In adults, cortical regions in the fusiform face area (FFA), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) respond selectively to faces but underlie distinct perceptual and social processes. When do each of these regions, and their distinctive functions, develop? We reviewed recent studies of awake human infants’ cortical responses to faces using functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Exchanges of help in childhood produce many positive consequences, such as increasing academic success, promoting happiness, and fostering positive peer relations. For this reason, caretakers encourage helping behavior early in life, and schools implement intervention programs to nurture children’s prosociality. An often overlooked issue, however, is that providing and receiving help do not always

Social interactions are a ubiquitous part of human life. They are also complex and dynamic, posing a challenge for traditional psychology methods. This article provides an overview of a dynamic systems approach to the study of social interactions that manages this complexity and enables the quantification of interdependence between people. We also discuss key empirical findings that demonstrate how

As people come together in romantic relationships, they tend to merge —to integrate aspects of each other and even create a new unit or entity. This phenomenon has inspired several robust literatures within the field of relationship science, but they have developed within relative isolation of one another. In this article, we put four of those literatures into conversation: merging in the context of

Situation models—mental representations formed during comprehension—have evolved significantly beyond their origin in text-based research. Situation models are now used in accounts of comprehension across various media, including films, comics, and even real-world events. This article reviews four key developments in comprehension research over the past 25 years: grounded cognition, multitext comprehension

Autism has influenced social-cognitive neuroscience in important ways. It has provided the impetus to look for the brain basis of mentalizing and encouraged the search for the brain bases of other social abilities. A fundamental aspect of social interaction is the ability to predict what other agents are going to do. We propose a hierarchy of three worlds—the world of objects, the world of agents,

Scientists have long focused on intrapersonal factors and solitary drinking settings in researching addiction etiology. Yet evidence has accumulated to indicate a key role for social contexts in the development of alcohol use disorder. Here we review four core characteristics of social drinking contexts that are relevant for understanding disordered drinking: prevalence, developmental timing, negative

Speech conveys both linguistic messages and a wealth of social and identity information about a talker. This information arrives as complex variations across many acoustic dimensions. Ultimately, speech communication depends on experience within a language community to develop shared long-term knowledge of the mapping from acoustic patterns to the category distinctions that support word recognition

Temperament traits are early appearing and relatively stable phenotypic profiles of behavior that are present across space and time. This definition invariably reflects the timescale imposed when gathering repeated measures of our variables of interest and our reliance on aggregate, mean-level values. However, if the timescale of observations is shortened and the frequency of observations is increased

Dancing to music is prevalent across human cultures. It is also developmentally precocious—most children display dance-like behaviors before their first birthday. This early emergence precedes a long maturational trajectory with broad individual differences. Here, we survey recent research on dance in infancy and childhood. We propose that investigating early musical movements is useful for understanding

The number of dogs in Western countries has increased over the past 2 decades, whereas the number of children has remained stable or decreased. Many dog owners, including those with children, say that their pets are more important to them than any human. Presumably, the declining fertility rates contribute to the increasing value of dogs in the lives of people, and dogs fill an empty niche. The companion-dog

Many scientists continue to conceive of object detection as occurring in stages that map onto levels in the visual hierarchy. This article reviews experiments suggesting that multiple interpretations and their semantics are activated at high levels before conscious object detection. That more than one interpretation is activated before object detection implies that ambiguity (and not just uncertainty)

Psychology has made great strides in how researchers collect, analyze, and report data, but there has been less attention to improving hypothesis generation. Some researchers still rely on intuition, serendipitous observations, or a limited reading of the literature to come up with a single idea about a relationship between constructs. Although this approach has led to valuable insights, it can constrain

Cascades from culture inform beliefs and norms that guide childrearing, resulting in diverse experiences that shape developmental outcomes. This article explores the influence of cultural beliefs and childrearing practices on infant development, focusing on the traditional gahvora cradling practice in Tajikistan. Cradling in gahvoras involves movement restriction, providing a unique model for investigating

Adolescence is a dynamic period of brain development marked by profound changes in learning, decision-making, and higher order cognition. This article explores how research on the adolescent brain can inform the development of biologically based computational models of learning and behavior. We highlight how computational frameworks such as reinforcement learning and artificial neural networks capture

Early caregiving experiences have strong, persistent links to emotion regulation. In this article we offer a view that the content represented in emotion-regulation neurobiology in part reflects consolidated interpersonal-affective memories abstracted from early caregiving experiences. We suggest that these interpersonal-affective memories, referred to here as “attachment schemas,” are represented

Basic spatial terms such as the English prepositions “in,” “on,” “above,” “below,” “left,” and “right” represent spatial relationships that are encoded in languages of the world and are readily learned by young children. How do children learn these terms, and what are the relative contributions of universal foundations from spatial cognition versus language-specific input? I argue that progress can

Humans are highly efficient in finding objects in their structured, daily-life environments. Behavioral studies have demonstrated that this efficiency is supported by expectations derived from scene context. Here, I review neuroimaging studies that have started to reveal the neural basis of contextual influences on visual search for objects. These studies point to a central role for the object-selective

Research on children’s responses to preventive health behaviors during COVID-19 provides insights of both practical and theoretical importance: Understanding how children reason about preventive behaviors is crucial for developing effective public-health campaigns. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic presented us with a unique natural experiment for examining children’s emerging sociomoral reasoning in

It is often said that much of consumption is “social” in nature, but what does this mean? This article proposes the social congruency framework for differentiating between different types of social consumption experiences—characterizing a consumption experience with respect to congruency with a social partner on up to three dimensions: what, where, and when. Utilizing this social congruency framework

Advances in computer technology have produced a flood of new data sets for understanding human language. However, nearly all of these new data sets are based on written, rather than spoken, language. This means that, despite their importance, open-access data on naturally occurring spoken-language conversations are much more difficult to obtain. The major exception to this is the TalkBank system, which

Many people in many cultures have a spiritual connection with nature. Research is beginning to reveal the implications of this “ecospiritual” orientation for two great challenges of our times: preserving the well-being of the natural environment and of ourselves. This article provides an overview of the current research on ecospirituality, with a focus on its role in supporting, and sometimes inadvertently

Filial piety—children’s respect, duty, and care toward parents—is often misconceptualized despite its role in intergenerational relationships and aging societies globally. We challenge three prevalent misconceptions about filial piety: that it solely involves unwavering obedience to parents, that it exists only in Asian cultures, and that it exclusively concerns caregiving to older adult parents. Drawing

Establishing a causal relationship requires not only the presence of a factor of interest but also the demonstration that the relationship is absent when the factor is absent. Such ideal conditions are rare, especially in observational studies in which creating control conditions is inherently difficult. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its unparalleled disruptions, offers a unique opportunity to isolate

A rich storehouse of semantic or world knowledge is a critical developmental and educational achievement. This article summarizes a research program that elucidates a productive or self-generative means of building this knowledge base, namely, self-derivation of knowledge through the integration of separate yet related episodes of new learning. The article highlights features of the research that lend

Beliefs about the changeable or stable nature of human attributes, that is, growth or fixed mindsets, act as fundamental frameworks guiding social perception. These mindsets are closely allied with other important beliefs that can be used to sustain and justify, or to mitigate, prejudicial attitudes. In this article, we review our program of research linking growth mindsets to prejudice. First, we

There is a pressing need for feasible, scalable interventions that address children’s and adults’ math anxiety and result in enhanced math learning. In this article, we suggest a pathway toward intervention development. First, we consider what is known about the mechanisms of math anxiety. To treat math anxiety, we must understand both how and why math anxiety interferes with mathematical learning

During the past 20 years a number of articles have appeared within a field that has become known as the “science of magic.” This subdiscipline of psychology posits that the ancient art of conjuring can be used to develop psychological theories and knowledge, and more than 150 peer-reviewed articles have now been published. In the current article, we critically evaluate what can be considered as the

People with schizophrenia suffer from hallucinations and delusions as well as from significant cognitive impairments. Working memory is a critical resource for many complex cognitive operations and is a critical area of impairment in schizophrenia. Here we present our hyperfocusing hypothesis, which suggests that an overly narrow and intense focusing of attention may underlie the working memory deficits

A growing body of research documents the positive impact that action video game play has on a range of cognitive skills. Such a result, in which training on one task promotes a broad variety of benefits, is a rarity in the cognitive training domain. Instead, the more typical result is that training on one task promotes benefits on that task alone with only limited transfer to untrained tasks. We have

The prevention of depressive disorders may be an important way to reduce the disease burden. All three types of prevention (universal, selective, and indicated) have potential but also have important limitations. Increasing evidence suggests that universal prevention, aimed at a population, may have no impact on the incidence of depression. Selective prevention, aimed at high-risk groups, is probably

Anti-blackness remains endemic to the U.S. social order. As such, scholars have used theories of anti-blackness to contextualize the harm and violence that many Black youth experience in school settings. In the current article, we discuss the psychological framework of radical healing for communities of color and the Community Healing and Resistance Through Storytelling framework to highlight how schools

Recent years have seen a surge in research on why people fall for misinformation and what can be done about it. Drawing on a framework that conceptualizes truth judgments of true and false information as a signal-detection problem, the current article identifies three inaccurate assumptions in the public and scientific discourse about misinformation: (1) People are bad at discerning true from false

Transformer models of language represent a step change in our ability to account for cognitive phenomena. Although the specific architecture that has garnered recent interest is quite young, many of its components have antecedents in the cognitive science literature. In this article, we start by providing an introduction to large language models aimed at a general psychological audience. We then highlight

An emerging literature on “the psychology of poverty” suggests that the experience of poverty itself has psychological consequences, some of which may make escaping poverty more difficult. We synthesize the evidence base from both psychology and economics using an organizing framework comprising four sets of mechanisms: cognitive function, mental health, beliefs, and preferences. We discuss the strength

Mental health treatments currently available to address racial discrimination for 21 million youth of color are inadequate. Given the nascent but promising mechanisms found within behavioral health interventions via racial socialization, or the process through which children acquire knowledge about race, developing effective and scalable therapeutic strategies to contend with the stress from racism

Any behavior humans can perform, they can performed in an “ostensive” way, that is, overtly attracting attention and providing evidence of meaning. The communicative principle of relevance is a lawlike generalization about ostensive stimuli and hence about human communication. Here I present the principle as a pair of simple and general empirical statements: one on the audience side and one on the

Conspiracy theories have been treated mostly as a homogeneous phenomenon in empirical research. However, to fully understand their causes and consequences, a multifaceted approach to conspiracy theories would be useful. Here, we propose an organizational framework with three facets (groups, ideology, and status) to conceptualize conspiracy theories. Based on a review of recent research, the current

This article spotlights a widespread problem in research and practice: Asians are commonly categorized as a monolithic group in the United States. Regarding research, my 24-year archival analysis of Psychological Science shows that most U.S. studies did not specify which Asian subgroup(s) were examined. Regarding practice, my analysis of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) webpages and latest

The goal of psychological science is to discover truths about human nature, and the typical form of empirical insights is a simple statement of the form x relates to y. We suggest that such “one-liners” imply much larger x- y relationships than those we typically study. Given the multitude of factors that compete and interact to influence any human outcome, small effect sizes should not surprise us

Research on intergroup friendships has historically focused on individuals and dyads. Only recently has research begun to examine intergroup friendship in the context of the broader web of social relationships in which individuals and dyads are embedded. This review highlights emerging research on the role of social networks in intergroup friendship, with a focus on interracial friendship. In particular

Uncertainty has a negative reputation. Not knowing what has happened or is going to happen is typically depicted as undesirable, and people often seek to minimize and avoid it. Research has shown that having a negative attitude toward uncertainty is associated with poor mental health and that certainty seeking can lead to accepting meager rewards and low-quality information. As a remedy for negative

The success of methods based on artificial neural networks in creating intelligent machines seems like it might pose a challenge to explanations of human cognition in terms of Bayesian inference. We argue that this is not the case and that these systems in fact offer new opportunities for Bayesian modeling. Specifically, we argue that artificial neural networks and Bayesian models of cognition lie

Population-level administrative data—data on individuals’ interactions with administrative systems, such as health-care, social-welfare, criminal-justice, and education systems—are a fruitful resource for research into behavior, development, and well-being. However, administrative data are underutilized in psychological science. Here, we review advantages of population-level administrative data for

How do humans build and navigate their complex social world? Standard theoretical frameworks often attribute this success to a foundational capacity to analyze other people’s appearance and behavior to make inferences about their unobservable mental states. Here we argue that this picture is incomplete. Human behavior leaves traces in our physical environment that reveal our presence, our goals, and

Over the last decade, deep neural networks (DNNs) have transformed the state of the art in artificial intelligence. In domains such as language production and reasoning, long considered uniquely human abilities, contemporary models have proven capable of strikingly human-like performance. However, in contrast to classical symbolic models, neural networks can be inscrutable even to their designers,

Multiple models of vision propose that perception involves a process of prediction and verification. Here we argue that real-world statistical regularities—representations that, on average, more quickly make contact with meaning—serve as the basis of these predictions. We show that statistically regular images—those, we argue, that more closely match perceptual predictions—are more readily perceived

The wisdom of the crowd is the finding that aggregating the judgments of many people can lead to surprisingly accurate group judgments. Usually statistical methods are used to aggregate people’s judgments, but there are advantages to using cognitive models instead. Crowd judgments based on cognitive modeling can (a) identify experts and amplify their judgments, (b) provide a representational structure

Associative memory declines with age, and this decline is thought to stem from a decreased ability to form new associations or bind information together. However, a growing body of work suggests that (a) the binding process itself remains relatively intact with age when tested implicitly and (b) older adults form excessive associations (or “hyper-bind”) because of a decreased ability to control attention

Visual working memory is traditionally studied using abstract, meaningless stimuli. Although studies using such simplified stimuli have been insightful in understanding the mechanisms of visual working memory, they also potentially limit our ability to understand how people encode and store conceptually rich and meaningful stimuli in the real world. Recent studies have demonstrated that meaningful

This article provides an overview of a model of psychological well-being put forth over 30 years ago. The intent was to advance new dimensions of positive functioning based on integration of clinical, developmental, existential, and humanistic thinking along with Aristotle’s writings about eudaimonia. The operationalization and validation of the model are briefly described, followed by an overview

Humans need to experience meaning in their lives yet often find it difficult to do so. We argue that, for nonreligious individuals in many Western cultures, the materialist and reductionist ideology that surrounds scientific practice and data may be an impediment to attaining a robust sense of meaning in life. Furthermore, scientific materialism and reductionism may be especially problematic for existential

We introduce the concept of “metajudgment” to provide a framework for understanding folk standards people use to navigate everyday decisions. Defined as a set of metatheories and beliefs about different types of judgment, metajudgment serves as the guiding principle behind the selection and application of reasoning strategies in various contexts. We review emerging studies on metajudgment to identify

We propose that much of modern human behavior can be understood as the outcome of a primitive and implicit desire for social embeddedness (i.e., a desire to belong to a larger, societal-level collective). Research from our lab suggests that people watch television, follow celebrities, and go to concerts and sporting events, at least in part, to fill this need. Connections to other research and implications

Digital technologies, such as mobile devices and wearable sensors, are ingrained in daily life, making them a promising vehicle for delivering health behavior interventions. However, a critical challenge that undermines the utility of digital interventions is the suboptimal engagement of participants, where participant engagement is defined as the investment of physical, cognitive, and affective energies

Names are important signifiers of identity, but for many ethnic minority–group members, names trigger discriminatory responses. Name anglicization (or name whitening) is one proactive response to ward off anticipated discrimination and to signal assimilation. We review evidence suggesting that name anglicization may reduce discrimination (compared with using an original ethnic name), but it burdens

Inequality is perpetuated, in part, by the psychological and behavioral tendencies that arise from the social context of inequality. Cognitive biases lead most people to see themselves as middle class, even when that perception does not align with economic reality. Those who perceive themselves as economically advantaged tend to view inequality as fair and legitimate, often dismissing proponents of

We explore the role of intuitive theories in the cultural evolution of moral cognition, integrating recent work across subfields of psychology and suggesting directions for future research. Focusing on intuitive theories in the moral domain concerning how people judge the moral value of actions and make inferences about moral character, we review evidence that the specific forms these theories take

Environments shape people, and at the same time, people are attracted to environments that fit their characteristics because fit facilitates the achievement of people’s desired life outcomes, such as relationship satisfaction, work success, and well-being. In this article, we outline how persons and environments can fit, the relevance of fit and misfit for different life outcomes, and the benefits

Language models are a rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence with enormous potential to improve our understanding of human cognition. However, many popular language models are cognitively implausible on multiple fronts. For language models to offer plausible insights into human cognitive processing, they should implement a transparent and cognitively plausible learning mechanism, train