How do people forecast their own and others' risk preferences? Although it is well established that affective forecasts shape decision-making, less is known about where these forecasts come from. Five studies demonstrate that people rely on intuitive theories of attention when forecasting future affect-such as dread and savoring while waiting for a risk to be resolved-with these affective forecasts in turn shaping willingness to take such risks. In Study 1, forecasts of the participant's own expectations and attention were systematically related to forecasts of positive and negative affect during a waiting period, which in turn predicted risk preferences. Studies 2a and 2b demonstrate substantial heterogeneity in intuitive attention-affect theories: some participants believed attention amplifies the emotional consequences of expectations, whereas others believed attention is uniformly affectively negative. These differences led to sharply divergent predictions about when attention should increase or decrease risk-taking. Study 3 shows that attention is also informative about expectations: participants differed in whether they believed attention signals optimism or pessimism, producing downstream consequences for affective forecasts and risk-taking. Finally, Study 4 reveals that many people endorse asymmetric causal models, viewing optimism as a cause of risk-taking, but risk-taking as a cause of attention. Together, these findings show that forecasts of risk preferences depend critically on people's intuitive theories about how cognition shapes affect and how affective utility is generated over time. By integrating affective forecasting, attention, and decision-making under uncertainty, this work highlights the role of metacognitive beliefs in shaping economic preferences.
Much of human knowledge distills patterns that are consistent across many similar experiences over time, such as the typical layout of a bedroom. This is particularly true of word knowledge. The thousands of words we learn form a stable, interconnected network of word meanings that capture regularities in the way words are typically combined to express ideas, such as that “oranges” are something you can “eat” and similar to “apples”. Yet, we know surprisingly little about accumulating knowledge from regularities over time, especially in childhood when building knowledge is paramount. Here, we investigated 4-6-year-old children’s abilities to accumulate interconnected word knowledge from regularities experienced repeatedly over a month. Younger children appeared to relearn the regularities anew at each exposure, whereas older children accumulated increasingly strong connections across encounters. These findings point to substantial developmental changes in gradual learning processes that build knowledge over time.
When different individuals view the same image, their eye movements are often similar. The degree of this similarity is called interobserver congruency (IOC). We investigated how IOC is determined by three factors that impact gaze control: the visual features of an image, its semantic content, and the task observers perform when viewing it. We first quantified the low-level physical features and semantic complexity of images using a well-established measure of visual clutter and a novel measure based on a distributional semantic model, respectively. Then, we selected an image set in which these two measures were uncorrelated and used it in an eye-tracking experiment, in which observers either freely viewed the images or memorised their content. We assessed IOC using four metrics: two capturing purely spatial IOC and two sensitive to spatiotemporal IOC, i.e., considering both the locations and order of fixations. The values of the two spatial metrics decreased with increasing clutter and remained insensitive to the remaining factors we investigated. The two spatiotemporal metrics were sensitive to both clutter and semantic complexity, but, interestingly, in different ways. Specifically, according to a metric that was insensitive to the presence of objects in images, IOC decreased with clutter and increased with semantic complexity, while the metric sensitive to objects showed the opposite pattern. Additionally, we found that the memorization task rendered oculomotor behaviour more exploratory, which had modulatory effects on spatiotemporal – but not spatial – IOC. Together, our findings reveal how factors known to shape gaze behaviour determine IOC.
Human language allows for virtually limitless productivity. Why, then, are certain perfectly-comprehensible sentences (e.g., *The boy dragged the girl the box) deemed ungrammatical by native speakers? Here, we test the prediction of Construction Grammar accounts (c.f., Categorical Grammar accounts) that grammatical acceptability is probabilistically affected by the compatibility between the meaning (semantics) of the construction (e.g., [AGENT] [ACTION] [RECPIENT] [PATIENT]) and (a) the nouns (e.g., The boy sent the girl the package is more grammatical than *The boy sent Chicago the package; Studies 1,3,5) and (b) the speaker's intended meaning in context (e.g., the team in the Chicago office > the geographic location; Studies 2,4,6). Across a series of six large (N = 100) pre-registered studies, we find that (in all but one case), both of these factors significantly affect English speakers' rated acceptability of sentences, across the transitive and periphrastic causative (e.g., The clown made the man laugh vs *The clown laughed the man); the to- and double-object dative (e.g., The girl said something to the boy vs *The girl said the boy something) and the active/passive (e.g., The book cost $10 vs *$10 was cost by the book). These findings constitute support for Construction Gramar approaches, under which this type of grammatical acceptability results from a probabilistic semantic clash, and against Categorical Grammar accounts, which can explain graded (as opposed to categorical) ungrammaticality only via some kind of add-on.
In everyday touch, the hand often contacts multiple surfaces simultaneously. Yet little is known about how pleasantness is formed when texture pairs are explored at the same time. Previous research has shown that tactile signals presented to adjacent fingers can be integrated through averaging or assimilation processes. These accounts primarily address the integration of stimulus attributes and do not consider whether relations between textures may also contribute to evaluative judgments. The present study examined this possibility by obtaining ratings on five relational dimensions (similarity, contrast, harmony, emergence, and modulation) and testing whether these ratings helped explain the overall pleasantness of texture pairs beyond the mean pleasantness of the component textures. Across three experiments, participants evaluated the pleasantness of texture pairs, judged relational qualities between textures, and rated the tactile attributes of individual textures. The results showed that overall pleasantness could not be fully explained by the average pleasantness of the component textures. Instead, ratings on these relational dimensions—particularly similarity and contrast—provided additional explanatory power for overall pleasantness. Together, these findings suggest that the texture combination itself contributes to pleasantness in paired touch beyond the pleasantness of the component textures alone.
