This commentary critically complements a recentproposal that cognitive science can leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to counter declining literacy. While recognizing the educational potential of LLMs, we highlight a significant trade-off: their inherent design reduces users' direct engagement with written text, undermining deeper literacy skills, especially in young learners. Acknowledging this tension is essential for developing pedagogically sound interventions. Cognitive scientists and educators must jointly anticipate which cognitive capacities may weaken, identify critical skills needed in emerging multimodal contexts, and collaboratively devise instructional strategies to preserve the cognitive benefits humans derive specifically from sustained interaction with written language.

In many real-world settings, people often have to make judgments with incomplete information. Estimating unknown quantities without using precise quantitative modeling and data is called guesstimation, which is often needed in forecasting settings. Furthermore, research in education found that solving guesstimation problems builds general problem-solving skills. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation on how people solve guesstimation problems. We study their problem-solving behavior with think-aloud methods, and we identify solution strategies that are frequently used. In a two-response paradigm, we first ask for gut-feeling answers to guesstimation questions and then allow deliberation before a second answer is given. Comparing the quality of these two answers reveals that deliberation improves the answer quality significantly. In a second experiment, we additionally elicit participants' confidence about their deliberated answers by asking for an entire distribution instead of just a point estimate. We find that participants are generally overconfident in their answers. We discuss guesstimation tasks as suitable test-beds for studying human deliberative judgments in general and in the more specific context of improving forecasting through appropriate artificial intelligencetools.

Abstract This study investigated cross‐cultural differences in visual attention patterns during comic reading, focusing on participants with Japanese and American cultural backgrounds. Using an eye‐tracking paradigm, we examined attention processes as participants viewed pages from American comics and Japanese manga featuring objective or subjective viewpoints. The results showed that for objective pages, American readers exhibited relatively longer fixations on focal objects, while Japanese readers allocated relatively more attention to backgrounds, aligning with analytic versus holistic cognitive styles. By contrast, for subjective materials, Japanese readers demonstrated greater attention to focal objects than American readers did, suggesting that the subjective perspective embedded in manga shifts Japanese readers toward a focal‐object‐oriented attentional style. Individual differences in self‐reported analytic‐holistic cognitive styles and manga reading experience, in addition to cultural background, were associated with attentional patterns for manga. The results underscore the influence of artistic design in shaping visual attention in ways that both mirror and transcend culturally ingrained attentional biases. This study deepens our understanding of cross‐cultural variations in visual processing and comic reading behaviors, providing fresh insights into the complex interplay among culture, cognition, and visual narrative comprehension.

Five-to-six-year-olds' abilities to detect and solve ambiguities in spoken language have been found to be a predictor of their later reading abilities in first-to-third grade. However, the origins of this relationship remain unclear. Success in ambiguity detection may be reflective of overall language attainment, which varies with socioeconomic status (SES) and is known to predict reading. Yet, it is also possible that children's ability to detect ambiguity is explained by domain-general cognitive control skills, which can also vary with SES and predict literacy attainment. In this cross-sectional study, we examined within the same children the contributions of overall language knowledge, SES, and cognitive control skills to their ability to detect ambiguities in speech. Five-to-six-year-old French-learning preschoolers (n=38) performed three different tasks: ambiguity detection, a cognitive control (Flanker/No-Go) task, and standard assessments of vocabulary and oral language comprehension in French (BSEDS). Years of maternal education after the end of high school were used as a proxy of family SES. Individual differences in the ability to detect ambiguity were strongly related to children's cognitive control abilities, as indexed by congruency effects in the Flanker task. No relations with SES or language assessment were observed. These results lend support to the idea that children's reading development may hinge upon their ability to deal effectively with temporary lexical, syntactic, and semantic ambiguities that pervade real-time sentence interpretation and that their ability to deal with representational conflict in speech is reflective of their domain-general cognitive control skills.

The concept of time has long been the subject of complex philosophical reflections and scientific research, which have interpreted it differently based on the starting question, context, and level of analysis of the system under investigation. In the present review, we first explore how time has been studied among different scientific fields such as physics, neuroscience, and bioecological sciences. We emphasize the fundamental role of an organism's ability to perceive the passage of time and dynamically adapt to its environment for survival. Growth, reproduction, and communication processes are subject to spatiotemporal variability, and the sense of time allows organisms to structure their interactions, track past, and anticipate future events. Specifically, building on a relational and multilevel approach, this paper proposes an analysis of various aspects of the temporal dimension of plants—ranging from their growth and adaptation rates to behavioral strategies and modes of communication—culminating in a focused examination of research based on the kinematical analysis of plant movement. By adopting a comparative and critical approach, we raise several questions about the temporality of processes from different perspectives. Further insights into the timing of physiological and communication processes in plants will help to recognize the central role of temporality in life and to discover mechanisms, processes, and behavioral strategies that may be common (or similar) across species or unique (species‐specific) for some organisms, both with and without nervous systems.

Previous psycholinguistic research has demonstrated that sentence processing varies according to both syntactic and discourse context. However, a systematic investigation of how such contexts influence how the processor manages low-level representations of linguistic structure has yet to be carried out. In this paper, we conduct a series of self-paced reading experiments which show how one well-established linguistic measurement-phonotactic distinctions between non-words-varies according to the phonological, syntactic, and discourse context that the non-words appear in. Our results demonstrate that the various types of context that we control for can influence both when and if phonotactic distinctions surface. More broadly, our findings suggest that well-established phonological and psycholinguistic effects may not generalize when tested in largercontexts.

In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to front and behind, followed by left and right. This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by different locative terms. An additional possibility is that children may be delayed in expressing certain spatial meanings partly due to difficulties in discovering the mappings between locative terms in speech and spatial relation they express. We investigate cognitive and mapping difficulties in the domain of spatial language by comparing how children map spatial meanings onto speech versus visually motivated forms in co-speech gesture across different spatial relations. Twenty-four 8-year-old and 23 adult native Turkish-speakers described four-picture displays where the target picture depicted in-on, front-behind, or left-right relations between objects. As the complexity of spatial relations increased, children were more likely to rely on gestures as opposed to speech to informatively express the spatial relation. Adults overwhelmingly relied on speech to informatively express the spatial relation, and this did not change across the complexity of spatial relations. Nevertheless, even when spatial expressions in both speech and co-speech gesture were considered, children lagged behind adults when expressing the most complex left-right relations. These findings suggest that cognitive development and mapping difficulties introduced by the modality of expressions interact in shaping the development of spatial language.

Most Chinese words are compounds formed through the combination of meaningful characters. Yet, due to compositional complexity, it is poorly understood how this combinatorial process affects the access to the whole-word meaning. In the present study, we turned to the recent development in compositional distributional semantics, and employed a deep neural network to learn the less-than-systematic relationship between the constituent characters and the compound words. Based on the compositional representations derived from the computational model, we investigated the combinatorial process in terms of the degree of overlap between the compositional and the lexicalized representations as well as the degree of distinctness of the compositional representation. Analyses of lexical decision and eye-tracking data revealed the effects of both compositional attributes over and above the effects of constituent character features and compound features, indicating an active engagement of the combinatorial process in compound processing. Moreover, with the increase of compound frequency, and thus the increased likelihood that the holistic route prevails, these compositional effects appeared to be dampened. These findings, therefore, provided a computational characterization for the dual-route framework, which sheds light on the universal process of compound comprehension across different languages.