Previous studies show that word learning from context can be intrinsically rewarding, even in the absence of external feedback or incentives. Intrinsic reward activates the brain's reward-memory circuit, leading to enhanced memory for words people enjoyed learning. Existing studies have tested the link between contextual word learning and reward in the written domain (i.e., through reading). However, word learning from context often occurs in the oral domain, where conversations provide a rich source for acquiring vocabulary in both first and second language learning. In this online behavioral study, we investigate whether word learning triggers enjoyment across modalities, focusing on listening, reading, and listening and reading in combination. In all the modalities, we found that when words are successfully learned from context, people report greater levels of enjoyment. We also found that words that were associated with higher enjoyment during learning were recognised more accurately than those associated with lower enjoyment 24 hours later. Our results demonstrate the relevance of intrinsic reward for language learning and suggest that the link between contextual word learning and reward operates on higher-level word representations, rather than on modality-specific ones.

Cognitive control is a prerequisite for achieving goals in daily life. Miyake et al. (2000) distinguished three separable but correlated cognitive control functions in young adults: inhibition, shifting, and updating. This three-factor model was later adapted to a bi-factor model with a common factor and separate updating and shifting factors. Over the years, these models have been replicated in various young adult samples. However, other studies have failed to confirm these models. Furthermore, the variety of tasks used in these studies hampers replication of the underlying factor structure of cognitive control. The primary goal of this study was to address this issue of replicability by validating the factor structure of cognitive control functions using a new test battery based on often-used tasks, while offering full transparency about each step in the analysis process. This test battery comprises nine behavioral tasks measuring inhibition, shifting and updating. The factor structure was assessed in 247 young adults (84.21% female). Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to test the one-factor model with a common cognitive control function, the three-factor model with separate but correlated cognitive control functions, and the bi-factor model. Our findings supported the three-factor model with correlated cognitive control functions as the best-fitting model, despite some fit indices yielding mixed evidence. Additionally, the test battery in this study is offered as an open-source and easily accessible resource. Finally, we offer a critical look on the field and provide recommendations for future use and adaptations of this test battery to increase its broad applicability.

Humans are strategic animals. We constantly make prospective choices, allocating limited resources in situations of uncertain, future outcomes. The management of our finite monthly budget, financial investments, or the allocation of time to the different questions in an exam are just a few examples. In these scenarios, both decision-making and resource allocation tend to fluctuate over time even under invariable set of constraints. However, it is unclear whether these fluctuations affect performance and whether they underlie additional objectives beyond pure reward maximisation. We address these questions using the breadth-depth dilemma, a novel ecological protocol where participants engage in sequential multiple-choice scenarios characterised by limited capacity. We designed two experimental environments. In one environment, optimal performance, formalised with an ideal allocator model, is associated with homogeneous resource allocation across consecutive choices. In contrast, the other environment entails that fluctuating resource allocation leads to greater expected rewards. Our study evaluates participants’ adherence to these scenarios and measures fluctuations as deviation from homogeneous allocations. The results revealed that participants’ behaviour fluctuates more than optimal, but critically, behavioural fluctuations adapt to the available capacity and the environmental context. Moreover, our findings unveil pronounced sequential strategies, such as save-for-later and reward history-dependent choice, further implying that these strategies contribute to decision variability. An extension of the optimal allocator model demonstrates that the characteristic excess fluctuations facilitate better-informed future choices (information gain), reduce uncertainty (risk avoidance), and generate diverse potential strategies (entropy seeking). Although having a modest impact on performance, these strategies may reflect advantageous behaviours in the long run under ever changing real-world environments.

Features of word form (e.g., the vowel i as in meet) are associated with word meaning (e.g., positive valence), termed sound symbolism. Experimentally, sound symbolism is predominantly examined using pseudo-words. The present research employs a new experimental paradigm where participants are shown faces and are asked to choose a suitable name from memory for each face. In two experiments (total N = 399), we tested whether valence (manipulated via facial expressions, Experiment 1a, or likability, Experiment 1b) influences the occurrence of i-phonemes and o-phonemes in first names. To test convergent validity, a corpus analysis (Study 2) examined the association of likability and the occurrence of i-phonemes and o-phonemes using a representative corpus of German first names. Consistent with previous findings, names given to positively (vs. negatively) valenced faces more frequently contained i-phonemes, whereas, unexpectedly, valence did not influence o-phoneme occurrence. Thus, the naming paradigm bridges the gap between controlled pseudo-word experiments and the natural use of real names and can be employed to examine whether sound symbolic associations are stable enough to generalize to meaningful words.

Feeling of agency (FoA)—the experience of controlling one’s actions and their outcomes—has been widely studied for bodily movements. Here, we investigated if microsaccades—small ballistic eye movements—are equally characterized by FoA and if intention mediates this sense of control. We measured FoA via intentional binding, a perceived compression between an action and its effect. In our experiments, we presented a vertically oriented grating, rendered invisible during stable fixation by a rapid temporal phase shift (>60 Hz) that became visible when its retinal motion was slowed down by a microsaccade (active condition). The stimulus was embedded in a clock face and observers reported perceived stimulus timing in each trial. Perceived timing of microsaccade-contingent stimulus perception was compared to the replay of a previous microsaccade’s retinal consequence (replay condition). Trials without a stimulus were included as a control. To examine the role of intention, we tested this paradigm across two experiments in which observers were either instructed to saccade (intended microsaccades) or fixate (unintended microsaccades). In Experiment 2, no instruction was administered such that any microsaccades were considered spontaneous. Microsaccades—either actively generated or replayed—consistently rendered the stimulus highly visible compared to trials without such movements—provided microsaccade direction and peak velocity aligned with the stimulus’s motion. Temporal estimates did not differ between the active and replay conditions for any microsaccade type. This result suggests the absence of temporal binding between eye movements and their sensory consequences, and that intention does not facilitate FoA for small eye movements.Significance StatementEye movements reflect our decision to closer inspect an aspect of the environment—bodily actions that align our perception with a preceding intention. Here, we investigated if microsaccades—a ballistic, minuscule type of saccade—can be characterized by a feeling of agency: the faint experience of affecting change through intentional actions. In two experiments, we presented an identical stimulus whose visibility was either gaze-contingent (active condition) or independent of eye movements (replay condition). In Experiment 1, we directly compared intended and unintended microsaccades and contrasted them with spontaneous microsaccades in Experiment 2. We found no difference between the active and replay condition for either eye movement type. Our data, hence, does not support feeling of agency for microsaccades. While it remains an open question if large saccades are characterized by feeling of agency, our finding demonstrates that intention is not sufficient to elicit feeling of agency for minuscule motor acts.

The development of robust frameworks to understand how the human brain represents conscious and unconscious perceptual contents is paramount to make progress in the neuroscience of consciousness. Recent functional MRI studies using multi-voxel pattern classification analyses showed that unconscious contents could be decoded from brain activity patterns. However, decoding does not imply a full understanding of neural representations. Here we re-analysed data from a high-precision fMRI study coupled with representational similarity analysis based on convolutional neural network models to provide a detailed information-based approach to neural representations of both unconscious and conscious perceptual content. The results showed that computer vision model representations strongly predicted brain responses in ventral visual cortex and in fronto-parietal regions to both conscious and unconscious contents. Moreover, this pattern of results generalised when the models were trained and tested with different participants. Remarkably, these observations results held even when the analysis was restricted to observers that showed null perceptual sensitivity. In light of the highly distributed brain representation of unconscious information, we suggest that the functional role of fronto-parietal cortex in conscious perception is unlikely to be related to the broadcasting of information, as proposed by the global neuronal workspace theory, and may instead relate to the generation of meta-representations as proposed by higher-order theories.

Executing go/no-go and approach/avoidance responses toward objects can increase people's choices of go over no-go items, and of approach over avoidance items. Some theoretical accounts explain these effects as the results of merely executing these responses (i.e., action execution), while others propose that these choice effects stem from interpreting these motor responses as valenced actions (i.e., action interpretation). To test the role of action execution versus action interpretation in both go/no-go and approach/avoidance responses, we employed a recently developed training that combined both dimensions orthogonally. Participants either pressed a key or not (i.e., go/no-go) to control a shopping cart on screen, to either collect or not collect certain food items (i.e., approach/avoidance). After the training, they repeatedly chose between food items (i.e., candies) for real consumption. When the instructions framed the responses as approach/avoidance actions, participants (N = 98) preferred approach items over avoidance items, but did not show preferences between go and no-go items in their choices. In contrast, when the instructions framed the responses as go/no-go actions, participants (N = 98) preferred go items over no-go items, but did not show preferences between approach and avoidance items. Despite making the same actual responses in both instruction groups, action interpretation determined whether go/no-go or approach/avoidance actions influenced food choice. Disambiguating the interpretation of motor responses as clearly valenced and meaningful actions may therefore be a fruitful way to maximize the effectiveness of response-based behavioral interventions.

We examined long-term contingency learning (CL) in a color classification task with two separate sets of non-overlapping color-word contingencies that were employed in alternating blocks of the task ("alternating blocks paradigm"). Analyzing only the first occurrences of the word distractors in each block provides a pure indicator of long-term CL that is free from recency-based episodic retrieval processes. A high-powered (n = 110), pre-registered study revealed evidence for reliable long-term color-word CL. This long-term CL effect depended on contingency awareness, indicating that genuine long-term CL is influenced by propositional knowledge.

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a location repetition cost typically observed when signaling the detection of or localizing sequentially presented stimuli repeating or changing their location. In discrimination tasks, however, IOR is often reduced or even absent; here, effects of binding and retrieval are thought to take place. Information is bound into an event file, which upon feature repetition causes retrieval, leading to partial repetition costs. It is assumed that the presence of retrieval-based effects masks the observation of IOR. Yet, some evidence suggests that long intervals between stimuli can lead to IOR in tasks in which usually mostly binding effects are observed. We hypothesized that with an increasing interval between prime response and probe onset (response stimulus interval, RSI), event files will decay and decreasingly mask IOR. In turn, IOR should be strongest at longest intervals. In the current study, participants discriminated the color of stimuli repeating or changing their location. Crucially, we varied the RSI from 500 ms to 3000 ms, trial-wise (Experiment 1) and block-wise (Experiment 2). We observed overall binding effects that were reduced with increasing RSI; these effects were slightly stronger when presented block-wise. IOR was overall absent (Experiment 1) or weak (Experiment 2) and did not emerge with increasing RSI. While event file decay took place, it did not unleash IOR. Rather, these results suggest that retrieval-based effects do not simply mask but overwrite IOR when manually responding. The observations of IOR with long intervals are discussed in the context of overall fast responding.

The dissociation between conscious and unconscious perception is one of the most relevant issues in the study of human cognition. While there is evidence suggesting that some stimuli might be unconsciously processed up to its meaning (e.g., high-level stimulus processing), some authors claim that most results on the processing of subliminal stimuli can be explained by a mixture of methodological artefacts and questionable assumptions about what can be considered non-conscious. Particularly, one of the most controversial topics involves the method by which the awareness of the stimuli is assessed. To address this question, we introduced an integrative approach to assess the extent to which masked hierarchical stimuli (i.e., global shapes composed of local elements) can be processed in the absence of awareness. We combined a priming task where participants had to report global or local shapes, with the use of subjective and objective awareness measures collected either in a separate block (offline), or trial-by-trial during the main task (online). The unconscious processing of the masked primes was then evaluated through two different novel model-based methods: a Bayesian and a General Recognition Theory modeling approach. Despite the high correlation between awareness measures, our results show that the use of alternative approaches based on different theoretical assumptions leads to diverging conclusions about the extent of the unconscious processing of the masked primes.