Article-Journal

At the core of what defines us as humans is the concept of theory of mind: the ability to track other people’s mental states. The …

There is no one way to learn a technique; their acquisition depends on the specifics of the learning context. Such demands speak to our capacity to successfully transmit vital know-how by flexibly adapting to local contingencies. Cognitive accounts of cultural learning have yet to explain this flexibility. Here, we argue that a key feature of cultural learning is that both the expert(s) and novice(s) recruit cognitive mechanisms of action coordination modulating their behavior contingently on the behavior of their partner, generating a process of mutual adaptation supporting the successful transmission of technical skills in diverse and fluctuating learning environments.

Commentary on Whiten, A. (2022). Blind alleys and fruitful pathways in the comparative study of cultural cognition. Physics of Life …

Copying has been a productive paradigm for the study cultural learning. Copying is about information transmission, the success of which …

Social learning is the mechanism by which humans transmit information between individuals through public displays, and this plays a key role in the formation and stabilisation of cultural traditions. However, despite the importance of this learning for understanding cultural transmission, the psychological processes in single transmission episodes are often unclear. This means that the same behaviour may be interpreted as either high-fidelity copying or pragmatic reconstruction, which posit different predictions about the underlying processes. We present a methodological approach that can distinguish between these two processes by exploiting changes in context. This approach can not only identify learning processes at the level of single transmission episodes, but may also help to elucidate the content of socially learned mental representations.

People have a drive towards maximising the efficiency of their individual actions, but are also willing to sacrifice their own efficiency to maximise joint utility. One thing that could potentially interfere with this drive towards maximising efficiency is a motivation towards fairness - what happens when the most overall efficient option in a joint action requires an unfair task distribution from the two people involved? In two experiments, we find that people reliably prioritise efficiency over fairness, which supports action planning accounts for joint actions that emphasise rationality.

Owning an object makes it special to us, and people identify objects they own faster than objects they do not; this has typically been assumed to be a general feature of object processing—that is, an object that belongs to you will be subject to a general advantage in processing by virtue of its ownership status. We show that, contrary to this assumption, this general processing advantage depends heavily on where the object appears; owned objects are not processed faster if they appear outside one’s own space. This gives important insights into how ownership and self-relevance, which are usually studied in simplified laboratory environments, might operate differently in more complex real-world environments where space itself can be owned.

Previous research has shown that we are better able to visually process two individuals (a dyad) if they are facing each other as opposed to looking away from each other. Previously, this effect has been shown with images of full bodies. We replicate and extend this finding using faces, and show that this perceptual grouping of facing dyads is affected by the emotional expression of the individuals.

Incidental learning of trust from gaze cues is weaker for other-race than own-race faces, but is just as strong for highly trustworthy and low trustworthy faces.

People can learn to make trust inferences on the basis of eye gaze behaviour. However, this study shows that these learned representations are not strengthened by a period of sleep, and are accessed without participants being explicitly aware of the behaviour that led to these feelings of trustworthiness. This suggests that rather than remembering specific episodes and using those memories to form impressions, we may form social representations of people (as trustworthy or untrustworthy) as a cost-saving device to save from having to remember their actual behaviour.