known about sex differences in instrumental tasks, where physical effort is exerted to gain rewards. To this end, we tested 81 individuals (47 women) with an effort allocation task, where participants had to repeatedly press a button to collect food and money tokens. We analyzed the motivational phases of invigoration and effort maintenance with varying reward magnitude, difficulty, and reward type. Whereas women and men did not differ in invigoration, we...

There has been debate regarding the correlation between baseline/resting state measures of pupil diameter and cognitive abilities such as working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. A positive correlation between baseline pupil diameter and cognitive ability has been cited as evidence for a role of the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) and its functional connection with cortical networks as a reason for individual differences in fluid intelligence (Tsukahara & Engle, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(46), e2110630118, 2021a). Several...

Does our mood change as time passes? This question is central to behavioural and affective science, yet it remains largely unexamined. To investigate, we intermixed subjective momentary mood ratings into repetitive psychology paradigms. Here we demonstrate that task and rest periods lowered participants’ mood, an effect we call ‘Mood Drift Over Time’. This finding was replicated in 19 cohorts totalling 28,482 adult and adolescent participants. The drift was relatively large (-13.8% after 7.3 min of rest, Cohen’s d = 0.574) and was consistent across cohorts....

In neuroeconomics, there is much interest in understanding simple value-based choices where agents choose between visually presented goods, comparable to a shopping scenario in a supermarket. However, many everyday decisions are made in the physical absence of the considered goods, requiring agents to recall information about the goods from memory. Here, we asked whether and how this reliance on an internal memory representation affects the temporal dynamics of decision making on a cognitive and neural level. Participants performed a remember-and-decide task in which...