This is a weekly newsletter based on my RSS feeds. I have an LLM pipeline select the most relevant articles from my feeds (based on the about page of this website) and summarize them.
Herding cats: children and adults infer collective decision speed from team size and diversity, but disagree about whether consensus strength matters more than team size
This ScienceDirect article preview summarizes a study on how children and adults estimate the time it takes for teams to reach a consensus decision. The study found that both children and adults expect larger and more diverse teams to take longer, but only adults consider the strength of initial consensus when estimating decision speed, expecting faster decisions from teams where one faction has a strong initial majority. The study suggests that children may weigh team size more heavily than consensus strength.
Context-dependent role of confidence in information-seeking
This is an article preview from ScienceDirect for a 2025 Cognition journal article titled “Context-dependent role of confidence in information-seeking.” The article explores the relationship between decision confidence and information seeking in perceptual tasks, specifically how manipulations that induce under- or overconfidence affect the tendency to seek more information before making a choice. Two experiments examined how comparative feedback and training difficulty influence information seeking, finding that the link between confidence and information seeking is more complex than previously thought, driven by beliefs about past performance and perceived task difficulty. The authors make their data and analysis code openly available.
Statistical learning in spelling and reading
Statistical learning theory suggests that reading and spelling acquisition relies on implicitly learning the statistical structure of writing systems. However, experienced readers and spellers don’t always reflect these statistics perfectly. This discrepancy may be due to complexity, production ease, or satisficing. Literacy instruction should therefore emphasize probabilistic patterns and contextual influences in writing.
Autism-related shifts in the brains information processing hierarchy
This review proposes that altered sensory-transmodal brain hierarchies are a key mechanism in autism, contributing to its diverse symptoms, neurodevelopmental hallmarks like reduced social bias and enhanced perception, and heterogeneous neuroimaging results. This hierarchical framework offers a unifying explanation for behavioral, cognitive, computational, and neural aspects of autism.
Skewed distributions facilitate infants’ word segmentation
This ScienceDirect article preview from the journal Cognition (October 2025) presents a study investigating how skewed word frequency distributions impact infants’ ability to segment speech. The research found that 7- to 9-month-old infants exposed to a skewed distribution of artificial words showed better segmentation performance than those exposed to a uniform distribution. This suggests that skewed distributions facilitate early language learning and that lab studies using uniform distributions may underestimate infants’ true segmentation abilities.
The interplay of cognition and affect in fourth graders math performance: role of working memory in mediating the effects of math anxiety and math interest on arithmetic fluency
This study investigates how math anxiety and interest impact fourth graders’ arithmetic fluency, focusing on working memory’s role in mediating these relationships.
Rethinking planning metrics: An analysis of common measurements of planning abilities
This is an article preview from ScienceDirect about a study titled “Rethinking planning metrics: An analysis of common measurements of planning abilities.” The study investigates whether commonly used planning tasks (Tower of London, Zoo Map test, Traveling Salesperson problems) actually measure a cohesive cognitive construct. The highlights suggest the tasks may not be correlated and may not tap into a single cognitive construct. The abstract details the study’s findings that correlations between these tasks were negligible and unstable, indicating they likely don’t measure the same underlying skill. The introduction discusses the importance of planning skills and the lack of consensus on valid measurement tasks.
Evaluating the role of mental sampling in probability judgments: Illogical rankings occur in a predictable manner
This ScienceDirect article investigates how people make probability judgments, focusing on mental sampling models. The researchers introduce a novel “Event Ranking Task” where participants rank the likelihood of events (A, not-A, B, not-B). The study derives and tests qualitative predictions from direct sampling models, finding that people’s rankings often violate logical probability rules in predictable ways, supporting the idea that mental sampling underlies probability judgments. The study also shows that people’s judgments at the trial level may not reflect the true relationships among the events’ underlying probabilities.