Cognition

Exploration is fundamental to how children learn about the world. To explore a new environment comprehensively, a child must navigate without getting lost while simultaneously attending to salient information along the way. Both abilities improve across childhood, yet most studies examine them in isolation, often in constrained spaces with limited sensory complexity. Here, we asked 7- to 14-year-old children (N=42) and young adults (18-22; N=42) to freely explore a large furniture store in immersive virtual reality, which contained many objects and attention-capturing multisensory events. Surprisingly, despite traveling comparable distances, children explored less - they covered less spatial area and examined fewer unique objects than adults. Fine-grained analyses of their behaviors showed that the reduction in exploration was due to children spending more time backtracking and children taking longer to adapt to salient multisensory objects, which were uncorrelated across individuals after controlling for age and independently predicted exploration. However, only backtracking duration predicted success in a subsequent search task, demonstrating a link between navigational success during exploration and the quality of learned spatial representations for later use. Together, the results demonstrate that children explore less comprehensively than adults in large-scale spaces because they are susceptible to getting lost and perseverating on salient events nested within a large environment, but that these behaviors change with age. This suggests that while children are widely considered to be curious explorers within local environments, their ability to do so within larger environments is shaped by the maturation of cognitive systems that integrate experiences over complex contexts.

Despite the ubiquitous nature of visual search in our daily lives, our knowledge of the underlying mechanisms is almost entirely derived from studies using simple, synthetic stimuli briefly flashed on a computer monitor. In real life, however, visual search occurs in three-dimensional environments over much longer timescales and involves the dynamic coordination of attention, memory, and action planning, generating novel predictions that cannot be tested with traditional approaches. Here, we examined how self-guided visual search unfolds under naturalistic conditions that extend over space and time. We asked participants (N=80) to find specific objects (e.g., a green lamp, an orange shelf) in an immersive, visually rich virtual reality environment using range-limited teleportation (2 m steps). Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that self-guided search engaged a hierarchical information-seeking policy characterized at each stage by recurring plan-and-execute cycles paired with subgoal-specific attentional priorities. Subgoal priorities progressed from wayfinding to identification of clusters of target-similar objects, and then to specific target features. These search priorities progressively narrowed the search space through coordinated eye, head, and body movements that recurred throughout the task. We conclude that naturalistic search is hierarchical, built from sequential subgoals with shifting attentional priorities that single-level tasks cannot capture. Moreover, immersive VR with eye-head-body tracking dissociates motor planning from execution moments and reveals how looking content shifts with each task subgoal while the person moves through space, something desktop tasks cannot capture.

Recognising people precedes and informs most social interactions, yet it is not clear why individuals differ so markedly in face recognition ability. Exposure-based accounts propose that it is shaped by visual experience with faces, known as 'face diet', but most prior work treats exposure as passively acquired, thereby masking the active and dynamic nature of visual attention in natural settings. Here we examined whether spontaneous attention to faces in everyday environments predicts face recognition ability. Eighty participants wore mobile eye-tracking glasses while walking through a busy university campus and during a face-to-face interaction, before completing standard measures of face recognition ability. Fixations directed to faces showed stable individual differences in both settings. People who looked more at faces scored higher on our composite measure of face recognition ability, and gaze in the two settings predicted ability independently, together accounting for 22% of its variance. These findings suggest that differences in how people actively sample visual information from their environments may be an overlooked source of variance in perceptual expertise.

Mice are widely used to study the neural basis of perceptual decision-making, often with the ultimate goal of extrapolating insights to humans. Yet, whether humans and mice rely on similar computational strategies remains rarely tested, partly because the two species acquire knowledge differently. Animals learn from experience, while humans usually receive verbal task instructions. Here, we explicitly contrast these modes of learning in humans who perform a perceptual decision-making task adapted from a standardized rodent task. Specifically, we present an open behavioral dataset from 80 human participants who performed 600 trials of a visual contrast-discrimination task, matched to the standardized International Brain Laboratory task for mice (International Brain Laboratory et al., 2021, 2025). Participants either received verbal instructions ('Instructed') or were only told to discover the rules of the task by playing ('Uninstructed'). The dataset contains choices, response times, continuous cursor trajectories, eye-tracking and pupil recordings. Descriptive analyses show that Uninstructed participants were less accurate and had higher lapse rates than Instructed participants. They improved over the first 200 trials, approaching the performance of Instructed participants. These data provide a benchmark for testing whether computational strategies identified in mice also describe human behavior.

Spontaneous eye blinks have long been linked to cognitive processing, yet how task demands shape blink timing and its relationship to behavioral performance remains unclear. We examined spontaneous blink behavior in 576 adults performing two variants of the Continuous Performance Task (CPT). Blink occurrence and timing were most strongly modulated by the experimental condition in the more demanding CPT-AX task, whereas their association with response time was stronger in the CPT-X task, where more consistent blink timing predicted faster responses. This dissociation suggests that task structure changes not only blink behavior but also the behavioral relevance of blink timing. These findings are consistent with an adaptive scheduling account of spontaneous blinking and provide a conceptual framework for understanding when and why blink timing contains chronometric information about ongoing cognition.

Efficient motion perception requires integrating immediate sensory evidence with internal representations shaped by experience. This influence of recent history can produce serial dependence effects (SDEs), in which current judgments are biased toward or away from the source of previous information. We examined SDEs in auditory, visual, and cued audiovisual motion-direction discrimination using aggregate psychometric measures and trial-level generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMMs), which estimated the independent contributions of the previous stimulus direction and the participant's previous response. Participants completed unisensory (n=57) and cued audiovisual (n=48) motion-discrimination tasks. Aggregate analyses indicated attractive SDEs in auditory conditions, repulsive SDEs in visual conditions, and no net SDE in the audiovisual-cued condition. Trial-level modeling revealed a more nuanced structure: previous stimulus direction produced repulsive effects in both unisensory conditions, with previous visual direction influencing judgments across all conditions containing visual motion, whereas previous response produced attractive effects only when visual information was task-relevant. In the audiovisual-cued condition, the absence of a net psychometric shift was consistent with the opposing influences of an attractive response-history effect and a repulsive visual stimulus-history effect rather than an absence of serial dependence. These findings suggest that serial dependence in motion perception reflects dissociable and concurrently operating processes, including a predominantly visual, adaptation-like stimulus-history effect and a task-dependent, decision-related response-history effect.

Task demand has a long-standing history in experimental psychology, with numerous investigations of the capacity of different systems and processes under varying cognitive load. Whilst demand is a broadly used term in the literature, it is limited by a lack of cross-domain operationalisation, and thus can be a confound in many inter-domain investigations. To address this, we generated and validated two large-scale, open-source, widely applicable stimuli sets that: (i) can probe a wide, continuous range of objective behaviourally-measured processing demand, and (ii) can be directly matched across two highly contrastive cognitive domains (semantic and visuospatial processing). We normed these tasks in a large, online cohort of healthy adults, enabling future studies to utilise and benefit from reliable baseline measures of demand. Using a matching algorithm that takes into account both speed and accuracy, we then closely paired each semantic judgement trial with a trial of comparable difficulty from the corresponding visuospatial task to produce a cross domain matched set of over 400 items. Finally, we analysed the psycholinguistic and perceptual properties of these stimuli to explore some of the underlying factors driving demand.

Attentional selection not only increases behavioural performance and neural information for attended stimuli but, in some instances, induces changes in stimulus appearance. While reported appearance changes have mostly concerned the effects of attending to a particular spatial location, here we report a shift in appearance that occurs when attention is directed to one component of a stimulus rapidly alternating at a single spatial location. Our stimuli included two frames of different colors, which alternated at 3.75Hz or 7.5Hz. Participants reported the perceived dominance of one frame's color in the reference stimulus, by comparison with a target stimulus. We found that when one stimulus frame was more salient than the other, with a greater likelihood of capturing exogenous attention, there was an illusory perception that the frame was physically present for a greater proportion of time. When the frames were matched in salience, a task encouraging participants to endogenously direct their attention to one frame produced a smaller shift in appearance. Our results add to the body of literature demonstrating that attention can change appearance, in this case altering the appearance of attended versus unattended stimuli that are presented at the same spatial location. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that at the 'temporal transparent' alternation rate of 7.5Hz, where rapidly alternating stimuli are perceived as two translucent surfaces, attentional selection of one surface can account for the apparent paradox that feature conjunctions are perceived at stimulus alternation rates higher than predicted by the temporal limits of feature binding for other stimuli.

Consensus is rarely a one-off achievement. In a changing world, groups must repeatedly update judgments they have already agreed upon, making consensus updating a common feature of real-world collective decisions. However, previous research on collective decision-making has focused mainly on how groups reach a single consensus, leaving the updating of established consensus largely unexamined. This raises two unanswered questions: does consensus updating involve biases analogous to sunk cost, and are such biases related to the cost of the previous consensus? Building a Fake Consensus paradigm, we manipulated consensus-formation cost and examined how dyads updated a subjectively established consensus after new information arrived. An independent individual experiment provided information-matched updating baselines, allowing us to determine whether dyads updated less or more than individuals responding to the same evidence. Contrary to sunk-cost predictions, low-cost consensus led dyads to update less than the individual baseline, whereas medium- and high-cost consensus led them to update more. The pathway through perceived consensus sharedness was significant, and the association between sharedness and updating was stronger at higher left temporoparietal junction inter-brain synchrony. These findings indicate that the history of consensus formation shapes subsequent updating by altering the psychological meaning of shared endorsement, while interpersonal alignment determines how this shared experience translates into coordinated behavior. To our knowledge, this is the first experimentally controlled study of consensus updating in teams to isolate formation history from actual disagreement, providing a new paradigm for studying how collective judgments change after agreement.

Recalling scenes and events depends on how information is relationally organised in memory, but it is unclear whether the organisation of eye movements during encoding, rather than simply how much is explored, shapes what is remembered. Using a scene-viewing paradigm and drawing-based free recall task to capture the content and structure of remembered scenes, we examined whether scene memory was better explained by 'lower-order' measures reflecting the magnitude and spatial extent of sampling, or 'higher-order' measures capturing gaze organisation and temporal dynamics. Relative to lower-order measures (number of fixations and scanpath length), memory precision was better predicted by repeated sampling of viewed regions (refixations) and gaze distributions (stationary gaze entropy) during encoding. Thus, the organisation of visual attention, rather than sampling quantity, contributed to scene representations that preserved relationships between elements. These findings highlight a role for spatial gaze dynamics in optimally encoding organised, relational scene representations for episodic memory.

When objects are embedded in a complex lighting environment, the illumination they receive depends on their geometric relationship to the environment. We measured performance in an odd-one-out color constancy task, with objects rendered in complex lighting environments. Observers identified the odd object among four objects, with two rendered under each of two lighting environments, sampled from a wide range of object orientations and camera positions. Constancy was high. The presence of a surrounding context increased accuracy. Gloss provided no measurable benefit. We also tested a condition in which the global color impression provided misleading information about the lighting environment, but this impaired performance only slightly. These findings suggest that human color constancy remains robust even under complex lighting environments, contrary to predictions of many simple models of illuminant discounting.

Reading behaviour is sensitive to contextual demands. For example, when reading to study or answer questions, readers strategically allocate more attention to goal-relevant sections, read slower, and regress more frequently to extract specific information based on task demands. This suggests that readers flexibly adapt their strategies according to goals and situational constraints. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms supporting this flexibility remain unclear. To test this, we combined eye-tracking with EEG during naturalistic reading and examined how short-term reading goals modulated the neural tracking of hierarchical linguistic features at the orthographic (orthographic neighbourhood size), lexical (word frequency), and contextual-semantic (Surprisal) levels. Forty native English speakers read narratives in three goal conditions: Baseline (no goal), Proofreading (detect spelling errors), and Comprehension (attend to content). Fixation-aligned word-level EEG activity was modelled using multivariate temporal response function to estimate the strength of feature-specific neural tracking. Orthographic tracking was significantly enhanced during Proofreading relative to Baseline, and predicted better Proofreading accuracy. Conversely, stronger frequency tracking predicted better Comprehension accuracy. Contextual-semantic tracking was not modulated by task goal. These findings suggest that reading goals selectively bias neural processing towards linguistic features (sublexical vs. lexical) that support successful task performance, providing evidence for short-term functional plasticity in linguistic processing and supporting a flexible predictive processing account of goal-directed reading.

Effective verbal communication requires individuals to align their communicative intentions through the precise use of utterances, yet how this is achieved in dynamic, open-ended communication remains unclear. Combining predictive deep language models (DLMs) with cognitive computational modeling, we tested a computational division of labor between context-sensitive global constraint on the utterance space and partner-sensitive local adjustment of selection priorities. We formalized local adjustment using an active inference inspired updating rule within a statistical-pragmatic hybrid model. Thirty dyads performed a dynamic, open-ended collaborative word-generation task during functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning. Interlocutors converged in their lexical choices, and lexical alignment was best explained by a hybrid model integrating contextual selection priors with interaction-specific local adjustment among the models tested. This hybrid process formed a dynamic hypothesis landscape comprising a global semantic search region and local selection priorities. Critically, interaction did not simply reduce uncertainty: within individuals, the hypothesis space of global semantic search progressively narrowed while local uncertainty among plausible alternatives increased; between partners, both global hypothesis space and local selection became increasingly aligned, with alignment of local selection priorities most strongly predicting subsequent lexical alignment. The contribution of local adjustment was stronger during precise verbal communication than in the control tasks. Neural analyses further identified correlates of the local adjustment process: temporoparietal and anterior temporal regions supported partner-related inference and semantic prediction error, respectively, and their activity during thinking predicted subsequent inferior frontal activity associated with self-updating during speaking. The participant's own hypothesis landscape was also represented in the left inferior parietal-supramarginal cortex. The main findings generalized across language models and an independent Czech dataset. Together, these findings reveal that alignment in open-ended communication emerges from complementary statistical and pragmatic computations, providing a framework for understanding human and human-AI communication.

Eye movements have been shown to reveal the cognitive processes underlying spatial ability, but most studies investigating gaze behaviour in spatial cognition use a single, screen-based task. Therefore, it is unknown whether these gaze behaviours are preserved across naturalistic task environments, or whether their relationship with spatial performance is domain-general or task-specific. The present study tested whether established gaze behaviours are preserved and generalizable across diverse, naturalistic spatial tasks. N = 30 young adults completed three naturalistic spatial tasks varying in perceptual, cognitive, and visuomotor demands: Q-bitz, the Brick Building Task (BBT), and the Mental Rotation Test (MRT). Gaze was measured using the Pupil Labs Neon eye tracker. Within-task analyses were conducted to assess whether gaze behaviours were preserved, and cross-task analyses were conducted to assess the generalizability of preserved gaze behaviours. Within-task analyses identified source inspection and transition rate as gaze behaviours that were consistently sensitive to changing task demands. Cross-task analyses showed that source fixation duration was a domain-general predictor of performance, whereas the relationship between transition rate and performance differed by task. Exploratory sex-separated analyses also suggested a more consistent gaze-performance relationship in males. These findings show that source fixation duration may represent a common cognitive process underlying performance across naturalistic spatial tasks.

Motor imagery and overt action are proposed to share common planning mechanisms while relying on distinct processes during movement performance. To investigate how repetition affects physical and imagined movements, participants physically or mentally drew paths while avoiding barriers. The barrier orientations were either repeated or different across consecutive trials, and the modality (execution or imagery) of the trials either changed or remained the same for two consecutive trials. Reaction time and movement time were analysed as measures of movement planning and task performance, respectively. Imagined movements produced longer reaction times and movement times than physical movements. Repetition of orientation reduced reaction times in both physical and imagined trials, indicating that trajectory repetition facilitated movement preparation. In contrast, previous trial type influenced reaction times only for physical movements, which were only initiated faster when preceded by another physical trial. Different effects emerged for movement time. Physical movements were faster when the same trajectory was repeated no matter the previous trial type, whereas imagined movements were unaffected by orientation and instead showed shorter durations when preceded by another imagined trial. The findings indicate that physical and imagined movements rely on more similar trajectory representations during the planning stage, but diverge during task performance. While physical movements appear to benefit from the persistence of previously generated movement trajectories, imagined trials seems more influenced by modality-specific cognitive processes. These results provide behavioural support for the Motor-Cognitive model and contribute to understanding how movement repetition influences overt and imagined actions.

In visuomotor sequential tasks, chaining actions smoothly requires tight coordination between sensory and motor systems to deal with competing demands, such as reducing uncertainty about future opportunities for action while controlling ongoing ones. In a football-based decision-making task, experts and novices used different strategies to overcome these competing demands, demonstrating a proactive and a sequential visuomotor strategy, respectively. We propose a computational explanation of expertise-related difference in policy selection, grounded in the active inference framework. We simulated the selection of sequence of actions using a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) model, and we manipulated three parameters: the reward structure, the prior beliefs about state transition, and the sensory precision. Simulations showed that selection of the proactive strategy relied on strong prior beliefs, high sensory precision and high valuation of fast passing. Conversely, the sequential policy was selected when rapid performance was not highly valued, or under noisy prior beliefs, or lower level of sensory precision. Decreasing sensory precision and adding noise in prior beliefs also decreased decision accuracy. These results suggest that policy selection leading to novice or expert visuomotor strategy reflects differences in the underlying generative model, particularly in how agents value different aspects of the task.

Everyday problems often require choosing among actions with different future consequences, even though fully evaluating those consequences is often computationally infeasible. The human brain is remarkable in its ability to solve such complex problems efficiently. In this paper, we hypothesize that this capacity arises from a principle inspired by Bayesian accounts of perception and sensorimotor control: evidence derived from effortful forward planning is integrated with task-specific preferences akin to priors, weighted by the uncertainty of these preferences. To test this hypothesis, we used a sequential decision-making task with a relatively large state space. Model comparison showed that participants' deviations from optimal forward planning are best captured by task-specific preferences, rather than by unsystematic errors, recent action-history effects, or offer-context biases. Moreover, the influence of forward planning on participants' responses depended on preference uncertainty, as evidenced by both choice behavior and reaction times, and preferences were not arbitrary but instead supported above-stochastic performance even in the absence of forward planning. Together, these results are consistent with a Bayesian-inspired interpretation of decision making, in which costly forward planning is integrated with state-dependent priors or preferences. These preferences may provide an inexpensive, quickly available first-pass solution, which is complemented by forward planning when preference-based guidance is uncertain.

Revising a decision while acting on it is a fundamental aspect of natural behavior, yet the underlying computations are difficult to track in real time. To explore how such belief updates unfold, we tested whether eye movements reveal a subject's change of mind during a naturalistic navigation task with a binary target choice. Humans and monkeys were required to navigate to one of two goal locations presented either simultaneously or sequentially in a virtual environment where explicit position cues were absent. Our findings reveal that gaze continuously tracks the latent variable, including changes of mind. We found that the target tracking accuracy before the second target is even presented during sequential target trials predicts whether the subject's navigational goal persists (first target choice) or changes (second target choice). These results underscore the importance of gaze in action planning and changes of mind, supporting the hypothesis that eye movements embody not only the current latent variable but also its uncertainty.

Perception combines incoming sensory evidence with priors learned from preceding input. One example is the central tendency effect in which stimulus estimates regress towards a prior based on the mean of the stimulus distribution. Whether such priors are specific to each modality or shared across modalities remains unresolved. Here, we examined this question using speed perception in the visual, auditory and tactile modalities and used central tendency as a behavioral probe. By giving each modality its own speed range, clear predictions emerge when modalities are interleaved: if priors are modality specific, each modality should maintain its own central tendency bias whereas a supramodal prior would exhibit a different mean based on the pooled set of speeds. Moreover, a supra-modal prior should exhibit precision weighting, with the more reliable cue receiving more weight. For vision and touch, speed estimates converged when interleaved: both modalities shifted but the less reliable one shifted more, consistent with a precision-weighted supramodal prior. For vision and audition, the priors remained largely distinct: audition (the less reliable modality) showed a partial shift but did not converge on the precision weighted, supramodal mean. This was not explained by the large audiovisual reliability difference: it persisted when visual precision was reduced. These results show that in the motion domain, visual and tactile signals can combine crossmodally, but auditory and visual signals do not. Supramodal processing of motion therefore depends on which senses are involved and is likely explained by the lack of an early spatial mapping in audition.

Selective attention, the ability to focus on relevant information while ignoring task-irrelevant information, is crucial for learning. Selective attention has largely been studied in motionless individuals. However, body movements are intrinsic to cognition and particularly frequent in children. To test whether movements explain successful attention control throughout childhood, we tracked head rotations while younger children (6-8 years, n = 25), older children (9-10 years, n = 20) and adults (18-30 years; n = 21) identified a spatial target sound under distraction. Distractor reports decreased with age, confirming a developmental increase in attention control. Importantly, a dissociation of two distinct types of movement emerged: Task-dependent head rotation to lateral targets was similar across age groups. Contrary, task-independent movements before and early during a trial decreased with age and predicted attention accuracy. Thus, movements unrelated to the attention goal do not reflect noise but signify attentional control across development.