-
The Role of Feedback in the Statistical Learning of Language‐Like Regularities Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Felicity F. Frinsel, Fabio Trecca, Morten H. Christiansen
In language learning, learners engage with their environment, incorporating cues from different sources. However, in lab‐based experiments, using artificial languages, many of the cues and features that are part of real‐world language learning are stripped away. In three experiments, we investigated the role of positive, negative, and mixed feedback on the gradual learning of language‐like statistical
-
-
Cognitive Science From the Perspective of Linguistic Diversity Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Yoolim Kim, Annika Tjuka
This letter addresses two issues in language research that are important to cognitive science: the comparability of word meanings across languages and the neglect of an integrated approach to writing systems. The first issue challenges generativist claims by emphasizing the importance of comparability of data, drawing on typologists’ findings about different languages. The second issue addresses the
-
Integrating Social Cognition Into Domain‐General Control: Interactive Activation and Competition for the Control of Action (ICON) Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Robert Ward, Richard Ramsey
Social cognition differs from general cognition in its focus on understanding, perceiving, and interpreting social information. However, we argue that the significance of domain‐general processes for controlling cognition has been historically undervalued in social cognition and social neuroscience research. We suggest much of social cognition can be characterized as specialized feature representations
-
The Information‐Processing Perspective on Categorization Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-02-25 Manolo Martínez
Categorization behavior can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the trade‐off between as high as possible faithfulness in the transmission of information about samples of the classes to be categorized, and as low as possible transmission costs for that same information. The kinds of categorization behaviors we associate with conceptual atoms, prototypes, and exemplars emerge naturally as a result of
-
How Prior Knowledge, Gesture Instruction, and Interference After Instruction Interact to Influence Learning of Mathematical Equivalence Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-02-25 Susan Wagner Cook, Elle M. D. Wernette, Madison Valentine, Mary Aldugom, Todd Pruner, Kimberly M. Fenn
Although children learn more when teachers gesture, it is not clear how gesture supports learning. Here, we sought to investigate the nature of the memory processes that underlie the observed benefits of gesture on lasting learning. We hypothesized that instruction with gesture might create memory representations that are particularly resistant to interference. We investigated this possibility in a
-
Determining the Relativity of Word Meanings Through the Construction of Individualized Models of Semantic Memory Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-02-25 Brendan T. Johns
Distributional models of lexical semantics are capable of acquiring sophisticated representations of word meanings. The main theoretical insight provided by these models is that they demonstrate the systematic connection between the knowledge that people acquire and the experience that they have with the natural language environment. However, linguistic experience is inherently variable and differs
-
The Icing on the Cake. Or Is it Frosting? The Influence of Group Membership on Children's Lexical Choices Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Thomas St. Pierre, Jida Jaffan, Craig G. Chambers, Elizabeth K. Johnson
Adults are skilled at using language to construct/negotiate identity and to signal affiliation with others, but little is known about how these abilities develop in children. Clearly, children mirror statistical patterns in their local environment (e.g., Canadian children using zed instead of zee), but do they flexibly adapt their linguistic choices on the fly in response to the choices of different
-
Calculated Comparisons: Manufacturing Societal Causal Judgments by Implying Different Counterfactual Outcomes Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Jamie Amemiya, Gail D. Heyman, Caren M. Walker
How do people come to opposite causal judgments about societal problems, such as whether a public health policy reduced COVID-19 cases? The current research tests an understudied cognitive mechanism in which people may agree about what actually happened (e.g., that a public health policy was implemented and COVID-19 cases declined), but can be made to disagree about the counterfactual, or what would
-
Spontaneous Eye Blinks Map the Probability of Perceptual Reinterpretation During Visual and Auditory Ambiguity Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Supriya Murali, Barbara Händel
Spontaneous eye blinks are modulated around perceptual events. Our previous study, using a visual ambiguous stimulus, indicated that blink probability decreases before a reported perceptual switch. In the current study, we tested our hypothesis that an absence of blinks marks a time in which perceptual switches are facilitated in- and outside the visual domain. In three experiments, presenting either
-
Putting it Together, Together Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Chen Zheng, Barbara Tversky
People are not as fast or as strong as many other creatures that evolved around us. What gives us an evolutionary advantage is working together to achieve common aims. Coordinating joint action begins at a tender age with such cooperative activities as alternating babbling and clapping games. Adult joint activities are far more complex and use multiple means of coordination. Joint action has attracted
-
The Keys to the Future? An Examination of Statistical Versus Discriminative Accounts of Serial Pattern Learning Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Fabian Tomaschek, Michael Ramscar, Jessie S. Nixon
Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences—and the relations between the elements they comprise—are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the learning of sequences are rarely investigated. We present
-
Modeling Magnitude Discrimination: Effects of Internal Precision and Attentional Weighting of Feature Dimensions Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Emily M. Sanford, Chad M. Topaz, Justin Halberda
Given a rich environment, how do we decide on what information to use? A view of a single entity (e.g., a group of birds) affords many distinct interpretations, including their number, average size, and spatial extent. An enduring challenge for cognition, therefore, is to focus resources on the most relevant evidence for any particular decision. In the present study, subjects completed three tasks—number
-
Evaluative Deflation, Social Expectations, and the Zone of Moral Indifference Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Pascale Willemsen, Lucien Baumgartner, Bianca Cepollaro, Kevin Reuter
Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated
-
Hand Gestures Have Predictive Potential During Conversation: An Investigation of the Timing of Gestures in Relation to Speech Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Marlijn ter Bekke, Linda Drijvers, Judith Holler
During face-to-face conversation, transitions between speaker turns are incredibly fast. These fast turn exchanges seem to involve next speakers predicting upcoming semantic information, such that next turn planning can begin before a current turn is complete. Given that face-to-face conversation also involves the use of communicative bodily signals, an important question is how bodily signals such
-
A Computational Approach to Identifying Cultural Keywords Across Languages Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Zheng Wei Lim, Harry Stuart, Simon De Deyne, Terry Regier, Ekaterina Vylomova, Trevor Cohn, Charles Kemp
Distinctive aspects of a culture are often reflected in the meaning and usage of words in the language spoken by bearers of that culture. Keywords such as душа (soul) in Russian, hati (heart) in Indonesian and Malay, and gezellig (convivial/cosy/fun) in Dutch are held to be especially culturally revealing, and scholars have identified a number of such keywords using careful linguistic analyses (Peeters
-
Predicting Hand Movements With Distributional Semantics: Evidence From Mouse-Tracking Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Daniele Gatti, Marco Marelli, Luca Rinaldi
Although mouse-tracking has been taken as a real-time window on different aspects of human decision-making processes, whether purely semantic information affects response conflict at the level of motor output as measured through mouse movements is still unknown. Here, across two experiments, we investigated the effects of semantic knowledge by predicting participants’ performance in a standard keyboard
-
Scientists Invent New Hypotheses, Do Brains? Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Nir Fresco, Lotem Elber-Dorozko
How are new Bayesian hypotheses generated within the framework of predictive processing? This explanatory framework purports to provide a unified, systematic explanation of cognition by appealing to Bayes rule and hierarchical Bayesian machinery alone. Given that the generation of new hypotheses is fundamental to Bayesian inference, the predictive processing framework faces an important challenge in
-
Thought Experiments as an Error Detection and Correction Tool Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Igor Bascandziev
The ability to recognize and correct errors in one's explanatory understanding is critically important for learning. However, little is known about the mechanisms that determine when and under what circumstances errors are detected and how they are corrected. The present study investigated thought experiments as a potential tool that can reveal errors and trigger belief revision in the service of error
-
When Good Intention Goes Away: Social Feedback Modulates the Influence of Outcome Valence on Temporal Binding Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Yunyun Chen, Hong He, Xintong Zou, Xuemin Zhang
The retrospective view of temporal binding (TB), the temporal contraction between one's actions and their effects, proposes that TB is influenced by what happens after the action. However, the role of the interaction between multiple sources of information following the action in the formation of TB has received limited attention. The current study aims to address this gap by investigating the combined
-
Does Lexical Coordination Affect Epistemic and Practical Trust? The Role of Conceptual Pacts Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Mélinda Pozzi, Adrian Bangerter, Diana Mazzarella
The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of “conceptual pacts,” or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task
-
Relevance and the Role of Labels in Categorization Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-26 Felix Gervits, Megan Johanson, Anna Papafragou
Language has been shown to influence the ability to form categories. Nevertheless, in most prior work, the effects of language could have been bolstered by the fact that linguistic labels were introduced by the experimenter prior to the categorization task in ways that could have highlighted their relevance for the task. Here, we compared the potency of labels to that of other non-linguistic cues on
-
Consistency and Variation in Reasoning About Physical Assembly Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-25 William P. McCarthy, David Kirsh, Judith E. Fan
The ability to reason about how things were made is a pervasive aspect of how humans make sense of physical objects. Such reasoning is useful for a range of everyday tasks, from assembling a piece of furniture to making a sandwich and knitting a sweater. What enables people to reason in this way even about novel objects, and how do people draw upon prior experience with an object to continually refine
-
The Efficiency of Question-Asking Strategies in a Real-World Visual Search Task Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-24 Alberto Testoni, Raffaella Bernardi, Azzurra Ruggeri
In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human–human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data-hungry artificial neural networks. In this paper, we argue that datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on human behavior and language use. We present a method that
-
Differences in Social Expectations About Robot Signals and Human Signals Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Lorenzo Parenti, Marwen Belkaid, Agnieszka Wykowska
In our daily lives, we are continually involved in decision-making situations, many of which take place in the context of social interaction. Despite the ubiquity of such situations, there remains a gap in our understanding of how decision-making unfolds in social contexts, and how communicative signals, such as social cues and feedback, impact the choices we make. Interestingly, there is a new social
-
Modeling Brain Representations of Words' Concreteness in Context Using GPT-2 and Human Ratings Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-16 Andrea Bruera, Yuan Tao, Andrew Anderson, Derya Çokal, Janosch Haber, Massimo Poesio
The meaning of most words in language depends on their context. Understanding how the human brain extracts contextualized meaning, and identifying where in the brain this takes place, remain important scientific challenges. But technological and computational advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence now provide unprecedented opportunities to study the human brain in action as language is
-
The N400 is Elicited by Meaning Changes but not Synonym Substitutions: Evidence From Persian Phrasal Verbs Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Kate Stone, Naghmeh Khaleghi, Milena Rabovsky
We tested two accounts of the cognitive process underlying the N400 event-related potential component: one that it reflects meaning-based processing and one that it reflects the processing of specific words. The experimental design utilized separable Persian phrasal verbs, which form a strongly probabilistic, long-distance dependency, ideal for the study of probabilistic processing. In sentences strongly
-
Rational Sentence Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Meilin Zhan, Sihan Chen, Roger Levy, Jiayi Lu, Edward Gibson
Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning—the prior—and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a language taxonomically different from English. We present
-
Perspective Taking Reflects Beliefs About Partner Sophistication: Modern Computer Partners Versus Basic Computer and Human Partners Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Jia E. Loy, Vera Demberg
We investigate partner effects on spatial perspective taking behavior in listeners, comparing behavior with a human versus a computer partner (Experiments 1 and 2), and with computer partners of different perceived capabilities (Experiment 3). Participants responded to spoken instructions from their partner which could be interpreted egocentrically (from their own perspective) or othercentrically (from
-
On the Connection Between Language Change and Language Processing Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-10 Peter Hendrix, Ching Chu Sun, Henry Brighton, Andreas Bender
Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction. Through a binomial linear regression analysis, we investigated
-
Conversational Eyebrow Frowns Facilitate Question Identification: An Online Study Using Virtual Avatars Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Naomi Nota, James P. Trujillo, Judith Holler
Conversation is a time-pressured environment. Recognizing a social action (the ‘‘speech act,’’ such as a question requesting information) early is crucial in conversation to quickly understand the intended message and plan a timely response. Fast turns between interlocutors are especially relevant for responses to questions since a long gap may be meaningful by itself. Human language is multimodal
-
Syncopation as Probabilistic Expectation: Conceptual, Computational, and Experimental Evidence Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-03 Noah R. Fram, Jonathan Berger
Definitions of syncopation share two characteristics: the presence of a meter or analogous hierarchical rhythmic structure and a displacement or contradiction of that structure. These attributes are translated in terms of a Bayesian theory of syncopation, where the syncopation of a rhythm is inferred based on a hierarchical structure that is, in turn, learned from the ongoing musical stimulus. Several
-
Influence of Mental Training of Attentional Control on Autonomic Arousal Within the Framework of the Temporal Preparation of a Force Task Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-03 Souhir Ezzedini, Sofia Ben Jebara, Malek Abidi, Giovanni de Marco
While temporal preparation has frequently been examined through the manipulation of foreperiods, the role of force level during temporal preparation remains underexplored. In our study, we propose to manipulate mental training of attentional control in order to shed light on the role of the force level and autonomic nervous system in the temporal preparation of an action. Forty subjects, divided into
-
Interpreting Rhythm as Parsing: Syntactic-Processing Operations Predict the Migration of Visual Flashes as Perceived During Listening to Musical Rhythms Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Gabriele Cecchetti, Cédric A. Tomasini, Steffen A. Herff, Martin A. Rohrmeier
Music can be interpreted by attributing syntactic relationships to sequential musical events, and, computationally, such musical interpretation represents an analogous combinatorial task to syntactic processing in language. While this perspective has been primarily addressed in the domain of harmony, we focus here on rhythm in the Western tonal idiom, and we propose for the first time a framework for
-
Effects of Iconicity in Recognition Memory Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 David M. Sidhu, Nareg Khachatoorian, Gabriella Vigliocco
Iconicity refers to a resemblance between word form and meaning. Previous work has shown that iconic words are learned earlier and processed faster. Here, we examined whether iconic words are recognized better on a recognition memory task. We also manipulated the level at which items were encoded—with a focus on either their meaning or their form—in order to gain insight into the mechanism by which
-
Event Knowledge in Large Language Models: The Gap Between the Impossible and the Unlikely Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Carina Kauf, Anna A. Ivanova, Giulia Rambelli, Emmanuele Chersoni, Jingyuan Selena She, Zawad Chowdhury, Evelina Fedorenko, Alessandro Lenci
Word co-occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common
-
Language-Specific Constraints on Conversation: Evidence from Danish and Norwegian Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Christina Dideriksen, Morten H. Christiansen, Mark Dingemanse, Malte Højmark-Bertelsen, Christer Johansson, Kristian Tylén, Riccardo Fusaroli
Establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in everyday conversations is crucial. To do so, people employ a variety of conversational devices, such as backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Here, we explore whether the use of conversational devices might be influenced by cross-linguistic differences in the speakers’ native language, comparing two matched languages—Danish and Norwegian—differing
-
Probing Lexical Ambiguity in Chinese Characters via Their Word Formations: Convergence of Perceived and Computed Metrics Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Tianqi Wang, Xu Xu, Xurong Xie, Manwa Lawrence Ng
Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and the nature of the representations of an ambiguous word's multiple meanings is yet to be fully understood. With a special focus on Chinese characters, the present study first established that native speaker's perception about a character's number of meanings was heavily influenced by the availability of its distinct word formations, while whether these
-
How to Tell a Dualist? Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-22 Iris Berent
People exhibit conflicting intuitions concerning the mind/body links. Here, I explore a novel explanation for these inconsistencies: Dualism is a violable constraint that interacts with Essentialism. Two experiments probe these interactions. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated the emergence of psychological traits in either a replica of one's body, or in the afterlife—after the body's demise. In
-
The Influence of Memory on Visual Perception in Infants, Children, and Adults Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Sagi Jaffe-Dax, Christine E. Potter, Tiffany S. Leung, Lauren L. Emberson, Casey Lew-Williams
Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we exposed participants to pairs of colorful stimuli and
-
Distinct Profiles for Beliefs About Religion Versus Science Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-16 S. Emlen Metz, Emily G. Liquin, Tania Lombrozo
A growing body of research suggests that scientific and religious beliefs are often held and justified in different ways. In three studies with 707 participants, we examine the distinctive profiles of beliefs in these domains. In Study 1, we find that participants report evidence and explanatory considerations (making sense of things) as dominant reasons for beliefs across domains. However, cuing the
-
The Meaning of Motion Lines?: A Review of Theoretical and Empirical Research on Static Depiction of Motion Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Irmak Hacımusaoğlu, Neil Cohn
Static depiction of motion, particularly lines trailing behind a mover, has long been of interest in the psychology literature. Empirical research has demonstrated that these “motion lines” benefited motion comprehension in static images by disambiguating the direction of movement. Yet, there is no consensus on how those lines derive their meaning. In this article, we review three accounts suggesting
-
No Peace for the Wicked? Immorality Is Thought to Disrupt Intrapersonal Harmony, Impeding Positive Psychological States and Happiness Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Michael M. Prinzing, Barbara L. Fredrickson
Why do people think that someone living a morally bad life is less happy than someone living a good life? One possibility is that judging whether someone is happy involves not only attributing positive psychological states (i.e., lots of pleasant emotions, few unpleasant emotions, and satisfaction with life) but also forming an evaluative judgment. Another possibility is that moral considerations affect
-
Following Affirmative and Negated Rules Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Robert Wirth, Wilfried Kunde, Roland Pfister
Rules are often stated in a negated manner (“no trespassing”) rather than in an affirmative manner (“stay in your lane”). Here, we build on classic research on negation processing and, using a finger-tracking design on a touchscreen, we show that following negated rather than affirmative rules is harder as indicated by multiple performance measures. Moreover, our results indicate that practice has
-
Expectations of Processing Ease, Informativeness, and Accuracy Guide Toddlers’ Processing of Novel Communicative Cues Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Marie Aguirre, Mélanie Brun, Olivier Morin, Anne Reboul, Olivier Mascaro
Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative cues tend to have low processing costs and high cognitive
-
Face Age is Mapped Into Three-Dimensional Space Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Mario Dalmaso, Stefano Pileggi, Michele Vicovaro
People can represent temporal stimuli (e.g., pictures depicting past and future events) as spatially connoted dimensions arranged along the three main axes (horizontal, sagittal, and vertical). For example, past and future events are generally represented, from the perspective of the individuals, as being placed behind and in front of them, respectively. Here, we report that such a 3D representation
-
Finding Structure in Modern Dance Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Claire Monroy, Laura Wagner
Research has shown that both adults and children organize familiar activity into discrete units with consistent boundaries, despite the dynamic, continuous nature of everyday experiences. However, less is known about how observers segment unfamiliar event sequences. In the current study, we took advantage of the novelty that is inherent in modern dance. Modern dance features natural human motion but
-
Against Arguments From Diagnostic Reasoning Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Jeske Toorman
Recent work in cognitive psychology and experimental semantics indicates that people do not categorize natural kinds solely by virtue of their purported scientific essence. Two attempts have been made to explain away the data by appealing to the idea that participants in these studies are reasoning diagnostically. I will argue that an appeal to diagnostic reasoning will likely not help to explain away
-
Repeat After Me? Both Children With and Without Autism Commonly Align Their Language With That of Their Caregivers Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Riccardo Fusaroli, Ethan Weed, Roberta Rocca, Deborah Fein, Letitia Naigles
Linguistic repetitions in children are conceptualized as negative in children with autism – echolalia, without communicative purpose – and positive in typically developing (TD) children – linguistic alignment involved in shared engagement, common ground and language acquisition. To investigate this apparent contradiction we analyzed spontaneous speech in 67 parent–child dyads from a longitudinal corpus
-
Bayesian Surprise Predicts Human Event Segmentation in Story Listening Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Manoj Kumar, Ariel Goldstein, Sebastian Michelmann, Jeffrey M. Zacks, Uri Hasson, Kenneth A. Norman
Event segmentation theory posits that people segment continuous experience into discrete events and that event boundaries occur when there are large transient increases in prediction error. Here, we set out to test this theory in the context of story listening, by using a deep learning language model (GPT-2) to compute the predicted probability distribution of the next word, at each point in the story
-
Questions About Quantifiers: Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Quantity Processing by the Brain Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Jakub Szymanik, Arnold Kochari, Heming Strømholt Bremnes
One approach to understanding how the human cognitive system stores and operates with quantifiers such as “some,” “many,” and “all” is to investigate their interaction with the cognitive mechanisms for estimating and comparing quantities from perceptual input (i.e., nonsymbolic quantities). While a potential link between quantifier processing and nonsymbolic quantity processing has been considered
-
Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Crowd Sound Dynamics Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Shannon Proksch, Majerle Reeves, Kent Gee, Mark Transtrum, Chris Kello, Ramesh Balasubramaniam
When multiple individuals interact in a conversation or as part of a large crowd, emergent structures and dynamics arise that are behavioral properties of the interacting group rather than of any individual member of that group. Recent work using traditional signal processing techniques and machine learning has demonstrated that global acoustic data recorded from a crowd at a basketball game can be
-
Surface and Contextual Linguistic Cues in Dialog Act Classification: A Cognitive Science View Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Guido M. Linders, Max M. Louwerse
What role do linguistic cues on a surface and contextual level have in identifying the intention behind an utterance? Drawing on the wealth of studies and corpora from the computational task of dialog act classification, we studied this question from a cognitive science perspective. We first reviewed the role of linguistic cues in dialog act classification studies that evaluated model performance on
-
When Native Speakers Are Not “Native-Like:” Chunking Ability Predicts (Lack of) Sensitivity to Gender Agreement During Online Processing Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Manuel F. Pulido, Priscila López-Beltrán
Previous work on individual differences has revealed limitations in the ability of existing measures (e.g., working memory) to predict language processing. Recent evidence suggests that an individual's sensitivity to detect the statistical regularities present in language (i.e., “chunk sensitivity”) may significantly modulate online sentence processing. We investigated whether individual chunk sensitivity
-
Top-Down Number Reading: Language Affects the Visual Identification of Digit Strings Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-21 Dror Dotan
Reading numbers aloud involves visual processes that analyze the digit string and verbal processes that produce the number words. Cognitive models of number reading assume that information flows from the visual input to the verbal production processes—a feed-forward processing mode in which the verbal production depends on the visual input but not vice versa. Here, I show that information flows also
-
Scale in Language Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-12 N. J. Enfield
A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the exceedingly complex relations that hold between many kinds of interdependent systems, but it can be difficult to know how to proceed when “everything is connected.” This paper offers a framework for tackling that challenge
-
The Relative Importance of Target and Judge Characteristics in Shaping the Moral Circle Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-08 Bastian Jaeger, Matti Wilks
People's treatment of others (humans, nonhuman animals, or other entities) often depends on whether they think the entity is worthy of moral concern. Recent work has begun to investigate which entities are included in a person's moral circle, examining how certain target characteristics (e.g., species category, perceived intelligence) and judge characteristics (e.g., empathy, political orientation)
-
Participatory Design for Cognitive Science: Examples From the Learning Sciences and Human−Computer Interaction Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Jenny Yun-Chen Chan, Tomohiro Nagashima, Avery H. Closser
Given the recent call to strengthen collaboration between researchers and relevant practitioners, we consider participatory design as a way to advance Cognitive Science. Building on examples from the Learning Sciences and Human−Computer Interaction, we (a) explore what, why, who, when, and where researchers can collaborate with community members in Cognitive Science research; (b) examine the ways in
-
Evidence for a Weak but Reliable Processing Advantage for False Beliefs Over Similar Nonmental States in Adults Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-08 Steven Samuel, Geoff G. Cole, Madeline J. Eacott, Rebecca Edwardson, Hattie Course
The ability to understand the mental states of others has sometimes been attributed to a domain-specific mechanism which privileges the processing of these states over similar but nonmental representations. If correct, then others’ beliefs should be processed more efficiently than similar information contained within nonmental states. We tested this by examining whether adults would be faster to process
-
The Puzzle of Belief Requires an Evolutionary Key to be Solved Cognitive Science (IF 2.617) Pub Date : 2023-10-09 Stefaan Blancke
The puzzle of belief arises as currently no definition captures the various ways in which people believe. As a solution to this puzzle and to make the study of belief empirically tractable, Van Leeuwen and Lombrozo suggest acknowledging the plurality of beliefs and organizing beliefs according to their shared functions and traits. However, their proposal does not make yet the distinction between proper