Human memory does not simply function like an information storage disk; instead, it flexibly reorganizes information. This flexibility can sometimes produce false memories of items related to those actually encountered–a possible byproduct of an adaptive memory system that enables generalization across related items or experiences. In the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task, participants often falsely remember seeing words that are semantically related to presented words. Here, we pro- pose and test a model of lexical (false) memory that predicts these errors, made possible by integrating (i) theories of memory that posit encoding of verbatim and gist-level information with (ii) a computational framework adapted from the perceptual false memory literature, and (iii) semantic relatedness measures from word embeddings analysis of large-scale text corpora. This Lexical Target Confusability Competition (Lexical TCC) model successfully predicts human participants’ false recognition in the DRM task, with implications for understanding how and when the mind produces false semantic memories.

Reasoning about what other people know is an important cognitive ability, known as epistemic reasoning, which has fascinated psychologists, economists, and logicians. In this paper, we propose a computational model of humans’ epistemic reasoning, including higher-order epistemic reasoning—reasoning about what one person knows about another person’s knowledge—that we test in an experiment using a deductive card game called “Aces and Eights”. Our starting point is the model of perfect higher-order epistemic reasoners given by the framework of dynamic epistemic logic. We modify this idealized model with bounds on the level of feasible epistemic reasoning and stochastic update of a player’s space of possibilities in response to new information. These modifications are crucial for explaining the variation in human performance across different participants and different games in the experiment. Our results demonstrate how research on epistemic logic and cognitive models can inform each other.

In decision-making situations that arise repeatedly, there are tradeoffs between: (i) acquiring new information to facilitate future, related decisions (exploration) and (ii) using existing information to secure expected outcomes (exploitation). Exploration choices have been well characterized in nonsocial contexts, but choices to explore (or not) in social environments are less well understood. Social environments are of particular interest because a key factor that increases exploration in nonsocial contexts is environmental uncertainty, and the social world is appreciated to be highly uncertain. Here, participants searched for rewards in a series of grids that were either described as comprising real people distributing previously-earned points (social context) or as the result of a computer algorithm or natural phenomenon (nonsocial context). Participants explored more, and earned fewer rewards, in the social versus nonsocial context, suggesting that social uncertainty prompted exploration at the cost of task-relevant goals.

People have strong intuitions about which colors do and do not match particular pieces of music — a phenomenon often conceptualized through semantic mediation. We further explored the specific strategies people employ to navigate these color-music associations which offers crucial insights to identifying the cognitive mechanisms that enable such cross-domain associations. We show that while some people rely more on intuition, other people actively seek justification of association by consulting common linguistic descriptors, emotional contents, and environmental cues. We found that more spontaneous strategies lessen the role of semantic mediation, while more evaluative strategies, especially those involving the use of language, amplify it. Notably, the use of evaluative strategies introduced an asymmetrical effect for matching and mismatching colors. Additionally, individuals employing similar strategies associated a given music excerpt with more similar colors, suggesting that strategy alignment enhances the consistency of color-music associations. Interestingly, this pattern of convergence was not observed among individuals who predominantly relied on guessing.

Recent years have witnessed significant advances in our understanding of bounds on rationality in both cognitive psychology and economics. These two fields have been making separate progress, but time is ripe for unifying these efforts. In this article, we introduce recently developed economic tools, themselves rooted in the psychometric tradition, to quantify individual differences in the capacity for cognitive control. These tools suggest that a reliable assessment of the capacity for cognitive control may be accomplished by examining task performance as a function of reward. We demonstrate through simulation studies that an incentive-informed measure of task performance does a better job of recovering individual differences in one’s capacity for cognitive control, compared to the commonly used congruency effect. Furthermore, we show that the economic approach can be used to predict control-dependent behavior across different task settings. We conclude by discussing future directions for the fruitful integration of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology with the aim of improved measurement of individual differences in the capacity for cognitive control.

Negative gender stereotypes targeting women’s intellectual ability are a deterrent to women’spursuit of prestigious careers in fields whose members believe brilliance is required for success.Previous research has documented that children start to develop gender stereotypes aboutbrilliance at the age of six. This can have lifelong effects as people are drawn towards genderedactivities, careers, etc. Statistical replication with preexisting data from Bian et al. (2017)supports this claim. To further examine the validity and sufficiency of the measures in theoriginal study, we develop an extension by implementing two new statistical models. Lastly, wepropose future work to address the possible role of masculine appearances in the perception ofbrilliance.