When given a choice, people will avoid cognitively effortful courses of action because the experience of effort is evaluated as aversive and costly. At the same time, a body of work spanning psychology, economics, and neuroscience suggests that goods, actions, and experiences are often evaluated in the context in which they are encountered, rather in absolute terms. To probe the extent to which the evaluation of cognitive effort is also context-dependent, we had participants learn associations between unique stimuli and subjective demand levels across low-demand and high-demand contexts. We probed demand preferences and subjective evaluation using a forced-choice paradigm as well by examining effort ratings, taken both on-line (during learning) and off-line (after choice). When choosing between two stimuli objectively identical in terms of demand, participants showed a clear preference for the stimulus learned in the low- versus high-demand context and rated this stimulus as more subjectively effortful than the low-demand context in on-line but not off-line ratings, suggesting an assimilation effect. Finally, we observed that the extent to which individual participants who exhibited stronger assimilation effects in off-line demand ratings were more likely to manifest an assimilation effect in demand preferences. Broadly, our findings suggest that effort evaluations occur in a context-dependent manner and are specifically assimilated to the broader context in which they occur.

The current study assesses whether varying the encoding context of a repeated event is a potential strategy to improve recognition memory across retrieval contexts. Context variability, also known as encoding variability, has historically been investigated primarily using recall and cued recall tasks, with the consensus being that encoding variability is not necessarily beneficial for episodic retrieval. However, recent studies (see text) suggest that test type may determine the strategy\'s effectiveness. Aligned with these recent findings, we found consistent benefits to simple item recognition when a word was studied in more variable contexts compared to less variable contexts across four experiments. This main effect of context variability occurred when crossed with a manipulation of repetition spacing and when crossed with a manipulation of encoding-retrieval context match. Variation in encoding contexts beyond the future retrieval context led to better item recognition than repeated study exposures within the future retrieval context. We argue that the current study and other recent findings indicate a need to re-evaluate the historical consensus on encoding variability as a beneficial strategy for learning.

School context can shape relative intervention response in myriad ways due to factors, such as instructional quality, resource allocation, peer effects, and correlations between the school context and characteristics of enrolled students (e.g., higher-poverty students attending higher-poverty schools). In the current study, we used data from 16,000 Grade 3 students in a community-based supplemental reading intervention program to investigate the degree to which school context factors (percentage eligible for free/reduced-price lunch [FRPL], school-level achievement) relate to the differences in triannual reading fluency growth rates between students actively receiving supplemental intervention (active recipients) and those that formerly received intervention (and therefore only received general class instruction at this time; former recipients). Using Bayesian multilevel modeling, our findings indicate that school-level FRPL eligibility played a more prominent factor in growth rate differences between these two groups than school-level reading achievement. However, school-level reading achievement was much more strongly related to reading fluency differences between active and former intervention recipients at the beginning of the school year (when controlling for FRPL). Implications for investigating school-level heterogeneity in intervention response and sustainability are discussed.

Decision-making has been observed to be systematically affected by decoys, i.e., options that should be irrelevant, either because unavailable or because manifestly inferior to other alternatives, and yet shift preferences towards their target. Decoy effects have been extensively studied both in humans and in several other species; however, evidence in non-human primates remains scant and inconclusive. To address this gap, this study investigates how choices in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.) are affected by different types of decoys: asymmetrically dominated decoys, i.e., available and unavailable options that are inferior to only one of the other alternatives, and phantom decoys, i.e., unavailable options that are superior to another available alternative. After controlling for the subjective strength of initial preferences and the distance of each decoy from its target in attribute space, results demonstrate a systematic shift in capuchins\' preference towards the target of both asymmetrically dominated decoys (whether they are available or not) and phantom decoys, regardless of what options is being targeted by such decoys. This provides the most comprehensive evidence to date of decoy effects in non-human primates, with important theoretical and methodological implications for future comparative studies on context effects in decision-making.

There is an ongoing debate in the scientific community regarding the nature and role of the mental representations involved in solving arithmetic word problems. In this study, we took a closer look at the interplay between mental representations, drawing production, and strategy choice. We used dual-strategy isomorphic word problems sharing the same mathematical structure, but differing in the entities they mentioned in their problem statement. Due to the non-mathematical knowledge attached to these entities, some problems were believed to lead to a specific (cardinal) encoding compatible with one solving strategy, whereas other problems were thought to foster a different (ordinal) encoding compatible with the other solving strategy. We asked 59 children and 52 adults to solve 12 of those arithmetic word problems and to make a diagram of each problem. We hypothesized that the diagrams of both groups would display prototypical features indicating either a cardinal representation or an ordinal representation, depending on the entities mentioned in the problem statement. Joint analysis of the drawing task and the problem-solving task showed that the cardinal and ordinal features of the diagrams are linked with the hypothesized semantic properties of the problems and, crucially, with the choice of one solving strategy over another. We showed that regardless of their experience, participants\' strategy use depends on their problem representation, which is influenced by the non-mathematical information in the problem statement, as revealed in their diagrams. We discuss the relevance of drawing tasks for investigating mental representations and fostering mathematical development in school.

Musicians display a variety of auditory perceptual benefits relative to people with little or no musical training; these benefits are collectively referred to as the \"musician advantage.\" Importantly, musicians consistently outperform nonmusicians for tasks relating to pitch, but there are mixed reports as to musicians outperforming nonmusicians for timbre-related tasks. Due to their experience manipulating the timbre of their instrument or voice in performance, we hypothesized that musicians would be more sensitive to acoustic context effects stemming from the spectral changes in timbre across a musical context passage (played by a string quintet then filtered) and a target instrument sound (French horn or tenor saxophone; Experiment 1). Additionally, we investigated the role of a musician\'s primary instrument of instruction by recruiting French horn and tenor saxophone players to also complete this task (Experiment 2). Consistent with the musician advantage literature, musicians exhibited superior pitch discrimination to nonmusicians. Contrary to our main hypothesis, there was no difference between musicians and nonmusicians in how spectral context effects shaped instrument sound categorization. Thus, musicians may only outperform nonmusicians for some auditory skills relevant to music (e.g., pitch perception) but not others (e.g., timbre perception via spectral differences).

Historically, understanding human cognition such as action processing has been a challenging issue in cognitive neuropsychology and the more we know about cognition, the more we shape it as a complex, multi-determined phenomenon that is embedded in a social context. The present study aimed at understanding how the social context could influence affordance selection. We hypothesized that affordance selection would be modulated by social context and that a given hand configuration would be considered appropriate or not, as a function of the presence or absence of social context. Twenty-six healthy participants were asked to judge the appropriateness of three variants of 10 hand-object interactions based on photographs presented with or without a visual, social context. In our results, hand configurations were intrinsically acceptable or not, but this effect was modulated by the social context. A three-step model of the influence of social context on affordance selection was proposed, according to which selection depends on social norms, in the form of social knowledge and social context analysis.

In this study, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment to investigate the effects of sentence context and tonal information on spoken word recognition processes in Cantonese Chinese. We recruited 60 native Cantonese listeners to participate in the eye-tracking experiment. The target words (phonologically similar words) were manipulated to either (1) a congruent context or (2) an incongruent context in the experiment. The resulting eye-movement patterns in the incongruent context condition clearly revealed that (1) sentence context produced a garden-path effect in the initial stage of the spoken word recognition processes and then (2) the lexical tone of the word (bottom-up information) overrode the contextual effects to help listeners to discriminate between different similar-sounding words during lexical access. In conclusion, the patterns of eye-tracking data show the interactive processes between the lexical tone (an acoustic cue within a Cantonese word) and sentence context played in different phases to the spoken word recognition of Cantonese Chinese.

UNASSIGNED: Previous experiments purportedly showed that image-based factors like convexity were sufficient for figure assignment. Recently, however, we found that the probability of perceiving a figure on the convex side of a central border was only slightly higher than chance for two-region displays and increased with the number of display regions; this increase was observed only when the concave regions were homogeneously colored. These convex figure context effects (CEs) revealed that figure assignment in these classic displays entails more than a response to local convexity. A Bayesian observer replicated the convex figure CEs using both a convexity object prior and a new, homogeneous background prior and made the novel prediction that the classic displays in which both the convex and concave regions were homogeneous were ambiguous during perceptual organization.
UNASSIGNED: Here, we report three experiments investigating the proposed ambiguity and examining how the convex figure CEs unfold over time with an emphasis on whether they entail recurrent processing. Displays were shown for 100 ms followed by pattern masks after ISIs of 0, 50, or 100 ms. The masking conditions were designed to add noise to recurrent processing and therefore to delay the outcome of processes in which they play a role. In Exp. 1, participants viewed two- and eight-region displays with homogeneous convex regions (homo-convex displays; the putatively ambiguous displays). In Exp. 2, participants viewed putatively unambiguous hetero-convex displays. In Exp. 3, displays and masks were presented to different eyes, thereby delaying mask interference in the thalamus for up to 100 ms.
UNASSIGNED: The results of Exps. 1 and 2 are consistent with the interpretation that recurrent processing is involved in generating the convex figure CEs and resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays. The results of Exp. 3 suggested that corticofugal recurrent processing is involved in resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays and that cortico-cortical recurrent processes play a role in generating convex figure CEs and these two types of recurrent processes operate in parallel. Our results add to evidence that perceptual organization evolves dynamically and reveal that stimuli that seem unambiguous can be ambiguous during perceptual organization.

In recent years, researchers have discovered much about how disgust works, its neural basis, its relationship with immune function, its connection with mating, and some of its antecedents and consequents. Despite these advances in our understanding, an under-explored area is how disgust may be used to serve a communicative function, including how individuals might strategically downplay or exaggerate the disgust display in front of different audiences. Here, we generated two hypotheses about potential communicative functions of disgust, and tested these hypotheses in four countries (Turkey, Croatia, Germany, and Norway). We found no evidence in support of either hypothesis in any country. Discussion focuses on the likely falsity of the two central hypotheses, alternative interpretations of our findings, and directions for future research.