Perception and Cognitive Control in Rationally Inattentive Child Behaviour.

Astle, Johnson, and Akarca (2024) and Mani (2024) raise important questions about the representativeness of the theory and neural network model presented in Jones et al. (2024). In response, we briefly lay out future research priorities and the implications of a fully developed theory of rational inattention for how we think about, measure, and respond to individual differences in child development.

Rational inattention: A new theory of neurodivergent information seeking.

This paper presents rational inattention as a new, transdiagnostic theory of information seeking in neurodevelopmental conditions that have uneven cognitive and socio-emotional profiles, including developmental language disorder (DLD), dyslexia, dyscalculia and autism. Rational inattention holds that the optimal solution to minimizing epistemic uncertainty is to avoid imprecise information sources. The key theoretical contribution of this report is to endogenize imprecision, making it a function of the primary neurocognitive difficulties that have been invoked to explain neurodivergent phenotypes, including deficits in auditory perception, working memory, procedural learning and the social brain network.

Bilinguals apply language-specific grain sizes during sentence reading.

Languages differ in the consistency with which they map orthography to phonology, and a large body of work now shows that orthographic consistency determines the style of word decoding in monolinguals. Here, we characterise word decoding in bilinguals whose two languages differ in orthographic consistency, assessing whether they maintain two distinct reading styles or settle on a single 'compromise' reading style. In Experiment 1, Welsh-English bilinguals read cognates and pseudowords embedded in Welsh and English sentences.

Language and transient emotional states affect implicit cultural bias.

Bilinguals react to cultural information in a language-dependent fashion, but it is unknown whether this is influenced by the individual's emotional state. Here, we show that induced mood states increase cultural bias-measured using the Implicit Association Test (IAT)-but this effect occurs asymmetrically across languages. In the native language, bilinguals show a strong cultural bias, which is not influenced by mood.

Abstract images and words can convey the same meaning.

Intuitively, deriving meaning from an abstract image is a uniquely human, idiosyncratic experience. Here we show that, despite having no universally recognised lexical association, abstract images spontaneously elicit specific concepts conveyed by words, with a consistency akin to that of concrete images. We presented a group of naïve participants with abstract picture-word pairs construed as 'related' or 'unrelated' according to a preliminary norming procedure conducted with different participants.

Episodic traces and statistical regularities: Paired associate learning in typical and dyslexic readers.

Learning visual-phonological associations is a key skill underlying successful reading acquisition. However, we are yet to understand the cognitive mechanisms that enable efficient learning in good readers, and those which are aberrant in individuals with developmental dyslexia. Here, we use a repeated cued-recall task to examine how typical and reading-impaired adults acquire novel associations between visual and phonological stimuli, incorporating a looking-at-nothing paradigm to probe implicit memory for target locations.