In homage to Larry Jacoby, this autobiographical and empirical account traces the intellectual lineage of research on implicit social cognition from its origins in research on implicit memory and the serendipitous discovery of a bias without awareness. This result redirected the author’s scholarly attention to the hidden presence of social categories in judgment. Tracing major theoretical and methodological advances in early work on implicit social cognition, mid-period convergent evidence from neuroimaging and developmental origins in childhood, the paper ends with recent computational analyses of natural language, and the discovery of human-like biases in large language models. Together, the work highlights an enduring discovery – the frequent dissociation between explicit and implicit cognition in humans and machines. This discovery, that bias is routinely hidden from introspective access, reveals unintended hypocrisy in carbon and silicon minds whose consequences for fairness and justice remain unaddressed.
This study examined the relationship between the processing efficiency of single-character and two-character words presented in fovea and parafovea and word-level eye-movement parameters in reading Chinese among a heterogenous sample of 70 adult readers (age 18–60 years). Foveal processing efficiency was assessed with performance accuracy in lexical decision, where one-character and two-character words of medium frequency and pseudowords were presented backward-masked for identification using different exposure times (40 ms and 60 ms). Parafoveal-processing efficiency was assessed by presenting similar stimuli for 150 ms to the right and left of the central fixation point (1.35 and 2.27 degrees of visual angle). Measures of foveal and parafoveal-processing efficiency were used to predict eye behavior in reading eight expository texts in varying topics. The Random Forests technique was used to assess the relative importance of individual difference measures in predicting readers’ eye-movement patterns. Results were further tested with (generalized) linear mixed-effects ((G)LM) modeling. The results show that the ability to recognize two-character words in fovea best predicts first fixation and gaze durations of words during reading and that both the ability to recognize single-character and two-character words in fovea best predicts word refixation and skipping probabilities during reading as well as the length of between-word saccades. The results are consistent with an analogous study conducted in Finnish, which found that efficiency in foveal word recognition was a better predictor of both foveal and parafoveal processing during reading than efficiency in parafoveal word recognition.
Readers are often confronted with one-sided, conflicting, or even false information when engaging with socioscientific issues. Based on the notion that validation of information is a routine part of comprehension, we conducted four experiments to investigate how explicit validity judgments and nonstrategic validation of (mis)information on socioscientific issues are affected by the interaction between belief consistency and factual accuracy. Experiment 1 (n = 73) and Experiment 2 (n = 50) used a validity judgment task and found that participants made more errors in judging false belief-consistent claims and needed more time to correctly respond to true but belief-inconsistent and to false but belief-consistent claims. Experiment 3 (n = 84) used the epistemic Stroop task to investigate whether readers' beliefs and knowledge also influence nonstrategic validation, even when readers' task does not require an explicit judgment of validity or belief consistency. In the epistemic Stroop task, affirmative responses did not differ significantly between true and false belief-consistent claims, whereas they were longer for false belief-inconsistent claims. Experiment 4 (n = 226) replicated the results for both tasks, controlling for readers' prior knowledge. The results suggest that beliefs may bias explicit validity judgments, but also the nonstrategic processing of socioscientific claims.
Bilingual speakers must regulate cross-language competition to communicate effectively, yet this regulation typically unfolds under concurrent cognitive demands. To characterise how cognitive load shapes bilingual control, we used a dual-task picture-naming paradigm in which 78 proficient Chinese–English bilinguals performed single-language, cued-switching, and voluntary-switching blocks with and without a secondary tone-monitoring task. Cognitive load did not simply undermine performance; instead, it constrained control engagement and prompted context-sensitive reconfiguration. In cued switching, where the L2 is externally required and especially vulnerable to L1 interference, load shifted control towards a more proactive state that protected L2 access via global downregulation of the L1. In voluntary switching, where speakers can exploit trial-by-trial fluctuations in relative activation, load strengthened a reactive selection strategy: participants selected the L2 when it was rapidly accessible but fell back to the L1 when L2 activation was insufficient. Overall, bilingual control adapted to cognitive load by shifting both the mode and strategy of control in a context-dependent manner, showing that what adapts is not only the type of control recruited, but also how it is employed as contextual demands fluctuate.
Previous research suggests that dimensions such as space, time, and quantity are processed through a generalized magnitude system. Past evidence also shows that brightness can interact with numerical quantity. This study examined brightness–number interactions in young and older adults, and their modulations by stimulus-related factors (e.g., numerical ratio, item proportion) and domain-general mechanisms (e.g., executive control). Across four experiments using a numerical Stroop-like task, younger and older adults compared the numerical values of digit pairs varying in numerical magnitude and brightness (i.e., brighter vs. dimmer). Results revealed robust congruency effects (i.e., better performance when both dimensions matched) in both younger and older adults, consistent with the idea of shared magnitude representations across the lifespan. Additionally, congruency effects (a) increased for larger-ratio items, and (b) decreased in blocks with a high proportion of incongruent items. Data also revealed that (a) young and older adults had similar congruency effects, and (b) older adults showed smaller facilitation but larger interference effects in high-conflict conditions. These findings suggest that brightness operates as a magnitude dimension, and highlight the role of domain-general executive mechanisms (e.g., proactive control) in regulating magnitude processing across the lifespan.
