Psychological Science

Intelligence is often considered to be fundamentally different from other personality traits. Twin studies show that intelligence and the Big Five personality traits are partly influenced by the same genetic factors, but it remains unclear to what degree shared genes, SNPs, and biological pathways influence them. To address these questions, we analyzed the genetic associations of all six traits. First, we calculated their genetic correlations using LD score regression. We then quantified polygenic overlap using a bivariate causal mixture model, finding that approximately 90% of the genetic variants influencing the Big Five personality traits also impact intelligence. Finally, we performed gene prioritization and gene set enrichment analysis on each trait, once again finding substantial overlap. At each level, intelligence was as similar to the Big Five traits as they were to one another. Genetically and biologically, intelligence fits in with the rest of personality.

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.

How do we come to "see" the same thing differently after hearing someone else's perspective? Revising an interpretation could reflect changes in how the brain represents the meaning of what we see, changes in how we visually sample the input, or both. To disentangle these mechanisms, we developed MindLibs, an adaptive fMRI and eye-tracking paradigm in which participants generate interpretations of ambiguous photographs and then view alternative interpretations chosen in real time to vary in semantic content from their own. Exposure to semantically distant alternatives revealed a strong link between reinterpretation as reported behaviorally and representational shifts in association cortex, but no systematic relationship between reinterpretation and changes in gaze. In particular, representational shifts in lateral default-mode network regions (DMN-B) predicted reinterpretation independently of shifts in frontoparietal, attention, and visual networks, and independently of whether gaze changed. In contrast, shifts in visual cortex tracked reinterpretation only when gaze also shifted, and contributed no unique variance beyond DMN-B. These findings identify higher-order conceptual reconfiguration, rather than perceptual resampling, as the primary account of how people revise the meaning of an ambiguous scene.

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.

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.

Although human perception appears continuous, converging evidence suggests that sensory input is integrated over discrete temporal windows. The duration of these Temporal Integration Windows (TIWs) determines the temporal resolution of perception, but how this fundamental property develops across infancy and childhood remains unknown. Here, we estimate TIW duration from 5 months of age to adulthood using a novel, instruction-free eye-tracking paradigm that isolates pre-attentive visual integration. Across four experiments with the same paradigm (N = 308 participants), we measured spontaneous detection of a visual target that emerges only when two alternating displays are integrated within a single perceptual window. We observed a striking developmental shortening of the TIW. In adults and 5-year-olds, integration succeeded at short interstimulus intervals (ISIs; 16-32 ms) but failed at longer intervals (83-116 ms), yielding an estimated TIW of [~]57 ms. At 3 years, the TIW extended to [~]100 ms. In infancy, integration remained robust at substantially longer ISIs, with estimates of [~]250 ms at 18 and 8 months, and [~]400 ms at 5 months. The steepest reduction occurred within the first year of life. These findings reveal an approximately sevenfold acceleration in the temporal resolution of visual perception from early infancy to adulthood. Progressive shortening of TIWs suggests that infants and adults integrate sensory information over fundamentally different temporal scales, with implications for perceptual organization, learning, and neurodevelopmental trajectories.

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.

Age is a fundamental social attribute that affects rights, responsibilities and even social status. Color information of the face can affect perceived age, but the nature of its contribution, independent of luminance information, remains underexplored. To better characterize the role of color in age perception, we conducted two experiments. In our first experiment, we tested whether natural age-related changes in facial color alone can drive changes in perceived age. In our second experiment, we manipulated red-green contrast across faces aged 18-91 and tested the effect of this manipulation of perceived youthfulness. Our findings demonstrate that natural age-related color changes do provide cues for age perception, dissociable from luminance information. We also found that the optimal red-green contrast level to make faces look the youngest was significantly higher than the originals, meaning that faces tended to appear younger when their redness was accentuated, even though average face redness increases with age. Our analysis revealed that younger faces required greater increases in redness level compared to their older counterparts to achieve the youngest appearance. These results suggest that the spatial distribution of redness contributes to apparent youthfulness, especially in younger faces.

Financial exploitation often arises in social contexts in which individuals must evaluate fairness, trust, and interpersonal information during financial decisions. We examined whether neural responses to fairness in social versus nonsocial contexts relate to financial exploitation vulnerability and whether these relationships vary with age, emotional intelligence, and affect. A total of 310 adults spanning ages 21-89 completed an fMRI Ultimatum Game in which they accepted or rejected offers from human and computer partners, along with measures of financial exploitation vulnerability, emotional intelligence, and affect. Participants were strongly sensitive to offer fairness, and individual differences in behavioral sensitivity to partner type were associated with social-relative anterior insula responses to unfairness. Greater baseline negative affect was associated with stronger anterior insula differentiation between social and nonsocial fairness. Financial exploitation vulnerability was associated with prefrontal responses to social-relative fairness in ways that depended on individual characteristics: age moderated its association with dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation, whereas emotional intelligence moderated its association with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation. Whole-brain connectivity analyses further showed that age moderated associations between emotional intelligence and executive control network connectivity with posterior cingulate and right temporoparietal regions. These findings suggest that vulnerability to financial exploitation is reflected in how social context is integrated with affective and individual characteristics across adulthood.

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.

Memory faces a fundamental challenge. It has to become flexible enough to be accessed by novel cues without losing the specific information that defines each individual episode. Whether memory transformation solves this problem by sacrificing details or by adaptively expanding retrieval while preserving them is unclear. We tested this by manipulating the match between a memory and its retrieval cue. Participants retrieved object associations after 6, 24 and 48 hours using either the original encoded image or novel exemplars that were more typical or more distinctive of the same object category. Retrieval initially benefited from the originally encoded image, but this advantage was reduced across delay. By 48 hours, a never-seen, more typical exemplar triggered retrieval as effectively as the original one, while the same convergence was not evident for less-typical exemplars. Crucially, such cue expansion was not accompanied by a loss of perceptual specificity. Participants retained access to the originally encoded exemplar across delays, while errors increasingly favoured more typical alternatives. At the item level, stronger episodic memories predicted better access to perceptual detail, but did not predict the tendency of errors for category-like information, which instead increased with delay. This dissociation suggests that memory generalisation and the continued accessibility of visual detail reflect partly separable transformations rather than opposite ends of a single continuum.

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.

While creativity is widely recognized as multifaceted, genome-wide association studies have largely focused on individual measures. Here, we used genomic structural equation modeling of six creativity-related GWASs and identified two latent genetic factors: a general factor and an artistic factor, with 22 and 13 genome-wide significant loci, respectively, nine of which are novel. The general factor was almost perfectly genetically correlated with educational attainment (rg = 0.96), suggesting that it primarily captured genetic influences shared with cognitive and educational processes rather than creativity-specific variation. In contrast, the artistic factor showed only a weak genetic correlation with educational attainment (rg = 0.11) and consistent positive genetic correlations with psychiatric disorders, whereas associations for the general factor were largely null or negative. Biological annotation analyses further identified distinct enrichment patterns unique to the artistic factor, providing initial evidence that different dimensions of creativity may be characterized by partially distinct neurobiological pathways.

Language can be experienced in highly serial form, as in speech, or in fully parallel form, as in text, yet how our brains adapt to differences in seriality is not understood. Here, we held modality constant (visual) and examined whether processing mechanisms underlying grammaticality detection are similar under Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) and Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation (RPVP). To identify shared neural representations of grammaticality, we trained a classifier on magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses to grammatical and ungrammatical three-word phrases in one presentation mode and tested its generalization to the other. Behaviorally, accuracy was higher and reaction times faster for grammatical vs. ungrammatical phrases across presentation modes. Neurally, cross-presentation decoding revealed shared representations of grammaticality at word 2 across train-test directions--albeit with different latencies and durations--and an early shared representation at word 3 when trained on RPVP. We take the bidirectional representations at word 2 to capture distinct but presentation-invariant combinatorial processes and the asymmetry at word 3 as reflecting stronger global structure encoding in RPVP.

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.

Language is vastly ambiguous, yet in context our brains resolve ambiguity effortlessly. This is particularly evident at the lexical level: Although most words can convey a wide range of related meanings, humans rapidly and automatically select the one appropriate for the context. We investigated the neural mechanisms underlying this process by focusing on a case where, intuitively, one meaning appears more basic than another: nouns describing animate entities, such as tiger, which can also refer to representations of those entities when combined with a material modifier, as in plastic tiger. Using magnetoencephalography, we decoded animacy from neural signals and found that even in such cases, our approach revealed no evidence that the tiger in plastic tiger is represented as a sentient animal in any stage of processing. Instead, phrase-level animacy--plastic tiger as inanimate--was decodable as early as 210 ms post-stimulus onset and persisted for several hundred milliseconds. These findings challenge theories assuming a shift from a basic sense of a word to a more derived one, highlighting instead the role of compositional context in shaping word meanings.

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.

While much of the neural and cognitive machinery for visual perception is in place within weeks from birth, we identified and quantified a fundamental difference between infant and adult vision: the temporal rate at which meaningful visual information can be reliably extracted. Using frequency-tagging electroencephalography with rapid serial visual presentation, we found that object categorization at 4 and 9 months is respectively seven times and two to three times slower than in adults. Using quantitative information from infants experiments, we created and presented accelerated visual streams to adults, to match infants perceptual experience. We used deep convolutional neural networks to identify object representations that match those elicited in adults when accelerating the information flow. Results show that acceleration compromises finer-grained object distinction while sparing broad, general object representations. We propose that slow vision is a design feature of early development for preserving and highlighting the most stable and general features of the world.

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.

The development of speech in human children is a protracted process that depends on social experience. From early life, young children produce vocalizations in the presence of others, which affords unique opportunities for feedback about how to communicate successfully. However, for feedback to happen, young childrens speech needs to effect change in the brains of their caregivers. Using dual-brain functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure real-time communication between caregivers and their 2- to 3-year-old children (n = 56), we found that children's vocalizations selectively modulated caregivers' brain activity. Parents' brains showed a rapid response to children's production of speech that was communicatively advanced (multiword utterances) vs. less advanced (babble). The findings imply that if part of learning to talk is figuring out how to get your communication partner to listen, then early conversations likely present continuous opportunities for feedback that guide children toward advances in spoken language.