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Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences

Impact factor: 2.385 5-Year impact factor: 2.849 Print ISSN: 0364-0213 Online ISSN: 1551-6709 Publisher: Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing)

Subject: Experimental Psychology

Most recent papers:

  • The Influence of Globally Ungrammatical Local Syntactic Constraints on Real‐Time Sentence Comprehension: Evidence From the Visual World Paradigm and Reading.
    Yuki Kamide, Anuenue Kukona.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 20, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract We investigated the influence of globally ungrammatical local syntactic constraints on sentence comprehension, as well as the corresponding activation of global and local representations. In Experiment 1, participants viewed visual scenes with objects like a carousel and motorbike while hearing sentences with noun phrase (NP) or verb phrase (VP) modifiers like “The girl who likes the man (from London/very much) will ride the carousel.” In both cases, “girl” and “ride” predicted carousel as the direct object; however, the locally coherent combination “the man from London will ride…” in NP cases alternatively predicted motorbike. During “ride,” local constraints, although ruled out by the global constraints, influenced prediction as strongly as global constraints: While motorbike was fixated less than carousel in VP cases, it was fixated as much as carousel in NP cases. In Experiment 2, these local constraints likewise slowed reading times. We discuss implications for theories of sentence processing. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 20, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12694   open full text
  • Do Metaphors Move From Mind to Mouth? Evidence From a New System of Linguistic Metaphors for Time.
    Rose K. Hendricks, Benjamin K. Bergen, Tyler Marghetis.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 17, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Languages around the world use a recurring strategy to discuss abstract concepts: describe them metaphorically, borrowing language from more concrete domains. We “plan ahead” to the future, “count up” to higher numbers, and “warm” to new friends. Past work has found that these ways of talking have implications for how we think, so that shared systems of linguistic metaphors can produce shared conceptualizations. On the other hand, these systematic linguistic metaphors might not just be the cause but also the effect of shared, non‐linguistic ways of thinking. Here, we present a case study of a variety of American English in which a shared, non‐linguistic conceptualization of time has become crystallized as a new system of linguistic metaphors. Speakers of various languages, including English, conceptualize time as a lateral timeline, with the past leftward and the future rightward. Until now, this conceptualization has not been documented in the speech of any language. In two studies, we document how members of the U.S. military, but not U.S. civilians, talk about time using conventionalized lateral metaphors (e.g., “move the meeting right” to mean “move the meeting later”). We argue that, under the right cultural circumstances, implicit mental representations become conventionalized metaphors in language. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 17, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12693   open full text
  • Visual Statistical Learning With Stimuli Presented Sequentially Across Space and Time in Deaf and Hearing Adults.
    Beatrice Giustolisi, Karen Emmorey.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 15, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non‐signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between VSL and sign language skill. Our second goal was to test the Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis, which makes the prediction that deaf people should be impaired in sequential processing tasks. For the VSL task, we adopted a modified version of the triplet learning paradigm, with stimuli presented sequentially across space and time. Results revealed that measures of sign language skill (sentence comprehension/repetition) did not correlate with VSL scores, possibly due to the sequential nature of our VSL task. Reading comprehension scores (PIAT‐R) were a significant predictor of VSL accuracy in hearing but not deaf people. This finding might be due to the sequential nature of the VSL task and to a less salient role of the sequential orthography‐to‐phonology mapping in deaf readers compared to hearing readers. The two groups did not differ in VSL scores. However, when reading ability was taken into account, VSL scores were higher for the deaf group than the hearing group. Overall, this evidence is inconsistent with the Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis, suggesting that humans can develop efficient sequencing abilities even in the absence of sound. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 15, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12691   open full text
  • Adult Learning and Language Simplification.
    Mark Atkinson, Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 15, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Languages spoken in larger populations are relatively simple. A possible explanation for this is that languages with a greater number of speakers tend to also be those with higher proportions of non‐native speakers, who may simplify language during learning. We assess this explanation for the negative correlation between population size and linguistic complexity in three experiments, using artificial language learning techniques to investigate both the simplifications made by individual adult learners and the potential for such simplifications to influence group‐level language characteristics. In Experiment 1, we show that individual adult learners trained on a morphologically complex miniature language simplify its morphology. In Experiment 2, we explore how these simplifications may then propagate through subsequent learning. We use the languages produced by the participants of Experiment 1 as the input for a second set of learners, manipulating (a) the proportion of their input which is simplified and (b) the number of speakers they receive their input from. We find, contrary to expectations, that mixing the input from multiple speakers nullifies the simplifications introduced by individuals in Experiment 1; simplifications at the individual level do not result in simplification of the population's language. In Experiment 3, we focus on language use as a mechanism for simplification, exploring the consequences of the interaction between individuals differing in their linguistic competence (as native and non‐native speakers might). We find that speakers who acquire a more complex language than their partner simplify their language during interaction. We ultimately conclude that adult learning can result in languages spoken by more people having simpler morphology, but that idiosyncratic simplifications by non‐natives do not offer a complete explanation in themselves; accommodation—by comparatively competent non‐natives to less competent speakers, or by native speakers to non‐natives—may be a key linking mechanism. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 15, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12686   open full text
  • Gaze and the Eye Pupil Adjust to Imagined Size and Distance.
    Unni Sulutvedt, Thea K. Mannix, Bruno Laeng.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 10, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Pupillary responses and associated vergence eye movements were monitored during imagery of objects of differing sizes (“large” or “small”) from varying distances (“near” or “far”). Objects’ imagined size and distance affected oculomotor behavior. Objects visualized as “far” resulted in the larger pupil dilations and smaller visual angle, while small objects imagined “near” were associated with smaller pupils in contrast to relatively larger pupils when imagined as “far” away. Furthermore, near objects resulted in larger visual angle, and particularly, vergence adjustments were observed that were dependent on imagined size and distance of the small objects. The findings are consistent with the idea that imagery emulates perception, also at the embodied level of oculomotor behaviors. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 10, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12684   open full text
  • Eye’ll Help You Out! How the Gaze Cue Reduces the Cognitive Load Required for Reference Processing.
    Mirjana Sekicki, Maria Staudte.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 08, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Referential gaze has been shown to benefit language processing in situated communication in terms of shifting visual attention and leading to shorter reaction times on subsequent tasks. The present study simultaneously assessed both visual attention and, importantly, the immediate cognitive load induced at different stages of sentence processing. We aimed to examine the dynamics of combining visual and linguistic information in creating anticipation for a specific object and the effect this has on language processing. We report evidence from three visual‐world eye‐tracking experiments, showing that referential gaze leads to a shift in visual attention toward the cued object, which consequently lowers the effort required for processing the linguistic reference. Importantly, perceiving and following the gaze cue did not prove costly in terms of cognitive effort, unless the cued object did not fit the verb selectional preferences. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 08, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12682   open full text
  • Coevolution of Lexical Meaning and Pragmatic Use.
    Thomas Brochhagen, Michael Franke, Robert van Rooij.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 08, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract According to standard linguistic theory, the meaning of an utterance is the product of conventional semantic meaning and general pragmatic rules on language use. We investigate how such a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics could evolve under general processes of selection and learning. We present a game‐theoretic model of the competition between types of language users, each endowed with certain lexical representations and a particular pragmatic disposition to act on them. Our model traces two evolutionary forces and their interaction: (i) pressure toward communicative efficiency and (ii) transmission perturbations during the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. We illustrate the model based on a case study on scalar implicatures, which suggests that the relationship between underspecified semantics and pragmatic inference is one of coevolution. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 08, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12681   open full text
  • Modeling the Structure and Dynamics of Semantic Processing.
    Armand S. Rotaru, Gabriella Vigliocco, Stefan L. Frank.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 08, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract The contents and structure of semantic memory have been the focus of much recent research, with major advances in the development of distributional models, which use word co‐occurrence information as a window into the semantics of language. In parallel, connectionist modeling has extended our knowledge of the processes engaged in semantic activation. However, these two lines of investigation have rarely been brought together. Here, we describe a processing model based on distributional semantics in which activation spreads throughout a semantic network, as dictated by the patterns of semantic similarity between words. We show that the activation profile of the network, measured at various time points, can successfully account for response times in lexical and semantic decision tasks, as well as for subjective concreteness and imageability ratings. We also show that the dynamics of the network is predictive of performance in relational semantic tasks, such as similarity/relatedness rating. Our results indicate that bringing together distributional semantic networks and spreading of activation provides a good fit to both automatic lexical processing (as indexed by lexical and semantic decisions) as well as more deliberate processing (as indexed by ratings), above and beyond what has been reported for previous models that take into account only similarity resulting from network structure. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 08, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12690   open full text
  • Event Structures Drive Semantic Structural Priming, Not Thematic Roles: Evidence From Idioms and Light Verbs.
    Jayden Ziegler, Jesse Snedeker, Eva Wittenberg.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 08, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub‐predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here, the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 08, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12687   open full text
  • Word Forms Are Structured for Efficient Use.
    Kyle Mahowald, Isabelle Dautriche, Edward Gibson, Steven T. Piantadosi.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 07, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort. This observation explains the famous finding that the most frequent words in a language tend to be short. A related prediction is that, even within words of the same length, the most frequent word forms should be the ones that are easiest to produce and understand. Using orthographics as a proxy for phonetics, we test this hypothesis using corpora of 96 languages from Wikipedia. We find that, across a variety of languages and language families and controlling for length, the most frequent forms in a language tend to be more orthographically well‐formed and have more orthographic neighbors than less frequent forms. We interpret this result as evidence that lexicons are structured by language usage pressures to facilitate efficient communication. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 07, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12689   open full text
  • The Outcome‐Representation Learning Model: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Model of the Iowa Gambling Task.
    Nathaniel Haines, Jasmin Vassileva, Woo‐Young Ahn.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 05, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to study decision‐making within healthy and psychiatric populations. However, the complexity of the IGT makes it difficult to attribute variation in performance to specific cognitive processes. Several cognitive models have been proposed for the IGT in an effort to address this problem, but currently no single model shows optimal performance for both short‐ and long‐term prediction accuracy and parameter recovery. Here, we propose the Outcome‐Representation Learning (ORL) model, a novel model that provides the best compromise between competing models. We test the performance of the ORL model on 393 subjects' data collected across multiple research sites, and we show that the ORL reveals distinct patterns of decision‐making in substance‐using populations. Our work highlights the importance of using multiple model comparison metrics to make valid inference with cognitive models and sheds light on learning mechanisms that play a role in underweighting of rare events. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12688   open full text
  • Statistical Learning Is Not Age‐Invariant During Childhood: Performance Improves With Age Across Modality.
    Amir Shufaniya, Inbal Arnon.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 02, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Humans are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment via statistical learning (SL), an ability thought to play an important role in language learning and learning more generally. While much work has examined statistical learning in infants and adults, less work has looked at the developmental trajectory of SL during childhood to see whether it is fully developed in infancy or improves with age, like many other cognitive abilities. A recent study showed modality‐based differences in the effect of age during childhood: While visual SL improved with age, auditory SL did not. This finding was taken as evidence for modality‐based differences in SL. However, since that study used auditory linguistic stimuli (syllables), the differential effect of age may have been driven by stimulus type (linguistic vs. non‐linguistic) rather than modality. Here, we ask whether age will affect performance similarly in the two modalities when non‐linguistic auditory stimuli are used (familiar sounds instead of syllables). We conduct a large‐scale study of children's performance on visual and non‐linguistic auditory SL during childhood (ages 5–12 years). The results show a similar effect of age in both modalities: Unlike previous findings, both visual and non‐linguistic auditory SL improved with age. These findings highlight the stimuli‐sensitive nature of SL and suggest that modality‐based differences may be stimuli‐dependent, and that age‐invariance may be limited to linguistic stimuli. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    October 02, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12692   open full text
  • Under What Conditions Can Recursion Be Learned? Effects of Starting Small in Artificial Grammar Learning of Center‐Embedded Structure.
    Fenna H. Poletiek, Christopher M. Conway, Michelle R. Ellefson, Jun Lai, Bruno R. Bocanegra, Morten H. Christiansen.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 28, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract It has been suggested that external and/or internal limitations paradoxically may lead to superior learning, that is, the concepts of starting small and less is more (Elman, ; Newport, ). In this paper, we explore the type of incremental ordering during training that might help learning, and what mechanism explains this facilitation. We report four artificial grammar learning experiments with human participants. In Experiments 1a and 1b we found a beneficial effect of starting small using two types of simple recursive grammars: right‐branching and center‐embedding, with recursive embedded clauses in fixed positions and fixed length. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 100). In Experiment 3 and 4, we used a more complex center‐embedded grammar with recursive loops in variable positions, producing strings of variable length. When participants were presented an incremental ordering of training stimuli, as in natural language, they were better able to generalize their knowledge of simple units to more complex units when the training input “grew” according to structural complexity, compared to when it “grew” according to string length. Overall, the results suggest that starting small confers an advantage for learning complex center‐embedded structures when the input is organized according to structural complexity. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    September 28, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12685   open full text
  • Social Network Limits Language Complexity.
    Matthew Lou‐Magnuson, Luca Onnis.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 28, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Natural languages vary widely in the degree to which they make use of nested compositional structure in their grammars. It has long been noted by linguists that the languages historically spoken in small communities develop much deeper levels of compositional embedding than those spoken by larger groups. Recently, this observation has been confirmed by a robust statistical analysis of the World Atlas of Language Structures. In order to examine this connection mechanistically, we propose an agent‐based model that accounts for key cultural evolutionary features of language transfer and language change. We identify transitivity as a physical parameter of social networks critical for the evolution of compositional structure and the hierarchical patterning of scale‐free distributions as inhibitory. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    September 28, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12683   open full text
  • The Cognitive Underpinnings of Option Generation in Everyday Life Decision‐Making: A Latent Variable Analysis.
    Johannes Leder, Jan A. Häusser, Stefan Krumm, Markus Germar, Alexander Schlemmer, Stefan Kaiser, Annemarie Kalis, Andreas Mojzisch.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 28, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract The ability to generate options for action is crucial for everyday life decision‐making. In this article, we propose and test a model of the cognitive underpinnings of option generation in everyday life situations. We carried out a laboratory study using measures of a wide range of cognitive functions and asked participants (N = 157) to generate options for actions for different everyday life decision‐making scenarios. The results of a latent variable analysis show that the cognitive underpinnings of option generation are consistent across different everyday life situations and, hence, option generation can be conceptualized as a general construct. Moreover, the results of a confirmatory factor analysis reveal that, when controlling for the shared variance among the cognitive processes assessed, verbal fluency, working memory capacity, ideation fluency, and processing speed predicted option generation. These findings suggest that option generation in everyday life situations can be distinguished from other cognitive constructs, such as divergent thinking (in terms of ideas’ originality) and long‐term memory. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    September 28, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12678   open full text
  • The Effect of Social Network Size on Hashtag Adoption on Twitter.
    Iris Monster, Shiri Lev‐Ari.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 22, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Propagation of novel linguistic terms is an important aspect of language use and language change. Here, we test how social network size influences people's likelihood of adopting novel labels by examining hashtag use on Twitter. Specifically, we test whether following fewer Twitter users leads to more varied and malleable hashtag use on Twitter, because each followed user is ascribed greater weight and thus exerts greater influence on the following user. Focusing on Dutch users tweeting about the terrorist attack in Brussels in 2016, we show that people who follow fewer other users use a larger number of unique hashtags to refer to the event, reflecting greater malleability and variability in use. These results have implications for theories of language learning, language use, and language change. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    September 22, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12675   open full text
  • Thinking About the Opposite of What Is Said: Counterfactual Conditionals and Symbolic or Alternate Simulations of Negation.
    Orlando Espino, Ruth M. J. Byrne.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 21, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract When people understand a counterfactual such as “if the flowers had been roses, the trees would have been orange trees,” they think about the conjecture, “there were roses and orange trees,” and they also think about its opposite, the presupposed facts. We test whether people think about the opposite by representing alternates, for example, “poppies and apple trees,” or whether models can contain symbols, for example, “no roses and no orange trees.” We report the discovery of an inference‐to‐alternates effect—a tendency to make an affirmative inference that refers to an alternate even from a negative minor premise, for example, “there were no orange trees, therefore there were poppies.” Nine experiments show the inference‐to‐alternates effect occurs in a binary context, but not a multiple context, and for direct and indirect reference; it can be induced and reduced by prior experience with similar inferences, and it also occurs for indicative conditionals. The results have implications for theories of counterfactual conditionals, and of negation. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    September 21, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12677   open full text
  • Issue Information.

    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 17, 2018
    --- - - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2105-2107, September 2018.
    September 17, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12546   open full text
  • Cross‐Cultural Differences in the Influence of Peers on Exploration During Play.
    Shirlene Wade, Celeste Kidd.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 03, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Certain social context features (e.g., maternal presence) are known to increase young children's exploration, a key process by which they learn. Yet limited research investigates the role of social context, especially peer presence, in exploration across development. We investigate whether the effect of peer presence on exploration is mediated by age or cultural‐specific experiences. We test its impact on exploration across development (2–11 years) and across cultures (United States and the Tsimane', indigenous farmer‐foragers in Bolivia). Specifically, peer presence does not boost exploration among young U.S. children and becomes more inhibitory among school‐age children. In contrast, peer presence facilitates exploration and provides an additional boost for older Tsimane' children, who differ from U.S. children in their cultural‐specific learning experiences (e.g., formal education), among other differences. We discuss potential cultural factors and mechanisms by which peer presence may boost exploratory behavior. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    September 03, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12679   open full text
  • Evaluating (and Improving) the Correspondence Between Deep Neural Networks and Human Representations.
    Joshua C. Peterson, Joshua T. Abbott, Thomas L. Griffiths.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 03, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Decades of psychological research have been aimed at modeling how people learn features and categories. The empirical validation of these theories is often based on artificial stimuli with simple representations. Recently, deep neural networks have reached or surpassed human accuracy on tasks such as identifying objects in natural images. These networks learn representations of real‐world stimuli that can potentially be leveraged to capture psychological representations. We find that state‐of‐the‐art object classification networks provide surprisingly accurate predictions of human similarity judgments for natural images, but they fail to capture some of the structure represented by people. We show that a simple transformation that corrects these discrepancies can be obtained through convex optimization. We use the resulting representations to predict the difficulty of learning novel categories of natural images. Our results extend the scope of psychological experiments and computational modeling by enabling tractable use of large natural stimulus sets. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    September 03, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12670   open full text
  • Unspoken Rules: Resolving Underdetermination With Closure Principles.
    Shaun Nichols, Jerry Gaus.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 03, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract When people learn normative systems, they do so based on limited evidence. Many of the possible actions that are available to an agent have never been explicitly permitted or prohibited. But people will often need to figure out whether those unspecified actions are permitted or prohibited. How does a learner resolve this incompleteness? The learner might assume if an action‐type is not expressly forbidden, then acts of that type are permitted. This closure principle is one of Liberty. Alternatively, the learner might assume that if an action‐type is not expressly permitted, then acts of that type are prohibited. This closure principle would be one of Residual Prohibition (Mikhail, 2011). On the basis of principles of pedagogical sampling (e.g., Shafto, Goodman, & Griffiths, ), we predicted that participants would infer the Liberty Principle (LP) when trained on prohibitions, and they would infer the Residual Prohibition Principle when trained on permissions. This is exactly what we found across several experiments. We also found a bias in favor of Liberty insofar as participants trained on both a prohibition and a permission rule tended still to infer the LP. However, we also found that if an action is potentially harmful, this diminishes the tendency to infer the LP. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    September 03, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12674   open full text
  • The Truth of Conditional Assertions.
    Geoffrey P. Goodwin, P. N. Johnson‐Laird.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 30, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Given a basic conditional of the form, If A then C, individuals usually list three cases as possible: A and C, not‐A and not‐C, not‐A and C. This result corroborates the theory of mental models. By contrast, individuals often judge that the conditional is true only in the case of A and C, and that cases of not‐A are irrelevant to its truth or falsity. This result corroborates other theories of conditionals. To resolve the discrepancy, we devised two new tasks: the “collective” truth task, in which participants judged whether sets of assertions about a specific individual, such as: If A then C, not‐A, C, could all be true at the same time; and one in which participants judged the truth of conditional predictions about specific future events. The results consistently matched the three possibilities, thereby corroborating the model theory. They also showed a massive violation of the probability calculus in estimates of the probabilities of the four cases in the partition of conditionals (A and C, A and not‐C, not‐A and C, and not‐A and not‐C), which summed to over 200%. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    August 30, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12666   open full text
  • Do Infants Learn Words From Statistics? Evidence From English‐Learning Infants Hearing Italian.
    Amber Shoaib, Tianlin Wang, Jessica F. Hay, Jill Lany.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 23, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with low TPs (LTPs). Such findings could mean that only the HTP sequences have a word‐like status, and they are more readily mapped to a referent for that reason. But these findings could also suggest that HTP sequences are easier to encode, just like any other predictable sequence. Here we aimed to distinguish between these explanations. To do so, we built on findings that infants become resistant to learning labels that are not typical of their native language as they approach 2 years of age and add words to their lexicons. If tracking TPs in speech results in identifying candidate words, at this age TPs may have reduced power to confer lexical status when they yield a unit that is very dissimilar to word forms that are typical of infants’ native language. Indeed, we found that at 20 months, English‐learning infants with relatively small vocabularies learned HTP Italian words (but not LTP words) as object labels, while infants with larger vocabularies resisted learning HTP Italian words. These findings suggest that the HTP sequences may be represented as candidate words, and more broadly, that TP statistics are relevant to word learning. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    August 23, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12673   open full text
  • Cultural Effects Rather Than a Bilingual Advantage in Cognition: A Review and an Empirical Study.
    Steven Samuel, Karen Roehr‐Brackin, Hyensou Pak, Hyunji Kim.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 22, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract The bilingual advantage hypothesis contends that the management of two languages in the brain is carried out through domain‐general mechanisms, and that bilinguals possess a performance advantage over monolinguals on (nonlinguistic) tasks that tap these processes. Presently, there is evidence both for and against such an advantage. Interestingly, the evidence in favor has been thought strongest in children and older adults, leading some researchers to argue that young adults might be at peak performance levels, and therefore bilingualism is unable to confer an improvement. We conducted a large‐scale review of the extant literature and found that the weight of research pointed to an absence of positive evidence for a bilingual advantage at any age. We next gave a large number of young adult participants a task designed to test the bilingual advantage hypothesis. Reasoning from the literature that young adults from an East Asian (Korean) culture would likely outperform those from a Western (British) culture, we also compared participants on this factor. We found no evidence for a bilingual advantage but did find evidence for enhanced performance in the Korean group. We interpret these results as further evidence against the bilingual advantage hypotheses. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2313-2341, September 2018.
    August 22, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12672   open full text
  • Common Object Representations for Visual Production and Recognition.
    Judith E. Fan, Daniel L. K. Yamins, Nicholas B. Turk‐Browne.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 20, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Production and comprehension have long been viewed as inseparable components of language. The study of vision, by contrast, has centered almost exclusively on comprehension. Here we investigate drawing—the most basic form of visual production. How do we convey concepts in visual form, and how does refining this skill, in turn, affect recognition? We developed an online platform for collecting large amounts of drawing and recognition data, and applied a deep convolutional neural network model of visual cortex trained only on natural images to explore the hypothesis that drawing recruits the same abstract feature representations that support natural visual object recognition. Consistent with this hypothesis, higher layers of this model captured the abstract features of both drawings and natural images most important for recognition, and people learning to produce more recognizable drawings of objects exhibited enhanced recognition of those objects. These findings could explain why drawing is so effective for communicating visual concepts, they suggest novel approaches for evaluating and refining conceptual knowledge, and they highlight the potential of deep networks for understanding human learning. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    August 20, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12676   open full text
  • Compound Words Reflect Cross‐Culturally Shared Bodily Metaphors.
    Kevin J. Holmes, Stephen J. Flusberg, Paul H. Thibodeau.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 15, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Parts of the body are often embedded in the structure of compound words, such as heartbreak and brainchild. We explored the relationships between the semantics of compounds and their constituent body parts, asking whether these relationships are largely arbitrary or instead reflect deeper metaphorical mappings shared across languages and cultures. In three studies, we found that U.S. English speakers associated the English translation equivalents of Chinese compounds with their constituent body parts at rates well above chance, even for compounds with highly abstract meanings and even when accounting for the semantic relatedness of the compounds and body parts. English speakers in India and Chinese speakers in Hong Kong showed similar intuitions about these associations. Our results suggest that the structure of compound words can provide insight into cross‐culturally shared ways of connecting meaning to the body. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    August 15, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12671   open full text
  • Hand Position and Response Assignment Modulate the Activation of the Valence‐Space Conceptual Metaphor.
    Emilia Castaño, Elizabeth Gilboy, Sara Feijóo, Elisabet Serrat, Carles Rostan, Joseph Hilferty, Toni Cunillera.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 12, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., good is up‐bad is down and good is right‐bad is left). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants’ hands while responding to the task—regardless of the location of their dominant hand—facilitates the judgment of positive and negative‐valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor–congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2342-2363, September 2018.
    August 12, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12669   open full text
  • How Do Creative Experts Practice New Skills? Exploratory Practice in Breakdancers.
    Daichi Shimizu, Takeshi Okada.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 12, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract How do expert performers practice as they develop creatively? This study investigated the processes involved in the practice of new skills by expert breakdancers. A great deal of evidence supports the theory of “deliberate practice” (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch‐Römer, 1993, Psychological Review, 100, 363) in skill acquisition; however, expert creative performers may emphasize other forms of practice for skill development. Four case studies collected through fieldwork and laboratory observation were analyzed to evaluate expert dancers’ practice processes as they developed proficiency in new, specific skills. We focused on three aspects of learning: the degree of skill acquisition, the content of skills included in practice, and dancers’ stated purposes for practicing. The results showed that dancers’ practice improved skills (as suggested by deliberate practice) and engaged the exploration of new, original skills, along with coordinating skills within performance. In their practice, these dance experts went beyond deliberative practice to highly exploratory processes for skill development. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2364-2396, September 2018.
    August 12, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12668   open full text
  • Simple Co‐Occurrence Statistics Reproducibly Predict Association Ratings.
    Markus J. Hofmann, Chris Biemann, Chris Westbury, Mariam Murusidze, Markus Conrad, Arthur M. Jacobs.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 11, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract What determines human ratings of association? We planned this paper as a test for association strength (AS) that is derived from the log likelihood that two words co‐occur significantly more often together in sentences than is expected from their single word frequencies. We also investigated the moderately correlated interactions of word frequency, emotional valence, arousal, and imageability of both words (r's ≤ .3). In three studies, linear mixed effects models revealed that AS and valence reproducibly account for variance in the human ratings. To understand further correlated predictors, we conducted a hierarchical cluster analysis and examined the predictors of four clusters in competitive analyses: Only AS and word2vec skip‐gram cosine distances reproducibly accounted for variance in all three studies. The other predictors of the first cluster (number of common associates, (positive) point‐wise mutual information, and word2vec CBOW cosine) did not reproducibly explain further variance. The same was true for the second cluster (word frequency and arousal); the third cluster (emotional valence and imageability); and the fourth cluster (consisting of joint frequency only). Finally, we discuss emotional valence as an important dimension of semantic space. Our results suggest that a simple definition of syntagmatic word contiguity (AS) and a paradigmatic measure of semantic similarity (skip‐gram cosine) provide the most general performance‐independent explanation of association ratings. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2287-2312, September 2018.
    August 11, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12662   open full text
  • More Than the Eye Can See: A Computational Model of Color Term Acquisition and Color Discrimination.
    Barend Beekhuizen, Suzanne Stevenson.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 06, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract We explore the following two cognitive questions regarding crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems: Why are some linguistic categories—that is, the associations between a term and a portion of the semantic space—harder to learn than others? How does learning a language‐specific set of lexical categories affect processing in that semantic domain? Using a computational word‐learner, and the domain of color as a testbed, we investigate these questions by modeling both child acquisition of color terms and adult behavior on a non‐verbal color discrimination task. A further goal is to test an approach to lexical semantic representation based on the principle that the more languages label any two situations with the same word, the more conceptually similar those two situations are. We compare such a crosslinguistically based semantic space to one based on perceptual similarity. Our computational model suggests a mechanistic explanation for the interplay between term frequency and the semantic closeness of learned categories in developmental error patterns for color terms. Our model also indicates how linguistic relativity effects could arise from an acquisition mechanism that yields language‐specific topologies for the same semantic domain. Moreover, we find that the crosslinguistically inspired semantic space supports these results at least as well as—and in some aspects better than—the purely perceptual one, thus confirming our approach as a practical and principled method for lexical semantic representation in cognitive modeling. - Cognitive Science, EarlyView.
    August 06, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12665   open full text
  • Typicality and Graded Membership in Dimensional Adjectives.
    Steven Verheyen, Paul Égré.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 05, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract This paper concerns an investigation of the manner in which typicality constrains graded membership in antonymous dimensional adjectives such as short/tall and cheap/expensive using the conceptual spaces framework. In this framework, items are organized in a space comprised of one or more dimensions along which they can be compared. The items’ graded membership is established by their relative proximity in this space to the prototypical instances of contrasting concepts. Because dimensional adjectives can be applied to an indefinite variety of things and grammatically have no upper bound to serve as cognitive reference point, they have been argued to lack prototypes. We present the results of an empirical study showing that the conceptual spaces framework can nevertheless be extended successfully to dimensional adjectives by complementing them with a comparison class argument (such as short/tall for an adult man and cheap/expensive for a smartphone), allowing participants to retrieve meaningful prototypical instances, which can be used to establish membership degree. Since dimensional adjectives are subjective, we investigate how the framework can accommodate interindividual variability in membership degree judgments. We find that the predictions of the framework significantly improve if prototypical instances themselves are assumed to come with a gradient instead of being considered equally typical, thereby providing a more fine‐grained account of typicality and furthering the development of the conceptual spaces framework. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2250-2286, September 2018.
    August 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12649   open full text
  • When Extremists Win: Cultural Transmission Via Iterated Learning When Populations Are Heterogeneous.
    Danielle J. Navarro, Amy Perfors, Arthur Kary, Scott D. Brown, Chris Donkin.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 31, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract How does the process of information transmission affect the cultural or linguistic products that emerge? This question is often studied experimentally and computationally via iterated learning, a procedure in which participants learn from previous participants in a chain. Iterated learning is a powerful tool because, when all participants share the same priors, the stationary distributions of the iterated learning chains reveal those priors. In many situations, however, it is unreasonable to assume that all participants share the same prior beliefs. We present four simulation studies and one experiment demonstrating that when the population of learners is heterogeneous, the behavior of an iterated learning chain can be unpredictable and is often systematically distorted by the learners with the most extreme biases. This results in group‐level outcomes that reflect neither the behavior of any individuals within the population nor the overall population average. We discuss implications for the use of iterated learning as a methodological tool as well as for the processes that might have shaped cultural and linguistic evolution in the real world. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2108-2149, September 2018.
    July 31, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12667   open full text
  • Universal Principles of Human Communication: Preliminary Evidence From a Cross‐cultural Communication Game.
    Nicolas Fay, Bradley Walker, Nik Swoboda, Ichiro Umata, Takugo Fukaya, Yasuhiro Katagiri, Simon Garrod.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 26, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract The present study points to several potentially universal principles of human communication. Pairs of participants, sampled from culturally and linguistically distinct societies (Western and Japanese, N = 108: 16 Western–Western, 15 Japanese–Japanese and 23 Western–Japanese dyads), played a dyadic communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of experimenter‐specified items to a partner by drawing, but without speaking or using letters or numbers. This paradigm forced participants to create a novel communication system. A range of similar communication behaviors were observed among the within‐culture groups (Western–Western and Japanese–Japanese) and the across‐culture group (Western–Japanese): They (a) used iconic signs to bootstrap successful communication, (b) addressed breakdowns in communication using other‐initiated repairs, (c) simplified their communication behavior over repeated social interactions, and (d) aligned their communication behavior over repeated social interactions. While the across‐culture Western–Japanese dyads found the task more challenging, and cultural differences in communication behavior were observed, the same basic findings applied across all groups. Our findings, which rely on two distinct cultural and linguistic groups, offer preliminary evidence for several universal principles of human communication. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2397-2413, September 2018.
    July 26, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12664   open full text
  • The Relation Between Factual and Counterfactual Conditionals.
    Ana Cristina Quelhas, Célia Rasga, P. N. Johnson‐Laird.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 11, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract What is the relation between factual conditionals: If A happened then B happened, and counterfactual conditionals: If A had happened then B would have happened? Some theorists propose quite different semantics for the two. In contrast, the theory of mental models and its computer implementation interrelates them. It postulates that both can have a priori truth values, and that the semantic bases of both are possibilities: states that are possible for factual conditionals, and that were once possible but that did not happen for counterfactual conditionals. Two experiments supported these relations. Experiment 1 showed that, like factual conditionals, certain counterfactuals are true a priori, and others are false a priori. Experiment 2 replicated this result and showed that participants selected appropriate paraphrases, referring, respectively, to real and to counterfactual possibilities, for the two sorts of conditional. These results are contrary to alternative accounts of conditionals. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2205-2228, September 2018.
    July 11, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12663   open full text
  • “Girls Are as Good as Boys at Math” Implies That Boys Are Probably Better: A Study of Expressions of Gender Equality.
    Eleanor K. Chestnut, Ellen M. Markman.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 28, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Although “Girls are as good as boys at math” explicitly expresses equality, we predict it could nevertheless suggest that boys have more raw talent. In statements with this subject‐complement structure, the item in the complement position serves as the reference point and is thus considered more typical and prominent. This explains why “Tents are like houses,” for instance, sounds better than “Houses are like tents”—people generally think of houses as more typical. For domains about ability, the reference point should be the item that is typically more skilled. We further propose that the reference point should be naturally more skilled. In two experiments, we presented adults with summaries of actual scientific evidence for gender equality in math (Experiment 1) or verbal ability (Experiment 2), but we manipulated whether the reference point in the statements of equality in the summaries (e.g., “Boys’ verbal ability is as good as girls’”) was girls or boys. As predicted, adults attributed more natural ability to each gender when it was in the complement rather than subject position. Yet, in Experiment 3, we found that when explicitly asked, participants judged that such sentences were not biased in favor of either gender, indicating that subject‐complement statements must be transmitting this bias in a subtle way. Thus, statements such as “Girls are as good as boys at math” can actually backfire and perpetuate gender stereotypes about natural ability. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2229-2249, September 2018.
    June 28, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12637   open full text
  • Inference in the Wild: A Framework for Human Situation Assessment and a Case Study of Air Combat.
    Ken McAnally, Catherine Davey, Daniel White, Murray Stimson, Steven Mascaro, Kevin Korb.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 24, 2018
    --- - |2 Abstract Situation awareness is a key construct in human factors and arises from a process of situation assessment (SA). SA comprises the perception of information, its integration with existing knowledge, the search for new information, and the prediction of the future state of the world, including the consequences of planned actions. Causal models implemented as Bayesian networks (BNs) are attractive for modeling all of these processes within a single, unified framework. We elicited declarative knowledge from two Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) fighter pilots about the information sources used in the identification (ID) of airborne entities and the causal relationships between these sources. This knowledge was represented in a BN (the declarative model) that was evaluated against the performance of 19 RAAF fighter pilots in a low‐fidelity simulation. Pilot behavior was well predicted by a simple associative model (the behavioral model) with only three attributes of ID. Search for information by pilots was largely compensatory and was near‐optimal with respect to the behavioral model. The average revision of beliefs in response to evidence was close to Bayesian, but there was substantial variability. Together, these results demonstrate the value of BNs for modeling human SA. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2181-2204, September 2018.
    June 24, 2018   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12636   open full text
  • Spatializing Emotion: No Evidence for a Domain‐General Magnitude System.
    Benjamin Pitt, Daniel Casasanto.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 22, 2017
    --- - |2 Abstract People implicitly associate different emotions with different locations in left‐right space. Which aspects of emotion do they spatialize, and why? Across many studies people spatialize emotional valence, mapping positive emotions onto their dominant side of space and negative emotions onto their non‐dominant side, consistent with theories of metaphorical mental representation. Yet other results suggest a conflicting mapping of emotional intensity (a.k.a., emotional magnitude), according to which people associate more intense emotions with the right and less intense emotions with the left — regardless of their valence; this pattern has been interpreted as support for a domain‐general system for representing magnitudes. To resolve the apparent contradiction between these mappings, we first tested whether people implicitly map either valence or intensity onto left‐right space, depending on which dimension of emotion they attend to (Experiments 1a, b). When asked to judge emotional valence, participants showed the predicted valence mapping. However, when asked to judge emotional intensity, participants showed no systematic intensity mapping. We then tested an alternative explanation of findings previously interpreted as evidence for an intensity mapping (Experiments 2a, b). These results suggest that previous findings may reflect a left‐right mapping of spatial magnitude (i.e., the size of a salient feature of the stimuli) rather than emotion. People implicitly spatialize emotional valence, but, at present, there is no clear evidence for an implicit lateral mapping of emotional intensity. These findings support metaphor theory and challenge the proposal that mental magnitudes are represented by a domain‐general metric that extends to the domain of emotion. - Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Issue 7, Page 2150-2180, September 2018.
    November 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12568   open full text
  • Semantic Information and the Syntax of Propositional Attitude Verbs.
    Aaron S. White, Valentine Hacquard, Jeffrey Lidz.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 19, 2017
    Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination (triad or “odd man out”) task and an ordinal (Likert) scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine‐grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally.
    October 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12512   open full text
  • Real Objects Can Impede Conditional Reasoning but Augmented Objects Do Not.
    Yuri Sato, Yutaro Sugimoto, Kazuhiro Ueda.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 19, 2017
    In this study, Knauff and Johnson‐Laird's (2002) visual impedance hypothesis (i.e., mental representations with irrelevant visual detail can impede reasoning) is applied to the domain of external representations and diagrammatic reasoning. We show that the use of real objects and augmented real (AR) objects can control human interpretation and reasoning about conditionals. As participants made inferences (e.g., an invalid one from "if P then Q" to "P"), they also moved objects corresponding to premises. Participants who moved real objects made more invalid inferences than those who moved AR objects and those who did not manipulate objects (there was no significant difference between the last two groups). Our results showed that real objects impeded conditional reasoning, but AR objects did not. These findings are explained by the fact that real objects may over‐specify a single state that exists, while AR objects suggest multiple possibilities.
    October 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12553   open full text
  • Symbol Grounding Without Direct Experience: Do Words Inherit Sensorimotor Activation From Purely Linguistic Context?
    Fritz Günther, Carolin Dudschig, Barbara Kaup.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 19, 2017
    Theories of embodied cognition assume that concepts are grounded in non‐linguistic, sensorimotor experience. In support of this assumption, previous studies have shown that upwards response movements are faster than downwards movements after participants have been presented with words whose referents are typically located in the upper vertical space (and vice versa for downwards responses). This is taken as evidence that processing these words reactivates sensorimotor experiential traces. This congruency effect was also found for novel words, after participants learned these words as labels for novel objects that they encountered either in their upper or lower visual field. While this indicates that direct experience with a word's referent is sufficient to evoke said congruency effects, the present study investigates whether this direct experience is also a necessary condition. To this end, we conducted five experiments in which participants learned novel words from purely linguistic input: Novel words were presented in pairs with real up‐ or down‐words (Experiment 1); they were presented in natural sentences where they replaced these real words (Experiment 2); they were presented as new labels for these real words (Experiment 3); and they were presented as labels for novel combined concepts based on these real words (Experiment 4 and 5). In all five experiments, we did not find any congruency effects elicited by the novel words; however, participants were always able to make correct explicit judgements about the vertical dimension associated to the novel words. These results suggest that direct experience is necessary for reactivating experiential traces, but this reactivation is not a necessary condition for understanding (in the sense of storing and accessing) the corresponding aspects of word meaning.
    October 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12549   open full text
  • Effects of Early Cues on the Processing of Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence for Experience‐Based Theories.
    Fuyun Wu, Elsi Kaiser, Shravan Vasishth.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 10, 2017
    We used Chinese prenominal relative clauses (RCs) to test the predictions of two competing accounts of sentence comprehension difficulty: the experience‐based account of Levy () and the Dependency Locality Theory (DLT; Gibson, ). Given that in Chinese RCs, a classifier and/or a passive marker BEI can be added to the sentence‐initial position, we manipulated the presence/absence of classifiers and the presence/absence of BEI, such that BEI sentences were passivized subject‐extracted RCs, and no‐BEI sentences were standard object‐extracted RCs. We conducted two self‐paced reading experiments, using the same critical stimuli but somewhat different filler items. Reading time patterns from both experiments showed facilitative effects of BEI within and beyond RC regions, and delayed facilitative effects of classifiers, suggesting that cues that occur before a clear signal of an upcoming RC can help Chinese comprehenders to anticipate RC structures. The data patterns are not predicted by the DLT, but they are consistent with the predictions of experience‐based theories.
    October 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12551   open full text
  • Disentangling Effects of Input Frequency and Morphophonological Complexity on Children's Acquisition of Verb Inflection: An Elicited Production Study of Japanese.
    Tomoko Tatsumi, Ben Ambridge, Julian M. Pine.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 10, 2017
    This study aims to disentangle the often‐confounded effects of input frequency and morphophonological complexity in the acquisition of inflection, by focusing on simple and complex verb forms in Japanese. Study 1 tested 28 children aged 3;3–4;3 on stative (complex) and simple past forms, and Study 2 tested 30 children aged 3;5–5;3 on completive (complex) and simple past forms, with both studies using a production priming paradigm. Mixed effects models for children's responses were built to test the prediction that children's verb use is explained by the relative bias in input frequency between the two inflectional forms. Although Study 1 did not show a significant effect of input bias (apparently due to problems with item selection), Study 2, which corrected for this problem, yielded the predicted relationship. These findings suggest that input frequency effects, at the level of different inflectional forms of the same verb stem, hold even after controlling for morphophonological complexity.
    October 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12554   open full text
  • Linguistic and Perceptual Mapping in Spatial Representations: An Attentional Account.
    Berenice Valdés‐Conroy, José A. Hinojosa, Francisco J. Román, Verónica Romero‐Ferreiro.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 10, 2017
    Building on evidence for embodied representations, we investigated whether Spanish spatial terms map onto the NEAR/FAR perceptual division of space. Using a long horizontal display, we measured congruency effects during the processing of spatial terms presented in NEAR or FAR space. Across three experiments, we manipulated the task demands in order to investigate the role of endogenous attention in linguistic and perceptual space mapping. We predicted congruency effects only when spatial properties were relevant for the task (reaching estimation task, Experiment 1) but not when attention was allocated to other features (lexical decision, Experiment 2; and color, Experiment 3). Results showed faster responses for words presented in Near‐space in all experiments. Consistent with our hypothesis, congruency effects were observed only when a reaching estimate was requested. Our results add important evidence for the role of top‐down processing in congruency effects from embodied representations of spatial terms.
    October 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12526   open full text
  • Redefining “Learning” in Statistical Learning: What Does an Online Measure Reveal About the Assimilation of Visual Regularities?
    Noam Siegelman, Louisa Bogaerts, Ofer Kronenfeld, Ram Frost.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 07, 2017
    From a theoretical perspective, most discussions of statistical learning (SL) have focused on the possible “statistical” properties that are the object of learning. Much less attention has been given to defining what “learning” is in the context of “statistical learning.” One major difficulty is that SL research has been monitoring participants’ performance in laboratory settings with a strikingly narrow set of tasks, where learning is typically assessed offline, through a set of two‐alternative‐forced‐choice questions, which follow a brief visual or auditory familiarization stream. Is that all there is to characterizing SL abilities? Here we adopt a novel perspective for investigating the processing of regularities in the visual modality. By tracking online performance in a self‐paced SL paradigm, we focus on the trajectory of learning. In a set of three experiments we show that this paradigm provides a reliable and valid signature of SL performance, and it offers important insights for understanding how statistical regularities are perceived and assimilated in the visual modality. This demonstrates the promise of integrating different operational measures to our theory of SL.
    October 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12556   open full text
  • Rational Inference of Beliefs and Desires From Emotional Expressions.
    Yang Wu, Chris L. Baker, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Laura E. Schulz.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 06, 2017
    We investigated people's ability to infer others’ mental states from their emotional reactions, manipulating whether agents wanted, expected, and caused an outcome. Participants recovered agents’ desires throughout. When the agent observed, but did not cause the outcome, participants’ ability to recover the agent's beliefs depended on the evidence they got (i.e., her reaction only to the actual outcome or to both the expected and actual outcomes; Experiments 1 and 2). When the agent caused the event, participants’ judgments also depended on the probability of the action (Experiments 3 and 4); when actions were improbable given the mental states, people failed to recover the agent's beliefs even when they saw her react to both the anticipated and actual outcomes. A Bayesian model captured human performance throughout (rs ≥ .95), consistent with the proposal that people rationally integrate information about others’ actions and emotional reactions to infer their unobservable mental states.
    October 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12548   open full text
  • Both Earlier Times and the Future Are “Front”: The Distinction Between Time‐ and Ego‐Reference‐Points in Mandarin Speakers’ Temporal Representation.
    Chengli Xiao, Mengya Zhao, Lei Chen.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 28, 2017
    Mandarin speakers, like most other language speakers around the world, use spatial terms to talk about time. However, the direction of their mental temporal representation along the front‐back axis remains controversial because they use the spatial term “front” to refer to both earlier times (e.g., front‐year means “the year before last”) and the future (e.g., front‐road means “prospect”). Although the linguistic distinction between time‐ and ego‐reference‐point spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin suggests a promising clarification of the above controversy, there is little empirical evidence verifying this distinction. In this study, Mandarin speakers’ time‐ and ego‐reference‐point temporal representations on three axes (i.e., sagittal, lateral, and vertical) were separately examined through two tasks. In a time‐reference‐point task, Mandarin speakers judged whether the time point of the second picture was earlier or later than the time point of the first picture, while in an ego‐reference‐point task, they judged whether an event or phase had happened in the past or would happen in the future. The results indicate that Mandarin speakers construe an earlier‐times‐in‐front‐of‐later‐times temporal sequence and adopt the front‐to‐the‐future orientation.
    September 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12552   open full text
  • All the Right Noises: Background Variability Helps Early Word Learning.
    Katherine E. Twomey, Lizhi Ma, Gert Westermann.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 23, 2017
    Variability is prevalent in early language acquisition, but, whether it supports or hinders learning is unclear; while target variability has been shown to facilitate word learning, variability in competitor items has been shown to make the task harder. Here, we tested whether background variability could boost learning in a referent selection task. Two groups of 2‐year‐old children saw arrays of one novel and two known objects on a screen, and they heard a novel or known label. Stimuli were identical across conditions, with the exception that in the constant color condition objects appeared on a uniform white background, and in the variable color condition backgrounds were different, uniform colors. At test, only children in the variable condition showed evidence of retaining label‐object associations. These data support findings from the adult memory literature, which suggest that variability supports learning by decontextualizing representations. We argue that these data are consistent with dynamic systems accounts of learning in which low‐level entropy adds sufficient noise to the developmental system to precipitate a change in behavior.
    September 23, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12539   open full text
  • The Role of Gesture in Supporting Mental Representations: The Case of Mental Abacus Arithmetic.
    Neon B. Brooks, David Barner, Michael Frank, Susan Goldin‐Meadow.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 11, 2017
    People frequently gesture when problem‐solving, particularly on tasks that require spatial transformation. Gesture often facilitates task performance by interacting with internal mental representations, but how this process works is not well understood. We investigated this question by exploring the case of mental abacus (MA), a technique in which users not only imagine moving beads on an abacus to compute sums, but also produce movements in gestures that accompany the calculations. Because the content of MA is transparent and readily manipulated, the task offers a unique window onto how gestures interface with mental representations. We find that the size and number of MA gestures reflect the length and difficulty of math problems. Also, by selectively interfering with aspects of gesture, we find that participants perform significantly worse on MA under motor interference, but that perceptual feedback is not critical for success on the task. We conclude that premotor processes involved in the planning of gestures are critical to mental representation in MA.
    September 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12527   open full text
  • Recombinant Enaction: Manipulatives Generate New Procedures in the Imagination, by Extending and Recombining Action Spaces.
    Jeenath Rahaman, Harshit Agrawal, Nisheeth Srivastava, Sanjay Chandrasekharan.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 27, 2017
    Manipulation of physical models such as tangrams and tiles is a popular approach to teaching early mathematics concepts. This pedagogical approach is extended by new computational media, where mathematical entities such as equations and vectors can be virtually manipulated. The cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting such manipulation‐based learning—particularly how actions generate new internal structures that support problem‐solving—are not understood. We develop a model of the way manipulations generate internal traces embedding actions, and how these action‐traces recombine during problem‐solving. This model is based on a study of two groups of sixth‐grade students solving area problems. Before problem‐solving, one group manipulated a tangram, the other group answered a descriptive test. Eye‐movement trajectories during problem‐solving were different between the groups. A second study showed that this difference required the tangram's geometrical structure, just manipulation was not enough. We propose a theoretical model accounting for these results, and discuss its implications.
    August 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12518   open full text
  • How Cross‐Linguistic Differences in the Grammaticalization of Future Time Reference Influence Intertemporal Choices.
    Dieter Thoma, Agnieszka E. Tytus.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 22, 2017
    According to Chen's (2013) Linguistic Savings Hypothesis (LSH), our native language affects our economic behavior. We present three studies investigating how cross‐linguistic differences in the grammaticalization of future‐time reference (FTR) affect intertemporal choices. In a series of decision scenarios about finance and health issues, we let speakers of altogether five languages that represent FTR with increasing strength, that is, Chinese, German, Danish, Spanish, and English, choose between hypothetical sooner‐smaller and later‐larger reward options. While the LSH predicts a present‐bias that increases with FTR‐strength, our decision makers preferred later‐larger options and this future‐bias increased with FTR‐strength. In multiple regressions, the FTR‐strength effect persisted when controlled for socioeconomic and cultural differences. We discuss why our findings deviate from the LSH and ask in how far the FTR‐strength effect represents a habitual constitution of linguistic relativity or an instance of online decision framing.
    August 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12525   open full text
  • Left‐Corner Parsing With Distributed Associative Memory Produces Surprisal and Locality Effects.
    Nathan E. Rasmussen, William Schuler.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 01, 2017
    This article describes a left‐corner parser implemented within a cognitively and neurologically motivated distributed model of memory. This parser's approach to syntactic ambiguity points toward a tidy account both of surprisal effects and of locality effects, such as the parsing breakdowns caused by center embedding. The model provides an algorithmic‐level (Marr, 1982) account of these breakdowns: The structure of the parser's memory and the nature of incremental parsing produce a smooth degradation of processing accuracy for longer center embeddings, and a steeper degradation when they are nested, in line with recall observations by Miller and Isard (1964) and speed‐accuracy trade‐off observations by McElree et al. (2003). Modeling results show that this effect is distinct from the effects of ambiguity and exceeds the effect of mere sentence length.
    August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12511   open full text
  • Grounding by Attention Simulation in Peripersonal Space: Pupils Dilate to Pinch Grip But Not Big Size Nominal Classifier.
    Marit Lobben, Agata Bochynska.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 01, 2017
    Grammatical categories represent implicit knowledge, and it is not known if such abstract linguistic knowledge can be continuously grounded in real‐life experiences, nor is it known what types of mental states can be simulated. A former study showed that attention bias in peripersonal space (PPS) affects reaction times in grammatical congruency judgments of nominal classifiers, suggesting that simulated semantics may include reenactment of attention. In this study, we contrasted a Chinese nominal classifier used with nouns denoting pinch grip objects with a classifier for nouns with big object referents in a pupil dilation experiment. Twenty Chinese native speakers read grammatical and ungrammatical classifier‐noun combinations and made grammaticality judgment while their pupillary responses were measured. It was found that their pupils dilated significantly more to the pinch grip classifier than to the big object classifier, indicating attention simulation in PPS. Pupil dilations were also significantly larger with congruent trials on the whole than in incongruent trials, but crucially, congruency and classifier semantics were independent of each other. No such effects were found in controls.
    August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12524   open full text
  • Input and Age‐Dependent Variation in Second Language Learning: A Connectionist Account.
    Marius Janciauskas, Franklin Chang.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 26, 2017
    Language learning requires linguistic input, but several studies have found that knowledge of second language (L2) rules does not seem to improve with more language exposure (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1989). One reason for this is that previous studies did not factor out variation due to the different rules tested. To examine this issue, we reanalyzed grammaticality judgment scores in Flege, Yeni‐Komshian, and Liu's (1999) study of L2 learners using rule‐related predictors and found that, in addition to the overall drop in performance due to a sensitive period, L2 knowledge increased with years of input. Knowledge of different grammar rules was negatively associated with input frequency of those rules. To better understand these effects, we modeled the results using a connectionist model that was trained using Korean as a first language (L1) and then English as an L2. To explain the sensitive period in L2 learning, the model's learning rate was reduced in an age‐related manner. By assigning different learning rates for syntax and lexical learning, we were able to model the difference between early and late L2 learners in input sensitivity. The model's learning mechanism allowed transfer between the L1 and L2, and this helped to explain the differences between different rules in the grammaticality judgment task. This work demonstrates that an L1 model of learning and processing can be adapted to provide an explicit account of how the input and the sensitive period interact in L2 learning.
    July 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12519   open full text
  • Linguistic Constraints on Statistical Word Segmentation: The Role of Consonants in Arabic and English.
    Itamar Kastner, Frans Adriaans.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 26, 2017
    Statistical learning is often taken to lie at the heart of many cognitive tasks, including the acquisition of language. One particular task in which probabilistic models have achieved considerable success is the segmentation of speech into words. However, these models have mostly been tested against English data, and as a result little is known about how a statistical learning mechanism copes with input regularities that arise from the structural properties of different languages. This study focuses on statistical word segmentation in Arabic, a Semitic language in which words are built around consonantal roots. We hypothesize that segmentation in such languages is facilitated by tracking consonant distributions independently from intervening vowels. Previous studies have shown that human learners can track consonant probabilities across intervening vowels in artificial languages, but it is unknown to what extent this ability would be beneficial in the segmentation of natural language. We assessed the performance of a Bayesian segmentation model on English and Arabic, comparing consonant‐only representations with full representations. In addition, we examined to what extent structurally different proto‐lexicons reflect adult language. The results suggest that for a child learning a Semitic language, separating consonants from vowels is beneficial for segmentation. These findings indicate that probabilistic models require appropriate linguistic representations in order to effectively meet the challenges of language acquisition.
    July 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12521   open full text
  • Two Models of Moral Judgment.
    Shane Bretz, Ron Sun.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 07, 2017
    This paper compares two theories and their two corresponding computational models of human moral judgment. In order to better address psychological realism and generality of theories of moral judgment, more detailed and more psychologically nuanced models are needed. In particular, a motivationally based theory of moral judgment (and its corresponding computational model) is developed in this paper that provides a more accurate account of human moral judgment than an existing emotion‐reason conflict theory. Simulations based on the theory capture and explain a range of relevant human data. They account not only for the original data that were used to support the emotion–reason conflict theory, but also for a wider range of data and phenomena.
    July 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12517   open full text
  • Knowing When Help Is Needed: A Developing Sense of Causal Complexity.
    Jonathan F. Kominsky, Anna P. Zamm, Frank C. Keil.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 04, 2017
    Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely (in part) on “mechanism metadata,” information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and it is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5 years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information.
    July 04, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12509   open full text
  • Dividing Attention Between Tasks: Testing Whether Explicit Payoff Functions Elicit Optimal Dual‐Task Performance.
    George D. Farmer, Christian P. Janssen, Anh T. Nguyen, Duncan P. Brumby.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 27, 2017
    We test people's ability to optimize performance across two concurrent tasks. Participants performed a number entry task while controlling a randomly moving cursor with a joystick. Participants received explicit feedback on their performance on these tasks in the form of a single combined score. This payoff function was varied between conditions to change the value of one task relative to the other. We found that participants adapted their strategy for interleaving the two tasks, by varying how long they spent on one task before switching to the other, in order to achieve the near maximum payoff available in each condition. In a second experiment, we show that this behavior is learned quickly (within 2–3 min over several discrete trials) and remained stable for as long as the payoff function did not change. The results of this work show that people are adaptive and flexible in how they prioritize and allocate attention in a dual‐task setting. However, it also demonstrates some of the limits regarding people's ability to optimize payoff functions.
    June 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12513   open full text
  • Sculptors, Architects, and Painters Conceive of Depicted Spaces Differently.
    Claudia Cialone, Thora Tenbrink, Hugo J. Spiers.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 27, 2017
    Sculptors, architects, and painters are three professional groups that require a comprehensive understanding of how to manipulate spatial structures. While it has been speculated that they may differ in the way they conceive of space due to the different professional demands, this has not been empirically tested. To achieve this, we asked architects, painters, sculptors, and a control group questions about spatially complex pictures. Verbalizations elicited were examined using cognitive discourse analysis. We found significant differences between each group. Only painters shifted consistently between 2D and 3D concepts, architects were concerned with paths and spatial physical boundedness, and sculptors produced responses that fell between architects and painters. All three differed from controls, whose verbalizations were generally less elaborate and detailed. Thus, for the case of sculptors, architects, and painters, profession appears to relate to a different spatial conceptualization manifested through a systematically contrasting way of talking about space.
    June 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12510   open full text
  • Visual Complexity and Its Effects on Referring Expression Generation.
    Micha Elsner, Alasdair Clarke, Hannah Rohde.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 26, 2017
    Speakers’ perception of a visual scene influences the language they use to describe it—which objects they choose to mention and how they characterize the relationships between them. We show that visual complexity can either delay or facilitate description generation, depending on how much disambiguating information is required and how useful the scene's complexity can be in providing, for example, helpful landmarks. To do so, we measure speech onset times, eye gaze, and utterance content in a reference production experiment in which the target object is either unique or non‐unique in a visual scene of varying size and complexity. Speakers delay speech onset if the target object is non‐unique and requires disambiguation, and we argue that this reflects the cost of deciding on a high‐level strategy for describing it. The eye‐tracking data demonstrate that these delays increase when speakers are able to conduct an extensive early visual search, implying that when speakers scan too little of the scene early on, they may decide to begin speaking before becoming aware that their description is underspecified. Speakers’ content choices reflect the visual makeup of the scene—the number of distractors present and the availability of useful landmarks. Our results highlight the complex role of visual perception in reference production, showing that speakers can make good use of complexity in ways that reflect their visual processing of the scene.
    June 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12507   open full text
  • Sensitivity to Shared Information in Social Learning.
    Andrew Whalen, Thomas L. Griffiths, Daphna Buchsbaum.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 13, 2017
    Social learning has been shown to be an evolutionarily adaptive strategy, but it can be implemented via many different cognitive mechanisms. The adaptive advantage of social learning depends crucially on the ability of each learner to obtain relevant and accurate information from informants. The source of informants’ knowledge is a particularly important cue for evaluating advice from multiple informants; if the informants share the source of their information or have obtained their information from each other, then their testimony is statistically dependent and may be less reliable than testimony from informants who do not share information. In this study, we use a Bayesian model to determine how rational learners should incorporate the effects of shared information when learning from other people, conducting three experiments that examine whether human learners behave similarly. We find that people are sensitive to a number of different patterns of dependency, supporting the use of a sophisticated strategy for social learning that goes beyond copying the majority, and broadening the situations in which social learning is likely to be an adaptive strategy.
    June 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12485   open full text
  • Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures.
    Julian De Freitas, Hagop Sarkissian, George E. Newman, Igor Grossmann, Felipe De Brigard, Andres Luco, Joshua Knobe.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 06, 2017
    People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to behave in morally good ways. Is this belief particular to individuals with optimistic beliefs or people from Western cultures, or does it reflect a widely held cognitive bias in how people understand the self? To address this question, we tested the good true self theory against two potential boundary conditions that are known to elicit different beliefs about the self as a whole. Study 1 tested whether individual differences in misanthropy—the tendency to view humans negatively—predict beliefs about the good true self in an American sample. The results indicate a consistent belief in a good true self, even among individuals who have an explicitly pessimistic view of others. Study 2 compared true self‐attributions across cultural groups, by comparing samples from an independent country (USA) and a diverse set of interdependent countries (Russia, Singapore, and Colombia). Results indicated that the direction and magnitude of the effect are comparable across all groups we tested. The belief in a good true self appears robust across groups varying in cultural orientation or misanthropy, suggesting a consistent psychological tendency to view the true self as morally good.
    June 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12505   open full text
  • A New Measure of Hallucinatory States and a Discussion of REM Sleep Dreaming as a Virtual Laboratory for the Rehearsal of Embodied Cognition.
    Clemens Speth, Jana Speth.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 06, 2017
    Hallucinatory states are experienced not only in connection with drugs and psychopathologies but occur naturally and spontaneously across the human circadian cycle: Our nightly dreams bring multimodal experiences in the absence of adequate external stimuli. The current study proposes a new, tighter measure of these hallucinatory states: Sleep onset, REM sleep, and non‐REM sleep are shown to differ with regard to (a) motor imagery indicating interactions with a rich imaginative world, and (b) cognitive agency that could enable sleepers to recognize their hallucinatory state. Mentation reports from the different states were analysed quantitatively with regard to two grammatical–semantic constructs, motor agency and cognitive agency. The present results support earlier physiological and psychological evidence in revealing a decline in cognitive functions and an increase in simulated interactions with a hallucinatory world, en route to normal REM sleep. This leads us to introduce the hypothesis that REM sleep, which exhibits remarkably high levels of (simulated) sensorimotor processes, may have evolved to serve as a virtual laboratory for the development and rehearsal of embodied cognition. The new measure of hallucinatory states presented here may also hold implications for the study of executive functions and (meta‐)cognitions, which might be interesting, for example, for the investigation of lucid dreaming.
    June 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12491   open full text
  • A Biologically Plausible Action Selection System for Cognitive Architectures: Implications of Basal Ganglia Anatomy for Learning and Decision‐Making Models.
    Andrea Stocco.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 06, 2017
    Several attempts have been made previously to provide a biological grounding for cognitive architectures by relating their components to the computations of specific brain circuits. Often, the architecture's action selection system is identified with the basal ganglia. However, this identification overlooks one of the most important features of the basal ganglia—the existence of a direct and an indirect pathway that compete against each other. This characteristic has important consequences in decision‐making tasks, which are brought to light by Parkinson's disease as well as genetic differences in dopamine receptors. This paper shows that a standard model of action selection in a cognitive architecture (ACT‐R) cannot replicate any of these findings, details an alternative solution that reconciles action selection in the architecture with the physiology of the basal ganglia, and extends the domain of application of cognitive architectures. The implication of this solution for other architectures and existing models are discussed.
    June 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12506   open full text
  • An Actor's Knowledge and Intent Are More Important in Evaluating Moral Transgressions Than Conventional Transgressions.
    Carly Giffin, Tania Lombrozo.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 02, 2017
    An actor's mental states—whether she acted knowingly and with bad intentions—typically play an important role in evaluating the extent to which an action is wrong and in determining appropriate levels of punishment. In four experiments, we find that this role for knowledge and intent is significantly weaker when evaluating transgressions of conventional rules as opposed to moral rules. We also find that this attenuated role for knowledge and intent is partly due to the fact that conventional rules are judged to be more arbitrary than moral rules; whereas moral transgressions are associated with actions that are intrinsically wrong (e.g., hitting another person), conventional transgressions are associated with actions that are only contingently wrong (e.g., wearing pajamas to school, which is only wrong if it violates a dress code that could have been otherwise). Finally, we find that it is the perpetrator's belief about the arbitrary or non‐arbitrary basis of the rule—not the reality—that drives this differential effect of knowledge and intent across types of transgressions.
    June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12504   open full text
  • Naïve and Robust: Class‐Conditional Independence in Human Classification Learning.
    Jana B. Jarecki, Björn Meder, Jonathan D. Nelson.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 02, 2017
    Humans excel in categorization. Yet from a computational standpoint, learning a novel probabilistic classification task involves severe computational challenges. The present paper investigates one way to address these challenges: assuming class‐conditional independence of features. This feature independence assumption simplifies the inference problem, allows for informed inferences about novel feature combinations, and performs robustly across different statistical environments. We designed a new Bayesian classification learning model (the dependence‐independence structure and category learning model, DISC‐LM) that incorporates varying degrees of prior belief in class‐conditional independence, learns whether or not independence holds, and adapts its behavior accordingly. Theoretical results from two simulation studies demonstrate that classification behavior can appear to start simple, yet adapt effectively to unexpected task structures. Two experiments—designed using optimal experimental design principles—were conducted with human learners. Classification decisions of the majority of participants were best accounted for by a version of the model with very high initial prior belief in class‐conditional independence, before adapting to the true environmental structure. Class‐conditional independence may be a strong and useful default assumption in category learning tasks.
    June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12496   open full text
  • Distinctiveness Benefits Novelty (and Not Familiarity), but Only Up to a Limit: The Prior Knowledge Perspective.
    Niv Reggev, Reut Sharoni, Anat Maril.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 15, 2017
    Novelty is a pivotal player in cognition, and its contribution to superior memory performance is a widely accepted convention. On the other hand, mnemonic advantages for familiar information are also well documented. Here, we examine the role of experimental distinctiveness as a potential explanation for these apparently conflicting findings. Across two experiments, we demonstrate that conceptual novelty, an unfamiliar combination of familiar constituents, is sensitive to its experimental proportions: Improved memory for novelty was observed when novel stimuli were relatively rare. Memory levels for familiar items, in contrast, were completely unaffected by experimental proportions, highlighting their insensitivity to list‐based distinctiveness. Finally, no mnemonic advantage for conceptual novelty over familiarity was observed even when novel stimuli were extremely rare at study. Together, these results imply that novel and familiar items are processed via partially distinct mechanisms, with (at least some facets of) novelty not providing a mnemonic advantage over familiarity.
    May 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12498   open full text
  • Anthropocentric by Default? Attribution of Familiar and Novel Properties to Living Things.
    Melanie Arenson, John D. Coley.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 08, 2017
    Humans naturally and effortlessly use a set of cognitive tools to reason about biological entities and phenomena. Two such tools, essentialist thinking and teleological thinking, appear to be early developmental cognitive defaults, used extensively in childhood and under limited circumstances in adulthood, but prone to reemerge under time pressure or cognitive load. We examine the nature of another such tool: anthropocentric thinking. In four experiments, we examined patterns of property attribution to a wide range of living and non‐living objects, manipulating time pressure, response type, and property (either novel or familiar) in a total of 471 participants. Results showed no tendency toward increased similarity‐based attribution patterns indicative of anthropocentric thinking under time pressure. However, anthropocentric thinking was consistently observed for unfamiliar properties. These findings suggest that anthropocentric thinking is not a developmentally persistent cognitive default, but rather a cognitive strategy deliberately employed in situations of uncertainty.
    May 08, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12501   open full text
  • No Harm, Still Foul: Concerns About Reputation Drive Dislike of Harmless Plagiarizers.
    Ike Silver, Alex Shaw.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 05, 2017
    Across a variety of situations, people strongly condemn plagiarizers who steal credit for ideas, even when the theft in question does not appear to harm anyone. Why would people react negatively to relatively harmless acts of plagiarism? In six experiments, we predict and find that these negative reactions are driven by people's aversion toward agents who attempt to falsely improve their reputations. In Studies 1–3, participants condemn plagiarism cases that they agree are harmless (i.e., stealing credit from an anonymous source). This effect is mediated by the extent to which participants perceive the plagiarizer to have falsely benefitted from plagiarizing. In Studies 4–5, we demonstrate that this effect is not explained solely by participants’ negative response to lies or violations of permission. In Study 6, participants condemn a plagiarism case in which the idea's original author actually benefits, providing the strongest evidence that people condemn plagiarism for reasons beyond perceived harm. We discuss how this work connects to broader questions of intellectual property and impression management.
    May 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12500   open full text
  • A Multi‐Factor Account of Degrees of Awareness.
    Peter Fazekas, Morten Overgaard.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. April 10, 2017
    In this paper we argue that awareness comes in degrees, and we propose a novel multi‐factor account that spans both subjective experiences and perceptual representations. At the subjective level, we argue that conscious experiences can be degraded by being fragmented, less salient, too generic, or flash‐like. At the representational level, we identify corresponding features of perceptual representations—their availability for working memory, intensity, precision, and stability—and argue that the mechanisms that affect these features are what ultimately modulate the degree of awareness. We conclude the paper by demonstrating why the original interpretations of certain empirical findings that apparently pose problems for our account are, in fact, flawed.
    April 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12478   open full text
  • The Semantic Drift of Quotations in Blogspace: A Case Study in Short‐Term Cultural Evolution.
    Sébastien Lerique, Camille Roth.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. April 10, 2017
    We present an empirical case study that connects psycholinguistics with the field of cultural evolution, in order to test for the existence of cultural attractors in the evolution of quotations. Such attractors have been proposed as a useful concept for understanding cultural evolution in relation with individual cognition, but their existence has been hard to test. We focus on the transformation of quotations when they are copied from blog to blog or media website: by coding words with a number of well‐studied lexical features, we show that the way words are substituted in quotations is consistent (a) with the hypothesis of cultural attractors and (b) with known effects of the word features. In particular, words known to be harder to recall in lists have a higher tendency to be substituted, and words easier to recall are produced instead. Our results support the hypothesis that cultural attractors can result from the combination of individual cognitive biases in the interpretation and reproduction of representations.
    April 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12494   open full text
  • Adaptive Anchoring Model: How Static and Dynamic Presentations of Time Series Influence Judgments and Predictions.
    Petko Kusev, Paul Schaik, Krasimira Tsaneva‐Atanasova, Asgeir Juliusson, Nick Chater.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. April 06, 2017
    When attempting to predict future events, people commonly rely on historical data. One psychological characteristic of judgmental forecasting of time series, established by research, is that when people make forecasts from series, they tend to underestimate future values for upward trends and overestimate them for downward ones, so‐called trend‐damping (modeled by anchoring on, and insufficient adjustment from, the average of recent time series values). Events in a time series can be experienced sequentially (dynamic mode), or they can also be retrospectively viewed simultaneously (static mode), not experienced individually in real time. In one experiment, we studied the influence of presentation mode (dynamic and static) on two sorts of judgment: (a) predictions of the next event (forecast) and (b) estimation of the average value of all the events in the presented series (average estimation). Participants' responses in dynamic mode were anchored on more recent events than in static mode for all types of judgment but with different consequences; hence, dynamic presentation improved prediction accuracy, but not estimation. These results are not anticipated by existing theoretical accounts; we develop and present an agent‐based model—the adaptive anchoring model (ADAM)—to account for the difference between processing sequences of dynamically and statically presented stimuli (visually presented data). ADAM captures how variation in presentation mode produces variation in responses (and the accuracy of these responses) in both forecasting and judgment tasks. ADAM's model predictions for the forecasting and judgment tasks fit better with the response data than a linear‐regression time series model. Moreover, ADAM outperformed autoregressive‐integrated‐moving‐average (ARIMA) and exponential‐smoothing models, while neither of these models accounts for people's responses on the average estimation task.
    April 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12476   open full text
  • A Priori True and False Conditionals.
    Ana Cristina Quelhas, Célia Rasga, Philip N. Johnson‐Laird.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 29, 2017
    The theory of mental models postulates that meaning and knowledge can modulate the interpretation of conditionals. The theory's computer implementation implied that certain conditionals should be true or false without the need for evidence. Three experiments corroborated this prediction. In Experiment 1, nearly 500 participants evaluated 24 conditionals as true or false, and they justified their judgments by completing sentences of the form, It is impossible that A and ___ appropriately. In Experiment 2, participants evaluated 16 conditionals and provided their own justifications, which tended to be explanations rather than logical justifications. In Experiment 3, the participants also evaluated as possible or impossible each of the four cases in the partitions of 16 conditionals: A and C, A and not‐C, not‐A and C, not‐A and not‐C. These evaluations corroborated the model theory. We consider the implications of these results for theories of reasoning based on logic, probabilistic logic, and suppositions.
    March 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12479   open full text
  • Is the Lateralized Categorical Perception of Color a Situational Effect of Language on Color Perception?
    Weifang Zhong, You Li, Yulan Huang, He Li, Lei Mo.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 27, 2017
    This study investigated whether and how a person's varied series of lexical categories corresponding to different discriminatory characteristics of the same colors affect his or her perception of colors. In three experiments, Chinese participants were primed to categorize four graduated colors—specifically dark green, light green, light blue, and dark blue—into green and blue; light color and dark color; and dark green, light green, light blue, and dark blue. The participants were then required to complete a visual search task. Reaction times in the visual search task indicated that different lateralized categorical perceptions (CPs) of color corresponded to the various priming situations. These results suggest that all of the lexical categories corresponding to different discriminatory characteristics of the same colors can influence people's perceptions of colors and that color perceptions can be influenced differently by distinct types of lexical categories depending on the context.
    March 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12493   open full text
  • Cultural Differences in Visual Search for Geometric Figures.
    Yoshiyuki Ueda, Lei Chen, Jonathon Kopecky, Emily S. Cramer, Ronald A. Rensink, David E. Meyer, Shinobu Kitayama, Jun Saiki.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 25, 2017
    While some studies suggest cultural differences in visual processing, others do not, possibly because the complexity of their tasks draws upon high‐level factors that could obscure such effects. To control for this, we examined cultural differences in visual search for geometric figures, a relatively simple task for which the underlying mechanisms are reasonably well known. We replicated earlier results showing that North Americans had a reliable search asymmetry for line length: Search for long among short lines was faster than vice versa. In contrast, Japanese participants showed no asymmetry. This difference did not appear to be affected by stimulus density. Other kinds of stimuli resulted in other patterns of asymmetry differences, suggesting that these are not due to factors such as analytic/holistic processing but are based instead on the target‐detection process. In particular, our results indicate that at least some cultural differences reflect different ways of processing early‐level features, possibly in response to environmental factors.
    March 25, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12490   open full text
  • Functional Equivalence of Sleep Loss and Time on Task Effects in Sustained Attention.
    Bella Z. Veksler, Glenn Gunzelmann.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 22, 2017
    Research on sleep loss and vigilance both focus on declines in cognitive performance, but theoretical accounts have developed largely in parallel in these two areas. In addition, computational instantiations of theoretical accounts are rare. The current work uses computational modeling to explore whether the same mechanisms can account for the effects of both sleep loss and time on task on performance. A classic task used in the sleep deprivation literature, the Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT), was extended from the typical 10‐min duration to 35 min, to make the task similar in duration to traditional vigilance tasks. A computational cognitive model demonstrated that the effects of time on task in the PVT were equivalent to those observed with sleep loss. Subsequently, the same mechanisms were applied to a more traditional vigilance task—the Mackworth Clock Task—providing a good fit to existing data. This supports the hypothesis that these different types of fatigue may produce functionally equivalent declines in performance.
    March 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12489   open full text
  • Multimodal Word Meaning Induction From Minimal Exposure to Natural Text.
    Angeliki Lazaridou, Marco Marelli, Marco Baroni.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 21, 2017
    By the time they reach early adulthood, English speakers are familiar with the meaning of thousands of words. In the last decades, computational simulations known as distributional semantic models (DSMs) have demonstrated that it is possible to induce word meaning representations solely from word co‐occurrence statistics extracted from a large amount of text. However, while these models learn in batch mode from large corpora, human word learning proceeds incrementally after minimal exposure to new words. In this study, we run a set of experiments investigating whether minimal distributional evidence from very short passages suffices to trigger successful word learning in subjects, testing their linguistic and visual intuitions about the concepts associated with new words. After confirming that subjects are indeed very efficient distributional learners even from small amounts of evidence, we test a DSM on the same multimodal task, finding that it behaves in a remarkable human‐like way. We conclude that DSMs provide a convincing computational account of word learning even at the early stages in which a word is first encountered, and the way they build meaning representations can offer new insights into human language acquisition.
    March 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12481   open full text
  • Ownership Dilemmas: The Case of Finders Versus Landowners.
    Peter DeScioli, Rachel Karpoff, Julian De Freitas.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 14, 2017
    People sometimes disagree about who owns which objects, and these ownership dilemmas can lead to costly disputes. We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying people's judgments about finder versus landowner cases, in which a person finds an object on someone else's land. We test psychological hypotheses motivated directly by three major principles that govern these cases in the law. The results show that people are more likely to favor the finder when the object is in a public space compared to a private space. We find mixed support for the hypothesis that people are less likely to favor a finder who is employed by the landowner. Last, we find no support for the hypothesis that people are more likely to favor finders for objects located above ground compared to below ground. We discuss implications for psychological theories of ownership and potential applications to property law.
    March 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12486   open full text
  • Learning the Structure of Social Influence.
    Samuel J. Gershman, Hillard Thomas Pouncy, Hyowon Gweon.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 13, 2017
    We routinely observe others’ choices and use them to guide our own. Whose choices influence us more, and why? Prior work has focused on the effect of perceived similarity between two individuals (self and others), such as the degree of overlap in past choices or explicitly recognizable group affiliations. In the real world, however, any dyadic relationship is part of a more complex social structure involving multiple social groups that are not directly observable. Here we suggest that human learners go beyond dyadic similarities in choice behaviors or explicit group memberships; they infer the structure of social influence by grouping individuals (including themselves) based on choices, and they use these groups to decide whose choices to follow. We propose a computational model that formalizes this idea, and we test the model predictions in a series of behavioral experiments. In Experiment 1, we reproduce a well‐established finding that people's choices are more likely to be influenced by someone whose past choices are more similar to their own past choices, as predicted by our model as well as dyadic similarity models. In Experiments 2–5, we test a set of unique predictions of our model by looking at cases where the degree of choice overlap between individuals is equated, but their choices indicate a latent group structure. We then apply our model to prior empirical results on infants’ understanding of others’ preferences, presenting an alternative account of developmental changes. Finally, we discuss how our model relates to classical findings in the social influence literature and the theoretical implications of our model. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that structure learning is a powerful framework for explaining the influence of social information on decision making in a variety of contexts.
    March 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12480   open full text
  • Further Tests of a Dynamic‐Adjustment Account of Saccade Targeting During the Reading of Chinese.
    Yanping Liu, Ren Huang, Dingguo Gao, Erik D. Reichle.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 13, 2017
    There are two accounts of how readers of unspaced writing systems (e.g., Chinese) know where to move their eyes: (a) saccades are directed toward default targets (e.g., centers of words that have been segmented in the parafovea); or (b) saccade lengths are adjusted dynamically, as a function of ongoing parafoveal processing. This article reports an eye‐movement experiment supporting the latter hypothesis by demonstrating that the slope of the relationship between the saccade launch site on word N and the subsequent fixation landing site on word N + 1 is > 1, suggesting that saccades are lengthened from launch sites that afford more parafoveal processing. This conclusion is then evaluated and confirmed via simulations using implementations of both hypotheses (Liu, Reichle, & Li, 2016), with a discussion of these results for our understanding of saccadic targeting during reading and existing models of eye‐movement control.
    March 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12487   open full text
  • Maternal Socioeconomic Status Influences the Range of Expectations During Language Comprehension in Adulthood.
    Melissa Troyer, Arielle Borovsky.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 13, 2017
    In infancy, maternal socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with real‐time language processing skills, but whether or not (and if so, how) this relationship carries into adulthood is unknown. We explored the effects of maternal SES in college‐aged adults on eye‐tracked, spoken sentence comprehension tasks using the visual world paradigm. When sentences ended in highly plausible, expected target nouns (Exp. 1), higher SES was associated with a greater likelihood of considering alternative endings related to the action of the sentence. Moreover, for unexpected sentence endings (Exp. 2), individuals from higher SES backgrounds were sensitive to whether the ending was action‐related (plausible) or unrelated (implausible), showing a benefit for plausible endings. Individuals from lower SES backgrounds did not show this advantage. This suggests maternal SES can influence the dynamics of sentence processing even in adulthood, with consequences for processing unexpected content. These findings highlight the importance of early lexical experience for adult language skills.
    March 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12488   open full text
  • What Am I Looking at? Interpreting Dynamic and Static Gaze Displays.
    Margot Wermeskerken, Damien Litchfield, Tamara Gog.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 13, 2017
    Displays of eye movements may convey information about cognitive processes but require interpretation. We investigated whether participants were able to interpret displays of their own or others' eye movements. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants observed an image under three different viewing instructions. Then they were shown static or dynamic gaze displays and had to judge whether it was their own or someone else's eye movements and what instruction was reflected. Participants were capable of recognizing the instruction reflected in their own and someone else's gaze display. Instruction recognition was better for dynamic displays, and only this condition yielded above chance performance in recognizing the display as one's own or another person's (Experiments 1 and 2). Experiment 3 revealed that order information in the gaze displays facilitated instruction recognition when transitions between fixated regions distinguish one viewing instruction from another. Implications of these findings are discussed.
    March 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12484   open full text
  • Problem‐Solving Phase Transitions During Team Collaboration.
    Travis J. Wiltshire, Jonathan E. Butner, Stephen M. Fiore.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 18, 2017
    Multiple theories of problem‐solving hypothesize that there are distinct qualitative phases exhibited during effective problem‐solving. However, limited research has attempted to identify when transitions between phases occur. We integrate theory on collaborative problem‐solving (CPS) with dynamical systems theory suggesting that when a system is undergoing a phase transition it should exhibit a peak in entropy and that entropy levels should also relate to team performance. Communications from 40 teams that collaborated on a complex problem were coded for occurrence of problem‐solving processes. We applied a sliding window entropy technique to each team's communications and specified criteria for (a) identifying data points that qualify as peaks and (b) determining which peaks were robust. We used multilevel modeling, and provide a qualitative example, to evaluate whether phases exhibit distinct distributions of communication processes. We also tested whether there was a relationship between entropy values at transition points and CPS performance. We found that a proportion of entropy peaks was robust and that the relative occurrence of communication codes varied significantly across phases. Peaks in entropy thus corresponded to qualitative shifts in teams’ CPS communications, providing empirical evidence that teams exhibit phase transitions during CPS. Also, lower average levels of entropy at the phase transition points predicted better CPS performance. We specify future directions to improve understanding of phase transitions during CPS, and collaborative cognition, more broadly.
    February 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12482   open full text
  • Information‐Theoretic Properties of Auditory Sequences Dynamically Influence Expectation and Memory.
    Kat Agres, Samer Abdallah, Marcus Pearce.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. January 25, 2017
    A basic function of cognition is to detect regularities in sensory input to facilitate the prediction and recognition of future events. It has been proposed that these implicit expectations arise from an internal predictive coding model, based on knowledge acquired through processes such as statistical learning, but it is unclear how different types of statistical information affect listeners’ memory for auditory stimuli. We used a combination of behavioral and computational methods to investigate memory for non‐linguistic auditory sequences. Participants repeatedly heard tone sequences varying systematically in their information‐theoretic properties. Expectedness ratings of tones were collected during three listening sessions, and a recognition memory test was given after each session. Information‐theoretic measures of sequential predictability significantly influenced listeners’ expectedness ratings, and variations in these properties had a significant impact on memory performance. Predictable sequences yielded increasingly better memory performance with increasing exposure. Computational simulations using a probabilistic model of auditory expectation suggest that listeners dynamically formed a new, and increasingly accurate, implicit cognitive model of the information‐theoretic structure of the sequences throughout the experimental session.
    January 25, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12477   open full text
  • Relational Priming Based on a Multiplicative Schema for Whole Numbers and Fractions.
    Melissa DeWolf, Ji Y. Son, Miriam Bassok, Keith J. Holyoak.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. January 17, 2017
    Why might it be (at least sometimes) beneficial for adults to process fractions componentially? Recent research has shown that college‐educated adults can capitalize on the bipartite structure of the fraction notation, performing more successfully with fractions than with decimals in relational tasks, notably analogical reasoning. This study examined patterns of relational priming for problems with fractions in a task that required arithmetic computations. College students were asked to judge whether or not multiplication equations involving fractions were correct. Some equations served as structurally inverse primes for the equation that immediately followed it (e.g., 4 × 3/4 = 3 followed by 3 × 8/6 = 4). Students with relatively high math ability showed relational priming (speeded solution times to the second of two successive relationally related fraction equations) both with and without high perceptual similarity (Experiment 2). Students with relatively low math ability also showed priming, but only when the structurally inverse equation pairs were supported by high perceptual similarity between numbers (e.g., 4 × 3/4 = 3 followed by 3 × 4/3 = 4). Several additional experiments established boundary conditions on relational priming with fractions. These findings are interpreted in terms of componential processing of fractions in a relational multiplication context that takes advantage of their inherent connections to a multiplicative schema for whole numbers.
    January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12468   open full text
  • Evolutionary Constraints on Human Object Perception.
    Sarah E. Koopman, Bradford Z. Mahon, Jessica F. Cantlon.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 29, 2016
    Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non‐human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non‐human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that monkeys’ discrimination sensitivity when identifying images of animals is predicted by established measures of semantic similarity derived from human conceptual judgments. We used metrics from computer vision and computational neuroscience to show that monkeys’ and humans’ performance cannot be explained by low‐level visual similarity alone. The results demonstrate that at least some of the underlying structure of object representations in humans is shared with non‐human primates, at an abstract level that extends beyond low‐level visual similarity. Because the monkeys had no experience with the objects we tested, the results suggest that monkeys and humans share a primitive representation of object similarity that is independent of formal knowledge and cultural experience, and likely derived from common evolutionary constraints on object representation.
    December 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12470   open full text
  • The Specificity of Sound Symbolic Correspondences in Spoken Language.
    Christina Y. Tzeng, Lynne C. Nygaard, Laura L. Namy.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 29, 2016
    Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, sound symbolism, or non‐arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specificity of these mappings. This study investigated whether sound symbolic properties correspond to specific meanings, or whether these properties generalize across semantic dimensions. In three experiments, native English‐speaking adults heard sound symbolic foreign words for dimensional adjective pairs (big/small, round/pointy, fast/slow, moving/still) and for each foreign word, selected a translation among English antonyms that either matched or mismatched with the correct meaning dimension. Listeners agreed more reliably on the English translation for matched relative to mismatched dimensions, though reliable cross‐dimensional mappings did occur. These findings suggest that although sound symbolic properties generalize to meanings that may share overlapping semantic features, sound symbolic mappings offer semantic specificity.
    December 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12474   open full text
  • A Neurocomputational Model of the N400 and the P600 in Language Processing.
    Harm Brouwer, Matthew W. Crocker, Noortje J. Venhuizen, John C. J. Hoeks.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 21, 2016
    Ten years ago, researchers using event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) to study language comprehension were puzzled by what looked like a Semantic Illusion: Semantically anomalous, but structurally well‐formed sentences did not affect the N400 component—traditionally taken to reflect semantic integration—but instead produced a P600 effect, which is generally linked to syntactic processing. This finding led to a considerable amount of debate, and a number of complex processing models have been proposed as an explanation. What these models have in common is that they postulate two or more separate processing streams, in order to reconcile the Semantic Illusion and other semantically induced P600 effects with the traditional interpretations of the N400 and the P600. Recently, however, these multi‐stream models have been called into question, and a simpler single‐stream model has been proposed. According to this alternative model, the N400 component reflects the retrieval of word meaning from semantic memory, and the P600 component indexes the integration of this meaning into the unfolding utterance interpretation. In the present paper, we provide support for this “Retrieval–Integration (RI)” account by instantiating it as a neurocomputational model. This neurocomputational model is the first to successfully simulate the N400 and P600 amplitude in language comprehension, and simulations with this model provide a proof of concept of the single‐stream RI account of semantically induced patterns of N400 and P600 modulations.
    December 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12461   open full text
  • Dirty Money: The Role of Moral History in Economic Judgments.
    Arber Tasimi, Susan A. Gelman.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 21, 2016
    Although traditional economic models posit that money is fungible, psychological research abounds with examples that deviate from this assumption. Across eight experiments, we provide evidence that people construe physical currency as carrying traces of its moral history. In Experiments 1 and 2, people report being less likely to want money with negative moral history (i.e., stolen money). Experiments 3–5 provide evidence against an alternative account that people's judgments merely reflect beliefs about the consequences of accepting stolen money rather than moral sensitivity. Experiment 6 examines whether an aversion to stolen money may reflect contamination concerns, and Experiment 7 indicates that people report they would donate stolen money, thereby counteracting its negative history with a positive act. Finally, Experiment 8 demonstrates that, even in their recall of actual events, people report a reduced tendency to accept tainted money. Altogether, these findings suggest a robust tendency to evaluate money based on its moral history, even though it is designed to participate in exchanges that effectively erase its origins.
    December 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12464   open full text
  • Do Americans Have a Preference for Rule‐Based Classification?
    Gregory L. Murphy, David A. Bosch, ShinWoo Kim.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 21, 2016
    Six experiments investigated variables predicted to influence subjects’ tendency to classify items by a single property (rule‐based responding) instead of overall similarity, following the paradigm of Norenzayan et al. (, Cognitive Science), who found that European Americans tended to give more “logical” rule‐based responses. However, in five experiments with Mechanical Turk subjects and undergraduates at an American university, we found a consistent preference for similarity‐based responding. A sixth experiment with Korean undergraduates revealed an effect of instructions, also reported by Norenzayan et al., in which classification instructions led to majority rule‐based responding but similarity instructions led to overall similarity grouping. Our American subjects showed no such difference and used similarity more overall. We conclude that Americans do not have a preference for rule responding in classification and discuss the differences between tasks that reliably show strong rule or unidimensional preferences (category construction and category learning) in contrast to this classification paradigm.
    December 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12463   open full text
  • The Generalized Quantum Episodic Memory Model.
    Jennifer S. Trueblood, Pernille Hemmer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 21, 2016
    Recent evidence suggests that experienced events are often mapped to too many episodic states, including those that are logically or experimentally incompatible with one another. For example, episodic over‐distribution patterns show that the probability of accepting an item under different mutually exclusive conditions violates the disjunction rule. A related example, called subadditivity, occurs when the probability of accepting an item under mutually exclusive and exhaustive instruction conditions sums to a number >1. Both the over‐distribution effect and subadditivity have been widely observed in item and source‐memory paradigms. These phenomena are difficult to explain using standard memory frameworks, such as signal‐detection theory. A dual‐trace model called the over‐distribution (OD) model (Brainerd & Reyna, 2008) can explain the episodic over‐distribution effect, but not subadditivity. Our goal is to develop a model that can explain both effects. In this paper, we propose the Generalized Quantum Episodic Memory (GQEM) model, which extends the Quantum Episodic Memory (QEM) model developed by Brainerd, Wang, and Reyna (2013). We test GQEM by comparing it to the OD model using data from a novel item‐memory experiment and a previously published source‐memory experiment (Kellen, Singmann, & Klauer, 2014) examining the over‐distribution effect. Using the best‐fit parameters from the over‐distribution experiments, we conclude by showing that the GQEM model can also account for subadditivity. Overall these results add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that quantum probability theory is a valuable tool in modeling recognition memory.
    December 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12460   open full text
  • Planning Beyond the Next Trial in Adaptive Experiments: A Dynamic Programming Approach.
    Woojae Kim, Mark A. Pitt, Zhong‐Lin Lu, Jay I. Myung.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 18, 2016
    Experimentation is at the heart of scientific inquiry. In the behavioral and neural sciences, where only a limited number of observations can often be made, it is ideal to design an experiment that leads to the rapid accumulation of information about the phenomenon under study. Adaptive experimentation has the potential to accelerate scientific progress by maximizing inferential gain in such research settings. To date, most adaptive experiments have relied on myopic, one‐step‐ahead strategies in which the stimulus on each trial is selected to maximize inference on the next trial only. A lingering question in the field has been how much additional benefit would be gained by optimizing beyond the next trial. A range of technical challenges has prevented this important question from being addressed adequately. This study applies dynamic programming (DP), a technique applicable for such full‐horizon, “global” optimization, to model‐based perceptual threshold estimation, a domain that has been a major beneficiary of adaptive methods. The results provide insight into conditions that will benefit from optimizing beyond the next trial. Implications for the use of adaptive methods in cognitive science are discussed.
    December 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12467   open full text
  • Young Children's Reliance on Information From Inaccurate Informants.
    Sunae Kim, Markus Paulus, Chuck Kalish.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 18, 2016
    Prior work shows that children selectively learn from credible speakers. Yet little is known how they treat information from non‐credible speakers. This research examined to what extent and under what conditions children may or may not learn from problematic sources. In three studies, we found that children displayed trust toward previously inaccurate speakers. Children were equally likely to extend labels from previously accurate and inaccurate speakers to novel objects. Moreover, they expected third parties to share labels provided by previously inaccurate speakers. Only when there was clear evidence that the speakers' information was wrong (as in the case when speakers' perceptual access to the information was blocked), did young children reject the label. Together, the findings provide evidence that young children do not completely ignore the labels supplied by non‐credible speakers unless there is strong reason to do so.
    December 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12471   open full text
  • So It Is, So It Shall Be: Group Regularities License Children's Prescriptive Judgments.
    Steven O. Roberts, Susan A. Gelman, Arnold K. Ho.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 03, 2016
    When do descriptive regularities (what characteristics individuals have) become prescriptive norms (what characteristics individuals should have)? We examined children's (4–13 years) and adults' use of group regularities to make prescriptive judgments, employing novel groups (Hibbles and Glerks) that engaged in morally neutral behaviors (e.g., eating different kinds of berries). Participants were introduced to conforming or non‐conforming individuals (e.g., a Hibble who ate berries more typical of a Glerk). Children negatively evaluated non‐conformity, with negative evaluations declining with age (Study 1). These effects were replicable across competitive and cooperative intergroup contexts (Study 2) and stemmed from reasoning about group regularities rather than reasoning about individual regularities (Study 3). These data provide new insights into children's group concepts and have important implications for understanding the development of stereotyping and norm enforcement.
    December 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12443   open full text
  • Acceptability of Dative Argument Structure in Spanish: Assessing Semantic and Usage‐Based Factors.
    Florencia Reali.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 30, 2016
    Multiple constraints, including semantic, lexical, and usage‐based factors, have been shown to influence dative alternation across different languages. This work explores whether fine‐grained statistics and semantic properties of the verb affect the acceptability of dative constructions in Spanish. First, a corpus analysis reveals that verbs of different semantic classes occur naturally in alternative dative constructions, a pattern quite different from English. The fact that dative alternation appears independent of semantic classes challenges traditional semantic‐based approaches. Second, acceptability rating tasks reveal that dative constructions containing highly entrenched word combinations and frequent word order are judged more acceptable regardless of the verbs' semantics. The results are interpreted in favor of usage‐based accounts: Acceptability of dative constructions may be language‐specific and depend on patterns of use and conventionalization.
    November 30, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12459   open full text
  • “Cuts in Action”: A High‐Density EEG Study Investigating the Neural Correlates of Different Editing Techniques in Film.
    Katrin S. Heimann, Sebo Uithol, Marta Calbi, Maria A. Umiltà, Michele Guerra, Vittorio Gallese.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 24, 2016
    In spite of their striking differences with real‐life perception, films are perceived and understood without effort. Cognitive film theory attributes this to the system of continuity editing, a system of editing guidelines outlining the effect of different cuts and edits on spectators. A major principle in this framework is the 180° rule, a rule recommendation that, to avoid spectators’ attention to the editing, two edited shots of the same event or action should not be filmed from angles differing in a way that expectations of spatial continuity are strongly violated. In the present study, we used high‐density EEG to explore the neural underpinnings of this rule. In particular, our analysis shows that cuts and edits in general elicit early ERP component indicating the registration of syntactic violations as known from language, music, and action processing. However, continuity edits and cuts‐across the line differ from each other regarding later components likely to be indicating the differences in spatial remapping as well as in the degree of conscious awareness of one's own perception. Interestingly, a time–frequency analysis of the occipital alpha rhythm did not support the hypothesis that such differences in processing routes are mainly linked to visual attention. On the contrary, our study found specific modulations of the central mu rhythm ERD as an indicator of sensorimotor activity, suggesting that sensorimotor networks might play an important role. We think that these findings shed new light on current discussions about the role of attention and embodied perception in film perception and should be considered when explaining spectators’ different experience of different kinds of cuts.
    November 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12439   open full text
  • “Pushing the Button While Pushing the Argument”: Motor Priming of Abstract Action Language.
    Franziska Schaller, Sabine Weiss, Horst M. Müller.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 24, 2016
    In a behavioral study we analyzed the influence of visual action primes on abstract action sentence processing. We thereby aimed at investigating mental motor involvement during processes of meaning constitution of action verbs in abstract contexts. In the first experiment, participants executed either congruous or incongruous movements parallel to a video prime. In the second experiment, we added a no‐movement condition. After the execution of the movement, participants rendered a sensibility judgment on action sentence targets. It was expected that congruous movements would facilitate both concrete and abstract action sentence comprehension in comparison to the incongruous and the no‐movement condition. Results in Experiment 1 showed a concreteness effect but no effect of motor priming. Experiment 2 revealed a concreteness effect as well as an interaction effect of the sentence and the movement condition. The findings indicate an involvement of motor processes in abstract action language processing on a behavioral level.
    November 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12433   open full text
  • Core Intuitions About Persons Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God.
    Michael Barlev, Spencer Mermelstein, Tamsin C. German.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 24, 2016
    This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co‐option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about persons and acquired Christian beliefs about God were consistent (i.e., true according to both [e.g., “God has beliefs that are true”] or false according to both [e.g., “All beliefs God has are false”]) or inconsistent (i.e., true on intuition but false theologically [e.g., “God has beliefs that are false”] or false on intuition but true theologically [e.g., “All beliefs God has are true”]). Participants were less accurate and slower to respond to inconsistent versus consistent statements, suggesting that the core intuitions both coexisted alongside and interfered with the acquired beliefs (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 2 when responding under time pressure participants were disproportionately more likely to make errors on inconsistent versus consistent statements than when responding with no time pressure, suggesting that the resolution of interference requires cognitive resources the functioning of which decreases under cognitive load. In Experiment 3 a plausible alternative interpretation of these findings was ruled out by demonstrating that the response accuracy and time differences on consistent versus inconsistent statements occur for God—a supernatural religious entity—but not for a natural religious entity (a priest).
    November 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12435   open full text
  • Children's Representation and Imitation of Events: How Goal Organization Influences 3‐Year‐Old Children's Memory for Action Sequences.
    Jeff Loucks, Christina Mutschler, Andrew N. Meltzoff.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 24, 2016
    Children's imitation of adults plays a prominent role in human cognitive development. However, few studies have investigated how children represent the complex structure of observed actions which underlies their imitation. We integrate theories of action segmentation, memory, and imitation to investigate whether children's event representation is organized according to veridical serial order or a higher level goal structure. Children were randomly assigned to learn novel event sequences either through interactive hands‐on experience (Study 1) or via storybook (Study 2). Results demonstrate that children's representation of observed actions is organized according to higher level goals, even at the cost of representing the veridical temporal ordering of the sequence. We argue that prioritizing goal structure enhances event memory, and that this mental organization is a key mechanism of social‐cognitive development in real‐world, dynamic environments. It supports cultural learning and imitation in ecologically valid settings when social agents are multitasking and not demonstrating one isolated goal at a time.
    November 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12446   open full text
  • Not Only Size Matters: Early‐Talker and Late‐Talker Vocabularies Support Different Word‐Learning Biases in Babies and Networks.
    Eliana Colunga, Clare E. Sims.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 21, 2016
    In typical development, word learning goes from slow and laborious to fast and seemingly effortless. Typically developing 2‐year‐olds seem to intuit the whole range of things in a category from hearing a single instance named—they have word‐learning biases. This is not the case for children with relatively small vocabularies (late talkers). We present a computational model that accounts for the emergence of word‐learning biases in children at both ends of the vocabulary spectrum based solely on vocabulary structure. The results of Experiment 1 show that late‐talkers' and early‐talkers' noun vocabularies have different structures and that neural networks trained on the vocabularies of individual late talkers acquire different word‐learning biases than those trained on early‐talker vocabularies. These models make novel predictions about the word‐learning biases in these two populations. Experiment 2 tests these predictions on late‐ and early‐talking toddlers in a novel noun generalization task.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12409   open full text
  • My Heart Made Me Do It: Children's Essentialist Beliefs About Heart Transplants.
    Meredith Meyer, Susan A. Gelman, Steven O. Roberts, Sarah‐Jane Leslie.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    Psychological essentialism is a folk theory characterized by the belief that a causal internal essence or force gives rise to the common outward behaviors or attributes of a category's members. In two studies, we investigated whether 4‐ to 7‐year‐old children evidenced essentialist reasoning about heart transplants by asking them to predict whether trading hearts with an individual would cause them to take on the donor's attributes. Control conditions asked children to consider the effects of trading money with an individual. Results indicated that children reasoned according to essentialism, predicting more transfer of attributes in the transplant condition versus the non‐bodily money control. Children also endorsed essentialist transfer of attributes even when they did not believe that a transplant would change the recipient's category membership (e.g., endorsing the idea that a recipient of a pig's heart would act pig‐like, but denying that the recipient would become a pig). This finding runs counter to predictions from a strong interpretation of the “minimalist” position, an alternative to essentialism.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12431   open full text
  • Does the Body Survive Death? Cultural Variation in Beliefs About Life Everlasting.
    Rachel E. Watson‐Jones, Justin T. A. Busch, Paul L. Harris, Cristine H. Legare.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    Mounting evidence suggests that endorsement of psychological continuity and the afterlife increases with age. This developmental change raises questions about the cognitive biases, social representations, and cultural input that may support afterlife beliefs. To what extent is there similarity versus diversity across cultures in how people reason about what happens after death? The objective of this study was to compare beliefs about the continuation of biological and psychological functions after death in Tanna, Vanuatu (a Melanesian archipelago), and the United States (Austin, Texas). Children, adolescents, and adults were primed with a story that contained either natural (non‐theistic) or supernatural (theistic) cues. Participants were then asked whether or not different biological and psychological processes continue to function after death. We predicted that across cultures individuals would be more likely to endorse the continuation of psychological processes over biological processes (dualism) and that a theistic prime would increase continuation responses regarding both types of process. Results largely supported predictions; U.S. participants provided more continuation responses for psychological than biological processes following both the theistic and non‐theistic primes. Participants in Vanuatu, however, provided more continuation responses for biological than psychological processes following the theistic prime. The data provide evidence for both cultural similarity and variability in afterlife beliefs and demonstrate that individuals use both natural and supernatural explanations to interpret the same events.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12430   open full text
  • Seasonal Variations in Color Preference.
    Karen B. Schloss, Rolf Nelson, Laura Parker, Isobel A. Heck, Stephen E. Palmer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    We investigated how color preferences vary according to season and whether those changes could be explained by the ecological valence theory (EVT). To do so, we assessed the same participants’ preferences for the same colors during fall, winter, spring, and summer in the northeastern United States, where there are large seasonal changes in environmental colors. Seasonal differences were most pronounced between fall and the other three seasons. Participants liked fall‐associated dark‐warm colors—for example, dark‐red, dark‐orange (brown), dark‐yellow (olive), and dark‐chartreuse—more during fall than other seasons. The EVT could explain these changes with a modified version of Palmer and Schloss’ (2010) weighted affective valence estimate (WAVE) procedure that added an activation term to the WAVE equation. The results indicate that color preferences change according to season, as color‐associated objects become more/less activated in the observer. These seasonal changes in color preferences could not be characterized by overall shifts in weights along cone‐contrast axes.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12429   open full text
  • Reasoning With Causal Cycles.
    Bob Rehder.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    This article assesses how people reason with categories whose features are related in causal cycles. Whereas models based on causal graphical models (CGMs) have enjoyed success modeling category‐based judgments as well as a number of other cognitive phenomena, CGMs are only able to represent causal structures that are acyclic. A number of new formalisms that allow cycles are introduced and evaluated. Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) represent cycles by unfolding them over time. Chain graphs augment CGMs by allowing the presence of undirected links that model feedback relations between variables. Unfolded chain graphs are chain graphs that unfold over time. An existing model of causal cycles (alpha centrality) is also evaluated. Four experiments in which subjects reason about categories with cyclically related features provided evidence against DBNs and alpha centrality and for the two types of chain graphs. Chain graphs—a mechanism for representing the equilibrium distribution of a dynamic system—may thus be good candidates for modeling how people reason causally with complex systems. Applications of chain graphs to areas of cognition other than category‐based judgments are discussed.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12447   open full text
  • Recognition Decisions From Visual Working Memory Are Mediated by Continuous Latent Strengths.
    Timothy J. Ricker, Jonathan E. Thiele, April R. Swagman, Jeffrey N. Rouder.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    Making recognition decisions often requires us to reference the contents of working memory, the information available for ongoing cognitive processing. As such, understanding how recognition decisions are made when based on the contents of working memory is of critical importance. In this work we examine whether recognition decisions based on the contents of visual working memory follow a continuous decision process of graded information about the correct choice or a discrete decision process reflecting only knowing and guessing. We find a clear pattern in favor of a continuous latent strength model of visual working memory–based decision making, supporting the notion that visual recognition decision processes are impacted by the degree of matching between the contents of working memory and the choices given. Relation to relevant findings and the implications for human information processing more generally are discussed.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12436   open full text
  • Generative Inferences Based on Learned Relations.
    Dawn Chen, Hongjing Lu, Keith J. Holyoak.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    A key property of relational representations is their generativity: From partial descriptions of relations between entities, additional inferences can be drawn about other entities. A major theoretical challenge is to demonstrate how the capacity to make generative inferences could arise as a result of learning relations from non‐relational inputs. In the present paper, we show that a bottom‐up model of relation learning, initially developed to discriminate between positive and negative examples of comparative relations (e.g., deciding whether a sheep is larger than a rabbit), can be extended to make generative inferences. The model is able to make quasi‐deductive transitive inferences (e.g., “If A is larger than B and B is larger than C, then A is larger than C”) and to qualitatively account for human responses to generative questions such as “What is an animal that is smaller than a dog?” These results provide evidence that relational models based on bottom‐up learning mechanisms are capable of supporting generative inferences.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12455   open full text
  • Does Environmental Experience Shape Spatial Cognition? Frames of Reference Among Ancash Quechua Speakers (Peru).
    Joshua A. Shapero.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    Previous studies have shown that language contributes to humans' ability to orient using landmarks and shapes their use of frames of reference (FoRs) for memory. However, the role of environmental experience in shaping spatial cognition has not been investigated. This study addresses such a possibility by examining the use of FoRs in a nonverbal spatial memory task among residents of an Andean community in Peru. Participants consisted of 97 individuals from Ancash Quechua‐speaking households (8–77 years of age) who spoke Quechua and/or Spanish and varied considerably with respect to the extent of their experience in the surrounding landscape. The results demonstrated that environmental experience was the only factor significantly related to the preference for allocentric FoRs. The study thus shows that environmental experience can play a role alongside language in shaping habits of spatial representation, and it suggests a new direction of inquiry into the relationships among language, thought, and experience.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12458   open full text
  • Using Predictability for Lexical Segmentation.
    Çağrı Çöltekin.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    This study investigates a strategy based on predictability of consecutive sub‐lexical units in learning to segment a continuous speech stream into lexical units using computational modeling and simulations. Lexical segmentation is one of the early challenges during language acquisition, and it has been studied extensively through psycholinguistic experiments as well as computational methods. However, despite strong empirical evidence, the explicit use of predictability of basic sub‐lexical units in models of segmentation is underexplored. This paper presents an incremental computational model of lexical segmentation for exploring the usefulness of predictability for lexical segmentation. We show that the predictability cue is a strong cue for segmentation. Contrary to earlier reports in the literature, the strategy yields state‐of‐the‐art segmentation performance with an incremental computational model that uses only this particular cue in a cognitively plausible setting. The paper also reports an in‐depth analysis of the model, investigating the conditions affecting the usefulness of the strategy.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12454   open full text
  • Incidental Learning of Melodic Structure of North Indian Music.
    Martin Rohrmeier, Richard Widdess.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    Musical knowledge is largely implicit. It is acquired without awareness of its complex rules, through interaction with a large number of samples during musical enculturation. Whereas several studies explored implicit learning of mostly abstract and less ecologically valid features of Western music, very little work has been done with respect to ecologically valid stimuli as well as non‐Western music. The present study investigated implicit learning of modal melodic features in North Indian classical music in a realistic and ecologically valid way. It employed a cross‐grammar design, using melodic materials from two modes (rāgas) that use the same scale. Findings indicated that Western participants unfamiliar with Indian music incidentally learned to identify distinctive features of each mode. Confidence ratings suggest that participants' performance was consistently correlated with confidence, indicating that they became aware of whether they were right in their responses; that is, they possessed explicit judgment knowledge. Altogether our findings show incidental learning in a realistic ecologically valid context during only a very short exposure, they provide evidence that incidental learning constitutes a powerful mechanism that plays a fundamental role in musical acquisition.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12404   open full text
  • Dual Character Concepts in Social Cognition: Commitments and the Normative Dimension of Conceptual Representation.
    Guillermo Del Pinal, Kevin Reuter.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    The concepts expressed by social role terms such as artist and scientist are unique in that they seem to allow two independent criteria for categorization, one of which is inherently normative (Knobe, Prasada, & Newman, 2013). This study presents and tests an account of the content and structure of the normative dimension of these “dual character concepts.” Experiment 1 suggests that the normative dimension of a social role concept represents the commitment to fulfill the idealized basic function associated with the role. Background information can affect which basic function is associated with each social role. However, Experiment 2 indicates that the normative dimension always represents the relevant commitment as an end in itself. We argue that social role concepts represent the commitments to basic functions because that information is crucial to predict the future social roles and role‐dependent behavior of others.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12456   open full text
  • Spatial But Not Oculomotor Information Biases Perceptual Memory: Evidence From Face Perception and Cognitive Modeling.
    Andrea L. Wantz, Janek S. Lobmaier, Fred W. Mast, Walter Senn.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 17, 2016
    Recent research put forward the hypothesis that eye movements are integrated in memory representations and are reactivated when later recalled. However, “looking back to nothing” during recall might be a consequence of spatial memory retrieval. Here, we aimed at distinguishing between the effect of spatial and oculomotor information on perceptual memory. Participants’ task was to judge whether a morph looked rather like the first or second previously presented face. Crucially, faces and morphs were presented in a way that the morph reactivated oculomotor and/or spatial information associated with one of the previously encoded faces. Perceptual face memory was largely influenced by these manipulations. We considered a simple computational model with an excellent match (4.3% error) that expresses these biases as a linear combination of recency, saccade, and location. Surprisingly, saccades did not play a role. The results suggest that spatial and temporal rather than oculomotor information biases perceptual face memory.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12437   open full text
  • Characterizing Human Expertise Using Computational Metrics of Feature Diagnosticity in a Pattern Matching Task.
    Thomas Busey, Dimitar Nikolov, Chen Yu, Brandi Emerick, John Vanderkolk.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 10, 2016
    Forensic evidence often involves an evaluation of whether two impressions were made by the same source, such as whether a fingerprint from a crime scene has detail in agreement with an impression taken from a suspect. Human experts currently outperform computer‐based comparison systems, but the strength of the evidence exemplified by the observed detail in agreement must be evaluated against the possibility that some other individual may have created the crime scene impression. Therefore, the strongest evidence comes from features in agreement that are also not shared with other impressions from other individuals. We characterize the nature of human expertise by applying two extant metrics to the images used in a fingerprint recognition task and use eye gaze data from experts to both tune and validate the models. The Attention via Information Maximization (AIM) model (Bruce & Tsotsos, 2009) quantifies the rarity of regions in the fingerprints to determine diagnosticity for purposes of excluding alternative sources. The CoVar model (Karklin & Lewicki, 2009) captures relationships between low‐level features, mimicking properties of the early visual system. Both models produced classification and generalization performance in the 75%–80% range when classifying where experts tend to look. A validation study using regions identified by the AIM model as diagnostic demonstrates that human experts perform better when given regions of high diagnosticity. The computational nature of the metrics may help guard against wrongful convictions, as well as provide a quantitative measure of the strength of evidence in casework.
    November 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12452   open full text
  • What Are the “True” Statistics of the Environment?
    Jacob Feldman.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 10, 2016
    A widespread assumption in the contemporary discussion of probabilistic models of cognition, often attributed to the Bayesian program, is that inference is optimal when the observer's priors match the true priors in the world—the actual “statistics of the environment.” But in fact the idea of a “true” prior plays no role in traditional Bayesian philosophy, which regards probability as a quantification of belief, not an objective characteristic of the world. In this paper I discuss the significance of the traditional Bayesian epistemic view of probability and its mismatch with the more objectivist assumptions about probability that are widely held in contemporary cognitive science. I then introduce a novel mathematical framework, the observer lattice, that aims to clarify this issue while avoiding philosophically tendentious assumptions. The mathematical argument shows that even if we assume that “ground truth” probabilities actually do exist, there is no objective way to tell what they are. Different observers, conditioning on different information, will inevitably have different probability estimates, and there is no general procedure to determine which one is right. The argument sheds light on the use of probabilistic models in cognitive science, and in particular on what exactly it means for the mind to be “tuned” to its environment.
    November 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12444   open full text
  • Imitation, Inspiration, and Creation: Cognitive Process of Creative Drawing by Copying Others' Artworks.
    Takeshi Okada, Kentaro Ishibashi.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 07, 2016
    To investigate the cognitive processes underlying creative inspiration, we tested the extent to which viewing or copying prior examples impacted creative output in art. In Experiment 1, undergraduates made drawings under three conditions: (a) copying an artist's drawing, then producing an original drawing; (b) producing an original drawing without having seen another's work; and (c) copying another artist's work, then reproducing that artist's style independently. We discovered that through copying unfamiliar abstract drawings, participants were able to produce creative drawings qualitatively different from the model drawings. Process analyses suggested that participants' cognitive constraints became relaxed, and new perspectives were formed from copying another's artwork. Experiment 2 showed that exposure to styles of artwork considered unfamiliar facilitated creativity in drawing, while styles considered familiar did not do so. Experiment 3 showed that both copying and thoroughly viewing artwork executed using an unfamiliar style facilitated creativity in drawing, whereas merely thinking about alternative styles of artistic representation did not do so. These experiments revealed that deep encounters with unfamiliar artworks—whether through copying or prolonged observation—change people's cognitive representations of the act of drawing to produce novel artwork.
    November 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12442   open full text
  • Exploring Initiative as a Signal of Knowledge Co‐Construction During Collaborative Problem Solving.
    Cynthia Howard, Barbara Di Eugenio, Pamela Jordan, Sandra Katz.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 07, 2016
    Peer interaction has been found to be conducive to learning in many settings. Knowledge co‐construction (KCC) has been proposed as one explanatory mechanism. However, KCC is a theoretical construct that is too abstract to guide the development of instructional software that can support peer interaction. In this study, we present an extensive analysis of a corpus of peer dialogs that we collected in the domain of introductory Computer Science. We show that the notion of task initiative shifts correlates with both KCC and learning. Speakers take task initiative when they contribute new content that advances problem solving and that is not invited by their partner; if initiative shifts between the partners, it indicates they both contribute to problem solving. We found that task initiative shifts occur more frequently within KCC episodes than outside. In addition, task initiative shifts within KCC episodes correlate with learning for low pre‐testers, and total task initiative shifts correlate with learning for high pre‐testers. As recognizing task initiative shifts does not require as much deep knowledge as recognizing KCC, task initiative shifts as an indicator of productive collaboration are potentially easier to model in instructional software that simulates a peer.
    November 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12415   open full text
  • First Language Attrition Induces Changes in Online Morphosyntactic Processing and Re‐Analysis: An ERP Study of Number Agreement in Complex Italian Sentences.
    Kristina Kasparian, Francesco Vespignani, Karsten Steinhauer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 07, 2016
    First language (L1) attrition in adulthood offers new insight on neuroplasticity and the role of language experience in shaping neurocognitive responses to language. Attriters are multilinguals for whom advancing L2 proficiency comes at the cost of the L1, as they experience a shift in exposure and dominance (e.g., due to immigration). To date, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying L1 attrition are largely unexplored. Using event‐related potentials (ERPs), we examined L1‐Italian grammatical processing in 24 attriters and 30 Italian native‐controls. We assessed whether (a) attriters differed from non‐attriting native speakers in their online detection and re‐analysis/repair of number agreement violations, and whether (b) differences in processing were modulated by L1‐proficiency. To test both local and non‐local agreement violations, we manipulated agreement between three inflected constituents and examined ERP responses on two of these (subject, verb, modifier). Our findings revealed group differences in amplitude, scalp distribution, and duration of LAN/N400 + P600 effects. We discuss these differences as reflecting influence of attriters’ L2‐English, as well as shallower online sentence repair processes than in non‐attriting native speakers. ERP responses were also predicted by L1‐Italian proficiency scores, with smaller N400/P600 amplitudes in lower proficiency individuals. Proficiency only modulated P600 amplitude between 650 and 900 ms, whereas the late P600 (beyond 900 ms) depended on group membership and amount of L1 exposure within attriters. Our study is the first to show qualitative and quantitative differences in ERP responses in attriters compared to non‐attriting native speakers. Our results also emphasize that proficiency predicts language processing profiles, even in native‐speakers, and that the P600 should not be considered a monolithic component.
    November 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12450   open full text
  • The Matrix Verb as a Source of Comprehension Difficulty in Object Relative Sentences.
    Adrian Staub, Brian Dillon, Charles Clifton.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 04, 2016
    Two experiments used eyetracking during reading to examine the processing of the matrix verb following object and subject relative clauses. The experiments show that the processing of the matrix verb following an object relative is indeed slowed compared to the processing of the same verb following a subject relative. However, this difficulty is entirely eliminated if additional material intervenes between the object gap and the matrix verb. An explanation in terms of spillover processing is ruled out, suggesting that it is the gap‐matrix verb sequence that is itself responsible for the difficulty. We consider two accounts of this difficulty, one emphasizing the potential difficulty of rapidly switching between the sentential subject's thematic or syntactic role in the embedded clause and its role in the matrix clause, and one emphasizing the potential difficulty of performing two demanding memory retrievals in rapid succession. The present experiments also closely replicate the previous findings from eyetracking that the noun phrase and the verb within an object relative are both loci of processing difficulty, but that the former induces substantially greater difficulty.
    November 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12448   open full text
  • Differences in the Evaluation of Generic Statements About Human and Non‐Human Categories.
    Arber Tasimi, Susan A. Gelman, Andrei Cimpian, Joshua Knobe.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 04, 2016
    Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non‐human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening (vs. a non‐threatening) property for artifacts, but this negativity bias did not also apply to human categories. Experiment 2 examined an alternative hypothesis for this result, and Experiments 3 and 4 served as conceptual replications of the first experiment. Experiment 5 found that even preschoolers apply generics differently for humans and artifacts. Finally, Experiment 6 showed that these effects reflect differences between human and non‐human categories more generally, as adults showed a negativity bias for categories of non‐human animals, but not for categories of humans. These findings suggest the presence of important, early‐emerging domain differences in people's judgments about generics.
    November 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12440   open full text
  • Functional Synergy Between Postural and Visual Behaviors When Performing a Difficult Precise Visual Task in Upright Stance.
    Cédrick T. Bonnet, Sébastien Szaffarczyk, Stéphane Baudry.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 26, 2016
    Previous works usually report greater postural stability in precise visual tasks (e.g., gaze‐shift tasks) than in stationary‐gaze tasks. However, existing cognitive models do not fully support these results as they assume that performing an attention‐demanding task while standing would alter postural stability because of the competition of attention between the tasks. Contrary to these cognitive models, attentional resources may increase to create a synergy between visual and postural brain processes to perform precise oculomotor behaviors. To test this hypothesis, we investigated a difficult searching task and a control free‐viewing task. The precise visual task required the 16 young participants to find a target in densely furnished images. The free‐viewing task consisted of looking at similar images without searching anything. As expected, the participants exhibited significantly lower body displacements (linear, angular) and a significantly higher cognitive workload in the precise visual task than in the free‐viewing task. Most important, our exploration showed functional synergies between visual and postural processes in the searching task, that is, significant negative relationships showing lower head and neck displacements to reach more expended zones of fixation. These functional synergies seemed to involve a greater attentional demand because they were not significant anymore when the cognitive workload was controlled (partial correlations). In the free‐viewing task, only significant positive relationships were found and they did not involve any change in cognitive workload. An alternative cognitive model and its potential subtended neuroscientific circuit are proposed to explain the supposedly cognitively grounded functional nature of vision–posture synergies in precise visual tasks.
    October 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12420   open full text
  • Plateaus, Dips, and Leaps: Where to Look for Inventions and Discoveries During Skilled Performance.
    Wayne D. Gray, John K. Lindstedt.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 20, 2016
    The framework of plateaus, dips, and leaps shines light on periods when individuals may be inventing new methods of skilled performance. We begin with a review of the role performance plateaus have played in (a) experimental psychology, (b) human–computer interaction, and (c) cognitive science. We then reanalyze two classic studies of individual performance to show plateaus and dips which resulted in performance leaps. For a third study, we show how the statistical methods of Changepoint Analysis plus a few simple heuristics may direct our focus to periods of performance change for individuals. For the researcher, dips become the marker of exploration where performance suffers as new methods are invented and tested. Leaps mark the implementation of a successful new method and an incremental jump above the path plotted by smooth and steady log–log performance increments. The methods developed during these dips and leaps are the key to surpassing one's teachers and acquiring extreme expertise.
    October 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12412   open full text
  • A Prime Example of the Maluma/Takete Effect? Testing for Sound Symbolic Priming.
    David M. Sidhu, Penny M. Pexman.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 20, 2016
    Certain nonwords, like maluma and takete, are associated with roundness and sharpness, respectively. However, this has typically been demonstrated using explicit tasks. We investigated whether this association would be detectable using a more implicit measure—a sequential priming task. We began with a replication of the standard Maluma/Takete effect (Experiments 1a and 1b) before examining whether round and sharp nonword primes facilitated the categorization of congruent shapes (Experiment 2). We found modest evidence of a priming effect in response accuracy. We next examined whether nonword primes affected categorization of ambiguous shapes, using visual (Experiment 3) and auditory primes (Experiment 4). We found that ambiguous shapes were categorized as round (sharp) more often following the presentation of a round (sharp) nonword. This suggests that phonemes may activate related shape information which then affects the processing of shapes, and that this association emerges even when participants are not explicitly searching for it.
    October 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12438   open full text
  • Familiarity, Priming, and Perception in Similarity Judgments.
    Laura M. Hiatt, J. Gregory Trafton.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 20, 2016
    We present a novel way of accounting for similarity judgments. Our approach posits that similarity stems from three main sources—familiarity, priming, and inherent perceptual likeness. Here, we explore each of these constructs and demonstrate their individual and combined effectiveness in explaining similarity judgments. Using these three measures, our account of similarity explains ratings of simple, color‐based perceptual stimuli that display asymmetry effects, as well as more complicated perceptual stimuli with structural properties; more traditional approaches to similarity solve one or the other and have difficulty accounting for both. Overall, our work demonstrates the importance of each of these components of similarity in explaining similarity judgments, both individually and together, and suggests important implications for other similarity approaches.
    October 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12418   open full text
  • Do Bilinguals Automatically Activate Their Native Language When They Are Not Using It?
    Albert Costa, Mario Pannunzi, Gustavo Deco, Martin J. Pickering.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 20, 2016
    Most models of lexical access assume that bilingual speakers activate their two languages even when they are in a context in which only one language is used. A critical piece of evidence used to support this notion is the observation that a given word automatically activates its translation equivalent in the other language. Here, we argue that these findings are compatible with a different account, in which bilinguals “carry over” the structure of their native language to the non‐native language during learning, and where there is no activation of translation equivalents. To demonstrate this, we describe a model in which language learning involves mapping native language phonological relationships to the non‐native language, and we show how it can explain the results attributed to automatic activation of translation equivalents.
    October 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12434   open full text
  • Can Infinitival to Omissions and Provisions Be Primed? An Experimental Investigation Into the Role of Constructional Competition in Infinitival to Omission Errors.
    Minna Kirjavainen, Elena V. M. Lieven, Anna L. Theakston.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 20, 2016
    An experimental study was conducted on children aged 2;6–3;0 and 3;6–4;0 investigating the priming effect of two WANT‐constructions to establish whether constructional competition contributes to English‐speaking children's infinitival to omission errors (e.g., *I want ___ jump now). In two between‐participant groups, children either just heard or heard and repeated WANT‐to, WANT‐X, and control prime sentences after which to‐infinitival constructions were elicited. We found that both age groups were primed, but in different ways. In the 2;6–3;0 year olds, WANT‐to primes facilitated the provision of to in target utterances relative to the control contexts, but no significant effect was found for WANT‐X primes. In the 3;6–4;0 year olds, both WANT‐to and WANT‐X primes showed a priming effect, namely WANT‐to primes facilitated and WANT‐X primes inhibited provision of to. We argue that these effects reflect developmental differences in the level of proficiency in and preference for the two constructions, and they are broadly consistent with “priming as implicit learning” accounts. The current study shows that (a) children as young as 2;6–3;0 years of age can be primed when they have only heard (not repeated) particular constructions, (b) children are acquiring at least two constructions for the matrix verb WANT, and (c) that these two WANT‐constructions compete for production.
    October 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12407   open full text
  • Grammaticality, Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge.
    Jey Han Lau, Alexander Clark, Shalom Lappin.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 12, 2016
    The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well‐formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large‐scale experiments using crowd‐sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state‐of‐the‐art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic.
    October 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12414   open full text
  • Why Are There Developmental Stages in Language Learning? A Developmental Robotics Model of Language Development.
    Anthony F. Morse, Angelo Cangelosi.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 28, 2016
    Most theories of learning would predict a gradual acquisition and refinement of skills as learning progresses, and while some highlight exponential growth, this fails to explain why natural cognitive development typically progresses in stages. Models that do span multiple developmental stages typically have parameters to “switch” between stages. We argue that by taking an embodied view, the interaction between learning mechanisms, the resulting behavior of the agent, and the opportunities for learning that the environment provides can account for the stage‐wise development of cognitive abilities. We summarize work relevant to this hypothesis and suggest two simple mechanisms that account for some developmental transitions: neural readiness focuses on changes in the neural substrate resulting from ongoing learning, and perceptual readiness focuses on the perceptual requirements for learning new tasks. Previous work has demonstrated these mechanisms in replications of a wide variety of infant language experiments, spanning multiple developmental stages. Here we piece this work together as a single model of ongoing learning with no parameter changes at all. The model, an instance of the Epigenetic Robotics Architecture (Morse et al 2010) embodied on the iCub humanoid robot, exhibits ongoing multi‐stage development while learning pre‐linguistic and then basic language skills.
    September 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12390   open full text
  • Tracking Multiple Statistics: Simultaneous Learning of Object Names and Categories in English and Mandarin Speakers.
    Chi‐hsin Chen, Lisa Gershkoff‐Stowe, Chih‐Yi Wu, Hintat Cheung, Chen Yu.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 26, 2016
    Two experiments were conducted to examine adult learners' ability to extract multiple statistics in simultaneously presented visual and auditory input. Experiment 1 used a cross‐situational learning paradigm to test whether English speakers were able to use co‐occurrences to learn word‐to‐object mappings and concurrently form object categories based on the commonalities across training stimuli. Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment and further examined whether speakers of Mandarin, a language in which final syllables of object names are more predictive of category membership than English, were able to learn words and form object categories when trained with the same type of structures. The results indicate that both groups of learners successfully extracted multiple levels of co‐occurrence and used them to learn words and object categories simultaneously. However, marked individual differences in performance were also found, suggesting possible interference and competition in processing the two concurrent streams of regularities.
    September 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12417   open full text
  • Dimension‐Based Statistical Learning Affects Both Speech Perception and Production.
    Matthew Lehet, Lori L. Holt.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 25, 2016
    Multiple acoustic dimensions signal speech categories. However, dimensions vary in their informativeness; some are more diagnostic of category membership than others. Speech categorization reflects these dimensional regularities such that diagnostic dimensions carry more “perceptual weight” and more effectively signal category membership to native listeners. Yet perceptual weights are malleable. When short‐term experience deviates from long‐term language norms, such as in a foreign accent, the perceptual weight of acoustic dimensions in signaling speech category membership rapidly adjusts. The present study investigated whether rapid adjustments in listeners’ perceptual weights in response to speech that deviates from the norms also affects listeners’ own speech productions. In a word recognition task, the correlation between two acoustic dimensions signaling consonant categories, fundamental frequency (F0) and voice onset time (VOT), matched the correlation typical of English, and then shifted to an “artificial accent” that reversed the relationship, and then shifted back. Brief, incidental exposure to the artificial accent caused participants to down‐weight perceptual reliance on F0, consistent with previous research. Throughout the task, participants were intermittently prompted with pictures to produce these same words. In the block in which listeners heard the artificial accent with a reversed F0 × VOT correlation, F0 was a less robust cue to voicing in listeners’ own speech productions. The statistical regularities of short‐term speech input affect both speech perception and production, as evidenced via shifts in how acoustic dimensions are weighted.
    September 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12413   open full text
  • Exploring Cognitive Relations Between Prediction in Language and Music.
    Aniruddh D. Patel, Emily Morgan.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 25, 2016
    The online processing of both music and language involves making predictions about upcoming material, but the relationship between prediction in these two domains is not well understood. Electrophysiological methods for studying individual differences in prediction in language processing have opened the door to new questions. Specifically, we ask whether individuals with musical training predict upcoming linguistic material more strongly and/or more accurately than non‐musicians. We propose two reasons why prediction in these two domains might be linked: (a) Musicians may have greater verbal short‐term/working memory; (b) music may specifically reward predictions based on hierarchical structure. We provide suggestions as to how to expand upon recent work on individual differences in language processing to test these hypotheses.
    September 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12411   open full text
  • The Pursuit of Word Meanings.
    Jon Scott Stevens, Lila R. Gleitman, John C. Trueswell, Charles Yang.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 25, 2016
    We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross‐situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word‐referent probability but pursues and tests the best referent‐meaning at any given time. Pursuit is found to perform as well as global models under many conditions extracted from naturalistic corpora of parent‐child interactions, even though the model maintains far less information than global models. Moreover, Pursuit is found to best capture human experimental findings from several relevant cross‐situational word‐learning experiments, including those of Yu and Smith (), the paradigm example of a finding believed to support fully global cross‐situational models. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed, most notably that the model characterizes only the earliest stages of word learning, when reliance on the co‐occurring referent world is at its greatest.
    September 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12416   open full text
  • Update on “What” and “Where” in Spatial Language: A New Division of Labor for Spatial Terms.
    Barbara Landau.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 16, 2016
    In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's () paper, “What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition,” proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds (named by count nouns), versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions (i.e., play the role of arguments of spatial prepositions). We provided empirical and theoretical arguments for the link between these distinct representations in spatial language and their accompanying nonlinguistic neural representations, emphasizing the “what” and “where” systems of the visual system. In the present paper, I propose a second division of labor between two classes of spatial prepositions in English that appear to be quite distinct. One class includes prepositions such as in and on, whose core meanings engage force‐dynamic, functional relationships between objects, with geometry only a marginal player. The second class includes prepositions such as above/below and right/left, whose core meanings engage geometry, with force‐dynamic relationships a passing or irrelevant variable. The insight that objects’ force‐dynamic relationships matter to spatial terms’ uses is not new; but thinking of these terms as a distinct set within spatial language has theoretical and empirical consequences that are new. I propose three such consequences, rooted in the fact that geometric knowledge is highly constrained and early‐emerging in life, while force‐dynamic knowledge of objects and their interactions is relatively unconstrained and needs to be learned piecemeal over a lengthy timeline. First, the two classes will engage different learning problems, with different developmental trajectories for both first and second language learners; second, the classes will naturally lead to different degrees of cross‐linguistic variation; and third, they may be rooted in different neural representations.
    September 16, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12410   open full text
  • Highlighting in Early Childhood: Learning Biases Through Attentional Shifting.
    Joseph M. Burling, Hanako Yoshida.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 16, 2016
    The literature on human and animal learning suggests that individuals attend to and act on cues differently based on the order in which they were learned. Recent studies have proposed that one specific type of learning outcome, the highlighting effect, can serve as a framework for understanding a number of early cognitive milestones. However, little is known how this learning effect itself emerges among children, whose memory and attention are much more limited compared to adults. Two experiments were conducted using different versions of the general highlighting paradigm: Experiment 1 tested 3 to 6 year olds with a newly developed image‐based version of the paradigm, which was designed specifically to test young children. Experiment 2 tested the validity of an image‐based implementation of the highlighting paradigm with adult participants. The results from Experiment 1 provide evidence for the highlighting effect among children 3–6 years old, and they suggest age‐related differences in dividing attention among multiple cues during learning. Experiment 2 replicated results from previous studies by showing robust biases for both image‐based and text‐based versions of the highlighting task. This study suggests that sensitivity to learning order emerges early through the process of cued attention, and the role of the highlighting effect in early language learning is discussed.
    September 16, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12408   open full text
  • Comprehending Sentences With the Body: Action Compatibility in British Sign Language?
    David Vinson, Pamela Perniss, Neil Fox, Gabriella Vigliocco.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 03, 2016
    Previous studies show that reading sentences about actions leads to specific motor activity associated with actually performing those actions. We investigate how sign language input may modulate motor activation, using British Sign Language (BSL) sentences, some of which explicitly encode direction of motion, versus written English, where motion is only implied. We find no evidence of action simulation in BSL comprehension (Experiments 1–3), but we find effects of action simulation in comprehension of written English sentences by deaf native BSL signers (Experiment 4). These results provide constraints on the nature of mental simulations involved in comprehending action sentences referring to transfer events, suggesting that the richer contextual information provided by BSL sentences versus written or spoken English may reduce the need for action simulation in comprehension, at least when the event described does not map completely onto the signer's own body.
    August 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12397   open full text
  • Social Media and Language Processing: How Facebook and Twitter Provide the Best Frequency Estimates for Studying Word Recognition.
    Amaç Herdağdelen, Marco Marelli.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 01, 2016
    Corpus‐based word frequencies are one of the most important predictors in language processing tasks. Frequencies based on conversational corpora (such as movie subtitles) are shown to better capture the variance in lexical decision tasks compared to traditional corpora. In this study, we show that frequencies computed from social media are currently the best frequency‐based estimators of lexical decision reaction times (up to 3.6% increase in explained variance). The results are robust (observed for Twitter‐ and Facebook‐based frequencies on American English and British English datasets) and are still substantial when we control for corpus size.
    August 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12392   open full text
  • Learning During Processing: Word Learning Doesn't Wait for Word Recognition to Finish.
    Keith S. Apfelbaum, Bob McMurray.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 29, 2016
    Previous research on associative learning has uncovered detailed aspects of the process, including what types of things are learned, how they are learned, and where in the brain such learning occurs. However, perceptual processes, such as stimulus recognition and identification, take time to unfold. Previous studies of learning have not addressed when, during the course of these dynamic recognition processes, learned representations are formed and updated. If learned representations are formed and updated while recognition is ongoing, the result of learning may incorporate spurious, partial information. For example, during word recognition, words take time to be identified, and competing words are often active in parallel. If learning proceeds before this competition resolves, representations may be influenced by the preliminary activations present at the time of learning. In three experiments using word learning as a model domain, we provide evidence that learning reflects the ongoing dynamics of auditory and visual processing during a learning event. These results show that learning can occur before stimulus recognition processes are complete; learning does not wait for ongoing perceptual processing to complete.
    July 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12401   open full text
  • Of Papers and Pens: Polysemes and Homophones in Lexical (mis)Selection.
    Leon Li, L. Robert Slevc.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 29, 2016
    Every word signifies multiple senses. Many studies using comprehension‐based measures suggest that polysemes’ senses (e.g., paper as in printer paper or term paper) share lexical representations, whereas homophones’ meanings (e.g., pen as in ballpoint pen or pig pen) correspond to distinct lexical representations. Less is known about the lexical representations of polysemes compared to homophones in language production. In this study, speakers named pictures after reading sentence fragments that primed polysemes and homophones either as direct competitors to pictures (i.e., semantic‐competitors), or as indirect‐competitors to pictures (e.g., polysemous senses of semantic competitors, or homophonous meanings of semantic competitors). Polysemes (e.g., paper) elicited equal numbers of intrusions to picture names (e.g., cardboard) compared to in control conditions whether primed as direct competitors (printer paper) or as indirect‐competitors (term paper). This contrasted with the finding that homophones (e.g., pen) elicited more intrusions to picture names (e.g., crayon) compared to in control conditions when primed as direct competitors (ballpoint pen) than when primed as indirect‐competitors (pig pen). These results suggest that polysemes, unlike homophones, are stored and retrieved as unified lexical representations.
    July 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12402   open full text
  • Dealing with Big Numbers: Representation and Understanding of Magnitudes Outside of Human Experience.
    Ilyse Resnick, Nora S. Newcombe, Thomas F. Shipley.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 29, 2016
    Being able to estimate quantity is important in everyday life and for success in the STEM disciplines. However, people have difficulty reasoning about magnitudes outside of human perception (e.g., nanoseconds, geologic time). This study examines patterns of estimation errors across temporal and spatial magnitudes at large scales. We evaluated the effectiveness of hierarchical alignment in improving estimations, and transfer across dimensions. The activity was successful in increasing accuracy for temporal and spatial magnitudes, and learning transferred to the estimation of numeric magnitudes associated with events and objects. However, there were also a number of informative differences in performance on temporal, spatial, and numeric magnitude measures, suggesting that participants possess different categorical information for these scales. Educational implications are discussed.
    July 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12388   open full text
  • Does Variability Across Events Affect Verb Learning in English, Mandarin, and Korean?
    Jane B. Childers, Jae H. Paik, Melissa Flores, Gabrielle Lai, Megan Dolan.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 25, 2016
    Extending new verbs is important in becoming a productive speaker of a language. Prior results show children have difficulty extending verbs when they have seen events with varied agents. This study further examines the impact of variability on verb learning and asks whether variability interacts with event complexity or differs by language. Children (aged 2½ to 3 years) in the United States, China, Korea, and Singapore learned verbs linked to simple and complex events. Sets of events included one or three agents, and children were asked to extend the verb at test. Children learning verbs linked to simple movements performed similarly across conditions. However, children learning verbs linked to events with multiple objects were less successful if those events were enacted by multiple agents. A follow‐up study rules out an influence of event order. Overall, similar patterns of results emerged across languages, suggesting common cognitive processes support children's verb learning.
    July 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12398   open full text
  • Memory‐Based Simple Heuristics as Attribute Substitution: Competitive Tests of Binary Choice Inference Models.
    Hidehito Honda, Toshihiko Matsuka, Kazuhiro Ueda.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 20, 2016
    Some researchers on binary choice inference have argued that people make inferences based on simple heuristics, such as recognition, fluency, or familiarity. Others have argued that people make inferences based on available knowledge. To examine the boundary between heuristic and knowledge usage, we examine binary choice inference processes in terms of attribute substitution in heuristic use (Kahneman & Frederick, 2005). In this framework, it is predicted that people will rely on heuristic or knowledge‐based inference depending on the subjective difficulty of the inference task. We conducted competitive tests of binary choice inference models representing simple heuristics (fluency and familiarity heuristics) and knowledge‐based inference models. We found that a simple heuristic model (especially a familiarity heuristic model) explained inference patterns for subjectively difficult inference tasks, and that a knowledge‐based inference model explained subjectively easy inference tasks. These results were consistent with the predictions of the attribute substitution framework. Issues on usage of simple heuristics and psychological processes are discussed.
    July 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12395   open full text
  • Arranging Objects in Space: Measuring Task‐Relevant Organizational Behaviors During Goal Pursuit.
    Grayden J. F. Solman, Alan Kingstone.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 18, 2016
    Human behavior unfolds primarily in built environments, where the arrangement of objects is a result of ongoing human decisions and actions, yet these organizational decisions have received limited experimental study. In two experiments, we introduce a novel paradigm designed to explore how individuals organize task‐relevant objects in space. Participants completed goals by locating and accessing sequences of objects in a computer‐based task, and they were free to rearrange the positions of objects at any time. We measure a variety of organization changes and evaluate how these measures relate to individual differences in performance. In Experiment 1, we show that with weak structure in task demands, changes in object positions that arise through performance of the task lead to improved order, characterized predominantly by a centralization of frequently used items and a peripheralization of infrequently used objects. In Experiment 2, with increased task structure, we observe more refined organizational tendencies, with selective contraction and clustering of interrelated task‐relevant objects. We further demonstrate that these more selective organization behaviors are reliably associated with individual differences in task performance. Collectively, these two studies reveal properties of space and of task demands that support and facilitate effective organization of the environment in support of ongoing behavior.
    July 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12391   open full text
  • Forgetting of Foreign‐Language Skills: A Corpus‐Based Analysis of Online Tutoring Software.
    Karl Ridgeway, Michael C. Mozer, Anita R. Bowles.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 27, 2016
    We explore the nature of forgetting in a corpus of 125,000 students learning Spanish using the Rosetta Stone® foreign‐language instruction software across 48 lessons. Students are tested on a lesson after its initial study and are then retested after a variable time lag. We observe forgetting consistent with power function decay at a rate that varies across lessons but not across students. We find that lessons which are better learned initially are forgotten more slowly, a correlation which likely reflects a latent cause such as the quality or difficulty of the lesson. We obtain improved predictive accuracy of the forgetting model by augmenting it with features that encode characteristics of a student's initial study of the lesson and the activities the student engaged in between the initial and delayed tests. The augmented model can predict 23.9% of the variance in an individual's score on the delayed test. We analyze which features best explain individual performance.
    June 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12385   open full text
  • Extending SME to Handle Large‐Scale Cognitive Modeling.
    Kenneth D. Forbus, Ronald W. Ferguson, Andrew Lovett, Dedre Gentner.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 20, 2016
    Analogy and similarity are central phenomena in human cognition, involved in processes ranging from visual perception to conceptual change. To capture this centrality requires that a model of comparison must be able to integrate with other processes and handle the size and complexity of the representations required by the tasks being modeled. This paper describes extensions to Structure‐Mapping Engine (SME) since its inception in 1986 that have increased its scope of operation. We first review the basic SME algorithm, describe psychological evidence for SME as a process model, and summarize its role in simulating similarity‐based retrieval and generalization. Then we describe five techniques now incorporated into the SME that have enabled it to tackle large‐scale modeling tasks: (a) Greedy merging rapidly constructs one or more best interpretations of a match in polynomial time: O(n2log(n)); (b) Incremental operation enables mappings to be extended as new information is retrieved or derived about the base or target, to model situations where information in a task is updated over time; (c) Ubiquitous predicates model the varying degrees to which items may suggest alignment; (d) Structural evaluation of analogical inferences models aspects of plausibility judgments; (e) Match filters enable large‐scale task models to communicate constraints to SME to influence the mapping process. We illustrate via examples from published studies how these enable it to capture a broader range of psychological phenomena than before.
    June 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12377   open full text
  • Modeling Lag‐2 Revisits to Understand Trade‐Offs in Mixed Control of Fixation Termination During Visual Search.
    Hayward J. Godwin, Erik D. Reichle, Tamaryn Menneer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 20, 2016
    An important question about eye‐movement behavior is when the decision is made to terminate a fixation and program the following saccade. Different approaches have found converging evidence in favor of a mixed‐control account, in which there is some overlap between processing information at fixation and planning the following saccade. We examined one interesting instance of mixed control in visual search: lag‐2 revisits, during which observers fixate a stimulus, move to a different stimulus, and then revisit the first stimulus on the next fixation. Results show that the probability of lag‐2 revisits occurring increased with the number of target‐similar stimuli, and revisits were preceded by a brief fixation on the intervening distractor stimulus. We developed the Efficient Visual Sampling (EVS) computational model to simulate our findings (fixation durations and fixation locations) and to provide insight into mixed control of fixations and the perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes that produce lag‐2 revisits.
    June 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12379   open full text
  • Containment and Support: Core and Complexity in Spatial Language Learning.
    Barbara Landau, Kristen Johannes, Dimitrios Skordos, Anna Papafragou.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 20, 2016
    Containment and support have traditionally been assumed to represent universal conceptual foundations for spatial terms. This assumption can be challenged, however: English in and on are applied across a surprisingly broad range of exemplars, and comparable terms in other languages show significant variation in their application. We propose that the broad domains of both containment and support have internal structure that reflects different subtypes, that this structure is reflected in basic spatial term usage across languages, and that it constrains children's spatial term learning. Using a newly developed battery, we asked how adults and 4‐year‐old children speaking English or Greek distribute basic spatial terms across subtypes of containment and support. We found that containment showed similar distributions of basic terms across subtypes among all groups while support showed such similarity only among adults, with striking differences between children learning English versus Greek. We conclude that the two domains differ considerably in the learning problems they present, and that learning in and on is remarkably complex. Together, our results point to the need for a more nuanced view of spatial term learning.
    June 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12389   open full text
  • The Importance of Reading Naturally: Evidence From Combined Recordings of Eye Movements and Electric Brain Potentials.
    Paul Metzner, Titus Malsburg, Shravan Vasishth, Frank Rösler.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 16, 2016
    How important is the ability to freely control eye movements for reading comprehension? And how does the parser make use of this freedom? We investigated these questions using coregistration of eye movements and event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants read either freely or in a computer‐controlled word‐by‐word format (also known as RSVP). Word‐by‐word presentation and natural reading both elicited qualitatively similar ERP effects in response to syntactic and semantic violations (N400 and P600 effects). Comprehension was better in free reading but only in trials in which the eyes regressed to previous material upon encountering the anomaly. A more fine‐grained ERP analysis revealed that these regressions were strongly associated with the well‐known P600 effect. In trials without regressions, we instead found sustained centro‐parietal negativities starting at around 320 ms post‐onset; however, these negativities were only found when the violation occurred in sentence‐final position. Taken together, these results suggest that the sentence processing system engages in strategic choices: In response to words that don't match built‐up expectations, it can either explore alternative interpretations (reflected by regressions, P600 effects, and good comprehension) or pursue a “good‐enough” processing strategy that tolerates a deficient interpretation (reflected by progressive saccades, sustained negativities, and relatively poor comprehension).
    June 16, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12384   open full text
  • Reference Production as Search: The Impact of Domain Size on the Production of Distinguishing Descriptions.
    Albert Gatt, Emiel Krahmer, Kees Deemter, Roger P.G. Gompel.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 06, 2016
    When producing a description of a target referent in a visual context, speakers need to choose a set of properties that distinguish it from its distractors. Computational models of language production/generation usually model this as a search process and predict that the time taken will increase both with the number of distractors in a scene and with the number of properties required to distinguish the target. These predictions are reminiscent of classic findings in visual search; however, unlike models of reference production, visual search models also predict that search can become very efficient under certain conditions, something that reference production models do not consider. This paper investigates the predictions of these models empirically. In two experiments, we show that the time taken to plan a referring expression—as reflected by speech onset latencies—is influenced by distractor set size and by the number of properties required, but this crucially depends on the discriminability of the properties under consideration. We discuss the implications for current models of reference production and recent work on the role of salience in visual search.
    June 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12375   open full text
  • Modeling Statistical Insensitivity: Sources of Suboptimal Behavior.
    Annie Gagliardi, Naomi H. Feldman, Jeffrey Lidz.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 01, 2016
    Children acquiring languages with noun classes (grammatical gender) have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the hypothesis that children are classifying nouns optimally with respect to a distribution that does not match the surface distribution of statistical features in their input. We propose three ways in which children's apparent statistical insensitivity might arise, and find that all three provide ways to account for the difference between children's behavior and the optimal classifier. A fourth model combines two of these proposals and finds that children's insensitivity is best modeled as a bias to ignore certain features during classification, rather than an inability to encode those features during learning. These results provide insight into children's developing knowledge of noun classes and highlight the complex ways in which statistical information from the input interacts with children's learning processes.
    June 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12373   open full text
  • Effects of Disfluency in Online Interpretation of Deception.
    Jia E. Loy, Hannah Rohde, Martin Corley.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 01, 2016
    A speaker's manner of delivery of an utterance can affect a listener's pragmatic interpretation of the message. Disfluencies (such as filled pauses) influence a listener's off‐line assessment of whether the speaker is truthful or deceptive. Do listeners also form this assessment during the moment‐by‐moment processing of the linguistic message? Here we present two experiments that examined listeners’ judgments of whether a speaker was indicating the true location of the prize in a game during fluent and disfluent utterances. Participants’ eye and mouse movements were biased toward the location named by the speaker during fluent utterances, whereas the opposite bias was observed during disfluent utterances. This difference emerged rapidly after the onset of the critical noun. Participants were similarly sensitive to disfluencies at the start of the utterance (Experiment 1) and in the middle (Experiment 2). Our findings support recent research showing that listeners integrate pragmatic information alongside semantic content during the earliest moments of language processing. Unlike prior work which has focused on pragmatic effects in the interpretation of the literal message, here we highlight disfluency's role in guiding a listener to an alternative non‐literal message.
    June 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12378   open full text
  • Why Are Verbs So Hard to Remember? Effects of Semantic Context on Memory for Verbs and Nouns.
    Julie L. Earles, Alan W. Kersten.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 23, 2016
    Three experiments test the theory that verb meanings are more malleable than noun meanings in different semantic contexts, making a previously seen verb difficult to remember when it appears in a new semantic context. Experiment 1 revealed that changing the direct object noun in a transitive sentence reduced recognition of a previously seen verb, whereas changing the verb had little impact on noun recognition. Experiment 2 revealed that verbs exhibited context effects more similar to those shown by superordinate nouns rather than basic‐level nouns. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the degree of meaning change in a target word resulting from changes in semantic context influenced the magnitude of context effects, but context effects remained larger for verbs than for nouns even when the degree of meaning change was similar for nouns and verbs. These results are discussed with respect to the imageability and grammatical roles played by nouns and verbs in a sentence.
    May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12374   open full text
  • Moving Word Learning to a Novel Space: A Dynamic Systems View of Referent Selection and Retention.
    Larissa K. Samuelson, Sarah C. Kucker, John P. Spencer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. April 29, 2016
    Theories of cognitive development must address both the issue of how children bring their knowledge to bear on behavior in‐the‐moment, and how knowledge changes over time. We argue that seeking answers to these questions requires an appreciation of the dynamic nature of the developing system in its full, reciprocal complexity. We illustrate this dynamic complexity with results from two lines of research on early word learning. The first demonstrates how the child's active engagement with objects and people supports referent selection via memories for what objects were previously seen in a cued location. The second set of results highlights changes in the role of novelty and attentional processes in referent selection and retention as children's knowledge of words and objects grows. Together this work suggests that understanding systems for perception, action, attention, and memory, and their complex interaction, is critical to understand word learning. We review recent literature that highlights the complex interactions between these processes in cognitive development and point to critical issues for future work.
    April 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12369   open full text
  • The Cultural Evolution of Structured Languages in an Open‐Ended, Continuous World.
    Jon W. Carr, Kenny Smith, Hannah Cornish, Simon Kirby.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. April 07, 2016
    Language maps signals onto meanings through the use of two distinct types of structure. First, the space of meanings is discretized into categories that are shared by all users of the language. Second, the signals employed by the language are compositional: The meaning of the whole is a function of its parts and the way in which those parts are combined. In three iterated learning experiments using a vast, continuous, open‐ended meaning space, we explore the conditions under which both structured categories and structured signals emerge ex nihilo. While previous experiments have been limited to either categorical structure in meanings or compositional structure in signals, these experiments demonstrate that when the meaning space lacks clear preexisting boundaries, more subtle morphological structure that lacks straightforward compositionality—as found in natural languages—may evolve as a solution to joint pressures from learning and communication.
    April 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12371   open full text
  • Multiple Sensory‐Motor Pathways Lead to Coordinated Visual Attention.
    Chen Yu, Linda B. Smith.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 25, 2016
    Joint attention has been extensively studied in the developmental literature because of overwhelming evidence that the ability to socially coordinate visual attention to an object is essential to healthy developmental outcomes, including language learning. The goal of this study was to understand the complex system of sensory‐motor behaviors that may underlie the establishment of joint attention between parents and toddlers. In an experimental task, parents and toddlers played together with multiple toys. We objectively measured joint attention—and the sensory‐motor behaviors that underlie it—using a dual head‐mounted eye‐tracking system and frame‐by‐frame coding of manual actions. By tracking the momentary visual fixations and hand actions of each participant, we precisely determined just how often they fixated on the same object at the same time, the visual behaviors that preceded joint attention and manual behaviors that preceded and co‐occurred with joint attention. We found that multiple sequential sensory‐motor patterns lead to joint attention. In addition, there are developmental changes in this multi‐pathway system evidenced as variations in strength among multiple routes. We propose that coordinated visual attention between parents and toddlers is primarily a sensory‐motor behavior. Skill in achieving coordinated visual attention in social settings—like skills in other sensory‐motor domains—emerges from multiple pathways to the same functional end.
    March 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12366   open full text
  • Compatibilism and Incompatibilism in Social Cognition.
    John Turri.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 25, 2016
    Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibilism. This paper reports five experiments designed to identify such patterns. The results support a nuanced hybrid account: The central tendencies in ordinary social cognition are compatibilism about moral responsibility, compatibilism about positive moral accountability (i.e., about deserving credit for good outcomes), neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism about negative moral accountability (i.e., about deserving blame for bad outcomes), compatibilism about choice for actions with positive outcomes, and incompatibilism about choice for actions with negative or neutral outcomes.
    March 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12372   open full text
  • Processing Conversational Implicatures: Alternatives and Counterfactual Reasoning.
    Bob Tiel, Walter Schaeken.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 25, 2016
    In a series of experiments, Bott and Noveck (2004) found that the computation of scalar inferences, a variety of conversational implicature, caused a delay in response times. In order to determine what aspect of the inferential process that underlies scalar inferences caused this delay, we extended their paradigm to three other kinds of inferences: free choice inferences, conditional perfection, and exhaustivity in “it”‐clefts. In contrast to scalar inferences, the computation of these three kinds of inferences facilitated response times. Following a suggestion made by Chemla and Bott (2014), we propose that the time it takes to compute a conversational implicature depends on the structural characteristics of the required alternatives.
    March 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12362   open full text
  • Vocabulary, Grammar, Sex, and Aging.
    Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 22, 2016
    Understanding the changes in our language abilities along the lifespan is a crucial step for understanding the aging process both in normal and in abnormal circumstances. Besides controlled experimental tasks, it is equally crucial to investigate language in unconstrained conversation. I present an information‐theoretical analysis of a corpus of dyadic conversations investigating how the richness of the vocabulary, the word‐internal structure (inflectional morphology), and the syntax of the utterances evolves as a function of the speaker's age and sex. Although vocabulary diversity increases throughout the lifetime, grammatical diversities follow a different pattern, which also differs between women and men. Women use increasingly diverse syntactic structures at least up to their late fifties, and they do not deteriorate in terms of fluency through their lifespan. However, from age 45 onward, men exhibit a decrease in the diversity of the syntactic structures they use, coupled with an increased number of speech disfluencies.
    March 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12367   open full text
  • Auditory Verbal Experience and Agency in Waking, Sleep Onset, REM, and Non‐REM Sleep.
    Jana Speth, Trevor A. Harley, Clemens Speth.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 22, 2016
    We present one of the first quantitative studies on auditory verbal experiences (“hearing voices”) and auditory verbal agency (inner speech, and specifically “talking to (imaginary) voices or characters”) in healthy participants across states of consciousness. Tools of quantitative linguistic analysis were used to measure participants’ implicit knowledge of auditory verbal experiences (VE) and auditory verbal agencies (VA), displayed in mentation reports from four different states. Analysis was conducted on a total of 569 mentation reports from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, non‐REM sleep, sleep onset, and waking. Physiology was controlled with the nightcap sleep–wake mentation monitoring system. Sleep‐onset hallucinations, traditionally at the focus of scientific attention on auditory verbal hallucinations, showed the lowest degree of VE and VA, whereas REM sleep showed the highest degrees. Degrees of different linguistic‐pragmatic aspects of VE and VA likewise depend on the physiological states. The quantity and pragmatics of VE and VA are a function of the physiologically distinct state of consciousness in which they are conceived.
    March 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12363   open full text
  • Spicy Adjectives and Nominal Donkeys: Capturing Semantic Deviance Using Compositionality in Distributional Spaces.
    Eva M. Vecchi, Marco Marelli, Roberto Zamparelli, Marco Baroni.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 16, 2016
    Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective‐noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective‐noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not.
    March 16, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12330   open full text
  • Preadolescents Solve Natural Syllogisms Proficiently.
    Guy Politzer, Christelle Bosc‐Miné, Emmanuel Sander.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 16, 2016
    “Natural syllogisms” are arguments formally identifiable with categorical syllogisms that have an implicit universal affirmative premise retrieved from semantic memory rather than explicitly stated. Previous studies with adult participants (Politzer, 2011) have shown that the rate of success is remarkably high. Because their resolution requires only the use of a simple strategy (known as ecthesis in classic logic) and an operational use of the concept of inclusion (the recognition that an element that belongs to a subset must belong to the set but not vice versa), it was hypothesized that these syllogisms would be within the grasp of non‐adult participants, provided they have acquired the notion of deductive validity. Here, 11‐year‐old children were presented with natural syllogisms embedded in short dialogs. The first experiment showed that their performance was equivalent to adults' highest level of performance in standard experiments on syllogisms. The second experiment, while confirming children's proficiency in solving natural syllogisms, showed that they outperformed children who solved non‐natural matched syllogisms in the same experimental setting. The results are also in agreement with the argumentation theory of reasoning.
    March 16, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12365   open full text
  • Semantic Coherence Facilitates Distributional Learning.
    Long Ouyang, Lera Boroditsky, Michael C. Frank.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 14, 2016
    Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words’ linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that “postman” and “mailman” are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of association with other words (e.g., they both tend to occur with words like “deliver,” “truck,” “package”). In contrast to these computational results, artificial language learning experiments suggest that distributional statistics alone do not facilitate learning of linguistic categories. However, experiments in this paradigm expose participants to entirely novel words, whereas real language learners encounter input that contains some known words that are semantically organized. In three experiments, we show that (a) the presence of familiar semantic reference points facilitates distributional learning and (b) this effect crucially depends both on the presence of known words and the adherence of these known words to some semantic organization.
    March 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12360   open full text
  • A Bootstrapping Model of Frequency and Context Effects in Word Learning.
    George Kachergis, Chen Yu, Richard M. Shiffrin.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 14, 2016
    Prior research has shown that people can learn many nouns (i.e., word–object mappings) from a short series of ambiguous situations containing multiple words and objects. For successful cross‐situational learning, people must approximately track which words and referents co‐occur most frequently. This study investigates the effects of allowing some word‐referent pairs to appear more frequently than others, as is true in real‐world learning environments. Surprisingly, high‐frequency pairs are not always learned better, but can also boost learning of other pairs. Using a recent associative model (Kachergis, Yu, & Shiffrin, 2012), we explain how mixing pairs of different frequencies can bootstrap late learning of the low‐frequency pairs based on early learning of higher frequency pairs. We also manipulate contextual diversity, the number of pairs a given pair appears with across training, since it is naturalistically confounded with frequency. The associative model has competing familiarity and uncertainty biases, and their interaction is able to capture the individual and combined effects of frequency and contextual diversity on human learning. Two other recent word‐learning models do not account for the behavioral findings.
    March 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12353   open full text
  • Minimal Requirements for the Emergence of Learned Signaling.
    Matthew Spike, Kevin Stadler, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 14, 2016
    The emergence of signaling systems has been observed in numerous experimental and real‐world contexts, but there is no consensus on which (if any) shared mechanisms underlie such phenomena. A number of explanatory mechanisms have been proposed within several disciplines, all of which have been instantiated as credible working models. However, they are usually framed as being mutually incompatible. Using an exemplar‐based framework, we replicate these models in a minimal configuration which allows us to directly compare them. This reveals that the development of optimal signaling is driven by similar mechanisms in each model, which leads us to propose three requirements for the emergence of conventional signaling. These are the creation and transmission of referential information, a systemic bias against ambiguity, and finally some form of information loss. Considering this, we then discuss some implications for theoretical and experimental approaches to the emergence of learned communication.
    March 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12351   open full text
  • Normative Judgments and Individual Essence.
    Julian De Freitas, Kevin P. Tobia, George E. Newman, Joshua Knobe.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 14, 2016
    A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types of features that people typically consider when making such judgments, to date, existing work has not explored how these judgments may be shaped by normative considerations. The present studies demonstrate that normative beliefs do appear to play an important role in people's beliefs about persistence. Specifically, people are more likely to judge that the identity of a given entity (e.g., a hypothetical nation) remains the same when its features improve (e.g., the nation becomes more egalitarian) than when its features deteriorate (e.g., the nation becomes more discriminatory). Study 1 provides a basic demonstration of this effect. Study 2 shows that this effect is moderated by individual differences in normative beliefs. Study 3 examines the underlying mechanism, which is the belief that, in general, various entities are essentially good. Study 4 directly manipulates beliefs about essence to show that the positivity bias regarding essences is causally responsible for the effect.
    March 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12364   open full text
  • Non‐Arbitrariness in Mapping Word Form to Meaning: Cross‐Linguistic Formal Markers of Word Concreteness.
    Jamie Reilly, Jinyi Hung, Chris Westbury.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 14, 2016
    Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic differences, abstract and concrete words are also marked by distinct morphophonological structures such as length and morphological complexity. Native English speakers show sensitivity to these markers in tasks such as auditory word recognition and naming. One unanswered question is whether this violation of arbitrariness reflects an idiosyncratic property of the English lexicon or whether word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across other natural languages. We isolated concrete and abstract English nouns (N = 400), and translated each into Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Hebrew, and American Sign Language. We conducted offline acoustic analyses of abstract and concrete word length discrepancies across languages. In a separate experiment, native English speakers (N = 56) with no prior knowledge of these foreign languages judged concreteness of these nouns (e.g., Can you see, hear, feel, or touch this? Yes/No). Each naïve participant heard pre‐recorded words presented in randomized blocks of three foreign languages following a brief listening exposure to a narrative sample from each respective language. Concrete and abstract words differed by length across five of eight languages, and prediction accuracy exceeded chance for four of eight languages. These results suggest that word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across several of the world's most widely spoken languages. We interpret these findings as supportive of an adaptive cognitive heuristic that allows listeners to exploit non‐arbitrary mappings of word form to word meaning.
    March 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12361   open full text
  • Transitivity, Space, and Hand: The Spatial Grounding of Syntax.
    Timothy W. Boiteau, Amit Almor.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 10, 2016
    Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left‐to‐right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a novel method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect.
    March 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12355   open full text
  • The Role of Lexical Frequency in the Acceptability of Syntactic Variants: Evidence From that‐Clauses in Polish.
    Dagmar Divjak.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 10, 2016
    A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus‐ and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that‐complements in Polish. Polish verbs exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that‐complement occurs with low frequency (<0.66 ipm). These low‐frequency that‐clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated.
    March 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12335   open full text
  • Uphill and Downhill in a Flat World: The Conceptual Topography of the Yupno House.
    Kensy Cooperrider, James Slotta, Rafael Núñez.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 10, 2016
    Speakers of many languages around the world rely on body‐based contrasts (e.g., left/right) for spatial communication and cognition. Speakers of Yupno, a language of Papua New Guinea's mountainous interior, rely instead on an environment‐based uphill/downhill contrast. Body‐based contrasts are as easy to use indoors as outdoors, but environment‐based contrasts may not be. Do Yupno speakers still use uphill/downhill contrasts indoors and, if so, how? We report three studies on spatial communication within the Yupno house. Even in this flat world, uphill/downhill contrasts are pervasive. However, the terms are not used according to the slopes beyond the house's walls, as reported in other groups. Instead, the house is treated as a microworld, with a “conceptual topography” that is strikingly reminiscent of the physical topography of the Yupno valley. The phenomenon illustrates some of the distinctive properties of environment‐based reference systems, as well as the universal power and plasticity of spatial contrasts.
    March 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12357   open full text
  • When Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence: Rational Inferences From Absent Data.
    Anne S. Hsu, Andy Horng, Thomas L. Griffiths, Nick Chater.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 06, 2016
    Identifying patterns in the world requires noticing not only unusual occurrences, but also unusual absences. We examined how people learn from absences, manipulating the extent to which an absence is expected. People can make two types of inferences from the absence of an event: either the event is possible but has not yet occurred, or the event never occurs. A rational analysis using Bayesian inference predicts that inferences from absent data should depend on how much the absence is expected to occur, with less probable absences being more salient. We tested this prediction in two experiments in which we elicited people's judgments about patterns in the data as a function of absence salience. We found that people were able to decide that absences either were mere coincidences or were indicative of a significant pattern in the data in a manner that was consistent with predictions of a simple Bayesian model.
    March 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12356   open full text
  • The Role of Moral Beliefs, Memories, and Preferences in Representations of Identity.
    Larisa Heiphetz, Nina Strohminger, Liane L. Young.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 03, 2016
    People perceive that if their memories and moral beliefs changed, they would change. We investigated why individuals respond this way. In Study 1, participants judged that identity would change more after changes to memories and widely shared moral beliefs (e.g., about murder) versus preferences and controversial moral beliefs (e.g., about abortion). The extent to which participants judged that changes would affect their relationships predicted identity change (Study 2) and mediated the relationship between type of moral belief and perceived identity change (Study 3). We discuss the role that social relationships play in judgments of identity and highlight implications for psychology and philosophy.
    March 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12354   open full text
  • “Because It's Hers”: When Preschoolers Use Ownership in Their Explanations.
    Shaylene E. Nancekivell, Ori Friedman.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 03, 2016
    Young children show competence in reasoning about how ownership affects object use. In the present experiments, we investigate how influential ownership is for young children by examining their explanations. In three experiments, we asked 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds (N = 323) to explain why it was acceptable (Experiments 1–3) or unacceptable (Experiment 2 and 3) for a person to use an object. In Experiments 1 and 2, older preschoolers referenced ownership more than alternative considerations when explaining why it was acceptable or unacceptable for a person to use an object, even though ownership was not mentioned to them. In Experiment 3, ownership was mentioned to children. Here, younger preschoolers frequently referenced ownership when explaining unacceptability of using an object, but not when explaining why using it was acceptable. These findings suggest that ownership is influential in preschoolers' explanations about the acceptability of using objects, but that the scope of its influence increases with age.
    March 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12358   open full text
  • Measuring Graded Membership: The Case of Color.
    Igor Douven, Sylvia Wenmackers, Yasmina Jraissati, Lieven Decock.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 03, 2016
    This paper considers Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership within a conceptual spaces framework and puts the account to the test in the domain of colors. Three experiments are reported that are meant to determine, on the one hand, the regions in color space where the typical instances of blue and green are located and, on the other hand, the degrees of blueness/greenness of various shades in the blue–green region as judged by human observers. From the locations of the typical blue and typical green regions in conjunction with Kamp and Partee's account follow degrees of blueness/greenness for the color shades we are interested in. These predicted degrees are compared with the judged degrees, as obtained in the experiments. The results of the comparison support the account of graded membership at issue.
    March 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12359   open full text
  • Feature Biases in Early Word Learning: Network Distinctiveness Predicts Age of Acquisition.
    Tomas Engelthaler, Thomas T. Hills.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 29, 2016
    Do properties of a word's features influence the order of its acquisition in early word learning? Combining the principles of mutual exclusivity and shape bias, the present work takes a network analysis approach to understanding how feature distinctiveness predicts the order of early word learning. Distance networks were built from nouns with edge lengths computed using various distance measures. Feature distinctiveness was computed as a distance measure, showing how far an object in a network is from other objects based on shared and non‐shared features. Feature distinctiveness predicted order of acquisition across all measures: Words that were further away from other words in the network space were learned earlier. The best distance measures were based only on non‐shared features (object dissimilarity) and did not include shared features (object similarity). This indicates that shared features may play less of a role in early word learning than non‐shared features. In addition, the strongest effects were found for visual form and surface features. Cluster analysis further revealed that this effect is a localized effect in the object feature space, where objects' distances from their cluster centroid were inversely correlated with their age of acquisition. Together, these results suggest a role for feature distinctiveness in early word learning.
    February 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12350   open full text
  • Going Beyond Input Quantity: Wh‐Questions Matter for Toddlers' Language and Cognitive Development.
    Meredith L. Rowe, Kathryn A. Leech, Natasha Cabrera.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 29, 2016
    There are clear associations between the overall quantity of input children are exposed to and their vocabulary acquisition. However, by uncovering specific features of the input that matter, we can better understand the mechanisms involved in vocabulary learning. We examine whether exposure to wh‐questions, a challenging quality of the communicative input, is associated with toddlers' vocabulary and later verbal reasoning skills in a sample of low‐income, African‐American fathers and their 24‐month‐old children (n = 41). Dyads were videotaped in free play sessions at home. Videotapes were transcribed and reliably coded for sheer quantity of fathers' input (number of utterances) as well as the number of wh‐questions fathers produce. Children's productive vocabulary was measured at 24 months using the McArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory MCDI (completed by the mothers), and children's verbal reasoning skills were measured 1 year later using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Results indicate that the overall quantity of father talk did not relate to children's vocabulary or reasoning skills. However, fathers' use of wh‐questions (but not other questions) related to both vocabulary and reasoning outcomes. Children's responses to wh‐questions were more frequent and more syntactically complex, measured using the mean length of utterance (MLU), than their responses to other questions. Thus, posing wh‐questions to 2‐year‐olds is a challenging type of input, which elicits a verbal response from the child that likely helps build vocabulary and foster verbal reasoning abilities.
    February 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12349   open full text
  • Language Reflects “Core” Cognition: A New Theory About the Origin of Cross‐Linguistic Regularities.
    Brent Strickland.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 29, 2016
    The underlying structures that are common to the world's languages bear an intriguing connection with early emerging forms of “core knowledge” (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007), which are frequently studied by infant researchers. In particular, grammatical systems often incorporate distinctions (e.g., the mass/count distinction) that reflect those made in core knowledge (e.g., the non‐verbal distinction between an object and a substance). Here, I argue that this connection occurs because non‐verbal core knowledge systematically biases processes of language evolution. This account potentially explains a wide range of cross‐linguistic grammatical phenomena that currently lack an adequate explanation. Second, I suggest that developmental researchers and cognitive scientists interested in (non‐verbal) knowledge representation can exploit this connection to language by using observations about cross‐linguistic grammatical tendencies to inspire hypotheses about core knowledge.
    February 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12332   open full text
  • The Power of 2: How an Apparently Irregular Numeration System Facilitates Mental Arithmetic.
    Andrea Bender, Sieghard Beller.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 24, 2016
    Mangarevan traditionally contained two numeration systems: a general one, which was highly regular, decimal, and extraordinarily extensive; and a specific one, which was restricted to specific objects, based on diverging counting units, and interspersed with binary steps. While most of these characteristics are shared by numeration systems in related languages in Oceania, the binary steps are unique. To account for these characteristics, this article draws on—and tries to integrate—insights from anthropology, archeology, linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science more generally. The analysis of mental arithmetic with these systems reveals that both types of systems entailed cognitive advantages and served important functions in the cultural context of their application. How these findings speak to more general questions revolving around the theoretical models and evolutionary trajectory of numerical cognition will be discussed in the .
    February 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12337   open full text
  • The P600 in Implicit Artificial Grammar Learning.
    Susana Silva, Vasiliki Folia, Peter Hagoort, Karl Magnus Petersson.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 23, 2016
    The suitability of the artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm to capture relevant aspects of the acquisition of linguistic structures has been empirically tested in a number of EEG studies. Some have shown a syntax‐related P600 component, but it has not been ruled out that the AGL P600 effect is a response to surface features (e.g., subsequence familiarity) rather than the underlying syntax structure. Therefore, in this study, we controlled for the surface characteristics of the test sequences (associative chunk strength) and recorded the EEG before (baseline preference classification) and after (preference and grammaticality classification) exposure to a grammar. After exposure, a typical, centroparietal P600 effect was elicited by grammatical violations and not by unfamiliar subsequences, suggesting that the AGL P600 effect signals a response to structural irregularities. Moreover, preference and grammaticality classification showed a qualitatively similar ERP profile, strengthening the idea that the implicit structural mere‐exposure paradigm in combination with preference classification is a suitable alternative to the traditional grammaticality classification test.
    February 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12343   open full text
  • Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking.
    Maryia Fedzechkina, Elissa L. Newport, T. Florian Jaeger.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 22, 2016
    Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross‐linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross‐linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning.
    February 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12346   open full text
  • Abstract Conceptual Feature Ratings Predict Gaze Within Written Word Arrays: Evidence From a Visual Wor(l)d Paradigm.
    Silvia Primativo, Jamie Reilly, Sebastian J Crutch.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 22, 2016
    The Abstract Conceptual Feature (ACF) framework predicts that word meaning is represented within a high‐dimensional semantic space bounded by weighted contributions of perceptual, affective, and encyclopedic information. The ACF, like latent semantic analysis, is amenable to distance metrics between any two words. We applied predictions of the ACF framework to abstract words using eyetracking via an adaptation of the classical “visual word paradigm” (VWP). Healthy adults (n = 20) selected the lexical item most related to a probe word in a 4‐item written word array comprising the target and three distractors. The relation between the probe and each of the four words was determined using the semantic distance metrics derived from ACF ratings. Eye movement data indicated that the word that was most semantically related to the probe received more and longer fixations relative to distractors. Importantly, in sets where participants did not provide an overt behavioral response, the fixation rates were nonetheless significantly higher for targets than distractors, closely resembling trials where an expected response was given. Furthermore, ACF ratings which are based on individual words predicted eye fixation metrics of probe‐target similarity at least as well as latent semantic analysis ratings which are based on word co‐occurrence. The results provide further validation of Euclidean distance metrics derived from ACF ratings as a measure of one facet of the semantic relatedness of abstract words and suggest that they represent a reasonable approximation of the organization of abstract conceptual space. The data are also compatible with the broad notion that multiple sources of information (not restricted to sensorimotor and emotion information) shape the organization of abstract concepts. While the adapted “VWP” is potentially a more metacognitive task than the classical visual world paradigm, we argue that it offers potential utility for studying abstract word comprehension.
    February 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12348   open full text
  • Perceptual Learning of Intonation Contour Categories in Adults and 9‐ to 11‐Year‐Old Children: Adults Are More Narrow‐Minded.
    Vsevolod Kapatsinski, Paul Olejarczuk, Melissa A. Redford.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 22, 2016
    We report on rapid perceptual learning of intonation contour categories in adults and 9‐ to 11‐year‐old children. Intonation contours are temporally extended patterns, whose perception requires temporal integration and therefore poses significant working memory challenges. Both children and adults form relatively abstract representations of intonation contours: Previously encountered and novel exemplars are categorized together equally often, as long as distance from the prototype is controlled. However, age‐related differences in categorization performance also exist. Given the same experience, adults form narrower categories than children. In addition, adults pay more attention to the end of the contour, while children appear to pay equal attention to the beginning and the end. The age range we examine appears to capture the tail‐end of the developmental trajectory for learning intonation contour categories: There is a continuous effect of age on category breadth within the child group, but the oldest children (older than 10;3) are adult‐like.
    February 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12345   open full text
  • Preschoolers' Acquisition of Novel Verbs in the Double Object Dative.
    Sudha Arunachalam.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 21, 2016
    Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative (e.g., Fred blicked the dog a stick) as compared to the prepositional dative (e.g., Fred blicked a stick to the dog). We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds (N = 60). In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the double object frame, even though we provided more contextual support. In Experiment 2, we tested a novel hypothesis that children would comprehend novel verbs in, and generalize them to, the double object frame if they were first familiarized to the verbs in the prepositional frame. They did, suggesting that part of their difficulty with the double object frame is due to uncertainty about a new verb's semantic/syntactic properties, information that the easy‐to‐comprehend prepositional frame provides. The benefits of training were short‐lived, however; children again struggled after a 2‐h delay. The results are discussed in the context of mechanisms underlying verb acquisition.
    February 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12368   open full text
  • Categories of Large Numbers in Line Estimation.
    David Landy, Arthur Charlesworth, Erin Ottmar.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 17, 2016
    How do people stretch their understanding of magnitude from the experiential range to the very large quantities and ranges important in science, geopolitics, and mathematics? This paper empirically evaluates how and whether people make use of numerical categories when estimating relative magnitudes of numbers across many orders of magnitude. We hypothesize that people use scale words—thousand, million, billion—to carve the large number line into categories, stretching linear responses across items within each category. If so, discontinuities in position and response time are expected near the boundaries between categories. In contrast to previous work (Landy, Silbert, & Goldin, 2013) that suggested only that a minority of college undergraduates employed categorical boundaries, we find that discontinuities near category boundaries occur in most or all participants, but that accurate and inaccurate participants respond in opposite ways to category boundaries. Accurate participants highlight contrasts within a category, whereas inaccurate participants adjust their responses toward category centers.
    February 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12342   open full text
  • Metonymy as Referential Dependency: Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Arguments for a Unified Linguistic Treatment.
    Maria M. Piñango, Muye Zhang, Emily Foster‐Hanson, Michiro Negishi, Cheryl Lacadie, R. Todd Constable.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 17, 2016
    We examine metonymy at psycho‐ and neurolinguistic levels, seeking to adjudicate between two possible processing implementations (one‐ vs. two‐mechanism). We compare highly conventionalized systematic metonymy (producer‐for‐product: “All freshmen read O'Connell”) to lesser‐conventionalized circumstantial metonymy (“[a waitress says to another:] ‘Table 2 asked for more coffee.”’). Whereas these two metonymy types differ in terms of contextual demands, they each reveal a similar dependency between the named and intended conceptual entities (e.g., Jackendoff, 1997; Nunberg, 1979, 1995). We reason that if each metonymy yields a distinct processing time course and substantially non‐overlapping preferential localization pattern, it would not only support a two‐mechanism view (one lexical, one pragmatic) but would suggest that conventionalization acts as a linguistic categorizer. By contrast, a similar behavior in time course and localization would support a one‐mechanism view and the inference that conventionalization acts instead as a modulator of contextual felicitousness, and that differences in interpretation introduced by conventionalization are of degree, not of kind. Results from three paradigms: self‐paced reading (SPR), event‐related potentials (ERP), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), reveal the following: no main effect by condition (metonymy vs. matched literal control) for either metonymy type immediately after the metonymy trigger, and a main effect for only the Circumstantial metonymy one word post‐trigger (SPR); a N400 effect across metonymy types and a late positivity for Circumstantial metonymy (ERP); and a highly overlapping activation connecting the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (fMRI). Altogether, the pattern observed does not reach the threshold required to justify a two‐mechanism system. Instead, the pattern is more naturally (and conservatively) understood as resulting from the implementation of a generalized referential dependency mechanism, modulated by degree of context dependence/conventionalization, thus supporting architectures of language whereby “lexical” and “pragmatic” meaning relations are encoded along a cline of contextual underspecification.
    February 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12341   open full text
  • Effects of Manipulation on Attributions of Causation, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility.
    Dylan Murray, Tania Lombrozo.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 11, 2016
    If someone brings about an outcome without intending to, is she causally and morally responsible for it? What if she acts intentionally, but as the result of manipulation by another agent? Previous research has shown that an agent's mental states can affect attributions of causal and moral responsibility to that agent, but little is known about what effect one agent's mental states can have on attributions to another agent. In Experiment 1, we replicate findings that manipulation lowers attributions of responsibility to manipulated agents. Experiments 2–7 isolate which features of manipulation drive this effect, a crucial issue for both philosophical debates about free will and attributions of responsibility in situations involving social influence more generally. Our results suggest that “bypassing” a manipulated agent's mental states generates the greatest reduction in responsibility, and we explain our results in terms of the effects that one agent's mental states can have on the counterfactual relations between another agent and an outcome.
    February 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12338   open full text
  • Transfer of Perceptual Expertise: The Case of Simplified and Traditional Chinese Character Recognition.
    Tianyin Liu, Tin Yim Chuk, Su‐Ling Yeh, Janet H. Hsiao.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 11, 2016
    Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by reduced holistic processing (HP), which depends mainly on writing rather than reading experience. Here we show that, while simplified and traditional Chinese readers demonstrated a similar level of HP when processing characters shared between the simplified and traditional scripts, simplified Chinese readers were less holistic than traditional Chinese readers in perceiving simplified characters; this effect depended mainly on their writing rather than reading performance. However, the two groups did not differ in HP of traditional characters, regardless of their difference in reading and writing performances. Our image analysis showed high visual similarity between the two character types, with a larger variance among simplified characters; this may allow simplified Chinese readers to interpolate and generalize their skills to traditional characters. Thus, transfer of perceptual expertise may be constrained by both the similarity in feature and the difference in exemplar variance between the categories.
    February 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12307   open full text
  • One Among Many: Anaphoric One and Its Relationship With Numeral One.
    Adele E. Goldberg, Laura A. Michaelis.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 01, 2016
    One anaphora (e.g., this is a good one) has been used as a key diagnostic in syntactic analyses of the English noun phrase, and “one‐replacement” has also figured prominently in debates about the learnability of language. However, much of this work has been based on faulty premises, as a few perceptive researchers, including Ray Jackendoff, have made clear. Abandoning the view of anaphoric one (a‐one) as a form of syntactic replacement allows us to take a fresh look at various uses of the word one. In the present work, we investigate its use as a cardinal number (1‐one) in order to better understand its anaphoric use. Like all cardinal numbers, 1‐one can only quantify an individuated entity and provides an indefinite reading by default. Owing to unique combinatoric properties, cardinal numbers defy consistent classification as determiners, quantifiers, adjectives, or nouns. Once the semantics and distribution of cardinal numbers, including 1‐one, are appreciated, many properties of a‐one follow with minimal stipulation. We claim that 1‐one and a‐one are distinct but very closely related lexemes. When 1‐one appears without a noun (e.g., Take one), it is nearly indistinguishable from a‐one (e.g., take one)—the only differences being interpretive (1‐one foregrounds its cardinality while a‐one does not) and prosodic (presence versus absence of primary accent). While we ultimately argue that a family of constructions is required to describe the full range of syntactic contexts in which one appears, the proposed network accounts for properties of a‐one by allowing it to inherit most of its syntactic and interpretive constraints from its historical predecessor, 1‐one.
    February 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12339   open full text
  • Form and Function in the Evolution of Grammar.
    Frederick J. Newmeyer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 01, 2016
    This article focuses on claims about the origin and evolution of language from the point of view of the formalist–functionalist debate in linguistics. In linguistics, an account of a grammatical phenomenon is considered “formal” if it accords center stage to the structural properties of that phenomenon, and “functional” if it appeals to the language user's communicative needs or to domain‐general human capacities. The gulf between formalism and functionalism has been bridged in language evolution research, in that some leading formalists, Ray Jackendoff for one, appeal to functional mechanisms such as natural selection. In Jackendoff's view, the biological evolution of language has proceeded in stages, each stage improving communicative efficiency. This article calls into question that idea, pointing to the fact that well‐understood purely historical processes suffice to explain the emergence of many grammatical properties. However, one central aspect of formalist linguistic theorizing—the idea of the autonomy of syntax—poses a challenge to the idea, central to most functionalist approaches, that the nature of grammar is a product of purely historical (as opposed to biological) evolution. The article concludes with a discussion of the origins of the autonomy of syntax, speculating that it may well have arisen over evolutionary (as opposed to historical) time.
    February 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12333   open full text
  • Conditionals, Context, and the Suppression Effect.
    Fabrizio Cariani, Lance J. Rips.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 01, 2016
    Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B (e.g., from If it rained, Alicia got wet and It rained to Alicia got wet). Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise (e.g., If she forgot her umbrella, Alicia got wet) can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional as a context‐sensitive strict conditional: true if and only if its consequent is true in each of a contextually determined set of situations in which its antecedent is true. Pragmatically, the theory claims that context changes in response to new assertions, including new conditional premises. Thus, the conclusion of a modus ponens argument may no longer be accepted in the changed context. Psychologically, the theory describes people as capable of reasoning about broad classes of possible situations, ordered by typicality, without having to reason about individual possible worlds. The theory accounts for the main suppression phenomena, and it generates some novel predictions that new experiments confirm.
    February 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12336   open full text
  • Spatial Language and the Embedded Listener Model in Parents’ Input to Children.
    Katrina Ferrara, Malena Silva, Colin Wilson, Barbara Landau.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 31, 2015
    Language is a collaborative act: To communicate successfully, speakers must generate utterances that are not only semantically valid but also sensitive to the knowledge state of the listener. Such sensitivity could reflect the use of an “embedded listener model,” where speakers choose utterances on the basis of an internal model of the listener's conceptual and linguistic knowledge. In this study, we ask whether parents’ spatial descriptions incorporate an embedded listener model that reflects their children's understanding of spatial relations and spatial terms. Adults described the positions of targets in spatial arrays to their children or to the adult experimenter. Arrays were designed so that targets could not be identified unless spatial relationships within the array were encoded and described. Parents of 3–4‐year‐old children encoded relationships in ways that were well‐matched to their children's level of spatial language. These encodings differed from those of the same relationships in speech to the adult experimenter (Experiment 1). In contrast, parents of individuals with severe spatial impairments (Williams syndrome) did not show clear evidence of sensitivity to their children's level of spatial language (Experiment 2). The results provide evidence for an embedded listener model in the domain of spatial language and indicate conditions under which the ability to model listener knowledge may be more challenging.
    December 31, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12328   open full text
  • Can We Forget What We Know in a False‐Belief Task? An Investigation of the True‐Belief Default.
    Paula Rubio‐Fernández.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 26, 2015
    It has been generally assumed in the Theory of Mind literature of the past 30 years that young children fail standard false‐belief tasks because they attribute their own knowledge to the protagonist (what Leslie and colleagues called a “true‐belief default”). Contrary to the traditional view, we have recently proposed that the children's bias is task induced. This alternative view was supported by studies showing that 3 year olds are able to pass a false‐belief task that allows them to focus on the protagonist, without drawing their attention to the target object in the test phase. For a more accurate comparison of these two accounts, the present study tested the true‐belief default with adults. Four experiments measuring eye movements and response inhibition revealed that (a) adults do not have an automatic tendency to respond to the false‐belief question according to their own knowledge and (b) the true‐belief response need not be inhibited in order to correctly predict the protagonist's actions. The positive results observed in the control conditions confirm the accuracy of the various measures used. I conclude that the results of this study undermine the true‐belief default view and those models that posit mechanisms of response inhibition in false‐belief reasoning. Alternatively, the present study with adults and recent studies with children suggest that participants' focus of attention in false‐belief tasks may be key to their performance.
    December 26, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12331   open full text
  • Iconicity and the Emergence of Combinatorial Structure in Language.
    Tessa Verhoef, Simon Kirby, Bart Boer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 26, 2015
    In language, recombination of a discrete set of meaningless building blocks forms an unlimited set of possible utterances. How such combinatorial structure emerged in the evolution of human language is increasingly being studied. It has been shown that it can emerge when languages culturally evolve and adapt to human cognitive biases. How the emergence of combinatorial structure interacts with the existence of holistic iconic form‐meaning mappings in a language is still unknown. The experiment presented in this paper studies the role of iconicity and human cognitive learning biases in the emergence of combinatorial structure in artificial whistled languages. Participants learned and reproduced whistled words for novel objects with the use of a slide whistle. Their reproductions were used as input for the next participant, to create transmission chains and simulate cultural transmission. Two conditions were studied: one in which the persistence of iconic form‐meaning mappings was possible and one in which this was experimentally made impossible. In both conditions, cultural transmission caused the whistled languages to become more learnable and more structured, but this process was slightly delayed in the first condition. Our findings help to gain insight into when and how words may lose their iconic origins when they become part of an organized linguistic system.
    December 26, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12326   open full text
  • Mechanisms of Reference Frame Selection in Spatial Term Use: Computational and Empirical Studies.
    Holger Schultheis, Laura A. Carlson.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 16, 2015
    Previous studies have shown that multiple reference frames are available and compete for selection during the use of spatial terms such as “above.” However, the mechanisms that underlie the selection process are poorly understood. In the current paper we present two experiments and a comparison of three computational models of selection to shed further light on the nature of reference frame selection. The three models are drawn from different areas of human cognition, and we assess whether they may be applied to a reference frame selection by examining their ability to account for both existing and new empirical data comprising acceptance rates, response times, and response time distributions. These three models are the competitive shunting model (Schultheis, ), the leaky competing accumulator (LCA) model (Usher & McClelland, ), and a lexical selection model (Howard, Nickels, Coltheart, & Cole‐Virtue, ). Model simulations show that only the LCA model satisfactorily accounts for the empirical observations. The key properties of this model that seem to drive its success are its bounded linear activation function, its number and type of processing stages, and its use of decay. Uncovering these critical properties has important implications for our understanding not only of spatial term use, in particular, but also of conflict and selection in human cognition more generally.
    December 16, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12327   open full text
  • Phonological Concept Learning.
    Elliott Moreton, Joe Pater, Katya Pertsova.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 28, 2015
    Linguistic and non‐linguistic pattern learning have been studied separately, but we argue for a comparative approach. Analogous inductive problems arise in phonological and visual pattern learning. Evidence from three experiments shows that human learners can solve them in analogous ways, and that human performance in both cases can be captured by the same models. We test GMECCS (Gradual Maximum Entropy with a Conjunctive Constraint Schema), an implementation of the Configural Cue Model (Gluck & Bower, ) in a Maximum Entropy phonotactic‐learning framework (Goldwater & Johnson, ; Hayes & Wilson, ) with a single free parameter, against the alternative hypothesis that learners seek featurally simple algebraic rules (“rule‐seeking”). We study the full typology of patterns introduced by Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins () (“SHJ”), instantiated as both phonotactic patterns and visual analogs, using unsupervised training. Unlike SHJ, Experiments 1 and 2 found that both phonotactic and visual patterns that depended on fewer features could be more difficult than those that depended on more features, as predicted by GMECCS but not by rule‐seeking. GMECCS also correctly predicted performance differences between stimulus subclasses within each pattern. A third experiment tried supervised training (which can facilitate rule‐seeking in visual learning) to elicit simple rule‐seeking phonotactic learning, but cue‐based behavior persisted. We conclude that similar cue‐based cognitive processes are available for phonological and visual concept learning, and hence that studying either kind of learning can lead to significant insights about the other.
    November 28, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12319   open full text
  • In Defense of Theory.
    Ray Jackendoff.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 27, 2015
    Formal theories of mental representation have receded from the importance they had in the early days of cognitive science. I argue that such theories are crucial in any mental domain, not just for their own sake, but to guide experimental inquiry, as well as to integrate the domain into the mind as a whole. To illustrate the criteria of adequacy for theories of mental representation, I compare two theoretical approaches to language: classical generative grammar (Chomsky, 1965, 1981, 1995) and the parallel architecture (Jackendoff, 1997, 2002). The grounds for comparison include (a) the internal coherence of the theory across phonology, syntax, and semantics; (b) the relation of language to other mental faculties; (c) the relationship between grammar and lexicon; (d) relevance to theories of language processing; and (e) the possibility of languages with little or no syntax.
    November 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12324   open full text
  • Is Passive Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence From Adult Grammaticality Judgment and Comprehension Studies.
    Ben Ambridge, Amy Bidgood, Julian M. Pine, Caroline F. Rowland, Daniel Freudenthal.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 26, 2015
    To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., *£5 was cost by the book), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and production priming studies have cast doubt upon this claim, finding no difference between highly affecting agent‐patient/theme‐experiencer passives (e.g., Wendy was kicked/frightened by Bob) and non‐actional experiencer theme passives (e.g., Wendy was heard by Bob). The present study provides evidence that a semantic constraint is psychologically real, and is readily observed when more fine‐grained independent and dependent measures are used (i.e., participant ratings of verb semantics, graded grammaticality judgments, and reaction time in a forced‐choice picture‐matching comprehension task). We conclude that a semantic constraint on the passive must be incorporated into accounts of the adult grammar.
    November 26, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12277   open full text
  • Construction Morphology and the Parallel Architecture of Grammar.
    Geert Booij, Jenny Audring.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 24, 2015
    This article presents a systematic exposition of how the basic ideas of Construction Grammar (CxG) (Goldberg, ) and the Parallel Architecture (PA) of grammar (Jackendoff, ) provide the framework for a proper account of morphological phenomena, in particular word formation. This framework is referred to as Construction Morphology (CxM). As to the implications of CxM for the architecture of grammar, the article provides evidence against a split between lexicon and grammar, in line with CxG. In addition, it shows that the PA approach makes it possible to be explicit about what happens on which level of the grammar, and thus to give an insightful account of interface phenomena. These interface phenomena appear to require that various types of information are accessible simultaneously, and it is argued that constructional schemas have the right format for expressing these mutual dependencies between different types of information.
    November 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12323   open full text
  • An Elicited‐Production Study of Inflectional Verb Morphology in Child Finnish.
    Sanna H. M. Räsänen, Ben Ambridge, Julian M. Pine.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 08, 2015
    Many generativist accounts (e.g., Wexler, 1998) argue for very early knowledge of inflection on the basis of very low rates of person/number marking errors in young children's speech. However, studies of Spanish (Aguado‐Orea & Pine, 2015) and Brazilian Portuguese (Rubino & Pine, 1998) have revealed that these low overall error rates actually hide important differences across the verb paradigm. The present study investigated children's production of person/number marked verbs by eliciting present tense verb forms from 82 native Finnish‐speaking children aged 2;2–4;8 years. Four main findings were observed: (a) Rates of person/number marking errors were higher in low‐frequency person/number contexts, even excluding children who showed no evidence of having learned the relevant morpheme, (b) most errors involved the use of higher frequency forms in lower frequency person/number contexts, (c) error rates were predicted not only by the frequency of person/number contexts (e.g., 3sg > 2pl) but also by the frequency of individual “ready‐inflected” lexical target forms, and (d) for low‐frequency verbs, lower error rates were observed for verbs with high phonological neighborhood density. It is concluded that any successful account of the development of verb inflection will need to incorporate both (a) rote‐storage and retrieval of individual inflected forms and (b) phonological analogy across them.
    November 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12305   open full text
  • Developmental Changes in Cross‐Situational Word Learning: The Inverse Effect of Initial Accuracy.
    Stanka A. Fitneva, Morten H. Christiansen.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 03, 2015
    Intuitively, the accuracy of initial word‐referent mappings should be positively correlated with the outcome of learning. Yet recent evidence suggests an inverse effect of initial accuracy in adults, whereby greater accuracy of initial mappings is associated with poorer outcomes in a cross‐situational learning task. Here, we examine the impact of initial accuracy on 4‐year‐olds, 10‐year‐olds, and adults. For half of the participants most word‐referent mappings were initially correct and for the other half most mappings were initially incorrect. Initial accuracy was positively related to learning outcomes in 4‐year‐olds, had no effect on 10‐year‐olds' learning, and was inversely related to learning outcomes in adults. Examination of item learning patterns revealed item interdependence for adults and 4‐year‐olds but not 10‐year‐olds. These findings point to a qualitative change in language learning processes over development.
    November 03, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12322   open full text
  • Incremental Bayesian Category Learning From Natural Language.
    Lea Frermann, Mirella Lapata.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 02, 2015
    Models of category learning have been extensively studied in cognitive science and primarily tested on perceptual abstractions or artificial stimuli. In this paper, we focus on categories acquired from natural language stimuli, that is, words (e.g., chair is a member of the furniture category). We present a Bayesian model that, unlike previous work, learns both categories and their features in a single process. We model category induction as two interrelated subproblems: (a) the acquisition of features that discriminate among categories, and (b) the grouping of concepts into categories based on those features. Our model learns categories incrementally using particle filters, a sequential Monte Carlo method commonly used for approximate probabilistic inference that sequentially integrates newly observed data and can be viewed as a plausible mechanism for human learning. Experimental results show that our incremental learner obtains meaningful categories which yield a closer fit to behavioral data compared to related models while at the same time acquiring features which characterize the learned categories. (An earlier version of this work was published in Frermann and Lapata .)
    November 02, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12304   open full text
  • Eye Movements Reveal Mental Looking Through Time.
    Kurt Stocker, Matthias Hartmann, Corinna S. Martarelli, Fred W. Mast.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 02, 2015
    People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
    November 02, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12301   open full text
  • Cognitive Metaphor Theory and the Metaphysics of Immediacy.
    Mathias W. Madsen.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 02, 2015
    One of the core tenets of cognitive metaphor theory is the claim that metaphors ground abstract knowledge in concrete, first‐hand experience. In this paper, I argue that this grounding hypothesis contains some problematic conceptual ambiguities and, under many reasonable interpretations, empirical difficulties. I present evidence that there are foundational obstacles to defining a coherent and cognitively valid concept of “metaphor” and “concrete meaning,” and some general problems with singling out certain domains of experience as more immediate than others. I conclude from these considerations that whatever the facts are about the comprehension of individual metaphors, the available evidence is incompatible with the notion of an underlying conceptual structure organized according to the immediacy of experience.
    November 02, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12320   open full text
  • Anticipation in Real‐World Scenes: The Role of Visual Context and Visual Memory.
    Moreno I. Coco, Frank Keller, George L. Malcolm.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 30, 2015
    The human sentence processor is able to make rapid predictions about upcoming linguistic input. For example, upon hearing the verb eat, anticipatory eye‐movements are launched toward edible objects in a visual scene (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). However, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie anticipation remain to be elucidated in ecologically valid contexts. Previous research has, in fact, mainly used clip‐art scenes and object arrays, raising the possibility that anticipatory eye‐movements are limited to displays containing a small number of objects in a visually impoverished context. In Experiment 1, we confirm that anticipation effects occur in real‐world scenes and investigate the mechanisms that underlie such anticipation. In particular, we demonstrate that real‐world scenes provide contextual information that anticipation can draw on: When the target object is not present in the scene, participants infer and fixate regions that are contextually appropriate (e.g., a table upon hearing eat). Experiment 2 investigates whether such contextual inference requires the co‐presence of the scene, or whether memory representations can be utilized instead. The same real‐world scenes as in Experiment 1 are presented to participants, but the scene disappears before the sentence is heard. We find that anticipation occurs even when the screen is blank, including when contextual inference is required. We conclude that anticipatory language processing is able to draw upon global scene representations (such as scene type) to make contextual inferences. These findings are compatible with theories assuming contextual guidance, but posit a challenge for theories assuming object‐based visual indices.
    October 30, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12313   open full text
  • Breaking Down the Bilingual Cost in Speech Production.
    Jasmin Sadat, Clara D. Martin, James S. Magnuson, François‐Xavier Alario, Albert Costa.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 25, 2015
    Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large‐scale picture‐naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance cost. In particular, we focused on the contributions of lexical frequency and phonological similarity across translations. The naming performance of Spanish‐Catalan bilinguals speaking in their dominant and non‐dominant language was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals. Single trial naming latencies were analyzed by means of linear mixed models accounting for individual effects at the participant and item level. While decreasing lexical frequency was shown to increase naming latencies in all groups, this variable by itself did not account for the bilingual cost. In turn, our results showed that the bilingual cost disappeared when naming words with high phonological similarity across translations. In short, our results show that frequency of use can play a role in the emergence of the bilingual cost, but that phonological similarity across translations should be regarded as one of the most important variables that determine the bilingual cost in speech production. Low phonological similarity across translations yields worse performance in bilinguals and promotes the bilingual cost in naming performance. The implications of our results for the effect of phonological similarity across translations within the bilingual speech production system are discussed.
    October 25, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12315   open full text
  • What Do People Find Incompatible With Causal Determinism?
    Adam Bear, Joshua Knobe.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 21, 2015
    Four studies explored people's judgments about whether particular types of behavior are compatible with determinism. Participants read a passage describing a deterministic universe, in which everything that happens is fully caused by whatever happened before it. They then assessed the degree to which different behaviors were possible in such a universe. Other participants evaluated the extent to which each of these behaviors had various features (e.g., requiring reasoning). We assessed the extent to which these features predicted judgments about whether the behaviors were possible in a deterministic universe. Experiments 1 and 2 found that people's judgments about whether a behavior was compatible with determinism were not predicted by their judgments about whether that behavior relies on physical processes in the brain and body, is uniquely human, is unpredictable, or involves reasoning. Experiment 3, however, found that a distinction between what we call “active” and “passive” behaviors can explain people's judgments. Experiment 4 extended these findings, showing that we can measure this distinction in several ways and that it is robustly predicted by two different cues. Taken together, these results suggest that people carve up mentally guided behavior into two distinct types—understanding one type to be compatible with determinism, but another type to be fundamentally incompatible with determinism.
    October 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12314   open full text
  • Perception of Sentence Stress in Speech Correlates With the Temporal Unpredictability of Prosodic Features.
    Sofoklis Kakouros, Okko Räsänen.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 20, 2015
    Numerous studies have examined the acoustic correlates of sentential stress and its underlying linguistic functionality. However, the mechanism that connects stress cues to the listener's attentional processing has remained unclear. Also, the learnability versus innateness of stress perception has not been widely discussed. In this work, we introduce a novel perspective to the study of sentential stress and put forward the hypothesis that perceived sentence stress in speech is related to the unpredictability of prosodic features, thereby capturing the attention of the listener. As predictability is based on the statistical structure of the speech input, the hypothesis also suggests that stress perception is a result of general statistical learning mechanisms. To study this idea, computational simulations are performed where temporal prosodic trajectories are modeled with an n‐gram model. Probabilities of the feature trajectories are subsequently evaluated on a set of novel utterances and compared to human perception of stress. The results show that the low‐probability regions of F0 and energy trajectories are strongly correlated with stress perception, giving support to the idea that attention and unpredictability of sensory stimulus are mutually connected.
    October 20, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12306   open full text
  • Leaping to Conclusions: Why Premise Relevance Affects Argument Strength.
    Keith J. Ransom, Amy Perfors, Daniel J. Navarro.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 16, 2015
    Everyday reasoning requires more evidence than raw data alone can provide. We explore the idea that people can go beyond this data by reasoning about how the data was sampled. This idea is investigated through an examination of premise non‐monotonicity, in which adding premises to a category‐based argument weakens rather than strengthens it. Relevance theories explain this phenomenon in terms of people's sensitivity to the relationships among premise items. We show that a Bayesian model of category‐based induction taking premise sampling assumptions and category similarity into account complements such theories and yields two important predictions: First, that sensitivity to premise relationships can be violated by inducing a weak sampling assumption; and second, that premise monotonicity should be restored as a result. We test these predictions with an experiment that manipulates people's assumptions in this regard, showing that people draw qualitatively different conclusions in each case.
    October 16, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12308   open full text
  • Exploiting Listener Gaze to Improve Situated Communication in Dynamic Virtual Environments.
    Konstantina Garoufi, Maria Staudte, Alexander Koller, Matthew W. Crocker.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 16, 2015
    Beyond the observation that both speakers and listeners rapidly inspect the visual targets of referring expressions, it has been argued that such gaze may constitute part of the communicative signal. In this study, we investigate whether a speaker may, in principle, exploit listener gaze to improve communicative success. In the context of a virtual environment where listeners follow computer‐generated instructions, we provide two kinds of support for this claim. First, we show that listener gaze provides a reliable real‐time index of understanding even in dynamic and complex environments, and on a per‐utterance basis. Second, we show that a language generation system that uses listener gaze to provide rapid feedback improves overall task performance in comparison with two systems that do not use gaze. Aside from demonstrating the utility of listener gaze in situated communication, our findings open the door to new methods for developing and evaluating multi‐modal models of situated interaction.
    October 16, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12298   open full text
  • Graph‐Theoretic Properties of Networks Based on Word Association Norms: Implications for Models of Lexical Semantic Memory.
    Thomas M. Gruenenfelder, Gabriel Recchia, Tim Rubin, Michael N. Jones.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 09, 2015
    We compared the ability of three different contextual models of lexical semantic memory (BEAGLE, Latent Semantic Analysis, and the Topic model) and of a simple associative model (POC) to predict the properties of semantic networks derived from word association norms. None of the semantic models were able to accurately predict all of the network properties. All three contextual models over‐predicted clustering in the norms, whereas the associative model under‐predicted clustering. Only a hybrid model that assumed that some of the responses were based on a contextual model and others on an associative network (POC) successfully predicted all of the network properties and predicted a word's top five associates as well as or better than the better of the two constituent models. The results suggest that participants switch between a contextual representation and an associative network when generating free associations. We discuss the role that each of these representations may play in lexical semantic memory. Concordant with recent multicomponent theories of semantic memory, the associative network may encode coordinate relations between concepts (e.g., the relation between pea and bean, or between sparrow and robin), and contextual representations may be used to process information about more abstract concepts.
    October 09, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12299   open full text
  • The Invisible Hand: Toddlers Connect Probabilistic Events With Agentive Causes.
    Yang Wu, Paul Muentener, Laura E. Schulz.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 09, 2015
    Children posit unobserved causes when events appear to occur spontaneously (e.g., Gelman & Gottfried, 1996). What about when events appear to occur probabilistically? Here toddlers (M = 20.1 months) saw arbitrary causal relationships (Cause A generated Effect A; Cause B generated Effect B) in a fixed, alternating order. The relationships were then changed in one of two ways. In the Deterministic condition, the event order changed (Event B preceded Event A); in the Probabilistic condition, the causal relationships changed (Cause A generated Effect B; Cause B generated Effect A). As intended, toddlers looked equally long at both changes (Experiment 1). We then introduced a previously unseen candidate cause. Toddlers looked longer at the appearance of a hand (Experiment 2) and novel agent (Experiment 3) in the Deterministic than the Probabilistic conditions, but looked equally long at novel non‐agents (Experiment 4), suggesting that by 2 years of age, toddlers connect probabilistic events with unobserved agents.
    October 09, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12309   open full text
  • How Distractor Objects Trigger Referential Overspecification: Testing the Effects of Visual Clutter and Distractor Distance.
    Ruud Koolen, Emiel Krahmer, Marc Swerts.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 02, 2015
    In two experiments, we investigate to what extent various visual saliency cues in realistic visual scenes cause speakers to overspecify their definite object descriptions with a redundant color attribute. The results of the first experiment demonstrate that speakers are more likely to redundantly mention color when visual clutter is present in a scene as compared to when this is not the case. In the second experiment, we found that distractor type and distractor color affect redundant color use: Speakers are most likely to overspecify if there is at least one distractor object present that has the same type, but a different color than the target referent. Reliable effects of distractor distance were not found. Taken together, our results suggest that certain visual saliency cues guide speakers in determining which objects in a visual scene are relevant distractors, and which not. We argue that this is problematic for algorithms that aim to generate human‐like descriptions of objects (such as the Incremental Algorithm), since these generally select properties that help to distinguish a target from all objects that are present in a scene.
    October 02, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12297   open full text
  • Anomalous Evidence, Confidence Change, and Theory Change.
    Joshua A. Hemmerich, Kellie Van Voorhis, Jennifer Wiley.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 01, 2015
    A novel experimental paradigm that measured theory change and confidence in participants' theories was used in three experiments to test the effects of anomalous evidence. Experiment 1 varied the amount of anomalous evidence to see if “dose size” made incremental changes in confidence toward theory change. Experiment 2 varied whether anomalous evidence was convergent (of multiple types) or replicating (similar finding repeated). Experiment 3 varied whether participants were provided with an alternative theory that explained the anomalous evidence. All experiments showed that participants' confidence changes were commensurate with the amount of anomalous evidence presented, and that larger decreases in confidence predicted theory changes. Convergent evidence and the presentation of an alternative theory led to larger confidence change. Convergent evidence also caused more theory changes. Even when people do not change theories, factors pertinent to the evidence and alternative theories decrease their confidence in their current theory and move them incrementally closer to theory change.
    October 01, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12289   open full text
  • Contamination Appraisals, Pollution Beliefs, and the Role of Cultural Inheritance in Shaping Disease Avoidance Behavior.
    Yitzhaq Feder.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 24, 2015
    Despite the upsurge of research on disgust, the implications of this research for the investigation of cultural pollution beliefs has yet to be adequately explored. In particular, the sensitivity of both disgust and pollution to a common set of elicitors (e.g., bodily emissions, disease, and death) suggests a common psychological basis, though several obstacles have prevented an integrative account, including methodological differences between the relevant disciplines. Employing a conciliatory framework that embraces both naturalistic (evolutionary) and humanistic levels of explanation, this article examines the dynamic reciprocal process by which contamination/contagion appraisals in individuals serve to shape—and are in turn shaped by—culture‐specific pollution beliefs. This complex interrelationship is illustrated by examining ancient Near Eastern and modern ethnographic documentation of pollution beliefs, highlighting the underappreciated function of these pollution beliefs as folk theories for the spread of infectious disease. By evaluating how pollution beliefs (as also modern germ theory) shape contamination appraisals in individuals, it will be argued that cultural inheritance has played a much larger role in guiding disease avoidance behavior than has been previously recognized.
    September 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12293   open full text
  • Faster Teaching via POMDP Planning.
    Anna N. Rafferty, Emma Brunskill, Thomas L. Griffiths, Patrick Shafto.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 24, 2015
    Human and automated tutors attempt to choose pedagogical activities that will maximize student learning, informed by their estimates of the student's current knowledge. There has been substantial research on tracking and modeling student learning, but significantly less attention on how to plan teaching actions and how the assumed student model impacts the resulting plans. We frame the problem of optimally selecting teaching actions using a decision‐theoretic approach and show how to formulate teaching as a partially observable Markov decision process planning problem. This framework makes it possible to explore how different assumptions about student learning and behavior should affect the selection of teaching actions. We consider how to apply this framework to concept learning problems, and we present approximate methods for finding optimal teaching actions, given the large state and action spaces that arise in teaching. Through simulations and behavioral experiments, we explore the consequences of choosing teacher actions under different assumed student models. In two concept‐learning tasks, we show that this technique can accelerate learning relative to baseline performance.
    September 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12290   open full text
  • Ecological Effects in Cross‐Cultural Differences Between U.S. and Japanese Color Preferences.
    Kazuhiko Yokosawa, Karen B. Schloss, Michiko Asano, Stephen E. Palmer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 24, 2015
    We investigated cultural differences between U.S. and Japanese color preferences and the ecological factors that might influence them. Japanese and U.S. color preferences have both similarities (e.g., peaks around blue, troughs around dark‐yellow, and preferences for saturated colors) and differences (Japanese participants like darker colors less than U.S. participants do). Complex gender differences were also evident that did not conform to previously reported effects. Palmer and Schloss's (2010) weighted affective valence estimate (WAVE) procedure was used to test the Ecological Valence Theory's (EVT's) prediction that within‐culture WAVE‐preference correlations should be higher than between‐culture WAVE‐preference correlations. The results supported several, but not all, predictions. In the second experiment, we tested color preferences of Japanese–U.S. multicultural participants who could read and speak both Japanese and English. Multicultural color preferences were intermediate between U.S. and Japanese preferences, consistent with the hypothesis that culturally specific personal experiences during one's lifetime influence color preferences.
    September 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12291   open full text
  • The Appeal to Expert Opinion: Quantitative Support for a Bayesian Network Approach.
    Adam J. L. Harris, Ulrike Hahn, Jens K. Madsen, Anne S. Hsu.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 01, 2015
    The appeal to expert opinion is an argument form that uses the verdict of an expert to support a position or hypothesis. A previous scheme‐based treatment of the argument form is formalized within a Bayesian network that is able to capture the critical aspects of the argument form, including the central considerations of the expert's expertise and trustworthiness. We propose this as an appropriate normative framework for the argument form, enabling the development and testing of quantitative predictions as to how people evaluate this argument, suggesting that such an approach might be beneficial to argumentation research generally. We subsequently present two experiments as an example of the potential for future research in this vein, demonstrating that participants' quantitative ratings of the convincingness of a proposition that has been supported with an appeal to expert opinion were broadly consistent with the predictions of the Bayesian model.
    September 01, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12276   open full text
  • Overhearers Use Addressee Backchannels in Dialog Comprehension.
    Jackson Tolins, Jean E. Fox Tree.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 01, 2015
    Observing others in conversation is a common format for comprehending language, yet little work has been done to understand dialog comprehension. We tested whether overhearers use addressee backchannels as predictive cues for how to integrate information across speaker turns during comprehension of spontaneously produced collaborative narration. In Experiment 1, words that followed specific backchannels (e.g., really, oh) were recognized more slowly than words that followed either generic backchannels (e.g., uh huh, mhm) or pauses. In Experiment 2, we found that when the turn after the backchannel was a continuation of the narrative, specific backchannels prompted the fastest verification of prior information. When the turn after was an elaboration, they prompted the slowest, indicating that overhearers took specific backchannels as cues to integrate preceding talk with subsequent talk. These findings demonstrate that overhearers capitalize on the predictive relationship between backchannels and the development of speakers’ talk, coordinating information across conversational roles.
    September 01, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12278   open full text
  • Framing From Experience: Cognitive Processes and Predictions of Risky Choice.
    Cleotilde Gonzalez, Katja Mehlhorn.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 27, 2015
    A framing bias shows risk aversion in problems framed as “gains” and risk seeking in problems framed as “losses,” even when these are objectively equivalent and probabilities and outcomes values are explicitly provided. We test this framing bias in situations where decision makers rely on their own experience, sampling the problem's options (safe and risky) and seeing the outcomes before making a choice. In Experiment 1, we replicate the framing bias in description‐based decisions and find risk indifference in gains and losses in experience‐based decisions. Predictions of an Instance‐Based Learning model suggest that objective probabilities as well as the number of samples taken are factors that contribute to the lack of framing effect. We test these two factors in Experiment 2 and find no framing effect when a few samples are taken but when large samples are taken, the framing effect appears regardless of the objective probability values. Implications of behavioral results and cognitive modeling are discussed.
    August 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12268   open full text
  • Toward a Metacognitive Account of Cognitive Offloading.
    Timothy L. Dunn, Evan F. Risko.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 26, 2015
    Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation. We looked to further examine this idea by independently manipulating the costs associated with both word rotation and array frame rotation. Surprisingly, we found that individuals’ patterns of spontaneous physical rotations did not follow patterns of performance costs or benefits associated with being physically rotated, findings difficult to reconcile with existing theories of strategy selection involving external resources. Individuals’ subjective ratings of perceived benefits, rather, provided an excellent match to the patterns of physical rotations, suggesting that the critical variable when deciding on‐the‐fly whether to incorporate an external resource is the participant's metacognitive beliefs regarding expected performance or the effort required for each approach (i.e., internal vs. internal + external). Implications for metacognition's future in theories of cognitive offloading are discussed.
    August 26, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12273   open full text
  • Exploring Temporal Progression of Events Using Eye Tracking.
    Tinka Welke, Susanne Raisig, Herbert Hagendorf, Elke Meer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 22, 2015
    This study investigates the representation of the temporal progression of events by means of the causal change in a patient. Subjects were asked to verify the relationship between adjectives denoting a source and resulting feature of a patient. The features were presented either chronologically or inversely to a primed event context given by a verb (to cut: long–short vs. short–long). Effects on response time and on eye movement data show that the relationship between features presented chronologically is verified more easily than that between features presented inversely. Post hoc, however, we found that the effects of temporal order occurred only when subjects read the features more than once. Then, the relationship between the features is matched with the causal change implied by the event context (contextual strategy). When subjects read the features only once, subjects respond to the relationship between the features without taking into account the event context.
    August 22, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12272   open full text
  • Predicting Short‐Term Remembering as Boundedly Optimal Strategy Choice.
    Andrew Howes, Geoffrey B. Duggan, Kiran Kalidindi, Yuan‐Chi Tseng, Richard L. Lewis.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 21, 2015
    It is known that, on average, people adapt their choice of memory strategy to the subjective utility of interaction. What is not known is whether an individual's choices are boundedly optimal. Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that an individual's decisions about the distribution of remembering between internal and external resources are boundedly optimal where optimality is defined relative to experience, cognitive constraints, and reward. The theory makes predictions that are tested against data, not fitted to it. The experiments use a no‐choice/choice utility learning paradigm where the no‐choice phase is used to elicit a profile of each participant's performance across the strategy space and the choice phase is used to test predicted choices within this space. They show that the majority of individuals select strategies that are boundedly optimal. Further, individual differences in what people choose to do are successfully predicted by the analysis. Two issues are discussed: (a) the performance of the minority of participants who did not find boundedly optimal adaptations, and (b) the possibility that individuals anticipate what, with practice, will become a bounded optimal strategy, rather than what is boundedly optimal during training.
    August 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12271   open full text
  • Learning Problem‐Solving Rules as Search Through a Hypothesis Space.
    Hee Seung Lee, Shawn Betts, John R. Anderson.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 21, 2015
    Learning to solve a class of problems can be characterized as a search through a space of hypotheses about the rules for solving these problems. A series of four experiments studied how different learning conditions affected the search among hypotheses about the solution rule for a simple computational problem. Experiment 1 showed that a problem property such as computational difficulty of the rules biased the search process and so affected learning. Experiment 2 examined the impact of examples as instructional tools and found that their effectiveness was determined by whether they uniquely pointed to the correct rule. Experiment 3 compared verbal directions with examples and found that both could guide search. The final experiment tried to improve learning by using more explicit verbal directions or by adding scaffolding to the example. While both manipulations improved learning, learning still took the form of a search through a hypothesis space of possible rules. We describe a model that embodies two assumptions: (1) the instruction can bias the rules participants hypothesize rather than directly be encoded into a rule; (2) participants do not have memory for past wrong hypotheses and are likely to retry them. These assumptions are realized in a Markov model that fits all the data by estimating two sets of probabilities. First, the learning condition induced one set of Start probabilities of trying various rules. Second, should this first hypothesis prove wrong, the learning condition induced a second set of Choice probabilities of considering various rules. These findings broaden our understanding of effective instruction and provide implications for instructional design.
    August 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12275   open full text
  • Uncertainty and Expectation in Sentence Processing: Evidence From Subcategorization Distributions.
    Tal Linzen, T. Florian Jaeger.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 19, 2015
    There is now considerable evidence that human sentence processing is expectation based: As people read a sentence, they use their statistical experience with their language to generate predictions about upcoming syntactic structure. This study examines how sentence processing is affected by readers' uncertainty about those expectations. In a self‐paced reading study, we use lexical subcategorization distributions to factorially manipulate both the strength of expectations and the uncertainty about them. We compare two types of uncertainty: uncertainty about the verb's complement, reflecting the next prediction step; and uncertainty about the full sentence, reflecting an unbounded number of prediction steps. We find that uncertainty about the full structure, but not about the next step, was a significant predictor of processing difficulty: Greater reduction in uncertainty was correlated with increased reading times (RTs). We additionally replicated previously observed effects of expectation violation (surprisal), orthogonal to the effect of uncertainty. This suggests that both surprisal and uncertainty affect human RTs. We discuss the consequences for theories of sentence comprehension.
    August 19, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12274   open full text
  • Concepts as Semantic Pointers: A Framework and Computational Model.
    Peter Blouw, Eugene Solodkin, Paul Thagard, Chris Eliasmith.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 01, 2015
    The reconciliation of theories of concepts based on prototypes, exemplars, and theory‐like structures is a longstanding problem in cognitive science. In response to this problem, researchers have recently tended to adopt either hybrid theories that combine various kinds of representational structure, or eliminative theories that replace concepts with a more finely grained taxonomy of mental representations. In this paper, we describe an alternative approach involving a single class of mental representations called “semantic pointers.” Semantic pointers are symbol‐like representations that result from the compression and recursive binding of perceptual, lexical, and motor representations, effectively integrating traditional connectionist and symbolic approaches. We present a computational model using semantic pointers that replicates experimental data from categorization studies involving each prior paradigm. We argue that a framework involving semantic pointers can provide a unified account of conceptual phenomena, and we compare our framework to existing alternatives in accounting for the scope, content, recursive combination, and neural implementation of concepts.
    August 01, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12265   open full text
  • Ranking Theory and Conditional Reasoning.
    Niels Skovgaard‐Olsen.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 24, 2015
    Ranking theory is a formal epistemology that has been developed in over 600 pages in Spohn's recent book The Laws of Belief, which aims to provide a normative account of the dynamics of beliefs that presents an alternative to current probabilistic approaches. It has long been received in the AI community, but it has not yet found application in experimental psychology. The purpose of this paper is to derive clear, quantitative predictions by exploiting a parallel between ranking theory and a statistical model called logistic regression. This approach is illustrated by the development of a model for the conditional inference task using Spohn's (2013) ranking theoretic approach to conditionals.
    July 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12267   open full text
  • The Relationship Between Artificial and Second Language Learning.
    Marc Ettlinger, Kara Morgan‐Short, Mandy Faretta‐Stutenberg, Patrick C.M. Wong.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 22, 2015
    Artificial language learning (ALL) experiments have become an important tool in exploring principles of language and language learning. A persistent question in all of this work, however, is whether ALL engages the linguistic system and whether ALL studies are ecologically valid assessments of natural language ability. In the present study, we considered these questions by examining the relationship between performance in an ALL task and second language learning ability. Participants enrolled in a Spanish language class were evaluated using a number of different measures of Spanish ability and classroom performance, which was compared to IQ and a number of different measures of ALL performance. The results show that success in ALL experiments, particularly more complex artificial languages, correlates positively with indices of L2 learning even after controlling for IQ. These findings provide a key link between studies involving ALL and our understanding of second language learning in the classroom.
    July 22, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12257   open full text
  • Parents Produce Explicit Cues That Help Toddlers Distinguish Joking and Pretending.
    Elena Hoicka, Jessica Butcher.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 21, 2015
    While separate pieces of research found parents offer toddlers cues to express that they are (1) joking and (2) pretending, and that toddlers and preschoolers understand intentions to (1) joke and (2) pretend, it is not yet clear whether parents and toddlers consider joking and pretending to be distinct concepts. This is important as distinguishing these two forms of non‐literal acts could open a gateway to understanding the complexities of the non‐literal world, as well as the complexities of intentions in general. Two studies found parents offer explicit cues to help 16‐ to 24‐month‐olds distinguish pretending and joking. Across an action play study (n = 25) and a verbal play study (n = 40) parents showed more disbelief and less belief through their actions and language when joking versus pretending. Similarly, toddlers showed less belief through their actions, and older toddlers showed less belief through their language. Toddlers' disbelief could be accounted for by their response to parents' language and actions. Thus, these studies reveal a mechanism by which toddlers learn to distinguish joking and pretending. Parents offer explicit cues to distinguish these intentions, and toddlers use these cues to guide their own behaviors, which in turn allows toddlers to distinguish these intentional contexts.
    July 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12264   open full text
  • Persistence of Initial Misanalysis With No Referential Ambiguity.
    Chie Nakamura, Manabu Arai.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 17, 2015
    Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make inferences about the initial interpretation using pragmatic information, suggesting the possibility that the initial analysis persisted due to comprehenders' pragmatic inference but not to their failure to perform complete reanalysis of the initial misanalysis. Our study investigated this by testing locally ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese, in which the initial misinterpretation contradicts the correct interpretation. Our study using a self‐paced reading technique demonstrated evidence for the persistence of the initial analysis with this structure. The results from an eye‐tracking study further suggested that the phenomenon directly reflected the amount of support given to the initial incorrect analysis prior to disambiguating information: The more supported the incorrect main clause analysis was, the more likely comprehenders were to preserve the analysis even after the analysis was falsified. Our results thus demonstrated that the preservation of the initial analysis occurs not due to referential ambiguities but to comprehenders' difficulty to fully revise the highly supported initial interpretation.
    July 17, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12266   open full text
  • Biologically Plausible, Human‐Scale Knowledge Representation.
    Eric Crawford, Matthew Gingerich, Chris Eliasmith.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 14, 2015
    Several approaches to implementing symbol‐like representations in neurally plausible models have been proposed. These approaches include binding through synchrony (Shastri & Ajjanagadde, ), “mesh” binding (van der Velde & de Kamps, ), and conjunctive binding (Smolensky, ). Recent theoretical work has suggested that most of these methods will not scale well, that is, that they cannot encode structured representations using any of the tens of thousands of terms in the adult lexicon without making implausible resource assumptions. Here, we empirically demonstrate that the biologically plausible structured representations employed in the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) approach to modeling cognition (Eliasmith, ) do scale appropriately. Specifically, we construct a spiking neural network of about 2.5 million neurons that employs semantic pointers to successfully encode and decode the main lexical relations in WordNet, which has over 100,000 terms. In addition, we show that the same representations can be employed to construct recursively structured sentences consisting of arbitrary WordNet concepts, while preserving the original lexical structure. We argue that these results suggest that semantic pointers are uniquely well‐suited to providing a biologically plausible account of the structured representations that underwrite human cognition.
    July 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12261   open full text
  • Counterintuitive Religious Ideas and Metaphoric Thinking: An Event‐Related Brain Potential Study.
    Sabela Fondevila, Sabrina Aristei, Werner Sommer, Laura Jiménez‐Ortega, Pilar Casado, Manuel Martín‐Loeches.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 06, 2015
    It has been shown that counterintuitive ideas from mythological and religious texts are more acceptable than other (non‐religious) world knowledge violations. In the present experiment we explored whether this relates to the way they are interpreted (literal vs. metaphorical). Participants were presented with verification questions that referred to either the literal or a metaphorical meaning of the sentence previously read (counterintuitive religious, counterintuitive non‐religious and intuitive), in a block‐wise design. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results converged. At variance to the literal interpretation of the sentences, the induced metaphorical interpretation specifically facilitated the integration (N400 amplitude decrease) of religious counterintuitions, whereas the semantic processing of non‐religious counterintuitions was not affected by the interpretation mode. We suggest that religious ideas tend to operate like other instances of figurative language, such as metaphors, facilitating their acceptability despite their counterintuitive nature.
    July 06, 2015   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12263   open full text
  • Integrating the Automatic and the Controlled: Strategies in Semantic Priming in an Attractor Network With Latching Dynamics.
    Itamar Lerner, Shlomo Bentin, Oren Shriki.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 02, 2014
    Semantic priming has long been recognized to reflect, along with automatic semantic mechanisms, the contribution of controlled strategies. However, previous theories of controlled priming were mostly qualitative, lacking common grounds with modern mathematical models of automatic priming based on neural networks. Recently, we introduced a novel attractor network model of automatic semantic priming with latching dynamics. Here, we extend this work to show how the same model can also account for important findings regarding controlled processes. Assuming the rate of semantic transitions in the network can be adapted using simple reinforcement learning, we show how basic findings attributed to controlled processes in priming can be achieved, including their dependency on stimulus onset asynchrony and relatedness proportion and their unique effect on associative, category‐exemplar, mediated and backward prime‐target relations. We discuss how our mechanism relates to the classic expectancy theory and how it can be further extended in future developments of the model.
    June 02, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12133   open full text
  • Action Attenuates the Effect of Visibility on Gesture Rates.
    Autumn B. Hostetter.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 02, 2014
    Much evidence suggests that semantic characteristics of a message (e.g., the extent to which the message evokes thoughts of spatial or motor properties) and social characteristics of a speaking situation (e.g., whether there is a listener who can see the speaker) both influence how much speakers gesture. However, the Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) framework (Hostetter & Alibali, ) predicts that these effects should not be independent but should interact such that the effect of visibility is lessened when a message evokes strong thoughts of action. This study tested this claim by comparing the gesture rates produced by speakers as they described 24 nouns that vary in how strongly they evoke thoughts of action. Further, half of the words were described with visibility between speaker and listener blocked. The results demonstrated a significant interaction as predicted by the GSA framework.
    June 02, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12113   open full text
  • Overestimation of Knowledge About Word Meanings: The “Misplaced Meaning” Effect.
    Jonathan F. Kominsky, Frank C. Keil.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 02, 2014
    Children and adults may not realize how much they depend on external sources in understanding word meanings. Four experiments investigated the existence and developmental course of a “Misplaced Meaning” (MM) effect, wherein children and adults overestimate their knowledge about the meanings of various words by underestimating how much they rely on outside sources to determine precise reference. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that children and adults show a highly consistent MM effect, and that it is stronger in young children. Study 3 demonstrates that adults are explicitly aware of the availability of outside knowledge, and that this awareness may be related to the strength of the MM effect. Study 4 rules out general overconfidence effects by examining a metalinguistic task in which adults are well calibrated.
    June 02, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12122   open full text
  • Modeling Mental Spatial Reasoning About Cardinal Directions.
    Holger Schultheis, Sven Bertel, Thomas Barkowsky.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 16, 2014
    This article presents research into human mental spatial reasoning with orientation knowledge. In particular, we look at reasoning problems about cardinal directions that possess multiple valid solutions (i.e., are spatially underdetermined), at human preferences for some of these solutions, and at representational and procedural factors that lead to such preferences. The article presents, first, a discussion of existing, related conceptual and computational approaches; second, results of empirical research into the solution preferences that human reasoners actually have; and, third, a novel computational model that relies on a parsimonious and flexible spatio‐analogical knowledge representation structure to robustly reproduce the behavior observed with human reasoners.
    May 16, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12125   open full text
  • The Impact of Analogies on Creative Concept Generation: Lessons From an In Vivo Study in Engineering Design.
    Joel Chan, Christian Schunn.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 16, 2014
    Research on innovation often highlights analogies from sources outside the current problem domain as a major source of novel concepts; however, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are not well understood. We analyzed the temporal interplay between far analogy use and creative concept generation in a professional design team's brainstorming conversations, investigating the hypothesis that far analogies lead directly to very novel concepts via large steps in conceptual spaces (jumps). Surprisingly, we found that concepts were more similar to their preceding concepts after far analogy use compared to baseline situations (i.e., without far analogy use). Yet far analogies increased the team's concept generation rate compared to baseline conditions. Overall, these results challenge the view that far analogies primarily lead to novel concepts via jumps in conceptual spaces and suggest alternative pathways from far analogies to novel concepts (e.g., iterative, deep exploration within a functional space).
    May 16, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12127   open full text
  • Agents and Causes: Dispositional Intuitions As a Guide to Causal Structure.
    Ralf Mayrhofer, Michael R. Waldmann.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 16, 2014
    Currently, two frameworks of causal reasoning compete: Whereas dependency theories focus on dependencies between causes and effects, dispositional theories model causation as an interaction between agents and patients endowed with intrinsic dispositions. One important finding providing a bridge between these two frameworks is that failures of causes to generate their effects tend to be differentially attributed to agents and patients regardless of their location on either the cause or the effect side. To model different types of error attribution, we augmented a causal Bayes net model with separate error sources for causes and effects. In several experiments, we tested this new model using the size of Markov violations as the empirical indicator of differential assumptions about the sources of error. As predicted by the model, the size of Markov violations was influenced by the location of the agents and was moderated by the causal structure and the type of causal variables.
    May 16, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12132   open full text
  • Markers of Topical Discourse in Child‐Directed Speech.
    Hannah Rohde, Michael C. Frank.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. April 15, 2014
    Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence‐internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provides new opportunities for listeners to infer speaker meaning. Such inferences allow the listener to build up a representation of the speakers' intended topic and more generally to identify relationships, structures, and messages that extend across multiple utterances. We address this issue by analyzing a video corpus of child–caregiver interactions. We use topic continuity as an index of discourse structure, examining how caregivers introduce and discuss objects across utterances. For the analysis, utterances are grouped into topical discourse sequences using three annotation strategies: raw annotations of speakers' referents, the output of a model that groups utterances based on those annotations, and the judgments of human coders. We analyze how the lexical, syntactic, and social properties of caregiver–child interaction change over the course of a sequence of topically related utterances. Our findings suggest that many cues used to signal topicality in adult discourse are also available in child‐directed speech.
    April 15, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12121   open full text
  • Moving Through Time: The Role of Personality in Three Real‐Life Contexts.
    Sarah E. Duffy, Michele I. Feist, Steven McCarthy.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. April 08, 2014
    In English, two deictic space‐time metaphors are in common usage: the Moving Ego metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time and the Moving Time metaphor conceptualizes time as moving forward toward the ego (Clark, 1973). Although earlier research investigating the psychological reality of these metaphors has typically examined spatial influences on temporal reasoning (e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002), recent lines of research have extended beyond this, providing initial evidence that personality differences and emotional experiences may also influence how people reason about events in time (Duffy & Feist, 2014; Hauser, Carter, & Meier, 2009; Richmond, Wilson, & Zinken, 2012). In this article, we investigate whether these relationships have force in real life. Building on the effects of individual differences in self‐reported conscientiousness and procrastination found by Duffy and Feist (2014), we examined whether, in addition to self‐reported conscientiousness and procrastination, there is a relationship between conscientious and procrastinating behaviors and temporal perspective. We found that participants who adopted the Moving Time perspective were more likely to exhibit conscientious behaviors, while those who adopted the Moving Ego perspective were more likely to procrastinate, suggesting that the earlier effects reach beyond the laboratory.
    April 08, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12124   open full text
  • Learning Visual Units After Brief Experience in 10‐Month‐Old Infants.
    Amy Needham, Robert L. Goldstone, Sarah E. Wiesen.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 27, 2014
    How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment investigates 10‐month‐old infants' use of brief prior experiences with objects to visually organize a display consisting of multiple geometrically shaped three‐dimensional blocks created for this study. After a brief exposure to a multipart portion of the display, each infant was shown two test events, one of which preserved the unit the infant had seen and the other of which broke that unit. Overall, infants looked longer at the event that broke the unit they had seen prior to testing than the event that preserved that unit, suggesting that infants made use of the brief prior experience to (a) form a cohesive unit of the multipart portion of the display they saw prior to test and (b) segregate this unit from the rest of the test display. This suggests that infants made inferences about novel parts of the test display based on limited exposure to a subset of the test display. Like adults, infants learn features of the three‐dimensional world through their experiences in it.
    March 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12123   open full text
  • Rational Hypocrisy: A Bayesian Analysis Based on Informal Argumentation and Slippery Slopes.
    Tage S. Rai, Keith J. Holyoak.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 19, 2014
    Moral hypocrisy is typically viewed as an ethical accusation: Someone is applying different moral standards to essentially identical cases, dishonestly claiming that one action is acceptable while otherwise equivalent actions are not. We suggest that in some instances the apparent logical inconsistency stems from different evaluations of a weak argument, rather than dishonesty per se. Extending Corner, Hahn, and Oaksford's (2006) analysis of slippery slope arguments, we develop a Bayesian framework in which accusations of hypocrisy depend on inferences of shared category membership between proposed actions and previous standards, based on prior probabilities that inform the strength of competing hypotheses. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that inferences of hypocrisy increase as perceptions of the likelihood of shared category membership between precedent cases and current cases increase, that these inferences follow established principles of category induction, and that the presence of self‐serving motives increases inferences of hypocrisy independent of changes in the actions themselves. Taken together, these results demonstrate that Bayesian analyses of weak arguments may have implications for assessing moral reasoning.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12120   open full text
  • When Is Perception Top‐Down and When Is It Not? Culture, Narrative, and Attention.
    Sawa Senzaki, Takahiko Masuda, Keiko Ishii.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 19, 2014
    Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross‐cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12118   open full text
  • Analyzing the Rate at Which Languages Lose the Influence of a Common Ancestor.
    Anna N. Rafferty, Thomas L. Griffiths, Dan Klein.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 19, 2014
    Analyzing the rate at which languages change can clarify whether similarities across languages are solely the result of cognitive biases or might be partially due to descent from a common ancestor. To demonstrate this approach, we use a simple model of language evolution to mathematically determine how long it should take for the distribution over languages to lose the influence of a common ancestor and converge to a form that is determined by constraints on language learning. We show that modeling language learning as Bayesian inference of n binary parameters or the ordering of n constraints results in convergence in a number of generations that is on the order of n log n. We relax some of the simplifying assumptions of this model to explore how different assumptions about language evolution affect predictions about the time to convergence; in general, convergence time increases as the model becomes more realistic. This allows us to characterize the assumptions about language learning (given the models that we consider) that are sufficient for convergence to have taken place on a timescale that is consistent with the origin of human languages. These results clearly identify the consequences of a set of simple models of language evolution and show how analysis of convergence rates provides a tool that can be used to explore questions about the relationship between accounts of language learning and the origins of similarities across languages.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12112   open full text
  • The Effects of Prior Learned Strategies on Updating an Opponent's Strategy in the Rock, Paper, Scissors Game.
    Elisabeth Stöttinger, Alex Filipowicz, James Danckert, Britt Anderson.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 19, 2014
    To explore how model building adapts to changing environments, we had participants play “rock‐paper‐scissors” against a computer that played a frequency bias or a player‐dependent bias and then switched. Participants demonstrated their use of prior experience in how quickly they recognized and exploited changes in the computer's play strategy; in general, the more similar the strategies, the more efficient the updating. These findings inform our understanding of previously reported updating impairments in right‐brain damaged patients.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12115   open full text
  • A Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling Approach to Searching and Stopping in Multi‐Attribute Judgment.
    Don Ravenzwaaij, Chris P. Moore, Michael D. Lee, Ben R. Newell.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 19, 2014
    In most decision‐making situations, there is a plethora of information potentially available to people. Deciding what information to gather and what to ignore is no small feat. How do decision makers determine in what sequence to collect information and when to stop? In two experiments, we administered a version of the German cities task developed by Gigerenzer and Goldstein (1996), in which participants had to decide which of two cities had the larger population. Decision makers were not provided with the names of the cities, but they were able to collect different kinds of cues for both response alternatives (e.g., “Does this city have a university?”) before making a decision. Our experiments differed in whether participants were free to determine the number of cues they examined. We demonstrate that a novel model, using hierarchical latent mixtures and Bayesian inference (Lee & Newell, ) provides a more complete description of the data from both experiments than simple conventional strategies, such as the take–the–best or the Weighted Additive heuristics.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12119   open full text
  • Signature Limits in Mindreading Systems.
    J. Robert Thompson.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 19, 2014
    Recent evidence that young children seem to both understand false belief in one sense, but not in another, has led to two‐systems theorizing about mindreading. By analyzing the most detailed two‐systems approach in studying social cognition—the theory of mindreading defended by Ian Apperly and Stephen Butterfill—I argue that that even when dutifully constructed, two‐systems approaches in social cognition struggle to adequately define the mindreading systems in terms of signature processing limits, an issue that becomes most apparent when investigating mindreading in infancy. I end the article by developing several challenges that face any two‐systems account of mindreading.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12117   open full text
  • You're a Good Structure, Charlie Brown: The Distribution of Narrative Categories in Comic Strips.
    Neil Cohn.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 19, 2014
    Cohn's (2013) theory of “Visual Narrative Grammar” argues that sequential images take on categorical roles in a narrative structure, which organizes them into hierarchic constituents analogous to the organization of syntactic categories in sentences. This theory proposes that narrative categories, like syntactic categories, can be identified through diagnostic tests that reveal tendencies for their distribution throughout a sequence. This paper describes four experiments testing these diagnostics to provide support for the validity of these narrative categories. In Experiment 1, participants reconstructed unordered panels of a comic strip into an order that makes sense. Experiment 2 measured viewing times to panels in sequences where the order of panels was reversed. In Experiment 3, participants again reconstructed strips but also deleted a panel from the sequence. Finally, in Experiment 4 participants identified where a panel had been deleted from a comic strip and rated that strip's coherence. Overall, categories had consistent distributional tendencies within experiments and complementary tendencies across experiments. These results point toward an interaction between categorical roles and a global narrative structure.
    March 19, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12116   open full text
  • A Computational Model for the Item‐Based Induction of Construction Networks.
    Judith Gaspers, Philipp Cimiano.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 18, 2014
    According to usage‐based approaches to language acquisition, linguistic knowledge is represented in the form of constructions—form‐meaning pairings—at multiple levels of abstraction and complexity. The emergence of syntactic knowledge is assumed to be a result of the gradual abstraction of lexically specific and item‐based linguistic knowledge. In this article, we explore how the gradual emergence of a network consisting of constructions at varying degrees of complexity can be modeled computationally. Linguistic knowledge is learned by observing natural language utterances in an ambiguous context. To determine meanings of constructions starting from ambiguous contexts, we rely on the principle of cross‐situational learning. While this mechanism has been implemented in several computational models, these models typically focus on learning mappings between words and referents. In contrast, in our model, we show how cross‐situational learning can be applied consistently to learn correspondences between form and meaning beyond such simple correspondences.
    March 18, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12114   open full text
  • Investigating Constituent Order Change With Elicited Pantomime: A Functional Account of SVO Emergence.
    Matthew L. Hall, Victor S. Ferreira, Rachel I. Mayberry.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 18, 2014
    One of the most basic functions of human language is to convey who did what to whom. In the world's languages, the order of these three constituents (subject [S], verb [V], and object [O]) is uneven, with SOV and SVO being most common. Recent experiments using experimentally elicited pantomime provide a possible explanation of the prevalence of SOV, but extant explanations for the prevalence of SVO could benefit from further empirical support. Here, we test whether SVO might emerge because (a) SOV is not well suited for describing reversible events (a woman pushing a boy) and (b) pressures to be efficient and mention subjects before objects conspire to rule out many other alternatives. We tested this by asking participants to describe reversible and non‐reversible events in pantomime, and we instructed some participants to be consistent in the form of their gestures and to teach them to the experimenter. These manipulations led to the emergence of SVO in speakers of both English (SVO) and Turkish (SOV).
    March 18, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12105   open full text
  • What Does Children's Spatial Language Reveal About Spatial Concepts? Evidence From the Use of Containment Expressions.
    Megan Johanson, Anna Papafragou.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 18, 2014
    Children's overextensions of spatial language are often taken to reveal spatial biases. However, it is unclear whether extension patterns should be attributed to children's overly general spatial concepts or to a narrower notion of conceptual similarity allowing metaphor‐like extensions. We describe a previously unnoticed extension of spatial expressions and use a novel method to determine its origins. English‐ and Greek‐speaking 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds used containment expressions (e.g., English into, Greek mesa) for events where an object moved into another object but extended such expressions to events where the object moved behind or under another object. The pattern emerged in adult speakers of both languages and also in speakers of 10 additional languages. We conclude that learners do not have an overly general concept of Containment. Nevertheless, children (and adults) perceive similarities across Containment and other types of spatial scenes, even when these similarities are obscured by the conventional forms of the language.
    March 18, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12106   open full text
  • The Adaptive Use of Recognition in Group Decision Making.
    Juliane E. Kämmer, Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Torsten Reimer, Carsten C. Schermuly.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 18, 2014
    Applying the framework of ecological rationality, the authors studied the adaptivity of group decision making. In detail, they investigated whether groups apply decision strategies conditional on their composition in terms of task‐relevant features. The authors focused on the recognition heuristic, so the task‐relevant features were the validity of the group members' recognition and knowledge, which influenced the potential performance of group strategies. Forty‐three three‐member groups performed an inference task in which they had to infer which of two German companies had the higher market capitalization. Results based on the choice data support the hypothesis that groups adaptively apply the strategy that leads to the highest theoretically achievable performance. Time constraints had no effect on strategy use but did have an effect on the proportions of different types of arguments. Possible mechanisms underlying the adaptive use of recognition in group decision making are discussed.
    March 18, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12110   open full text
  • Object Concepts in the Chemical Senses.
    Richard J. Stevenson.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 18, 2014
    This paper examines the applicability of the object concept to the chemical senses, by evaluating them against a set of criteria for object‐hood. Taste and chemesthesis do not generate objects. Their parts, perceptible from birth, never combine. Orthonasal olfaction (sniffing) presents a strong case for generating objects. Odorants have many parts yet they are perceived as wholes, this process is based on learning, and there is figure‐ground segregation. While flavors are multimodal representations bound together by learning, there is no functional need for flavor objects in the mouth. Rather, food identification occurs prior to ingestion using the eye and nose, with the latter retrieving multimodal flavor objects via sniffing (e.g., sweet smelling caramel). While there are differences in object perception between vision, audition, and orthonasal olfaction, the commonalities suggest that the brain has adopted the same basic solution when faced with extracting meaning from complex stimulus arrays.
    March 18, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12111   open full text
  • Productive Failure in Learning Math.
    Manu Kapur.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 14, 2014
    When learning a new math concept, should learners be first taught the concept and its associated procedures and then solve problems, or solve problems first even if it leads to failure and then be taught the concept and the procedures? Two randomized‐controlled studies found that both methods lead to high levels of procedural knowledge. However, students who engaged in problem solving before being taught demonstrated significantly greater conceptual understanding and ability to transfer to novel problems than those who were taught first. The second study further showed that when given an opportunity to learn from the failed problem‐solving attempts of their peers, students outperformed those who were taught first, but not those who engaged in problem solving first. Process findings showed that the number of student‐generated solutions significantly predicted learning outcomes. These results challenge the conventional practice of direct instruction to teach new math concepts and procedures, and propose the possibility of learning from one's own failed problem‐solving attempts or those of others before receiving instruction as alternatives for better math learning.
    March 14, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12107   open full text
  • Cross‐Cultural Differences in Categorical Memory Errors.
    Aliza J. Schwartz, Aysecan Boduroglu, Angela H. Gutchess.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 14, 2014
    Cultural differences occur in the use of categories to aid accurate recall of information. This study investigated whether culture also contributed to false (erroneous) memories, and extended cross‐cultural memory research to Turkish culture, which is shaped by Eastern and Western influences. Americans and Turks viewed word pairs, half of which were categorically related and half unrelated. Participants then attempted to recall the second word from the pair in response to the first word cue. Responses were coded as correct, as blanks, or as different types of errors. Americans committed more categorical errors than did Turks, and Turks mistakenly recalled more non‐categorically related list words than did Americans. These results support the idea that Americans use categories either to organize information in memory or to support retrieval strategies to a greater extent than Turks and suggest that culture shapes not only accurate recall but also erroneous distortions of memory.
    March 14, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12109   open full text
  • Logical Metonymy Resolution in a Words‐as‐Cues Framework: Evidence From Self‐Paced Reading and Probe Recognition.
    Alessandra Zarcone, Sebastian Padó, Alessandro Lenci.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. March 14, 2014
    Logical metonymy resolution (begin a book → begin reading a book or begin writing a book) has traditionally been explained either through complex lexical entries (qualia structures) or through the integration of the implicit event via post‐lexical access to world knowledge. We propose that recent work within the words‐as‐cues paradigm can provide a more dynamic model of logical metonymy, accounting for early and dynamic integration of complex event information depending on previous contextual cues (agent and patient). We first present a self‐paced reading experiment on German subordinate sentences, where metonymic sentences and their paraphrased version differ only in the presence or absence of the clause‐final target verb (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → Der Konditor begann, die Glasur aufzutragen/The baker began the icing → The baker began spreading the icing). Longer reading times at the target verb position in a high‐typicality condition (baker + icing → spread ) compared to a low‐typicality (but still plausible) condition (child + icing → spread) suggest that we make use of knowledge activated by lexical cues to build expectations about events. The early and dynamic integration of event knowledge in metonymy interpretation is bolstered by further evidence from a second experiment using the probe recognition paradigm. Presenting covert events as probes following a high‐typicality or a low‐typicality metonymic sentence (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → AUFTRAGEN/The baker began the icing → SPREAD), we obtain an analogous effect of typicality at 100 ms interstimulus interval.
    March 14, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12108   open full text
  • One and Done? Optimal Decisions From Very Few Samples.
    Edward Vul, Noah Goodman, Thomas L. Griffiths, Joshua B. Tenenbaum.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. January 28, 2014
    In many learning or inference tasks human behavior approximates that of a Bayesian ideal observer, suggesting that, at some level, cognition can be described as Bayesian inference. However, a number of findings have highlighted an intriguing mismatch between human behavior and standard assumptions about optimality: People often appear to make decisions based on just one or a few samples from the appropriate posterior probability distribution, rather than using the full distribution. Although sampling‐based approximations are a common way to implement Bayesian inference, the very limited numbers of samples often used by humans seem insufficient to approximate the required probability distributions very accurately. Here, we consider this discrepancy in the broader framework of statistical decision theory, and ask: If people are making decisions based on samples—but as samples are costly—how many samples should people use to optimize their total expected or worst‐case reward over a large number of decisions? We find that under reasonable assumptions about the time costs of sampling, making many quick but locally suboptimal decisions based on very few samples may be the globally optimal strategy over long periods. These results help to reconcile a large body of work showing sampling‐based or probability matching behavior with the hypothesis that human cognition can be understood in Bayesian terms, and they suggest promising future directions for studies of resource‐constrained cognition.
    January 28, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12101   open full text
  • Language Evolution Can Be Shaped by the Structure of the World.
    Amy Perfors, Daniel J. Navarro.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. January 24, 2014
    Human languages vary in many ways but also show striking cross‐linguistic universals. Why do these universals exist? Recent theoretical results demonstrate that Bayesian learners transmitting language to each other through iterated learning will converge on a distribution of languages that depends only on their prior biases about language and the quantity of data transmitted at each point; the structure of the world being communicated about plays no role (Griffiths & Kalish, , ). We revisit these findings and show that when certain assumptions about the relationship between language and the world are abandoned, learners will converge to languages that depend on the structure of the world as well as their prior biases. These theoretical results are supported with a series of experiments showing that when human learners acquire language through iterated learning, the ultimate structure of those languages is shaped by the structure of the meanings to be communicated.
    January 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12102   open full text
  • Weighing Outcomes by Time or Against Time? Evaluation Rules in Intertemporal Choice.
    Marc Scholten, Daniel Read, Adam Sanborn.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. January 10, 2014
    Models of intertemporal choice draw on three evaluation rules, which we compare in the restricted domain of choices between smaller sooner and larger later monetary outcomes. The hyperbolic discounting model proposes an alternative‐based rule, in which options are evaluated separately. The interval discounting model proposes a hybrid rule, in which the outcomes are evaluated separately, but the delays to those outcomes are evaluated in comparison with one another. The tradeoff model proposes an attribute‐based rule, in which both outcomes and delays are evaluated in comparison with one another: People consider both the intervals between the outcomes and the compensations received or paid over those intervals. We compare highly general parametric functional forms of these models by means of a Bayesian analysis, a method of analysis not previously used in intertemporal choice. We find that the hyperbolic discounting model is outperformed by the interval discounting model, which, in turn, is outperformed by the tradeoff model. Our cognitive modeling is among the first to offer quantitative evidence against the conventional view that people make intertemporal choices by discounting the value of future outcomes, and in favor of the view that they directly compare options along the time and outcome attributes.
    January 10, 2014   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12104   open full text
  • Intention, Emotion, and Action: A Neural Theory Based on Semantic Pointers.
    Tobias Schröder, Terrence C. Stewart, Paul Thagard.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 13, 2013
    We propose a unified theory of intentions as neural processes that integrate representations of states of affairs, actions, and emotional evaluation. We show how this theory provides answers to philosophical questions about the concept of intention, psychological questions about human behavior, computational questions about the relations between belief and action, and neuroscientific questions about how the brain produces actions. Our theory of intention ties together biologically plausible mechanisms for belief, planning, and motor control. The computational feasibility of these mechanisms is shown by a model that simulates psychologically important cases of intention.
    November 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12100   open full text
  • Implicit Transfer of Reversed Temporal Structure in Visuomotor Sequence Learning.
    Kanji Tanaka, Katsumi Watanabe.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 12, 2013
    Some spatio‐temporal structures are easier to transfer implicitly in sequential learning. In this study, we investigated whether the consistent reversal of triads of learned components would support the implicit transfer of their temporal structure in visuomotor sequence learning. A triad comprised three sequential button presses ([1][2][3]) and seven consecutive triads comprised a sequence. Participants learned sequences by trial and error, until they could complete it 20 times without error. Then, they learned another sequence, in which each triad was reversed ([3][2][1]), partially reversed ([2][1][3]), or switched so as not to overlap with the other conditions ([2][3][1] or [3][1][2]). Even when the participants did not notice the alternation rule, the consistent reversal of the temporal structure of each triad led to better implicit transfer; this was confirmed in a subsequent experiment. These results suggest that the implicit transfer of the temporal structure of a learned sequence can be influenced by both the structure and consistency of the change.
    November 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12098   open full text
  • Automatic Extraction of Property Norm‐Like Data From Large Text Corpora.
    Colin Kelly, Barry Devereux, Anna Korhonen.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. November 06, 2013
    Traditional methods for deriving property‐based representations of concepts from text have focused on either extracting only a subset of possible relation types, such as hyponymy/hypernymy (e.g., car is‐a vehicle) or meronymy/metonymy (e.g., car has wheels), or unspecified relations (e.g., car—petrol). We propose a system for the challenging task of automatic, large‐scale acquisition of unconstrained, human‐like property norms from large text corpora, and discuss the theoretical implications of such a system. We employ syntactic, semantic, and encyclopedic information to guide our extraction, yielding concept‐relation‐feature triples (e.g., car be fast, car require petrol, car cause pollution), which approximate property‐based conceptual representations. Our novel method extracts candidate triples from parsed corpora (Wikipedia and the British National Corpus) using syntactically and grammatically motivated rules, then reweights triples with a linear combination of their frequency and four statistical metrics. We assess our system output in three ways: lexical comparison with norms derived from human‐generated property norm data, direct evaluation by four human judges, and a semantic distance comparison with both WordNet similarity data and human‐judged concept similarity ratings. Our system offers a viable and performant method of plausible triple extraction: Our lexical comparison shows comparable performance to the current state‐of‐the‐art, while subsequent evaluations exhibit the human‐like character of our generated properties.
    November 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12091   open full text
  • Integrating Cognitive Process and Descriptive Models of Attitudes and Preferences.
    Guy E. Hawkins, A.A.J. Marley, Andrew Heathcote, Terry N. Flynn, Jordan J. Louviere, Scott D. Brown.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 11, 2013
    Discrete choice experiments—selecting the best and/or worst from a set of options—are increasingly used to provide more efficient and valid measurement of attitudes or preferences than conventional methods such as Likert scales. Discrete choice data have traditionally been analyzed with random utility models that have good measurement properties but provide limited insight into cognitive processes. We extend a well‐established cognitive model, which has successfully explained both choices and response times for simple decision tasks, to complex, multi‐attribute discrete choice data. The fits, and parameters, of the extended model for two sets of choice data (involving patient preferences for dermatology appointments, and consumer attitudes toward mobile phones) agree with those of standard choice models. The extended model also accounts for choice and response time data in a perceptual judgment task designed in a manner analogous to best–worst discrete choice experiments. We conclude that several research fields might benefit from discrete choice experiments, and that the particular accumulator‐based models of decision making used in response time research can also provide process‐level instantiations for random utility models.
    October 11, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12094   open full text
  • Retrieval Dynamics and Retention in Cross‐Situational Statistical Word Learning.
    Haley A. Vlach, Catherine M. Sandhofer.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 07, 2013
    Previous research on cross‐situational word learning has demonstrated that learners are able to reduce ambiguity in mapping words to referents by tracking co‐occurrence probabilities across learning events. In the current experiments, we examined whether learners are able to retain mappings over time. The results revealed that learners are able to retain mappings for up to 1 week later. However, there were interactions between the amount of retention and the different learning conditions. Interestingly, the strongest retention was associated with a learning condition that engendered retrieval dynamics that initially challenged the learner but eventually led to more successful retrieval toward the end of learning. The ease/difficulty of retrieval is a critical process underlying cross‐situational word learning and is a powerful example of how learning dynamics affect long‐term learning outcomes.
    October 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12092   open full text
  • Quantitative Standards for Absolute Linguistic Universals.
    Steven T. Piantadosi, Edward Gibson.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. October 03, 2013
    Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross‐linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross‐linguistic analysis will very rarely be able to statistically justify absolute, inviolable patterns in language. We formalize two statistical methods—frequentist and Bayesian—and show that in both it is possible to find strict linguistic universals, but that the numbers of independent languages necessary to do so is generally unachievable. This suggests that methods other than typological statistics are necessary to establish absolute properties of human language, and thus that many of the purported universals in linguistics have not received sufficient empirical justification.
    October 03, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12088   open full text
  • Rotating With Rotated Text: A Natural Behavior Approach to Investigating Cognitive Offloading.
    Evan F. Risko, Srdan Medimorec, Joseph Chisholm, Alan Kingstone.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 24, 2013
    Determining how we use our body to support cognition represents an important part of understanding the embodied and embedded nature of cognition. In the present investigation, we pursue this question in the context of a common perceptual task. Specifically, we report a series of experiments investigating head tilt (i.e., external normalization) as a strategy in letter naming and reading stimuli that are upright or rotated. We demonstrate that the frequency of this natural behavior is modulated by the cost of stimulus rotation on performance. In addition, we demonstrate that external normalization can benefit performance. All of the results are consistent with the notion that external normalization represents a form of cognitive offloading and that effort is an important factor in the decision to adopt an internal or external strategy.
    September 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12087   open full text
  • Children's Sensitivity to Ulterior Motives When Evaluating Prosocial Behavior.
    Gail Heyman, David Barner, Jennifer Heumann, Lauren Schenck.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. September 24, 2013
    Reasoning about ulterior motives was investigated among children ages 6–10 years (total N = 119). In each of two studies, participants were told about children who offered gifts to peers who needed help. Each giver chose to present a gift in either a public setting, which is consistent with having an ulterior motive to enhance one's reputation, or in a private setting, which is not consistent with having an ulterior motive. In each study, the 6‐ to 7‐year olds showed no evidence of understanding that the public givers might have ulterior motives, but the 8‐ to 10‐year olds rated the private givers more favorably. In , the older children were more likely than the younger children to refer to impression management when explaining their judgments of the givers. The younger children who mentioned impression management did so to justify a preference for public givers (e.g., by explaining that public givers are nicer because more of their peers will know that they are nice). Results from suggest that developmental change in children's reasoning about intentions and social outcomes contributes to their understanding of ulterior motives.
    September 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12089   open full text
  • All Giraffes Have Female‐Specific Properties: Influence of Grammatical Gender on Deductive Reasoning About Sex‐Specific Properties in German Speakers.
    Mutsumi Imai, Lennart Schalk, Henrik Saalbach, Hiroyuki Okada.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 19, 2013
    Grammatical gender is independent of biological sex for the majority of animal names (e.g., any giraffe, be it male or female, is grammatically treated as feminine). However, there is apparent semantic motivation for grammatical gender classes, especially in mapping human terms to gender. This research investigated whether this motivation affects deductive inference in native German speakers. We compared German with Japanese speakers (a language without grammatical gender) when making inferences about sex‐specific biological properties. We found that German speakers tended to erroneously draw inferences when the sex in the premise and grammatical gender of the target animal agreed. An over‐generalization of the grammar–semantics mapping was found even when the sex of the target was explicitly indicated. However, these effects occurred only when gender‐marking articles accompanied the nouns. These results suggest that German speakers project sex‐specific biological properties onto gender‐marking articles but not onto conceptual representations of animals per se.
    August 19, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12074   open full text
  • Singular Clues to Causality and Their Use in Human Causal Judgment.
    Peter A. White.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 19, 2013
    It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as heuristics for generating causal judgments under uncertainty and are a pervasive source of bias in causal judgment. More sophisticated clues such as mechanism clues and repeated interventions are derived from the 14. Research on the use of empirical information and conditional probabilities to identify causes has used scenarios in which several of the clues are present, and the use of empirical association information for causal judgment depends on the presence of singular clues. It is the singular clues and their origin that are basic to causal understanding, not multiple instance clues such as empirical association, contingency, and conditional probabilities.
    August 19, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12075   open full text
  • From Blickets to Synapses: Inferring Temporal Causal Networks by Observation.
    Chrisantha Fernando.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 19, 2013
    How do human infants learn the causal dependencies between events? Evidence suggests that this remarkable feat can be achieved by observation of only a handful of examples. Many computational models have been produced to explain how infants perform causal inference without explicit teaching about statistics or the scientific method. Here, we propose a spiking neuronal network implementation that can be entrained to form a dynamical model of the temporal and causal relationships between events that it observes. The network uses spike‐time dependent plasticity, long‐term depression, and heterosynaptic competition rules to implement Rescorla–Wagner‐like learning. Transmission delays between neurons allow the network to learn a forward model of the temporal relationships between events. Within this framework, biologically realistic synaptic plasticity rules account for well‐known behavioral data regarding cognitive causal assumptions such as backwards blocking and screening‐off. These models can then be run as emulators for state inference. Furthermore, this mechanism is capable of copying synaptic connectivity patterns between neuronal networks by observing the spontaneous spike activity from the neuronal circuit that is to be copied, and it thereby provides a powerful method for transmission of circuit functionality between brain regions.
    August 19, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12073   open full text
  • The Goal Circuit Model: A Hierarchical Multi‐Route Model of the Acquisition and Control of Routine Sequential Action in Humans.
    Richard P. Cooper, Nicolas Ruh, Denis Mareschal.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 13, 2013
    Human control of action in routine situations involves a flexible interplay between (a) task‐dependent serial ordering constraints; (b) top‐down, or intentional, control processes; and (c) bottom‐up, or environmentally triggered, affordances. In addition, the interaction between these influences is modulated by learning mechanisms that, over time, appear to reduce the need for top‐down control processes while still allowing those processes to intervene at any point if necessary or if desired. We present a model of the acquisition and control of goal‐directed action that goes beyond existing models by operationalizing an interface between two putative systems—a routine and a non‐routine system—thereby demonstrating how explicitly represented goals can interact with the emergent task representations that develop through learning in the routine system. The gradual emergence of task representations offers an explanation for the transfer of control with experience from the non‐routine goal‐based system to the routine system. At the same time it allows action selection to be sensitive both to environmental triggers and to biasing from multiple levels within the goal system.
    August 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12067   open full text
  • Discovering the Sequential Structure of Thought.
    John R. Anderson, Jon M. Fincham.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 13, 2013
    Multi‐voxel pattern recognition techniques combined with Hidden Markov models can be used to discover the mental states that people go through in performing a task. The combined method identifies both the mental states and how their durations vary with experimental conditions. We apply this method to a task where participants solve novel mathematical problems. We identify four states in the solution of these problems: Encoding, Planning, Solving, and Respond. The method allows us to interpret what participants are doing on individual problem‐solving trials. The duration of the planning state varies on a trial‐to‐trial basis with novelty of the problem. The duration of solution stage similarly varies with the amount of computation needed to produce a solution once a plan is devised. The response stage similarly varies with the complexity of the answer produced. In addition, we identified a number of effects that ran counter to a prior model of the task. Thus, we were able to decompose the overall problem‐solving time into estimates of its components and in way that serves to guide theory.
    August 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12068   open full text
  • Children Use Temporal Cues to Learn Causal Directionality.
    Benjamin M. Rottman, Jonathan F. Kominsky, Frank C. Keil.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 13, 2013
    The ability to learn the direction of causal relations is critical for understanding and acting in the world. We investigated how children learn causal directionality in situations in which the states of variables are temporally dependent (i.e., autocorrelated). In Experiment 1, children learned about causal direction by comparing the states of one variable before versus after an intervention on another variable. In Experiment 2, children reliably inferred causal directionality merely from observing how two variables change over time; they interpreted Y changing without a change in X as evidence that Y does not influence X. Both of these strategies make sense if one believes the variables to be temporally dependent. We discuss the implications of these results for interpreting previous findings. More broadly, given that many real‐world environments are characterized by temporal dependency, these results suggest strategies that children may use to learn the causal structure of their environments.
    August 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12070   open full text
  • A Quantitative Empirical Analysis of the Abstract/Concrete Distinction.
    Felix Hill, Anna Korhonen, Christian Bentz.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 13, 2013
    This study presents original evidence that abstract and concrete concepts are organized and represented differently in the mind, based on analyses of thousands of concepts in publicly available data sets and computational resources. First, we show that abstract and concrete concepts have differing patterns of association with other concepts. Second, we test recent hypotheses that abstract concepts are organized according to association, whereas concrete concepts are organized according to (semantic) similarity. Third, we present evidence suggesting that concrete representations are more strongly feature‐based than abstract concepts. We argue that degree of feature‐based structure may fundamentally determine concreteness, and we discuss implications for cognitive and computational models of meaning.
    August 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12076   open full text
  • Searching for Control: Priming Randomness Increases the Evaluation of Ritual Efficacy.
    Cristine H. Legare, André L. Souza.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 13, 2013
    Reestablishing feelings of control after experiencing uncertainty has long been considered a fundamental motive for human behavior. We propose that rituals (i.e., socially stipulated, causally opaque practices) provide a means for coping with the aversive feelings associated with randomness due to the perception of a connection between ritual action and a desired outcome. Two experiments were conducted (one in Brazil [n = 40] and another in the United States [n = 94]) to evaluate how the perceived efficacy of rituals is affected by feelings of randomness. In a between‐subjects design, the Scramble Sentence Task was used as a priming procedure in three conditions (i.e., randomness, negativity, and neutral) and participants were then asked to rate the efficacy of rituals used for problem‐solving purposes. The results demonstrate that priming randomness increased participants' perception of ritual efficacy relative to negativity and neutral conditions. Implications for increasing our understanding of the relationship between perceived control and ritualistic behavior are discussed.
    August 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12077   open full text
  • Birth of an Abstraction: A Dynamical Systems Account of the Discovery of an Elsewhere Principle in a Category Learning Task.
    Whitney Tabor, Pyeong W. Cho, Harry Dankowicz.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 09, 2013
    Human participants and recurrent (“connectionist”) neural networks were both trained on a categorization system abstractly similar to natural language systems involving irregular (“strong”) classes and a default class. Both the humans and the networks exhibited staged learning and a generalization pattern reminiscent of the Elsewhere Condition (Kiparsky, 1973). Previous connectionist accounts of related phenomena have often been vague about the nature of the networks’ encoding systems. We analyzed our network using dynamical systems theory, revealing topological and geometric properties that can be directly compared with the mechanisms of non‐connectionist, rule‐based accounts. The results reveal that the networks “contain” structures related to mechanisms posited by rule‐based models, partly vindicating the insights of these models. On the other hand, they support the one mechanism (OM), as opposed to the more than one mechanism (MOM), view of symbolic abstraction by showing how the appearance of MOM behavior can arise emergently from one underlying set of principles. The key new contribution of this study is to show that dynamical systems theory can allow us to explicitly characterize the relationship between the two perspectives in implemented models.
    August 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12072   open full text
  • Causal Premise Semantics.
    Stefan Kaufmann.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 08, 2013
    The rise of causality and the attendant graph‐theoretic modeling tools in the study of counterfactual reasoning has had resounding effects in many areas of cognitive science, but it has thus far not permeated the mainstream in linguistic theory to a comparable degree. In this study I show that a version of the predominant framework for the formal semantic analysis of conditionals, Kratzer‐style premise semantics, allows for a straightforward implementation of the crucial ideas and insights of Pearl‐style causal networks. I spell out the details of such an implementation, focusing especially on the notions of intervention on a network and backtracking interpretations of counterfactuals.
    August 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12063   open full text
  • A Ranking‐Theoretic Approach to Conditionals.
    Wolfgang Spohn.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 08, 2013
    Conditionals somehow express conditional beliefs. However, conditional belief is a bi‐propositional attitude that is generally not truth‐evaluable, in contrast to unconditional belief. Therefore, this article opts for an expressivistic semantics for conditionals, grounds this semantics in the arguably most adequate account of conditional belief, that is, ranking theory, and dismisses probability theory for that purpose, because probabilities cannot represent belief. Various expressive options are then explained in terms of ranking theory, with the intention to set out a general interpretive scheme that is able to account for the most variegated usage of conditionals. The Ramsey test is only the first option. Relevance is another, familiar, but little understood item, which comes in several versions. This article adds a further family of expressive options, which is able to subsume also counterfactuals and causal conditionals, and indicates at the end how this family allows for partial recovery of truth conditions for conditionals.
    August 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12057   open full text
  • Structural Counterfactuals: A Brief Introduction.
    Judea Pearl.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 08, 2013
    Recent advances in causal reasoning have given rise to a computational model that emulates the process by which humans generate, evaluate, and distinguish counterfactual sentences. Contrasted with the “possible worlds” account of counterfactuals, this “structural” model enjoys the advantages of representational economy, algorithmic simplicity, and conceptual clarity. This introduction traces the emergence of the structural model and gives a panoramic view of several applications where counterfactual reasoning has benefited problem areas in the empirical sciences.
    August 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12065   open full text
  • Counterfactuals and Causal Models: Introduction to the Special Issue.
    Steven A. Sloman.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 08, 2013
    Judea Pearl won the 2010 Rumelhart Prize in computational cognitive science due to his seminal contributions to the development of Bayes nets and causal Bayes nets, frameworks that are central to multiple domains of the computational study of mind. At the heart of the causal Bayes nets formalism is the notion of a counterfactual, a representation of something false or nonexistent. Pearl refers to Bayes nets as oracles for intervention, and interventions can tell us what the effect of action will be or what the effect of counterfactual possibilities would be. Counterfactuals turn out to be necessary to understand thought, perception, and language. This selection of papers tells us why, sometimes in ways that support the Bayes net framework and sometimes in ways that challenge it.
    August 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12064   open full text
  • Is It What You Do, or When You Do It? The Roles of Contingency and Similarity in Pro‐Social Effects of Imitation.
    Caroline Catmur, Cecilia Heyes.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 05, 2013
    Being imitated has a wide range of pro‐social effects, but it is not clear how these effects are mediated. Naturalistic studies of the effects of being imitated have not established whether pro‐social outcomes are due to the similarity and/or the contingency between the movements performed by the actor and those of the imitator. Similarity is often assumed to be the active ingredient, but we hypothesized that contingency might also be important, as it produces positive affect in infants and can be detected by phylogenetically ancient mechanisms of associative learning. We manipulated similarity and contingency between performed and observed actions in a computerized task. Similarity had no positive effects; however, contingency resulted in greater enjoyment of the task, reported closeness to others, and helping behavior. These results suggest that the pro‐social effects of being imitated may rely on associative mechanisms.
    August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12071   open full text
  • Pretense, Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Matters.
    Deena S. Weisberg, Alison Gopnik.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. August 05, 2013
    Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non‐real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representation separate from reality. In turn, according to causal models accounts, counterfactual reasoning is a crucial tool that children need to plan for the future and learn about the world. Both planning with causal models and learning about them require the ability to create false premises and generate conclusions from these premises. We argue that pretending allows children to practice these important cognitive skills. We also consider the prevalence of unrealistic scenarios in children's play and explain how they can be useful in learning, despite appearances to the contrary.
    August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12069   open full text
  • Counterfactual Graphical Models for Longitudinal Mediation Analysis With Unobserved Confounding.
    Ilya Shpitser.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 30, 2013
    Questions concerning mediated causal effects are of great interest in psychology, cognitive science, medicine, social science, public health, and many other disciplines. For instance, about 60% of recent papers published in leading journals in social psychology contain at least one mediation test (Rucker, Preacher, Tormala, & Petty, 2011). Standard parametric approaches to mediation analysis employ regression models, and either the “difference method” (Judd & Kenny, 1981), more common in epidemiology, or the “product method” (Baron & Kenny, 1986), more common in the social sciences. In this article, we first discuss a known, but perhaps often unappreciated, fact that these parametric approaches are a special case of a general counterfactual framework for reasoning about causality first described by Neyman (1923) and Rubin (1924) and linked to causal graphical models by Robins (1986) and Pearl (2006). We then show a number of advantages of this framework. First, it makes the strong assumptions underlying mediation analysis explicit. Second, it avoids a number of problems present in the product and difference methods, such as biased estimates of effects in certain cases. Finally, we show the generality of this framework by proving a novel result which allows mediation analysis to be applied to longitudinal settings with unobserved confounders.
    July 30, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12058   open full text
  • Familiar Verbs Are Not Always Easier Than Novel Verbs: How German Pre‐School Children Comprehend Active and Passive Sentences.
    Miriam Dittmar, Kirsten Abbot‐Smith, Elena Lieven, Michael Tomasello.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 29, 2013
    Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non‐prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis investigating German children using a forced‐choice pointing paradigm with reversed agent‐patient roles. We tested active transitive verbs in study 1. The 2‐year olds were better with familiar than novel verbs, while the 2½‐year olds pointed correctly for both. In study 2, we tested passives: 2½‐year olds were significantly below chance for familiar verbs and at chance for novel verbs, supporting the hypothesis that the entrenchment of the familiar verbs in the active transitive voice was interfering with interpreting them in the passive voice construction. The 3½‐year olds were also at chance for novel verbs but above chance with familiar verbs. We interpret this as reflecting a lessening of the verb‐in‐construction entrenchment as the child develops knowledge that particular verbs can occur in a range of constructions. The 4½‐year olds were above chance for both familiar and novel verbs. We discuss our findings in terms of the relative entrenchment of lexical and syntactic information and to interference between them.
    July 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12066   open full text
  • Compression as a Universal Principle of Animal Behavior.
    Ramon Ferrer‐i‐Cancho, Antoni Hernández‐Fernández, David Lusseau, Govindasamy Agoramoorthy, Minna J. Hsu, Stuart Semple.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 29, 2013
    A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non‐human animal species have provided evidence for a common pattern underlying diverse behavioral phenomena: Words follow Zipf's law of brevity (the tendency of more frequently used words to be shorter), and conformity to this general pattern has been seen in the behavior of a number of other animals. It has been argued that the presence of this law is a sign of efficient coding in the information theoretic sense. However, no strong direct connection has been demonstrated between the law and compression, the information theoretic principle of minimizing the expected length of a code. Here, we show that minimizing the expected code length implies that the length of a word cannot increase as its frequency increases. Furthermore, we show that the mean code length or duration is significantly small in human language, and also in the behavior of other species in all cases where agreement with the law of brevity has been found. We argue that compression is a general principle of animal behavior that reflects selection for efficiency of coding.
    July 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12061   open full text
  • Compact Representations of Extended Causal Models.
    Joseph Y. Halpern, Christopher Hitchcock.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 19, 2013
    Judea Pearl (2000) was the first to propose a definition of actual causation using causal models. A number of authors have suggested that an adequate account of actual causation must appeal not only to causal structure but also to considerations of normality. In Halpern and Hitchcock (2011), we offer a definition of actual causation using extended causal models, which include information about both causal structure and normality. Extended causal models are potentially very complex. In this study, we show how it is possible to achieve a compact representation of extended causal models.
    July 19, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12059   open full text
  • Programs as Causal Models: Speculations on Mental Programs and Mental Representation.
    Nick Chater, Mike Oaksford.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 15, 2013
    Judea Pearl has argued that counterfactuals and causality are central to intelligence, whether natural or artificial, and has helped create a rich mathematical and computational framework for formally analyzing causality. Here, we draw out connections between these notions and various current issues in cognitive science, including the nature of mental “programs” and mental representation. We argue that programs (consisting of algorithms and data structures) have a causal (counterfactual‐supporting) structure; these counterfactuals can reveal the nature of mental representations. Programs can also provide a causal model of the external world. Such models are, we suggest, ubiquitous in perception, cognition, and language processing.
    July 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12062   open full text
  • Causal Responsibility and Counterfactuals.
    David A. Lagnado, Tobias Gerstenberg, Ro'i Zultan.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 15, 2013
    How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over‐determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structural model account of actual causation (e.g., Halpern & Pearl, 2005) and its extension to responsibility judgments (Chockler & Halpern, 2004). We review the main theoretical and empirical issues that arise from this literature and propose a novel model of intuitive judgments of responsibility. This model is a function of both pivotality (whether an agent made a difference to the outcome) and criticality (how important the agent is perceived to be for the outcome, before any actions are taken). The model explains empirical results from previous studies and is supported by a new experiment that manipulates both pivotality and criticality. We also discuss possible extensions of this model to deal with a broader range of causal situations. Overall, our approach emphasizes the close interrelations between causality, counterfactuals, and responsibility attributions.
    July 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12054   open full text
  • Stepping Into a Map: Initial Heading Direction Influences Spatial Memory Flexibility.
    Stephanie A. Gagnon, Tad T. Brunyé, Aaron Gardony, Matthijs L. Noordzij, Caroline R. Mahoney, Holly A. Taylor.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 15, 2013
    Learning a novel environment involves integrating first‐person perceptual and motoric experiences with developing knowledge about the overall structure of the surroundings. The present experiments provide insights into the parallel development of these egocentric and allocentric memories by intentionally conflicting body‐ and world‐centered frames of reference during learning, and measuring outcomes via online and offline measures. Results of two experiments demonstrate faster learning and increased memory flexibility following route perspective reading (Experiment 1) and virtual navigation (Experiment 2) when participants begin exploring the environment on a northward (vs. any other direction) allocentric heading. We suggest that learning advantages due to aligning body‐centered (left/right/forward/back) with world‐centered (NSEW) reference frames are indicative of three features of spatial memory development and representation. First, memories for egocentric and allocentric information develop in parallel during novel environment learning. Second, cognitive maps have a preferred orientation relative to world‐centered coordinates. Finally, this preferred orientation corresponds to traditional orientation of physical maps (i.e., north is upward), suggesting strong associations between daily perceptual and motor experiences and the manner in which we preferentially represent spatial knowledge.
    July 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12055   open full text
  • Cat Got Your Tongue? Using the Tip‐of‐the‐Tongue State to Investigate Fixed Expressions.
    Emily Nordmann, Alexandra A. Cleland, Rebecca Bull.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 15, 2013
    Despite the fact that they play a prominent role in everyday speech, the representation and processing of fixed expressions during language production is poorly understood. Here, we report a study investigating the processes underlying fixed expression production. “Tip‐of‐the‐tongue” (TOT) states were elicited for well‐known idioms (e.g., hit the nail on the head) and participants were asked to report any information they could regarding the content of the phrase. Participants were able to correctly report individual words for idioms that they could not produce. In addition, participants produced both figurative (e.g., pretty for easy on the eye) and literal errors (e.g., hammer for hit the nail on the head) when in a TOT state, suggesting that both figurative and literal meanings are active during production. There was no effect of semantic decomposability on overall TOT incidence; however, participants recalled a greater proportion of words for decomposable rather than non‐decomposable idioms. This finding suggests there may be differences in how decomposable and non‐decomposable idioms are retrieved during production.
    July 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12060   open full text
  • Working Memory in Nonsymbolic Approximate Arithmetic Processing: A Dual‐Task Study With Preschoolers.
    Iro Xenidou‐Dervou, Ernest C. D. M. Lieshout, Menno Schoot.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 15, 2013
    Preschool children have been proven to possess nonsymbolic approximate arithmetic skills before learning how to manipulate symbolic math and thus before any formal math instruction. It has been assumed that nonsymbolic approximate math tasks necessitate the allocation of Working Memory (WM) resources. WM has been consistently shown to be an important predictor of children's math development and achievement. The aim of our study was to uncover the specific role of WM in nonsymbolic approximate math. For this purpose, we conducted a dual‐task study with preschoolers with active phonological, visual, spatial, and central executive interference during the completion of a nonsymbolic approximate addition dot task. With regard to the role of WM, we found a clear performance breakdown in the central executive interference condition. Our findings provide insight into the underlying cognitive processes involved in storing and manipulating nonsymbolic approximate numerosities during early arithmetic.
    July 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12053   open full text
  • Social Learning Strategies in Networked Groups.
    Thomas N. Wisdom, Xianfeng Song, Robert L. Goldstone.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 11, 2013
    When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem‐solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration.
    July 11, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12052   open full text
  • Evidence for the Role of Shape in Mental Representations of Similes.
    Lisanne Weelden, Joost Schilperoord, Alfons Maes.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. July 11, 2013
    People mentally represent the shapes of objects. For instance, the mental representation of an eagle is different when one thinks about a flying or resting eagle. This study examined the role of shape in mental representations of similes (i.e., metaphoric comparisons). We tested the prediction that when people process a simile they will mentally represent the entities of the comparison as having a similar shape. We conducted two experiments in which participants read sentences that either did (experimental sentences) or did not (control sentences) invite comparing two entities. For the experimental sentences, the ground of the comparison was explicit in Experiment 1 (“X has the ability to Z, just like Y”) and implicit in Experiment 2 (“X is like Y”). After having read the sentence, participants were presented with line drawings of the two objects, which were either similarly or dissimilarly shaped. They judged whether both objects were mentioned in the preceding sentence. For the experimental sentences, recognition latencies were shorter for similarly shaped objects than for dissimilarly shaped objects. For the control sentences, we did not find such an effect of similarity in shape. These findings suggest that a perceptual symbol of shape is activated when processing similes.
    July 11, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12056   open full text
  • Optimization and Quantization in Gradient Symbol Systems: A Framework for Integrating the Continuous and the Discrete in Cognition.
    Paul Smolensky, Matthew Goldrick, Donald Mathis.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 26, 2013
    Mental representations have continuous as well as discrete, combinatorial properties. For example, while predominantly discrete, phonological representations also vary continuously; this is reflected by gradient effects in instrumental studies of speech production. Can an integrated theoretical framework address both aspects of structure? The framework we introduce here, Gradient Symbol Processing, characterizes the emergence of grammatical macrostructure from the Parallel Distributed Processing microstructure (McClelland, Rumelhart, & The PDP Research Group, 1986) of language processing. The mental representations that emerge, Distributed Symbol Systems, have both combinatorial and gradient structure. They are processed through Subsymbolic Optimization–Quantization, in which an optimization process favoring representations that satisfy well‐formedness constraints operates in parallel with a distributed quantization process favoring discrete symbolic structures. We apply a particular instantiation of this framework, λ‐Diffusion Theory, to phonological production. Simulations of the resulting model suggest that Gradient Symbol Processing offers a way to unify accounts of grammatical competence with both discrete and continuous patterns in language performance.
    June 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12047   open full text
  • Where Do Features Come From?
    Geoffrey Hinton.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 25, 2013
    It is possible to learn multiple layers of non‐linear features by backpropagating error derivatives through a feedforward neural network. This is a very effective learning procedure when there is a huge amount of labeled training data, but for many learning tasks very few labeled examples are available. In an effort to overcome the need for labeled data, several different generative models were developed that learned interesting features by modeling the higher order statistical structure of a set of input vectors. One of these generative models, the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), has no connections between its hidden units and this makes perceptual inference and learning much simpler. More significantly, after a layer of hidden features has been learned, the activities of these features can be used as training data for another RBM. By applying this idea recursively, it is possible to learn a deep hierarchy of progressively more complicated features without requiring any labeled data. This deep hierarchy can then be treated as a feedforward neural network which can be discriminatively fine‐tuned using backpropagation. Using a stack of RBMs to initialize the weights of a feedforward neural network allows backpropagation to work effectively in much deeper networks and it leads to much better generalization. A stack of RBMs can also be used to initialize a deep Boltzmann machine that has many hidden layers. Combining this initialization method with a new method for fine‐tuning the weights finally leads to the first efficient way of training Boltzmann machines with many hidden layers and millions of weights.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12049   open full text
  • Culture, Perception, and Artistic Visualization: A Comparative Study of Children's Drawings in Three Siberian Cultural Groups.
    Kirill V. Istomin, Jaroslava Panáková, Patrick Heady.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 25, 2013
    In a study of three indigenous and non‐indigenous cultural groups in northwestern and northeastern Siberia, framed line tests and a landscape drawing task were used to examine the hypotheses that test‐based assessments of context sensitivity and independence are correlated with the amount of contextual information contained in drawings, and with the order in which the focal and background objects are drawn. The results supported these hypotheses, and inspection of the regression relationships suggested that the intergroup variations in test performance were likely to result from differences in the attention accorded to contextual information, as revealed by the drawings. Social and environmental explanations for the group differences in context sensitivity are also discussed. The conclusions support the argument that cultural differences in artistic styles and perceptual tests reflect the same underlying perceptual tendencies, and they are consistent with the argument that these tendencies reflect corresponding differences in patterns of social and environmental interaction.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12051   open full text
  • All Together Now: Concurrent Learning of Multiple Structures in an Artificial Language.
    Alexa R. Romberg, Jenny R. Saffran.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 14, 2013
    Natural languages contain many layers of sequential structure, from the distribution of phonemes within words to the distribution of phrases within utterances. However, most research modeling language acquisition using artificial languages has focused on only one type of distributional structure at a time. In two experiments, we investigated adult learning of an artificial language that contains dependencies between both adjacent and non‐adjacent words. We found that learners rapidly acquired both types of regularities and that the strength of the adjacent statistics influenced learning of both adjacent and non‐adjacent dependencies. Additionally, though accuracy was similar for both types of structure, participants’ knowledge of the deterministic non‐adjacent dependencies was more explicit than their knowledge of the probabilistic adjacent dependencies. The results are discussed in the context of current theories of statistical learning and language acquisition.
    June 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12050   open full text
  • How to Bootstrap a Human Communication System.
    Nicolas Fay, Michael Arbib, Simon Garrod.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. June 13, 2013
    How might a human communication system be bootstrapped in the absence of conventional language? We argue that motivated signs play an important role (i.e., signs that are linked to meaning by structural resemblance or by natural association). An experimental study is then reported in which participants try to communicate a range of pre‐specified items to a partner using repeated non‐linguistic vocalization, repeated gesture, or repeated non‐linguistic vocalization plus gesture (but without using their existing language system). Gesture proved more effective (measured by communication success) and more efficient (measured by the time taken to communicate) than non‐linguistic vocalization across a range of item categories (emotion, object, and action). Combining gesture and vocalization did not improve performance beyond gesture alone. We experimentally demonstrate that gesture is a more effective means of bootstrapping a human communication system. We argue that gesture outperforms non‐linguistic vocalization because it lends itself more naturally to the production of motivated signs.
    June 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12048   open full text
  • A Comparison of American and Nepalese Children's Concepts of Freedom of Choice and Social Constraint.
    Nadia Chernyak, Tamar Kushnir, Katherine M. Sullivan, Qi Wang.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 20, 2013
    Recent work has shown that preschool‐aged children and adults understand freedom of choice regardless of culture, but that adults across cultures differ in perceiving social obligations as constraints on action. To investigate the development of these cultural differences and universalities, we interviewed school‐aged children (4–11) in Nepal and the United States regarding beliefs about people's freedom of choice and constraint to follow preferences, perform impossible acts, and break social obligations. Children across cultures and ages universally endorsed the choice to follow preferences but not to perform impossible acts. Age and culture effects also emerged: Young children in both cultures viewed social obligations as constraints on action, but American children did so less as they aged. These findings suggest that while basic notions of free choice are universal, recognitions of social obligations as constraints on action may be culturally learned.
    May 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12046   open full text
  • Two Routes to Expertise in Mental Rotation.
    Alexander Provost, Blake Johnson, Frini Karayanidis, Scott D. Brown, Andrew Heathcote.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 15, 2013
    The ability to imagine objects undergoing rotation (mental rotation) improves markedly with practice, but an explanation of this plasticity remains controversial. Some researchers propose that practice speeds up the rate of a general‐purpose rotation algorithm. Others maintain that performance improvements arise through the adoption of a new cognitive strategy—repeated exposure leads to rapid retrieval from memory of the required response to familiar mental rotation stimuli. In two experiments we provide support for an integrated explanation of practice effects in mental rotation by combining behavioral and EEG measures in a way that provides more rigorous inference than is available from either measure alone. Before practice, participants displayed two well‐established signatures of mental rotation: Both response time and EEG negativity increased linearly with rotation angle. After extensive practice with a small set of stimuli, both signatures of mental rotation had all but disappeared. In contrast, after the same amount of practice with a much larger set both signatures remained, even though performance improved markedly. Taken together, these results constitute a reversed association, which cannot arise from variation in a single cause, and so they provide compelling evidence for the existence of two routes to expertise in mental rotation. We also found novel evidence that practice with the large but not the small stimulus set increased the magnitude of an early visual evoked potential, suggesting increased rotation speed is enabled by improved efficiency in extracting three‐dimensional information from two‐dimensional stimuli.
    May 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12042   open full text
  • Object Orientation Affects Spatial Language Comprehension.
    Michele Burigo, Simona Sacchi.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 15, 2013
    Typical spatial descriptions, such as “The car is in front of the house,” describe the position of a located object (LO; e.g., the car) in space relative to a reference object (RO) whose location is known (e.g., the house). The orientation of the RO affects spatial language comprehension via the reference frame selection process. However, the effects of the LO's orientation on spatial language have not received great attention. This study explores whether the pure geometric information of the LO (e.g., its orientation) affects spatial language comprehension using placing and production tasks. Our results suggest that the orientation of the LO influences spatial language comprehension even in the absence of functional relationships.
    May 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12041   open full text
  • The Idea of an Exact Number: Children's Understanding of Cardinality and Equinumerosity.
    Barbara W. Sarnecka, Charles E. Wright.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. May 14, 2013
    Understanding what numbers are means knowing several things. It means knowing how counting relates to numbers (called the cardinal principle or cardinality); it means knowing that each number is generated by adding one to the previous number (called the successor function or succession), and it means knowing that all and only sets whose members can be placed in one‐to‐one correspondence have the same number of items (called exact equality or equinumerosity). A previous study (Sarnecka & Carey, 2008) linked children's understanding of cardinality to their understanding of succession for the numbers five and six. This study investigates the link between cardinality and equinumerosity for these numbers, finding that children either understand both cardinality and equinumerosity or they understand neither. This suggests that cardinality and equinumerosity (along with succession) are interrelated facets of the concepts five and six, the acquisition of which is an important conceptual achievement of early childhood.
    May 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12043   open full text
  • The Mechanisms of Space‐Time Association: Comparing Motor and Perceptual Contributions in Time Reproduction.
    Marco Fabbri, Nicola Cellini, Monica Martoni, Lorenzo Tonetti, Vincenzo Natale.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. April 30, 2013
    The spatial‐temporal association indicates that time is represented spatially along a left‐to‐right line. It is unclear whether the spatial‐temporal association is mainly related to a perceptual or a motor component. In addition, the spatial‐temporal association is not consistently found using a time reproduction task. Our rationale for this finding is that, classically, a non‐lateralized button for performing the task has been used. Using two lateralized response buttons, the aim of the study was to find a spatial‐temporal association in a time reproduction task. To account for the perceptual component, reference and target stimuli were presented in different spaces through four experiments. In all experiments, a Spatial‐Temporal Association of Response Codes (STEARC) effect was found and this effect was not modulated by the spatial position of both reference and target stimuli. The results suggested that the spatial‐temporal association was mainly derived from the spatial information provided by response buttons, reflecting a motor but not visuospatial influence.
    April 30, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12038   open full text
  • Melting Lizards and Crying Mailboxes: Children's Preferential Recall of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts.
    Konika Banerjee, Omar S. Haque, Elizabeth S. Spelke.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. April 30, 2013
    Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This study examines whether children's concept recall similarly is sensitive to the degree of conceptual counterintuitiveness (operationalized as a concept's number of ontological domain violations) for items presented in the context of a fictional narrative. Seven‐ to nine‐year‐old children who listened to a story including both intuitive and counterintuitive concepts recalled the counterintuitive concepts containing one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2), but not three (Experiment 3), violations of intuitive ontological expectations significantly more and in greater detail than the intuitive concepts, both immediately after hearing the story and 1 week later. We conclude that one or two violations of expectation may be a cognitive optimum for children: They are more inferentially rich and therefore more memorable, whereas three or more violations diminish memorability for target concepts. These results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early‐emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices whose primary form and content is not derived from arbitrary custom or the social environment alone.
    April 30, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12037   open full text
  • Using Reinforcement Learning to Examine Dynamic Attention Allocation During Reading.
    Yanping Liu, Erik D. Reichle, Ding‐Guo Gao.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. February 21, 2013
    A fundamental question in reading research concerns whether attention is allocated strictly serially, supporting lexical processing of one word at a time, or in parallel, supporting concurrent lexical processing of two or more words (Reichle, Liversedge, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2009). The origins of this debate are reviewed. We then report three simulations to address this question using artificial reading agents (Liu & Reichle, 2010; Reichle & Laurent, 2006) that learn to dynamically allocate attention to 1–4 words to “read” as efficiently as possible. These simulation results indicate that the agents strongly preferred serial word processing, although they occasionally attended to more than one word concurrently. The reason for this preference is discussed, along with implications for the debate about how humans allocate attention during reading.
    February 21, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12027   open full text
  • Inference and Explanation in Counterfactual Reasoning.
    Lance J. Rips, Brian J. Edwards.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. January 31, 2013
    This article reports results from two studies of how people answer counterfactual questions about simple machines. Participants learned about devices that have a specific configuration of components, and they answered questions of the form “If component X had not operated [failed], would component Y have operated?” The data from these studies indicate that participants were sensitive to the way in which the antecedent state is described—whether component X “had not operated” or “had failed.” Answers also depended on whether the device is deterministic or probabilistic—whether X's causal parents “always” or only “usually” cause X to operate. Participants' explanations of their answers often invoked non‐operation of causally prior components or unreliability of prior connections. They less often mentioned independence from these causal elements.
    January 31, 2013   doi: 10.1111/cogs.12024   open full text
  • Complementary Learning Systems.
    Randall C. O’Reilly, Rajan Bhattacharyya, Michael D. Howard, Nicholas Ketz.
    Cognitive Science / Cognitive Sciences. December 05, 2011
    This paper reviews the fate of the central ideas behind the complementary learning systems (CLS) framework as originally articulated in McClelland, McNaughton, and O’Reilly (1995). This framework explains why the brain requires two differentially specialized learning and memory systems, and it nicely specifies their central properties (i.e., the hippocampus as a sparse, pattern‐separated system for rapidly learning episodic memories, and the neocortex as a distributed, overlapping system for gradually integrating across episodes to extract latent semantic structure). We review the application of the CLS framework to a range of important topics, including the following: the basic neural processes of hippocampal memory encoding and recall, conjunctive encoding, human recognition memory, consolidation of initial hippocampal learning in cortex, dynamic modulation of encoding versus recall, and the synergistic interactions between hippocampus and neocortex. Overall, the CLS framework remains a vital theoretical force in the field, with the empirical data over the past 15 years generally confirming its key principles.
    December 05, 2011   doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01214.x   open full text