It has been proposed that facial expression production originates in sensory regulation. Here we demonstrate that facial expressions of fear are configured to enhance sensory acquisition. A statistical model of expression appearance revealed that fear and disgust expressions have opposite shape and surface reflectance features. We hypothesized that this reflects a fundamental antagonism serving to augment versus diminish sensory exposure. In keeping with this hypothesis, when subjects posed expressions of fear, they had a subjectively larger visual field, faster eye movements during target localization and an increase in nasal volume and air velocity during inspiration. The opposite pattern was found for disgust. Fear may therefore work to enhance perception, whereas disgust dampens it. These convergent results provide support for the Darwinian hypothesis that facial expressions are not arbitrary configurations for social communication, but rather, expressions may have originated in altering the sensory interface with the physical world.

Quantifier words like EACH, EVERY, ALL and THREE are among the most abstract words in language. Unlike nouns, verbs and adjectives, the meanings of quantifiers are not related to a referent out in the world. Rather, quantifiers specify what relationships hold between the sets of entities, events and properties denoted by other words. When two quantifiers are in the same clause, they create a systematic ambiguity. "Every kid climbed a tree" could mean that there was only one tree, climbed by all, or many different trees, one per climbing kid. In the present study, participants chose a picture to indicate their preferred reading of different ambiguous sentences -those containing EVERY, as well as the other three quantifiers. In Experiment 1, we found large systematic differences in preference, depending on the quantifier word. In Experiment 2, we then manipulated the choice of a particular reading of one sentence, and tested how this affected participants" reading preference on a subsequent target sentence. We found a priming effect for all quantifiers, but only when the prime and target sentences contained the same quantifier. For example, ALL-A sentences prime other ALL-A sentences, while EACH-A primes EACH-A, but sentences with EACH do not prime sentences with ALL or vice versa. In Experiment 3, we ask whether the lack of priming across quantifiers could be due to the two sentences sharing one fewer word. We find that changing the verb between the prime and target sentence does not reduce the priming effect. In Experiment 4, we discover one case where there is priming across quantifiers -when one number (e.g. THREE) is in the prime, and a different one (e.g. FOUR) is in the target. We discuss how these findings relate to linguistic theories of quantifier meaning and what they tell us about the division of labor between conceptual content and combinatorial semantics, as well as the mental representations of quantification and of the abstract logical structure of language.

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Goals fall into two broad types – approach and avoidance. Research on infants’ early goal understanding has focused only on approach goals, usually assuming that infants will encode an ambiguous display where an actor picks one object over another as the actor wanting to approach the former rather than avoid the latter. We investigated infants’ understanding of approach and avoidance separately by presenting 7-month-olds with a hand either consistently approaching, or consistently avoiding, an object. Infants dishabituated to a disruption of the consistent approach pattern, but not of the consistent avoidance pattern. In the second experiment, we show that 14-month-olds, who have a richer understanding of goals, still do not dishabituate when a hand first reaches to and picks up an object it has consistently avoided before. A third experiment found that 7-month-olds successfully dishabituated to the first motion of a previously stationary object when all the objects moved on their own with no hand present, ruling out several low-level interpretations of infants’ failure to dishabituate to the violations of the avoidance pattern in Experiments 1 and 2. We conclude that infants do not represent avoidance from the same type of evidence they can use to represent approach.