Do speakers use less redundant language with more proficient interlocutors? Both the communicative efficiency framework and the language development literature predict that speech directed to younger infants should be more redundant than speech directed to older infants. Here, we test this by quantifying redundancy in infant-directed speech using entropy rate – an information-theoretic measure reflecting average degree of repetitiveness. While IDS is often described as repetitive, entropy rate provides a novel holistic measure of redundancy in this speech genre. Using two developmental corpora, we compare entropy rates of samples taken from different ages. We find that parents use less redundant speech when talking to older children, illustrating an effect of perceived interlocutor proficiency on redundancy. The developmental decrease in redundancy reflects a decrease in lexical repetition, but also a decrease in repetitions of multi-word sequences, highlighting the importance of larger sequences in early language learning.

“Or” is associated, in Gricean approaches, with the readings Inclusive (“at least one, and possibly both, options are true”) and Exclusive (“exactly one option is true”). Empirical findings show adults favoring Exclusive readings; but for children, the literature yields puzzling results. Laboratory comprehension tasks suggest children favor Inclusive, but naturalistic evidence suggests children’s “or” productions are overwhelmingly Exclusive. We first identify problems with previous research. Methodologically, asking children to provide truth judgements (the dominant experimental task) is not a child-friendly task. And theoretically, Inclusive and Exclusive are not optimal categories for classifying “or” readings. To resolve the comprehension-production puzzle, we adopt Ariel and Mauri’s richer analytic classification of “or” constructions, where Inclusive and Exclusive as such are not speaker-intended readings, and there are several, rather than one, “single-option” (Exclusive) readings. We apply this framework in analyzing the Berman corpus of Hebrew child language; and in designing a new, more ecologically valid, experimental task. Study 1 shows that in child-directed-speech, one specific Exclusive “or” construction, Choice Immediate (e.g., ↗Chocolates? Or ↘jelly beans?), is (i) the single dominant “or” function addressed to children, (ii) the one “or” reading children consistently respond appropriately to, and (iii) virtually the only “or” construction children produce. In Study 2, we present young children with a task involving this familiar “or” construction. The children respond with adult-like mastery even in the absence of a supporting context. These empirical findings argue for a usage-based account of how children acquire “or”.

People continuously track and adjust their behavior using external and internal signals. Autistic individuals manifest reduced sensorimotor error correction and slower updating of perceptual priors, yielding reduced behavioral flexibility. A potential reason for this reduced flexibility is a lessened sensitivity to both external and internal feedback. A key brain region involved in online monitoring of behavior and updating world models, known to be atypically activated in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). During a two-tone pitch discrimination task, we used EEG to track ASD participants9 ACC response dynamics, as manifested in their feedback-related negativity (FRN) component produced following "incorrect" feedback. We found that the FRN is missing in more than half of the ASD (17/30) participants, while clearly present in almost all non-autistics (33/35). Moreover, only in non-autistics, feedback affected performance in the following trial. Their responses were slower following an erred trial, their accuracy was improved following hard and correct trials, and they were more affected by the perceptual priors following easy and correct trials. Non-autistics9 EEG response to feedback was also sensitive to trial difficulty, while the EEG response of ASD participants was not. Overall, we observed EEG and behavioral correlates of reduced sensitivity to both external and internal feedback in ASD. These observations suggest that increasing the salience of the external feedback could improve ASDs9 error monitoring and perhaps increase their behavioral flexibility.

It has been suggested that, prior to a saccade, visual neurons predictively respond to stimuli that will fall in their receptive fields after completion of the saccade. This saccadic remapping process is thought to compensate for the shift of the visual world across the retina caused by eye movements. To map the timing of this predictive process in the brain, we recorded neural activity using electroencephalography during a saccade task. Human participants (male and female) made saccades between two fixation points while covertly attending to oriented gratings briefly presented at various locations on the screen. Data recorded during trials in which participants maintained fixation were used to train classifiers on stimuli in different positions. Subsequently, data collected during saccade trials were used to test for the presence of remapped stimulus information at the post-saccadic retinotopic location in the peri-saccadic period, providing unique insight into when remapped information becomes available. We found that the stimulus could be decoded at the remapped location ∼180 ms post-stimulus onset, but only when the stimulus was presented 100–200 ms before saccade onset. Within this range, we found that the timing of remapping was dictated by stimulus onset rather than saccade onset. We conclude that presenting the stimulus immediately before the saccade allows for optimal integration of the corollary discharge signal with the incoming peripheral visual information, resulting in a remapping of activation to the relevant post-saccadic retinotopic neurons.

Across languages, speech unfolds in the same temporal order, constrained by the forward flow of time. But the way phonology is spatially mapped onto orthography is language-specific, ranging from left-to-right, right-to-left, and top-to-bottom, among others. While the direction of writing systems influences how known words are visually processed, it is unclear whether it influences learning and memory for novel orthographic regularities. The present study tested English and Hebrew speakers on an orthographic word-referent mapping task in their native orthographies (written left-to-right and right-to-left, respectively), where the onsets and offsets of words were equally informative cues to word identity. While all individuals learned orthographic word-referent mappings significantly above chance, the parts of the word that were most strongly represented varied. English monolinguals false alarmed most to competing foils that began with the same bigram as the target, representing word onsets most strongly. However, Hebrew bilinguals trained on their native orthography showed no difference between false alarm rates to onset and offset competitors, representing the beginning and ends of words equally strongly. Importantly, Hebrew bilinguals tested on English words displayed a more English-like false alarm pattern (although not a full switch) suggesting that memory biases adapt to the opposite directionality of encountered text while retaining traces of native language biases. These findings demonstrate that experience with different writing systems influences how individuals represent novel orthographic words, starting in the earliest stages of learning.

Drug treatments for pain often do not outperform placebo, and a better understanding of placebo mechanisms is needed to improve treatment development and clinical practice. In a large-scale fMRI study (N = 392) with pre-registered analyses, we tested whether placebo analgesic treatment modulates nociceptive processes, and whether its effects generalize from conditioned to unconditioned pain modalities. Placebo treatment caused robust analgesia in conditioned thermal pain that generalized to unconditioned mechanical pain. However, placebo did not decrease pain-related fMRI activity in brain measures linked to nociceptive pain, including the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS) and spinothalamic pathway regions, with strong support for null effects in Bayes Factor analyses. In addition, surprisingly, placebo increased activity in some spinothalamic regions for unconditioned mechanical pain. In contrast, placebo reduced activity in a neuromarker associated with higher-level contributions to pain, the Stimulus Intensity Independent Pain Signature (SIIPS), and affected activity in brain regions related to motivation and value, in both pain modalities. Individual differences in behavioral analgesia were correlated with neural changes in both modalities. Our results indicate that cognitive and affective processes primarily drive placebo analgesia, and show the potential of neuromarkers for separating treatment influences on nociception from influences on evaluative processes.

The formation of predictions is essential to our ability to build models of the world and use them for intelligent decision-making. Here we challenge the dominant assumption that humans form only forward predictions, which specify what future events are likely to follow a given present event. We demonstrate that in some environments, it is more efficient to use backward prediction, which specifies what present events are likely to precede a given future event. This is particularly the case in diverging environments, where possible future events outnumber possible present events. Correspondingly, in six preregistered experiments (n = 1,299) involving both simple decision-making and more challenging planning tasks, we find that humans engage in backward prediction in divergent environments and use forward prediction in convergent environments. We thus establish that humans adaptively deploy forward and backward prediction in the service of efficient decision-making.

Adequate pain treatment is critical for patients’ physical and mental health. It is therefore essential that healthcare providers extend the appropriate treatment to each and every patient in pain. Here we build on findings showing that due to psychological stereotypes, females’ pain tends to be judged as less intense than males’ pain. We investigate whether medical decision makers give less pain treatment to female than to male patients. To answer this question, we analyze medical datasets on patients arriving with pain complaints at emergency departments in two countries (N = 21,851). In both countries, we find that physicians are 15-20% less likely to prescribe pain-relief medications to females than to males. This sex disparity remains significant even after adjusting for patients’ reported pain score, and for numerous patient, physician and emergency department variables. The disparity is observed among both male and female physicians. It is also reflected in additional pain management measures: nurses are about 10% less likely to record pain scores for female than for male patients, and female patients wait about 30 minutes longer for discharge from the emergency department. A controlled experiment supports the suggested mechanism, demonstrating via a clinical vignette that nurses (N=109) judge females’ pain as less intense than that of males. The findings provide converging evidence for a bias against female patients in real-life pain management decisions. We discuss the troubling societal and medical implications of this bias, and call for policy interventions to ensure equal pain treatment.

The decline in intergroup relations evident in myriad conflicts around the world has far-reaching implications: it erodes trust and cooperation at both the individual and societal levels, hinders effective societal functioning and threatens the well-being of individuals living in such contexts. In response, researchers have developed evidence-based interventions aimed at improving intergroup relations and cultivating societies that are more inclusive, tolerant and peaceful. However, a ‘one intervention fits all’ approach persists. In this Review, we consolidate research from four domains in social psychology (prejudice reduction, conflict resolution, intergroup reconciliation and affective polarization) to elucidate the critical features necessary for successful intergroup interventions. Specifically, we consider the importance of identifying meaningful intervention goals (what), crucial characteristics of intervention recipients (who) and key contextual features (where) for optimizing interventions. We also describe how motivation and conformity might present barriers to the successful implementation of intergroup interventions in the real world and we suggest ways to overcome these challenges. A thorough understanding of the features that influence intervention outcomes will enable effective personalization and contextualization of existing interventions and development of new ones.

Dyslexia, a specific difficulty in acquiring proficient reading, is also characterized by reduced short-term memory (STM) capacity. Extensive research indicates that individuals with developmental dyslexia (IDDs) benefit less from exposure, and this hampers their long-term knowledge accumulation. It is well established that long-term knowledge has a great effect on performance in STM tasks, and thus IDDs’ reduced benefit of exposure could potentially reduce their relative performance in such tasks, especially when frequent items, such as digit-words, are used. In this study we used a standard, widely used, STM assessment: the Digit Span subtest from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. The task was conducted twice: in native language and in second language. As exposure to native language is greater than exposure to second language, we predicted that IDDs’ performance in the task administered in native language will reveal a larger group difference as compared to second language, due to IDDs’ reduced benefit of item frequency. The prediction was confirmed, in line with the hypothesis that reduced STM in dyslexia to a large extent reflects reduced benefits from long-term item frequency and not a reduced STM per se.