Cognitive science has long relied on carefully controlled laboratory paradigms to study perception, attention, and executive functioning, raising persistent questions about ecological validity when scenes are complex, demands are self-paced, and outcomes matter to the observer. Commercial videogames present exactly this kind of environment. They are cognitively demanding by design, motivating by nature and consistent enough across players to support systematic behavioral comparison. Unlike the tools of typical laboratory research, they already exist. Here, we encourage researchers to treat commercial games as ready-made testing grounds requiring only a minimal experimental toolkit of screen recording, eye tracking, and behavioral timing. We describe how researchers can select games, generate testable perceptual hypotheses directly from a game's affordances, and implement within-subjects designs, with no engine access or developer cooperation required. We close by distinguishing the ecological questions this approach can answer from the mechanistic ones it cannot.
IntroductionThe accurate distinction between left and right is a critical cognitive function. A failure to correctly distinguish left and right during surgery can lead to a so-called Never Event, a preventable medical error that leads to death or severe injury of the patient. Unfortunately, such wrong-site surgeries still happen every year. Thus, understanding left-right confusion during surgery is critical for patient safety. However, current Left-Right Confusion (LRC) tests have low ecological validity for the complex, time-critical demands of a surgical environment. This study introduces the Never Events in Surgery Test (NEST), a novel, ecologically valid behavioural paradigm designed to simulate the cognitive dynamics during surgery.MethodsParticipants (N = 108) completed the NEST alongside established LRC tasks: the Bergen Left-Right Discrimination Task (BLRDT), the Left-Right Commands Task (LRCT), and the Left-Right Questionnaire (LRQ).ResultsNEST performance was significantly modulated by the posture of the training doll. Error rates were lowest in the prone position compared to lateral orientations (p < 0.05), while the supine position resulted in the shortest reaction times, significantly outperforming both prone and lateral positions (p < 0.001) without a significant increase in error rates. Crucially, the study established a cognitive dissociation: while reaction times across tasks were correlated, reflecting a shared component of general processing speed, the error rates from the established LRC measures (BLRDT, LRCT, LRQ) failed to predict the error rate observed in the applied NEST paradigm.DiscussionThe lack of predictive power for errors suggests that LRC susceptibility in applied contexts is an independent, context-specific risk factor for laterality errors not captured by traditional assessments. The findings argue for a paradigm shift in training and screening toward tailored, context-specific approaches.
Climate-risk scenario analysis has become central to financial supervision, adaptation planning, and institutional governance, yet formally modeled futures often fail to guide action. We argue that the gap between representation and response is partly cognitive. Drawing on constructive memory, mental time travel, source monitoring, episodic future thinking, scenario planning, and organizational sensemaking, we develop a framework of plausible futures for decision-making under deep uncertainty. On this account, climate futures gain practical force when they become mentally constructible, narratively scaffolded, socially stabilized, and culturally legitimated. Simulational fluency is proposed as one pathway through which scenario form may influence how readily decision-makers construct, inspect, compare, and rehearse possible futures. The framework identifies false precision in quantitative models and the ways narrative can sharpen or mislead judgement. These insights support the joint development of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Climate-risk governance requires sophisticated calculation together with anticipatory practices that allow institutions to inhabit uncertain futures cognitively; those practices keep uncertainty explicit and judgement both revisable and answerable to evidence.
IntroductionMusic is a highly rewarding experience, yet individuals differ substantially in how pleasurable they find music. In adults, sensitivity to musical reward has been consistently linked to socio-emotional traits, particularly empathy. However, little is known about whether this association is already present in middle childhood, before music engagement becomes increasingly tied to identity formation and autonomous, self-directed use during adolescence. The present study examined musical reward sensitivity in middle childhood and its relationship with empathy.MethodsA sample of 621 children aged 7–9 years completed a child-adapted Italian version of the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ-MC) and the Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA). Confirmatory factor analyses tested the factorial structure of the BMRQ-MC and its measurement invariance across gender. Correlational and regression analyses examined associations of musical reward sensitivity with empathy, musical engagement, and musical ability.ResultsThe original five-factor BMRQ model showed only partial support, with the Musical Seeking subscale displaying poor reliability and weak factor loadings. A four-factor model showed improved fit and measurement invariance across gender. Musical reward sensitivity was positively associated with empathy, particularly affective empathy, and showed a small positive association with musical engagement, whereas objective musical ability was unrelated.DiscussionThese findings support the psychometric validity of the BMRQ-MC for assessing musical reward sensitivity in middle childhood and suggest that, at this developmental stage, individual differences in musical reward are more closely linked to socio-emotional dispositions and musical engagement than to perceptual musical skills. The study highlights empathy as a key correlate of early musical pleasure and positions music reward sensitivity as a socio-emotionally grounded individual difference relevant to children's developing social functioning.
The field of eco-affective health has produced a growing body of evidence linking environmental change to human psychological and cognitive functioning, but it has done so without a shared methodological foundation. Studies of solastalgia, eco-anxiety, environmental risk perception, and adaptive decision-making use incompatible instruments, inconsistent scoring procedures, and divergent operationalizations of the same constructs, limiting cumulative knowledge, cross-study comparison, and translation into policy-relevant surveillance. This Methods paper introduces the Eco-Affective Health Assessment Protocol (EAHAP): a standardized, multimodal, and modular instrument battery designed to measure affective, cognitive, and functional responses to environmental change in a coherent and replicable framework. The EAHAP organizes existing instruments, the large majority independently validated, with one adapted ecological grief measure explicitly flagged as a candidate instrument pending independent psychometric validation, into three interdependent domains. The eco-affective domain covers solastalgia, eco-anxiety, ecological grief, affective numbing, and place attachment. The cognitive domain covers environmental risk perception, attentional processing, environmental appraisal, and adaptive decision-making under ecological stress. The functional domain covers psychological distress, anxiety and depressive symptoms, sleep disruption, and daily functioning limitation. Each domain is theoretically positioned within the Eco-Affective Health framework as a distinct signal layer, with eco-affective states functioning as early-warning indicators, cognitive mediators explaining variability in response to identical exposures, and functional outcomes providing downstream validation and economic relevance. The paper provides a complete description of materials and instruments, a step-by-step implementation protocol with timing and decision rules, a module selection matrix for different study types, anticipated results with expected psychometric properties, and a troubleshooting guide for the most common pitfalls. Cultural adaptation procedures are specified as a mandatory component of all implementations. The EAHAP is designed to be modular, allowing domain-specific use in fundamental research, and fully integrated for epidemiological surveillance, early warning systems, and intervention evaluation. By providing a shared methodological infrastructure, the EAHAP aims to accelerate the development of eco-affective health as a cumulative, cross-contextual, and policy-relevant scientific field.
Visual working memory (VWM) is a capacity-limited system that enables visual information to be maintained, prioritized, and used after perceptual input has disappeared. Although attention is often assumed to protect VWM from distraction, recent work suggests that distraction is not uniformly harmful and that its impact depends on the representational and attentional state of the memorized information. The present study examined how attentional prioritization and distractor similarity jointly shape VWM across encoding and maintenance. In two change-detection experiments, cue load and distractor type were manipulated within participants. Experiment 1 used pre-cues to guide external attention before encoding, whereas Experiment 2 used retro-cues to guide internal attention during maintenance. Trial-level binomial generalized linear mixed-effects models for accuracy and linear mixed-effects models for log-transformed correct-trial reaction time showed that performance was best when one or two items were prioritized and declined when attention was distributed across more items or when no cue was provided. Distractor effects depended on cue condition. Under broad or absent attentional guidance, non-feature-sharing distractors were generally more disruptive than distractors that shared one feature with an unprobed memory item; however, feature-sharing distractors did not improve accuracy relative to the no-distractor baseline. Accuracy and reaction time converged for the cue-load effect but often dissociated for distractor contrasts, indicating that RT-only effects should be interpreted cautiously as changes in retrieval or decision efficiency rather than memory fidelity. These findings support a conditional account in which the effect of feature overlap depends on attentional allocation and the accessibility of the maintained representations.
Memory is increasingly understood as a reconstructive process, yet many memory paradigms assess only the outcome of retrieval rather than the structure of reconstruction itself. Spatial reconstruction tasks (SRTs) provide a powerful approach for examining reconstructive memory because they require participants to recreate studied object-location configurations and allow researchers to quantify multiple sources of spatial error. This review synthesizes theoretical and empirical work on SRTs as measures of hippocampally-mediated relational memory. Lesion studies established that hippocampal damage impairs spatial reconstruction as well as demonstrating that SRTs are sensitive to particular underlying mechanisms. SRTs have been utilized across amnesia, traumatic brain injury, aging, and development, with accumulating evidence suggesting that they index the role of the hippocampus in binding specific objects to specific locations. However, the literature is limited by substantial variability in task design, stimulus type, and analytic metrics. We review commonly used measures and differing interpretations across studies using SRTs. Finally, we outline recommendations for standardizing SRT design and analysis, discuss key limitations and methodological constraints that should be addressed, and highlight future directions involving eye-tracking, neuroimaging, clinical populations, and extensions beyond spatial memory. Overall, we argue that SRTs offer a sensitive framework for understanding how relational memories are encoded, bound, and reconstructed, and have great utility for future research avenues.
Cognitive functions are essential for athletic performance but are often compromised by fatigue, stress, and the combined demands of sport and academic study. Both physical exercise and motor imagery shown to influence cognition, but, their comparative acute effects remain underexplored in collegiate athletes. This study compared the effects of squat imagery, squat execution, and quiet rest on cognitive performance. Ninety-eight collegiate athletes were randomly assigned to a squat imagery group (30-min seated squat imagery; n = 36), a squat execution group (five sets of 1-min squats separated by 10-s rests; n = 32), or a control group (30-min seated rest; n = 30). Cognitive performance was assessed before and after the interventions using the Stroop, Flanker, Sternberg, and Visual Search tasks. Two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance (group × time) was conducted, and the Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR) procedure was applied to 18 primary interaction tests. Both squat imagery and execution improved cognitive performance, particularly inhibitory control and working memory. Significant group × time interactions were found for Stroop response time (simple and complex) and Sternberg response time (one- and three-item conditions; all p < 0.01, partial η2 = 0.10–0.14). Follow-up analyses showed these improvements were primarily driven by the squat imagery group. Compared with squat execution, squat imagery produced greater reductions in response time for the Stroop simple and Sternberg three-item conditions, while improvements in the Stroop complex and Sternberg one-item conditions were comparable. Squat imagery also produced greater improvements in Visual Search congruent response time than both squat execution and control. A significant group × time interaction was observed for Visual Search incongruent accuracy (p < 0.05, partial η2 = 0.08–0.14), reflecting reduced accuracy following squat execution, whereas performance remained stable in the squat imagery and control groups. Although Flanker incongruent accuracy initially showed a significant interaction (p = 0.032, partial η2 = 0.07), this effect did not survive FDR correction (pFDR = 0.082). These findings demonstrate that acute squat imaging enhances inhibitory control and working memory without the drawbacks of physical activity. Squat visualization serves as a low-intensity, pragmatic cognitive improvement for collegiate athletes.
IntroductionStressful experiences may generate persistent emotional distress that could interfere with daily life. Early intervention is key to reducing those emotional disturbances and potentially preventing the development of more severe pyschopathology. The present research consists of two studies that evaluate the effects of the PASER technique on levels of emotional disturbance.MethodologyIn study 1, a quasi-experimental repeated-measures within-group design was used, with four assessments conducted through the APEEM inventory in relation to a non-pathological stressful situation selected by each participant. The first three measurements were mediated solely by brief imaginal exposure (inherent to the APEEM instrument) in order to control for the cumulative effects of exposure and habituation over time. Following each of these assessments, a 15-min distractor task was administered. The fourth measurement was conducted after the group application of the PASER technique. In study 2, an experimental design was conducted, assessing the effects of the variables “measurement time point” (baseline and post-test), “sex” and “intervention condition” (control vs. PASER).ResultsThe results showed a progressive reduction in emotional disturbance as time progressed in both studies. Participants receiving PASER exhibited a significantly greater reduction in emotional disturbance than those in the control condition. These findings support the effectiveness of PASER in reducing emotional disturbance beyond the effects attributable to repeated exposure and the passage of time.ConclusionsThese results suggest that PASER produces an effect greater than simple exposure-based desensitization, potentially promoting memory reconsolidation processes. Longitudinal studies are recommended to confirm the stability of these effects.
IntroductionFace emotion recognition is a core component of social cognition. The N170 event-related potential (ERP) is a well-known neural marker of face perception. However, the sensitivity of the N170 and other early and intermediate ERP components, such as the P100 and P250, to the emotional content of facial expressions remains debated, possibly due to the influence of attentional mechanisms. We investigated whether early facial emotion perception can be tracked by modulation of these EEG signatures when participants are required to selectively process both eye gaze and mouth emotional cues within a very short time frame.MethodsEEG data were recorded while 20 participants performed an emotion recognition task involving neutral, happy, and sad facial expressions. The task required the integration of gaze and expression cues within a brief 350-ms presentation, ensuring focused attentional deployment. We tested three hypotheses: (1) the P100 does not encode emotional expressions despite being modulated by attention; (2) the N170 is sensitive to emotional facial expressions; and (3) the P250 reflects higher-level emotional processing.ResultsThe P100 was not sensitive to facial emotional content. In contrast, both the amplitude and latency of the N170 were modulated by emotional expression, with larger amplitudes for happy compared with neutral and sad expressions, and longer latencies for happy and sad than for neutral faces. The P250 was also modulated by emotion, with sad faces eliciting lower amplitudes than happy and neutral faces.DiscussionThese findings indicate that the P100 does not encode emotional face recognition when selective attention is controlled for. In contrast, emotional facial expressions elicit distinct N170 and P250 responses, supporting the involvement of early and intermediate neural systems in emotional face processing.
IntroductionCan two-person decision-making change performance in detecting a change in the scene? Observers sometimes fail to detect visual changes that occur during a coincident visual transient or other disruption, a phenomenon known as change blindness. Although change blindness has been extensively studied, relatively little is known about whether collaborative decision-making can reduce such failures. Research on collective decision-making suggests that dyads make more accurate judgments than individuals, and recent findings show that they also adopt a more liberal decision criterion. This study examined whether dyads exhibit differences in sensitivity and decision criteria in a change detection task.MethodsParticipants in a dyad judged individually and collectively whether the pair of flickering images contained a change. We also conducted a follow-up independent repeated decision-making experiment, in which individuals responded twice with a period of time between two judgments, to confirm whether the second judgment without social input differed from the first judgment.ResultsResults from the dyadic decision-making experiment showed that dyads demonstrated enhanced sensitivity to detect changes and were more likely to respond “change present” than better individuals, suggesting the dyadic decisions were not simply based on the judgment of the more sensitive member. Results from the follow-up experiment supported the effect of dyadic decision-making by indicating no difference in sensitivity and decision criterion between first and second judgments.DiscussionThese findings suggest that dyadic decision-making may help reduce the failure of change detection by improving sensitivity and shifting the decision criterion to minimize missed detections.
Attention Restoration Theory has provided a framework for investigating how experiencing natural scenes can be especially helpful in overcoming attentional fatigue. If the structure of attention were better understood, it might facilitate experimental investigations of this theory and possibly expand its domain. The present paper reviews experiments that demonstrate that sustained focal attention is characterized by 3-8 Hz. oscillations that are interpreted as temporally sampling the environment. A traveling wave model is proposed as a generalization of this finding for distributed attention in which there is sampling of the environment over both time and space. Temporal and spatial sampling frequencies are assumed to be adjustable together from low to high. This model provides a frequency based interpretation of Attention Restoration Theory. Low frequency attention waves can occur in expansive natural environments with slow temporal rhythms and fractal structure and are restorative. In contrast, high frequency attention waves can occur in modern technological environments with high event rates and are fatiguing. This model of distributed attention will be helpful in researching attention restoration in relation to the spatio-temporal frequency content of natural and constructed environments. Attention restoration is discussed in the context of monitoring and vehicular control tasks, attentional aspects of religious practice, and music.
Introduction:As large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate everyday information seeking, a fundamental question emerges: do people conceptualize these systems as social agents, and does this tendency vary by age? Methods:We investigated how individuals anthropomorphize and trust a pseudo-LLM, examining English-speaking adults from the United States (n = 1,485) across four generations: Gen Z (age 18-26), Millennials (age 27-42), Gen X (age 43-57), and Baby Boomers (age 58-77). We experimentally manipulated anthropomorphic cues (text versus text+speech; first-person "I" versus third-person "the system" framing). Results:Age and generational differences were observed: Gen Z (the youngest age group) showed consistently lower anthropomorphism, reduced trust ratings of the system, and lower ratings of accuracy for responses generated by the LLM. Anthropomorphic voice cues increased perceived human-likeness and accuracy uniformly across age groups. Qualitative analyses further revealed age and generational differences in how participants conceptualized the system. Discussion:Together, these findings suggest that age and generational differences shape how people attribute mind and agency to artificial systems.
The more advanced the symbolic mathematics, the more impenetrable the meaning. This is particularly evident in quantum theory, where symbolic formalisms foreground states and objects. An alternative diagrammatic approach, Quantum Picturalism (QPic), privileges structure, relation, and transformation. As a category theoretic formalism, it supports reasoning through the composition of visually represented quantum processes, a distinction that not only concerns representation but also shapes how quantum phenomena are conceptualized, opening new educational possibilities and ways of knowing. The choice of formalism—algebraic or diagrammatic—is not neutral, but embodies underlying ontological commitments that shape which structural features of quantum phenomena—such as states vs. relations; objects vs. transformations—are made accessible. This paper examines the epistemological, cognitive, and educational significance of non-symbolic thought in mathematics, and in quantum mechanics in particular, using QPic as a guiding example. We raise a central question: can quantum processes be represented in ways that align more naturally with human cognition? What is new here is showing how the epistemological and cognitive aspects of non-symbolic formalism are brought into pedagogical practice. Such paradigm largely benefits from the language of thought hypothesis alongside theories of embodied cognition, dual coding, and conceptual metaphor theory to articulate a holistic framework in which multiple, interacting conceptual systems underpin understanding. Drawing on historical precedents—from Euclidean geometry to Leibniz's universal calculus of thought—we contend that human intuition works more naturally within relational and visual frameworks, particularly those that help complex ideas to be seen and manipulated as structured wholes. The broader impact of this paradigm lies in democratizing access to quantum innovation and rethinking what it means to understand the quantum world, offering an inclusive entry point into it.
IntroductionIn everyday social cognition, people reliably tend to anthropomorphize non-human agents or ascribe to them features associated with selfhood. In prior research, we showed that individuals often (over-)generalize from a single behavioral indicator of selfhood, such as learning ability or attentional sharing, to the assumption that other, unobserved indicators of selfhood are also present. This suggests that even minimal cues may be sufficient to activate a broader selfhood concept and its associated implications.MethodHere, we tested the prediction that single selfhood cues are as effective as multiple selfhood cues in eliciting selfhood- attributions to an artificial agent. In three experiments, we compared selfhood ratings for a robot exhibiting behavioral cues of efficiency, learning sensitivity, and equifinality with ratings for a robot exhibiting only one of these cues.ResultsContrary to our expectations, participants did not attribute the same degree of selfhood to both robots. They attributed more selfhood to the single-cue robot in Experiments 1 (single efficiency cue) and 3 (single equifinality cue), whereas in Experiment 2 (single learning cue), the multiple-cue robot received higher ratings on the manipulated characteristics as well as on context sensitivity (results for selfhood-attribution were negligible).DiscussionIn sum, we conclude that a single selfhood cue tends to elicit stronger selfhood-attributions overall than multiple cues. We discuss this finding in relation to the literature on cognitive bootstrapping (i.e., developing new and complex knowledge from a limited starting set), concluding that consistently applying a single skill to an apparent problem may reflect more human-like behavior.
Emotional information is often more likely to be recalled than neutral information. Among emotional information, there can also be valence biases in memory, with negative content remembered better than positive content or vice-versa. With regard to whether collaborating with others enhances negative memory biases or positive ones, findings in young adults are mixed. Moreover, little is known about how collaboration affects valence biases in older adults' memories, even though it is well documented that older adults often show positive memory biases on individual recall tasks. The present study examined the effect of collaborative retrieval on young and older adults' valence memory biases, by assigning young and older adults to individual-recall or collaborative-recall conditions prior to completing an individual recall task. In the collaborative recall condition, groups were composed of same age-group partners, all young adults or all older adults. Importantly, the recall tasks gave participants three category labels to recall at once, to cue memories in a manner that encouraged the intermixing of differently valenced content. Collaborative retrieval enhanced young adults' memories for all valences, but enhanced memory for positive valence to the greatest extent, resulting in a strong positive memory bias after collaboration. Older adults showed a positive memory bias regardless of whether or not they collaborated. These results emphasize that the positive memory biases typically seen in older adults can be elicited in young adults, if they collaborate with one another.
Menstrual cycles are major biological events with extensive effects on the brain and cognition, experienced by half of the human population. To develop a comprehensive account of human cognition, it is necessary to successfully integrate and characterize menstrual cycle effects in cognitive science research. However, current approaches to menstrual cycle analysis suffer from low data resolution and are not well-equipped to capture the highly variable, non-linear changes in outcomes of interest across the cycle. We present a validated standardized method remedying these issues, demonstrate its utility using hormonal, behavioral, and neuroimaging data, and provide an open-source toolkit to facilitate its use.
IntroductionBalance remains a critical element in the evaluation and management of sports injury, with recent recommendations to integrate dual-task cognitive exercises into balancing to further challenge the body's vestibular and somatosensory systems. Dual-task balancing has yet to be examined in a sample of para-athletes. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a dual-task cognitive exercise on unsupported, seated balance in a sample of healthy, collegiate para-athletes. A secondary objective was to investigate the role of sex, concussion history, and functional classification.MethodsA total of 52 participants completed a seated balance battery, with their eyes open and closed, on a stable and unstable surface, under both single and dual-task conditions. Measures consisted of human-scored biomechanical errors of coming out of the seated positions.ResultsBetween 90 and 94% of participants committed 0 errors during stable and unstable single-task, along with stable dual-task, while only 86.5% had 0 errors for unstable, dual-task balancing. No sex differences were observed during single and dual-task balancing. Concussion history and functional classification did not affect performance.DiscussionThe lack of differences between single and dual-task indicates that dual-task cognitive exercises or human-scored errors may not appropriately affect and assess upright seated balance and may require more dynamic tasks to further challenge balance and postural stability.
IntroductionPrevious research suggests that the protective effect of retrieval practice against acute stress may be modulated by item difficulty, with difficult items showing distinct vulnerability patterns compared to easy items. The present study aimed to replicate and extend these findings by strictly controlling for initial memory strength—a potential confound in prior work.MethodsUsing a 2 (Stress: Control vs. Stress) × 3 (Difficulty: E4, D4, D8) mixed factorial design, 56 male participants encoded 48 Swahili-Portuguese word pairs via retrieval practice. Items were manipulated by memorability and practice dosage to equalize initial strength between Easy (E4) and Difficult-Extended (D8) conditions. Forty-eight hours after encoding, participants underwent the modified Socially-Evaluated Cold Pressor Test (SECPT) or a control procedure before a final cued-recall test.ResultsAlthough the stress manipulation successfully elevated salivary cortisol and autonomic measures, the previously observed Stress × Difficulty interaction was not replicated. Results indicated a main effect of Difficulty, but stress did not impair retrieval performance across conditions. Notably, difficult items subjected to extended practice (D8) achieved recall rates comparable to easy items (E4), and both were unaffected by stress.DiscussionThese findings suggest that when memory traces are strengthened via repeated retrieval practice, they may become resistant to the deleterious effects of acute stress, regardless of intrinsic item difficulty.
