Humans often have an intuitive sense of whether they made the right decision or not -- our sense of confidence. In studies on metacognitive faculties, confidence is most often assessed explicitly, by asking participants how confident they are in their response being correct. While we can explicitly report our confidence, implicit methods of…

There is mounting empirical evidence to suggest that adults are intuitively cooperative. When presented with a cooperative dilemma between self-maximizing and benefitting the common good, decisions made quickly are more likely to be cooperative, whereas slow decisions tend to favor self-interest. To investigate the ontogenetic origins of intuitive…

The present study examined how narcissistic features, self-assessed lie- and truth-related abilities, and thinking processing style influence successful lying and convincing truth-telling. To this end, 100 undergraduate students completed the NPI, REI, and LTAAS questionnaires and drew two drawings each. They then presented to a panel of four…

The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun…

Sleep fosters the generation of explicit knowledge. Whether sleep also benefits implicit intuitive decisions about underlying patterns is unclear. We examined sleep's role in explicit and intuitive semantic coherence judgments. Participants encoded sets of three words and after a sleep or wake period were required to judge the potential…

There is emerging evidence that collocation use plays a primary role in determining various dimensions of L2 oral proficiency assessment and development. The current study presents the results of three experiments which examined the relationship between the degree of association in collocation use (operationalized as t scores and mutual…

These studies examined the role of ontological beliefs about category boundaries in early categorization. Study 1 found that preschool-age children (N = 48, aged 3-4 years old) have domain-specific beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries; children judged the boundaries of natural kind categories (animal species, human gender) as discrete…

People have strong intuitions about the influence objects exert upon one another when they collide. Because people's judgments appear to deviate from Newtonian mechanics, psychologists have suggested that people depend on a variety of task-specific heuristics. This leaves open the question of how these heuristics could be chosen, and how to…

It has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones. The authors argue that these findings might be due not to limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information search imposed by the commonly used experimental…