How do embodied configurations shape the emergence of communication? We investigated how bodily-visual communication develops under two interactional arrangements: standing-open and seated-at-table. Seventy dyads (140 participants) created novel speech-free signals for 32 meanings across three rounds of a referential communication task while their movements were recorded using high-resolution motion capture. Across both configurations, dyads showed robust efficiency dynamics: communicative success increased, movement path and volume decreased, articulatory specialisation intensified, and kinematic alignment between interlocutors increased. Configuration effects, however, were expressed most clearly in the movement-based measures rather than in communicative success. Success improved rapidly in both configurations, with only weak and transient evidence for an early standing-open advantage. By contrast, seated-at-table interaction promoted more compact movements and digital specialisation, whereas standing-open interaction involved larger movements and progressive brachiomanual specialisation. The pathways towards similar levels of alignment were also different: participants in the standing-open configuration converged in a linear fashion, whereas seated-at-table dyads converged rapidly by mid-experiment, then relaxed to the level ultimately reached in the standing-open configuration. These findings suggest that embodied arrangements do not primarily determine whether communication becomes successful, but they do shape how communicative efficiency is realised in bodily movement.
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is widely used in reasoning and decision making research, but it lacks a formal cognitive foundation. As a result, debates persist over why CRT scores correlate with mathematical ability, why some individuals solve CRT problems easily while others struggle, and which mental processes drive observed patterns in data. We use an ecological perspective combined with computational cognitive modeling to address these questions, focusing in particular on the bat-and-ball problem. First, we specify the learning environment by assembling a large dataset of grade school verbal math problems. Second, we specify a formal learning mechanism that selects the arithmetic operation most likely to be applied to a novel problem based on the linguistic association of the problem with learned exemplars. Our model generates the intuitive errors elicited by the bat-and-ball problem (as well as other CRT items) and explains why these errors can be seen as byproducts of adaptive cognition. It also makes new predictions about the effect of environmental structure and problem wording on strategy selection and downstream performance, and we validate these predictions in two new preregistered experiments. Overall, our work provides theoretical clarity and quantitative rigor to our understanding of intuitive judgment, and shows how such judgments can be understood as rational adaptations to the learning environment.
Disfluency in speech (e.g., English um and uh, also known as filled pauses) has long been argued to have social costs for the speaker. However, this conclusion is based on a limited set of measures obtained for scripted, lab-recorded speech. Here, using stimuli from spontaneous speech and an expanded set of social trait evaluations, we argue that phenomena typically described as “disfluency” are not always evaluated negatively. First, at the global person level, filled pauses did not affect the overall perceived competence, trustworthiness, or warmth of the speaker as a person (Experiment 1). However, at the local conversation level, filled pauses reduced perceived speaker trustworthiness within a conversation (Experiment 2). Furthermore, within a conversation, speakers who produced filled pauses were rated as less ready and less certain than speakers who did not (even though experts who used filled pauses were more likely to be considered careful than novices; Experiment 3). Finally, speakers using filled pauses were more likely to be avoided in future interactions (Experiment 4). Together, these data reveal flexible and detailed mappings of speech features such as disfluencies to social attributes and showcase the value of studying social meaning using speech generated beyond the lab.
Visual memory and visual imagery are closely intertwined cognitive functions, yet whether memory necessarily deteriorates when imagery is impaired remains unresolved. Aphantasia, the inability to voluntarily generate mental images, provides a compelling model to address this issue. Previous reports of preserved or subtle memory deficits in aphantasia may stem from low task demands, coarse measures, or memory content lacking fine-grained requirements. To address this, we employed high-load paradigms and continuous precision measures with mixture modelling to assess colour memory-a domain requiring fine-grained representation. Experiment 1 (20 aphantasics, 20 controls) tested colour memory for six sets of 20 objects (15 meaningful, 5 meaningless). Meaningless objects were included to minimise verbal labelling. Colours were sampled from the Hue-Saturation-Value (HSV) space. Memory was assessed with a continuous colour wheel and analysed using mixture modelling that decomposed response errors into retrieval success (whether a colour was retrieved) and precision (how accurately it was remembered). Results revealed that aphantasic individuals showed markedly larger errors than controls, driven by reduced retrieval success rather than precision. Moreover, error magnitude and retrieval success correlated with several imagery dimensions (e.g., object imagery, spontaneous imagery use), whereas retrieval precision did not. Experiment 2 (18 aphantasics, 20 controls) further tested whether deficits extend beyond colour using an analogous size-memory task. No group differences or imagery-memory correlations were observed. These findings provide initial evidence that visual imagery supports retrieval success, but not retrieval precision, in accessing object colour memory, and that this role may not extend equally to all object features.
Deciding what to do should typically involve considering what could have been done, but in fact was not done. We tested whether such unchosen alternative action paths leave traces in memory. Across two behavioural experiments, participants solved a modified Tower of London (ToL) task in which each problem afforded two alternative and equivalent optimal solution paths. They then undertook a recognition test in which they viewed configurations of the ToL drawn either from the chosen path, the unchosen path, or from new, unviewed configurations. Participants were consistently more likely to judge (falsely) that they had previously seen configurations from the unchosen but plausible path, compared to novel configurations. Signal detection analyses further showed reduced discriminability and a more liberal decision criterion for alternative-path configurations compared to control novel configurations. Unchosen action alternatives may be difficult to distinguish from actions that are actually executed, but may have a feeling of familiarity that leads to an “old” response. This effect replicated when novel items were matched to alternative items in visual similarity, ruling out explanations based on perceptual confusability. The results suggest that action planning generates representations of unchosen alternatives that can persist and bias later memory, even if not executed. Planning therefore leaves behind more than a route towards action goals: it also leaves mnemonic traces of paths not taken.
