CogSci 2016 papers

(in nicer format than this)
maintained by @wkvong
inspired by @karpathy's NIPS previews
Below every paper are TOP 100 most-occuring words in that paper and their color is based on LDA topic model with k = 7.
Toggle LDA topics to sort by: TOPIC 1 TOPIC 2 TOPIC 3 TOPIC 4 TOPIC 5 TOPIC 6 TOPIC 7
A Dream Model: Reactivation and Re-encoding Mechanisms for Sleep-dependent Memory Consolidation
George Kachergis, Roy de Kleijn, Bernhard Hommel


We humans spend almost a third of our lives asleep, and there is mounting evidence that sleep not only maintains, but actually improves many of our cognitive functions. Memory consolidation–the process of crystallizing and integrating memories into knowledge and skills–is particularly benefitted by sleep. We survey the evidence that sleep aids memory consolidation in various declarative and implicit memory tasks and review the basic neurophysiological structure of sleep with a focus on understanding what neural systems are involved. Drawing on machine learning research, we discuss why it might be useful for humans–and robots, perhaps–to have such an offline period for processing, even though humans are clearly capable of learning incrementally, online. Finally, we propose and simulate two mechanisms for use in computational memory models to accomplish sleep-based consolidation via either or both 1) re-encoding knowledge representations and 2) reactivating and strengthening recent memories.
[learning, evidence, time, early, improved, task, training] [implicit, experience, simply, version, survey, work, missing] [sleep, memory, rem, consolidation, declarative, episodic, incremental, hippocampus, replay, trace, batch, dream, hippocampal, reactivation, store, matching, occurs, specific, dreaming, bob, deprivation, ingrid, gsys, context] [knowledge, stage, procedural, require, thought, night, high, online, performance] [computational, large, proposed, amount, order, mechanism, random, word, semantic, existing, list, build] [model, updating, well, modeling, hypothesis, data, probability, empirical, based] [feature, brain, neural, process, motor, stored, current, activity, cortex, allows]
Solving the knowledge-behavior gap: Numerical cognition explains age-related changes in fairness
Nadia Chernyak, Beth Sandham, Paul Harris, Sara Cordes


Young children share fairly and expect others to do the same. Yet little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that support fairness. Across two experiments, we investigated whether children’s numerical competencies are linked with their sharing behavior. Preschoolers (aged 2.5-5.5) participated in either third-party (Experiment 1) or first-party (Experiment 2) resource allocation tasks. Children’s numerical competence was then assessed using the Give-N-Task (Sarnecka & Carey, 2008; Wynn, 1990). Numerical competence – specifically knowledge of the cardinal principle explained age-related changes in fair sharing in both the third- and first-party contexts. These results suggest that an understanding of the cardinal principle serves as an important mechanism for fair sharing behavior.
[age, trial, child, type, task, tested, response, journal, test, developmental, presented, looked] [experiment, understanding, cognition, cognitive, work, social, motivated, mediated, explained, possibility, excluded, told] [share, context, gender, shared, experimental, error, consistently] [sharing, fair, knowledge, numerical, fairly, young, cardinal, resource, fairness, number, counting, subset, puppet, ability, understand, continued, cardinality, dfs, asked, generous, recipient, recognize, division, preschool, video, boston, mediation, additional, museum, question, interested, equivalence, dinosaur] [principle, mechanism, table, order] [distribution, model, predicted, behavior, prior, likelihood, find, set, range, determine, norm] [figure]
Gesture reveals spatial analogies during complex relational reasoning
Kensy Cooperrider, Dedre Gentner, Susan Goldin-Meadow


How do people think about complex relational phenomena like the behavior of the stock market? Here we hypothesize that people reason about such phenomena in part by creating spatial analogies, and we explore this possibility by examining people’s spontaneous gestures. Participants read a written lesson describing positive and negative feedback systems and then explained the key differences between them. Though the lesson was highly abstract and free of concrete imagery, participants produced spatial gestures in abundance during their explanations. These spatial gestures, despite being fundamentally abstract, showed clear regularities and often built off of each other to form larger spatial models of relational structure—that is, spatial analogies. Importantly, the spatial richness and systematicity revealed in participants’ gestures was largely divorced from spatial language. These results provide evidence for the spontaneous use of spatial analogy during complex relational reasoning.
[relational, complex, analogy, evidence, type, time, learning, task, visuospatial, gentner, analogical] [people, causal, factor, cognitive, negative, positive, reasoning, participant, work, representational, possibility, established, described, understanding, mental, seed, mechanical, explain, key, consistent, explained, divorced] [spatial, gesture, language, reference, produced, depicted, describing, sort, spontaneous, produce, highly, remains] [change, feedback, lesson, analyzed, study, larger, understand, investigated, usa, example] [abstract, relation, sorting, concrete, considered, increase] [observed, set, behavior, model, call] [system, represent, space, involved, movement, multiple, left, focus, represented, process, role]
What Determines Human Certainty?
Louis Marti, Steven Piantadosi, Francis Mollica, Celeste Kidd


Previous work on concept learning has focused on how concepts are acquired, without addressing metacognitive aspects of this process. An important part of concept learning from a learner's perspective is knowing subjectively when a new concept has been effectively learned. Here, we investigate learners' certainty in a classic Boolean concept-learning task. We collected certainty judgements during the concept-learning task from 552 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We compare different models of certainty in order to determine exactly what learners' subjective certainty judgments encode. Our results suggest that learners' certainty is best explained by local accuracy rather than plausible alternatives such as total entropy or the maximum a posteriori hypothesis of an idealized Bayesian learner. This result suggests that certainty predominately reflects learners' performance and feedback, rather than any metacognition about the inferential task they are solving.
[accuracy, learning, trial, task, novel, predictor, evidence, condition, tested, rule, indicating, second, learner, compare] [participant, low, sense, cognitive, explained, psychological, simply, consistent] [map, highly, previous, feldman] [concept, performance, correct, feedback, high, number, study, metacognitive, practice, three] [local, large, small, entropy, predicate, table, measure, order, analysis, include, word, reflect, complexity] [certainty, model, log, subjective, total, hypothesis, ideal, xor, likelihood, boolean, red, uncertainty, best, fit, well, idealized, maximum, data, objective, reflects, memorization, guess, observed, simple, bayesian, prior, spanned, true, theory, increasing, confidence] [current, human, figure, poor, visual]
Desirable difficulties in the development of active inquiry skills
George Kachergis, Marjorie Rhodes, Todd Gureckis


This study explores developmental changes in the ability to ask informative questions. We hypothesized an intrinsic link between the ability to update beliefs in light of evidence and the ability to ask informative questions. Four- to ten-year-old children played an iPad game asking them to identify a hidden bug. Learners could either ask about individual bugs, or make a series of feature queries (e.g., "Does the bug have antennae?") that could more efficiently narrow the hypothesis space. The task display either helped children integrate evidence with the hypothesis space or required them to do so. Although we found that helping children update their beliefs improved some aspects of their active inquiry behavior, those that updated their own beliefs asked questions that were more context-sensitive and thus informative. The results show how making a task more difficult may actually improve children’s active inquiry skills, thus illustrating a type of desirable difficulty.
[condition, exemplar, age, bug, type, older, evidence, task, identify, younger, learning, developmental, slower, eliminated] [consistent, cognitive, work, false, anova, scientific] [informative, main, error, manipulated, select] [active, group, number, required, young, study, science, greater, difficulty, feedback, ability, asked, question, desirable, answer, difficult, lower] [random, structure, abstract, efficient, quality] [hypothesis, query, manual, update, eig, inquiry, button, round, updating, expected, remaining, gain, search, higher, game, efficiently, randomly, median, making, eliminate, selected, find, queried, scanning, played, simulated, qualitative, lead] [feature, figure, hidden, space, automatic, fewer, body, press]
Linguistic Signatures of Cognitive Processes during Writing
Laura Allen, Cecile Perret, Danielle McNamara


The relationship between working memory capacity and writing ability was examined via a linguistic analysis of student essays. Undergraduate students (n = 108) wrote timed, prompt-based essays and completed a battery of cognitive assessments. The surface- and discourse-level linguistic features of students’ essays were then analyzed using natural language processing tools. The results indicated that WM capacity was related to surface-level, but not discourse-level features of student essays. Additionally, the results suggest that these relationships were attenuated for students with high inferencing skills, as opposed to those with lower inferencing skills.
[journal, evidence, complex, processing, test] [capacity, cognitive, inference, low, intentional, relationship, understanding] [linguistic, memory, language, calculated, previous, degree] [ability, working, high, educational, knowledge, study, conducted, investigate, student, number, strategy] [writing, text, word, inferencing, cohesion, incidence, frequency, essay, logical, relate, quality, reading, lexical, semantic, verb, minimum, lsa, subordinating, analysis, calculate, polysemy, natural, comprehension, table, discourse, sentence, hypernymy, examine] [individual, higher, log, measured, model, selected, regression] [multiple, component, overlap, role, process, motion, current]
Balancing Structural and Temporal Constraints in Multitasking Contexts
Dario Salvucci, Tuomo Kujala


Recent research has shown that when people multitask, both the subtask structure and the temporal constraints of the component tasks strongly influence people’s task-switching behavior. In this paper, we propose an integrated theoretical account and associated computational model that aims to quantify how people balance structural and temporal constraints in everyday multitasking. We validate the theory using data from an empirical study in which drivers performed a visual-search task while navigating a driving environment. Through examination of illustrative protocols from the model and human drivers as well as the overall fit on the aggregate glance data, we explore the implications of the theory and model for time-critical multitasking domains.
[task, time, switch, showing, finding] [temporal, cognitive, people, person, account, influence, generally, focused, work, relationship, road] [item] [balance, example, number, better, chi, equal, three, lower] [structural, complete, computational, structure, theoretical, continuation, earlier, completion, analysis, includes, graph] [model, search, behavior, button, aggregate, individual, function, total, point, prior, increasing, data, reward, well, theory, empirical, hierarchy, consider] [urgency, subtask, driving, glance, figure, switching, human, press, driver, multitasking, action, continuing, duration, visual, protocol, current, kujala, associated, subtasks, focus, define, process, illustrated, environment, continues, balancing]
Do additional features help or harm during category learning? An exploration of the curse of dimensionality in human learners
Wai Keen Vong, Andrew Hendrickson, Amy Perfors, Daniel Navarro


How does the number of features impact category learning? One view suggests additional features create a “curse of dimensionality” - where having more features causes the size of the search space to explode such that learning becomes increasingly challenging. The opposing view suggests additional features provides additional information which should be beneficial. Previous research exploring this issue has produced conflicting results: some finding additional features are helpful (Hoffman & Murphy, 2006) or harmful (Minda & Smith, 2001; Edgell et al., 1996). Here we investigate the possibility that category structure may explain this apparent discrepancy – more features are useful in categories with family resemblance structure, but are not in rule-based categories. We find while the impact of having many features depends on category structure, which can be explained by a single unified model that attends to a single feature on any given trial and uses that information to make judgments.
[category, learning, testing, naive, family, rule, curse, trial, diagnosticity, accuracy, resemblance, block, suggests, learned, label, minda, classification, condition, stimulus, second, learn, journal, grow] [people, diagnostic, experiment, psychological] [experimental, previous, main, occurs] [performance, additional, number, three, hybrid, better, improve, correct, impact, hurt, high, differ] [structure, natural, large, small, manipulating, determining] [model, hypothesis, predictive, bayes, intermediate, prediction, full, qualitative, increasing, data, set, predicted, binary, based, capture, paper, find, proportion, amoeba, consider, selected, search, making, probability, perfectly] [feature, dimensionality, human, figure, single, current, space, defined, interaction]
A model of conditional probability judgment
Fintan Costello, Paul Watts


A standard view in cognitive psychology is that people estimate probabilities using heuristics that do not follow probability theory. We describe a model of probability estimation where people do follow probability theory in estimation, but are subject to random error or noise. This model predicts that people's conditional probability estimates will agree closely with probability theory for certain noise-cancelling expressions, but deviate from probability theory for other expressions. We describe an experiment which strongly confirms these predictions, suggesting that people estimate conditional probabilities in a way that follows standard probability theory, but is subject to the biasing effects of random noise.
[block, pair, chance, half, standard, evidence] [event, people, conditional, reasoning, close, agreement, experiment, positive, systematic, correction, psychology, reason, cognitive, psychological, hold] [item, instance, occurs, expect, bonferroni, calculated, error, degree, describe, memory] [sum, counting, number, equal, equation, required, correct] [random, read, table, bias, subject, frequency, direct, occurrence] [probability, theory, model, average, hpe, estimate, expected, individual, predicts, predicted, sample, noise, follow, correlation, set, assume, weather, flag, randomly, symmetrically, observed, dividing, requirement, ireland, range, probabilistic, heuristic, fell, estimated, exclusive, vary] [identity, distributed, multiple, view, expression, process]
When does passive learning improve the effectiveness of active learning?
Kyle MacDonald, Mike Frank


Much of what we learn comes from a mix of information that we select (active) and information that we receive (passive). But which type of training is better for different kinds of learning problems? Here, we explore this question by comparing different sequences of active/passive training in an abstract concept learning task. First, we replicate the active learning advantage from Markant & Gureckis (2014) (Experiments 1a and 1b). Then, we provide a test of whether experiencing active learning first or passive learning first improves the effectiveness of concept learning (Experiment 2). Across both experiments, active training led to better learning of the target concept, but "passive-first" learners were more accurate than "active-first" learners and more efficient than "active-only" learners. These findings broaden our understanding of when different sequences of active/passive learning are more effective, suggesting that for certain problems active exploration can be enhanced with prior passive experience.
[learning, training, category, accuracy, block, test, condition, classification, task, evidence, time, advantage, type, replication, receiving, size, learn, trial, indicate, finding, boundary, replicate, reliable, reported, explore, suggesting, completed, target, radius, second] [experiment, people, antenna, work, understanding, discussion] [channel, main] [active, passive, better, performance, gureckis, markant, concept, linear, identical, yoked, exact, study, science] [quality, distance, abstract, direct, increase, computed] [sample, fit, higher, sampling, generated, model, predicting, prior, randomly, exploration, data, generate, logistic, point] [original, interaction, performed, figure, selection, current, design, angle]
The mismeasurement of mind: How neuropsychological testing creates a false picture of cognitive aging
Michael Ramscar, Ching Chu Sun, Peter Hendrix, Harald Baayen


Age-related declines in scores on neuropsychological tests are widely believed to reveal that human cognitive capacities decline across the lifespan. In a computational simulation, we show how the behavioral patterns observed in Paired Associate Learning (PAL), a particularly sensitive measures of age-related performance change (Rabbitt & Lowe, 2000), are predicted by the models used to formalize associative learning processes in other areas of behavioral and neuroscientific research. The simulation further predicts that manipulating language exposure will reproduce the experience-related performance differences erroneously attributed to age-related decline in age-matched adults. Consistent with this, older bilinguals outperformed native speakers in a German PAL test, an advantage that increased with age. These analyses and results show that age-related PAL performance changes reflect the predictable effects of learning on the associability of test items, and indicate that failing to control for these effects is distorting our understanding of cognitive and brain development in adulthood.
[pal, learning, test, older, vocabulary, age, decline, cue, journal, presented, jury, ramscar, lifespan, paired, response, increased, meaningless, evidence, adult, aging, eagle, declining, development, task] [cognitive, experience, consistent, influence, understanding, psychological, appear, negative, sensitive] [language, german, associative, native, background, lexicon, harder, memory, meaningful] [performance, young, change, blocking, asked, correct, worse, better] [word, association, frequency, associate, chinese, reflect, analysis] [theory, data, predicted, simulation, prior, predicts, model] [figure, neuropsychological, behavioral, current, interaction, reveal, pattern, performed, human]
When are representations of causal events quantum versus classical?
James Yearsley, Jennifer Trueblood, Emmanuel Pothos


Throughout our lives, we are faced with a variety of causal reasoning problems. Arguably, the most successful models of causal reasoning, Causal Graphical Models (CGMs), perform well in some situations, but there is considerable variation in how well they are able to account for data, both across scenarios and between individuals. We propose a model of causal reasoning based on quantum probability (QP) theory that accounts for behavior in situations where CGMs fail. Whether QP or classical models are appropriate depends on the representation of events constructed by the reasoner. We describe an experiment that suggests the representation of events can change with experience to become more classical, and that the representation constructed can vary between individuals, in a way that correlates with a simple measure of cognitive ability, The Cognitive Reflection Task.
[block, test, novel, complex, learned] [crt, causal, reasoning, low, cognitive, experience, judgment, experiment, initial, told, including, reason, victoria, participant, lake, cognition, equally, event] [memory, clearly] [three, high, group, number, score, performance, asked, question, answer, better, reflection, difference] [order, amount, animal, turn, analysis, constructed] [classical, quantum, model, compatible, probability, bayesian, inverse, incompatible, shrimp, dic, theory, fallacy, based, behavior, well, individual, decision, successful, vary, bayes, set, state, projection, bottom, function, choice] [feature, representation, figure, body, represented, space, human, medium, associated, weight, top]
Systematic feature variation underlies adults’ and children’s use of in and on
Kristen Johannes, Colin Wilson, Barbara Landau


The spatial prepositions in and on apply to a wide range of containment and support relations, making exhaustive definitions difficult. Theories differ in whether they endorse geometric or functional properties and how these properties are related to meaning and use. We directly examine the roles of geometric and functional information in adults’ and children’s use of in and on by developing a large sample of relations situated within a small gradable geometric and functional feature space. We propose that variation in features across items is systematically related to the use of in and on and demonstrate that feature-language relationships change across development: adults’ expression use is sensitive to both geometric and functional features, while children’s use varies only according to geometric features.
[adult, child, position, task, match, early, suggesting, completed, evidence, reliably] [rating, relationship, cognitive, low, rated, wide, sensitive, scale, mapping, described] [geometric, support, containment, spatial, functional, object, locational, variation, enclosure, contact, vertical, item, language, description, ground, garrod, term, empty, gradable, degree, describe, highly, encode, coded] [control, high, group, hypothesized, provided, volume, study, knowledge] [surface, table, english, large] [predicted, probabilistic, sample, propose, set, range, predict, binary, based, individual, higher, model] [feature, figure, space, location, move, expression, top]
Modeling Triage Decision Making
J. Isaiah Harbison, Alan Mishler, Thomas Wallsten


With the ever increasing amount of information available, the ability to prioritize the most relevant items for full processing is increasingly necessary to maintain expertise in a domain. As a result, accurate triage decisions--initial decisions about the relevance of a given article, book, or talk in order to determine whether to pursue that information further--are very important. In the present paper, we present a model of triage decision making that includes both an information search component to determine reading strategy and a decision making component to make the final decision. We apply the model to human relevance ratings as well as binary decisions of relevance for a set of emails.
[evidence, time, response, target, reaction, rule, processing, general, tested] [relevance, participant, relevant, relationship, negative, judgment, rating, experiment] [distractor, incremental, item] [strategy, three, magnitude, additional, number, sum] [triage, topic, email, skim, paragraph, random, word, amount, text, reading, document, sentence, walk, order, article, table, confident, running, read] [decision, search, model, making, threshold, stopping, skimming, correlation, data, rate, pmi, binary, confidence, return, predicted, set, state, terminated, function, expected, maker, probability, well, gain, enron, terminate, patch, collected, determine, distribution] [process, figure, current, human, responding, movement, component]
Temporal Structure Modulates ERP Correlates of Visual Sequential Learning
Kimberly Ross, Christopher Conway


Sequential learning (SL) refers to the ability to learn the temporal and ordinal patterns of one’s environment. The current study examines the effects of synchronous and asynchronous temporal patterns on visual sequential learning. We hypothesize that entrainment allows for better processing of the ordinal structure of sequential events. Twenty healthy adult participants performed two versions (synchronous and asynchronous) of a visual sequential learning paradigm while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Reaction time data demonstrated that learning occurred in both temporal conditions. On the other hand, the mean ERP amplitudes between 350 and 750ms post-predictor onset in the posterior regions of interest revealed that learning of the statistical contingencies between stimuli was disrupted for the asynchronous temporal condition but intact for the synchronous condition. These neurophysiological data suggest that the brain processes regular and irregular timing events differently, with statistical learning of ordinal patterns being improved by a synchronous temporal structure.
[learning, half, synchronous, condition, task, erp, processing, asynchronous, statistical, predictor, second, sequential, target, timing, erps, reaction, time, regularity, sequence, presentation, auditory, block, explore, attention, journal, indicating, stimulus, type, revealed, improved, jost, predictability, metrical, repeated, entrainment, reported] [temporal, implicit, future, cognitive, psychological, version, participant] [filler, consciousness, main, experimental, language] [three, ordinal, circle, study, conducted, larger, better, ability, high, attending] [regular, structure] [posterior, data, well, expected, varying, theory] [visual, figure, process, brain, interaction, left, interest, current, net, component, allows]
Knowledge and use of price distributions by populations and individuals
Timothy Lew, Edward Vul


How much do individuals, compared to the population, know about the distribution of values in the world? Participants reported the prices of consumer goods such as watches and belts and we compared how accurately individuals vs. the overall population knew the mean and dispersion of prices. Although individuals and the population both knew objects’ average prices and relative standard deviations, the population was more sensitive to the absolute standard deviation of prices. In a second experiment, we examined whether individuals’ impoverished distribution knowledge impairs their ability to interpret advertisements. Consistent with people using Bayesian inference, the higher an object’s actual price dispersion, the more participants relied on advertisements; however, this effect is considerably smaller than a simple proportional offset, suggesting again that individuals underestimate dispersion. Thus, despite having a sense of the distribution of real world quantities, individuals tend to know only a fraction of the world distribution.
[standard, compared, indicate, presented, reported, category, session, indicating, suggesting, novel] [people, positive, experiment, negative, inference, participant, cognitive, despite, influence, guessed, consistent, examined] [object, rely, baking, highly, modifier, varied, calculated, accompanied] [knowledge, slope, ability, absolute, better, limited, smaller, linear] [variance, random, correlated, distributional, heavily, accurately, greatly] [price, dispersion, confidence, average, true, population, distribution, knew, infer, advertisement, model, individual, deviation, interval, regression, everyday, well, range, determine, log, pragmatic, full, prior, percentile, estimate, guess, calibrated, relied, bayesian, estimated, set, behavior, impoverished] [interaction, figure, multiple, represent, grey]
Benefiting from Being Alike: Interindividual Skill Differences Predict Collective Benefit in Joint Object Control
Basil Wahn, Laura Schmitz, Peter König, Günther Knoblich


When two individuals perform a task together, they combine their individual skills to achieve a joint goal. Previous research has shown that interindividual skill differences predict a group’s collective benefit in joint perceptual decision-making. In the present study, we tested whether this relationship also holds for other task domains, using a dynamic object control task in which two participants each controlled either the vertical or horizontal movement direction of an object. Our findings demonstrate that the difference in individuals’ skill levels was highly predictive of the dyad’s collective benefit. Differences in individuals’ subjective ratings of task difficulty reflected skill differences and thus also turned out to be a predictor of collective benefit. Generally, collective benefit was modulated by spatial task demands. Overall, the present study shows that previous findings in joint decision-making can be extended to dynamic motor tasks such as joint object control.
[task, target, type, condition, indicate, predictor, phase, test, tested, facilitate] [participant, cognitive, experiment, rating] [spatial, object, perceptual, vertical, experimental, previous, main, university] [collective, benefit, contribution, performance, control, skill, interindividual, cursor, better, dist, difficulty, member, difference, study, bahrami, larger, group, ratio, circle, three, external, lower, contributed, science, skillful, precise, coarse] [approach, relative, measure, quality] [individual, predict, predicted, subjective, well, correlation, jointly, data, higher] [joint, dyad, controlled, movement, figure, dynamic, action, horizontal, separately, assigning, left, motor, european, angle, moving, central, start, performed, interaction, germany]
Towards a Cognitively Realistic Representation of Word Associations
Ivana Kajic, Jan Gosmann, Terrence Stewart, Thomas Wennekers, Chris Eliasmith


The ability to associate words is an important cognitive skill. In this study we investigate different methods for representing word associations in the brain, using the Remote Associates Test (RAT) as a task. We explore representations derived from free association norms and statistical n-gram data. Although n-gram representations yield better performance on the test, a closer match with the human performance is obtained with representations derived from free associations. We propose that word association strengths derived from free associations play an important role in the process of RAT solving. Furthermore, we show that this model can be implemented in spiking neurons, and estimate the number of biologically realistic neurons that would suffice for an accurate representation.
[cue, test, second, statistical, processing, time, compound, target] [cognitive, work, analytical, psychological] [memory, language, latent, implemented, recall, associative] [free, solution, performance, problem, solving, group, correct, number, three, study, better, solve, reduction, sum, insight] [word, association, rat, vector, fan, analysis, semantic, google, approach, sym, remote, derived, fire, ngsym, symmetric, asym, creative, svd, similarity, producing] [data, model, set, asymmetric, based, probability, best, method, predict, allow, realistic, find, preferred] [human, matrix, representation, neural, top, spiking, representing, figure, represent, network, neuron, output, dimensionality, process, biologically]
Vector Space Semantic Models Predict Subjective Probability Judgments for Real-World Events
Sudeep Bhatia


We examine how people judge the probabilities of real-world events, such as natural disasters in different countries. We find that the associations between the words and phrases that constitute these events, as assessed by vector space semantic models, strongly correlate with the probabilities assigned to these events by participants. Thus, for example, the semantic proximity of “earthquake” and “Japan” accurately predicts judgments regarding the probability of an earthquake in Japan. Our results suggest that the mechanisms and representations at play in language are also active in high-level domains, such as judgment and decision making, and that existing insights regarding these representations can be used to make precise, quantitative, a priori predictions regarding the probability estimates of individuals.
[processing] [people, event, judgment, participant, psychological, bank, assigned, judge, famous, united, fact, described] [highly, associative, language, linguistic] [linear, study, knowledge, academy, asked, number, involving, logarithmic, japan] [word, semantic, vector, association, natural, cosine, distance, approach, analysis, similarity, nobel, mikolov, google, involve, turn, popular, large, considered, table] [probability, predict, average, earthquake, model, logistic, subjective, assign, paper, find, decision, fit, note, provide, consider, predicting, making, data, winning, estimate, attempt, fitting, linda, set, state, everyday] [space, released]
Noisy Parameters in Risky Choice
Sudeep Bhatia, Graham Loomes


We examine the effect of variability in model parameters on the predictions of expected utility theory and cumulative prospect theory, two of the most influential choice models in decision making research. We find that zero-mean and symmetrically distributed noise in the underlying parameters of these models can systematically distort choice probabilities, leading to false conclusions. Likewise, differences in choice proportions across decision makers might be due to differences in the amount of noise affecting underlying parameters rather than to differences in actual parameter values. Our results suggest that care and caution are needed when trying to infer the underlying preferences of decision makers, or the effects of psychological, biological, economic, and demographic variables on these preferences.
[modal, chance, deterministic, time, journal, pair] [suppose, case, account, psychological] [variability, offering, term] [high, seeking, equivalent] [small, typically, approach, amount, reflect, considered, random] [choice, decision, noise, probability, fechnerian, risk, expected, risky, underlying, gamble, parameter, utility, stochastic, preference, choosing, obtaining, model, function, eut, theory, luce, xiv, prospect, weighting, choose, tendency, yiii, observed, varying, option, range, consider, data, point, xiii, overweighting, cpt, making, safe, modelling, higher, economic, assumed, payoff, maker, chooses, noisy, vary, paper, chosen, xii] [figure, central, behavioral, pattern, distributed, represents, represented]
The Influence of Language-specific Auditory Cues on the Learnability of Center-embedded Recursion
Jun Lai, Chiara de Jong, Dingguo Gao, Ren Huang, Emiel Krahmer, Jan Sprenger


The learnability of center-embedded recursive structures has attracted much attention. However, previous studies adopted the artificial grammar learning paradigm and did not apply natural language stimuli. Accordingly, we attempt to tighten the link between artificial language learning and natural language acquisition in the auditory modality, by enriching our learning environment with phonological cues that occur in natural language, namely, spoken information, in particular, Chinese tones. In a grammaticality judgment task, we examined the syntactical processing by participants from different language backgrounds. Through the cross-language comparison between Chinese and Dutch native speakers, we aim to test the influence of language-specific phonological cues on processing complex linguistic structures. The results showed that tones had a more beneficial learning effect on Chinese than on Dutch participants. When participants learned a new language, they were likely to bring their own language routines implicitly from the familiar native language into processing the unfamiliar one.
[learning, artificial, auditory, tonal, processing, test, modality, statistical, complex, ungrammatical, target, repeated, second, pitch, half, accuracy, journal, chance, learned, segmentation, grammaticality, training, syllable, tone, recorded, presented, sun] [cognitive, influence, consistent] [language, dutch, native, phonological, previous, tilburg, listening, grammatical, memory, main, learnability, speech, linguistic, listener, netherlands, society, centerembedded] [study, science, three, number, performance, impact, annual] [chinese, natural, recursive, unique, word, grammar, small, syntactic, english, recursion, structure, syntactical, amount, complexity, acquisition, helped, large] [higher, prior, set, conference] [figure, current, performed, hierarchical, visual, input, focus]
U-INVITE: Estimating Individual Semantic Networks from Fluency Data
Jeffrey Zemla, Yoed Kenett, Kwang-Sung Jun, Joseph Austerweil


Semantic networks have been used extensively in psychology to describe how humans organize facts and knowledge in memory. Numerous methods have been proposed to construct semantic networks using data from memory retrieval tasks, such as the semantic fluency task (listing items in a category). However these methods typically generate group-level networks, and sometimes require a very large amount of participant data. We present a novel computational method for estimating an individual’s semantic network using semantic fluency data that requires very little data. We establish its efficacy by examining the semantic relatedness of associations estimated by the model.
[response, compared, time, category, task, statistical, novel, starting, reported] [cognitive, psychological, false, reconstructed, participant, psychology] [memory, item, retrieval] [number, procedure, three, additional, toy, difference] [semantic, fluency, random, walk, list, invite, irt, censored, beagle, removed, edge, jun, mth, unweighted, order, examine, irts, node, structure, uncensored, clustering, similarity, toggle, weighted, censoring, absorbed, incorporating, proposed, computational, large, amount] [model, method, data, estimate, generated, expected, probability, estimated, estimating, denotes, average, search, generate, individual, parameter, cost, higher, function, assume, total] [network, human, process, original, figure, switching, fewer, weight, transition, multiple]
Conversational expectations account for apparent limits on theory of mind use
Robert X.d. Hawkins, Noah Goodman


Theory of mind is a powerful cognitive ability: by the age of six, people are capable of accurately reasoning about others' beliefs and desires. An influential series of language understanding experiments by Keysar and colleagues, however, showed that adults systematically failed to take a speaker's beliefs into account, revealing limitations on theory of mind. In this paper we argue that these apparent failures are in fact successes. Through a minimal pair of replications comparing scripted vs. unscripted speakers, we show that critical utterances used by Keysar and colleagues are uncooperative: they are less informative than what a speaker would actually produce in that situation. When we allow participants to naturally interact, we find that listener expectations are justified and errors are reduced. This ironically shows that apparent failures of theory of mind are in fact attributable to sophisticated expectations about speaker behavior---that is, to theory of mind.
[target, condition, time, baseline, label, replication, reported, suggests, half] [experiment, social, fact, participant, roll, understanding, including, percentage, account, recruited, mechanical, common] [error, distractor, keysar, item, speaker, experimental, scripted, informative, director, matcher, object, referring, fitness, listener, tape, produce, web, cassette, language, informativity, confederate, utterance, unscripted, attempted, filler, cell, visible, unconstrained] [mind, better, instruction, precise, additional, difficult, correct] [random, relative, table, window] [theory, fit, total, making, tendency, decision, model, set, behavior, pragmatic, provide, data, find, amazon] [hidden, critical, occluded, move, original, figure, apparent, role]
Simpler structure for more informative words: a longitudinal study
Uriel Cohen Priva, Emily Gleason


As new concepts and discoveries accumulate over time, the amount of information available to speakers increases as well. One would expect that an utterance today would be more informative than an utterance 100 years ago (basing information on surprisal; Shannon 1948), given the increase in technology and scientific discoveries. This prediction, however, is at odds with recent theories regarding information in human language use, which suggest that speakers maintain a somewhat constant information rate over time. Using the Google Ngram corpus (Michel et al. 2011), we show for multiple languages that changes in lexical information (a unigram model) are actually negatively correlated with changes in structural information (a trigram model), supporting recent proposals on information theoretic constraints.
[time, journal, size, complex, year, predictability, suggesting] [negative, negatively, relationship, positively] [language, american, informative, speech, van, context, memory, expect, previous, brown, affect, utterance, linguistic] [number, change, cohen, study, provided, observing, controlling, material, subset, knowledge, reduction, published] [entropy, trigram, unigram, word, english, structural, unique, residual, lexical, corpus, correlated, google, syntactic, unigrams, ngram, frequency, british, amount, increase, rise, soup, complexity, raining, acceptable, aerial, today, levy, efficient, random] [rate, log, probability, total, data, model, correlation, sample, individual, hypothesis, predict, estimate, prediction, predicted, collected, higher] [figure, duration, controlled, theoretic]
Facilitating Spatial Task Learning in Interactive Multimedia Environments While Accounting for Individual Differences and Task Difficulty
Dar-Wei Chen, Richard Catrambone


Two experiments examined the effects of interactive tutorial features (compared to “passive” features) on learning spatial tasks, an area seldom explored in interactivity research. Experiment 1 results indicated that for simple spatial tasks, interactive tutorials hindered learning for participants of higher spatial ability but improved learning for lower-ability participants. This interaction can be explained by “compensation,” the notion that people of higher ability can compensate for poor external support (passive tutorials) while people of lower ability need the better support. It is likely that the increased cognitive load of interactivity (Kalyuga, 2007) hindered high-spatial participants on a relatively easy task. In Experiment 2, task difficulty was increased, and the results revealed that the interactive tutorial produced better learning than the passive tutorial, regardless of spatial abilities. With the relatively difficult task, the benefits of interactivity became clearer because most people actually needed the interactive features despite the associated cognitive load.
[learning, task, condition, cross, time, learn, learner, type] [experiment, people, multimedia, cognitive, mental, yellow, understanding, positive, discussion, examined, assigned, low] [spatial, van, support, main, matching] [interactive, interactivity, tutorial, ability, passive, cube, control, better, online, assessment, study, score, knowledge, difficult, educational, tier, video, college, creating, mse, high, allowed, needed, external, lower, easy, compensate, difference, encouraged, material, easily, difficulty, place, instructional, performance, achievement, create] [edge, complete, table] [individual, correlation, scoring, higher] [user, figure, interaction, corner, move, involves, performed, feature, scheme]
A Neural Dynamic Model Parses Object-Oriented Actions
Mathis Richter, Jonas Lins, Gregor Schoener


Parsing actions entails that relations between objects are discovered. A pervasively neural account of this process requires that fundamental problems are solved: the neural pointer problem, the binding problem, and the problem of generating discrete processing steps from time-continuous neural processes. We present a prototypical solution to these problems in a neural dynamic model that comprises dynamic neural fields holding representations close to sensorimotor surfaces as well as dynamic nodes holding discrete, language-like representations. Making the connection between these two types of representations enables the model to parse actions as well as ground movement phrases - all based on real visual input. We demonstrate how the dynamic neural processes autonomously generate the processing steps required to parse or ground object-oriented action.
[target, attention, relational, processing, attentional, time, selective, continuous, formed] [account, cognitive, yellow, frame] [spatial, reference, object, color, ground, language, intention, production, university, memory, map] [discrete, video, operator] [phrase, node, oxford, parsing, organization, computational] [model, red, based, behavior, theory, higher, requires, emerge, generate] [neural, field, dynamic, activation, process, architecture, feature, input, grounding, visual, perception, dft, movement, representation, represented, multiple, binding, moving, left, defined, peak, framework, interaction, embodied, action, represents, space, projected, motion, scene, allows, weight, steerable, user, project, sensorimotor, coordinate, location, output]
Contextual Events and Their Role in a Two-Choice Joint Simon Task
Steve Croker, J. Scott Jordan, Daniel Schloesser, Vincent Cialdella, Alex Dayer


We examined the effects of individual versus joint action on a Simon task using motion tracking to explore the implicit cognitive dynamics underlying responses. In both individual and joint conditions, participants were slower to respond, and were differentially attracted to the distracter response location, when the spatial component of the stimulus was incompatible with the response location. When two people completed similar two choice tasks together, the results were not statistically different from the individual condition, even though the magnitude of the stimulus-response compatibility effect was slightly larger. Neither was there an increased effect when the partner had no stimulus-response conflict to resolve. We found no evidence for an action conflict when the responses of the two partners were different. These data imply that the literature regarding the Joint Simon task is still in the process of determining the relevant events that interact with and support joint action.
[response, task, condition, stimulus, conflict, spatially, completed, target, mouse, rule, trajectory, presented, standard, trial, increased, evidence, alongside] [participant, cognitive, indicated] [spatial, color, distracter, confederate, error, expect, basic, referential] [difference, larger, greater, study, correct, addition, engaged, differentially] [direct] [individual, data, incompatible, maximum, compatible, green, deviation, button, red] [left, joint, simon, respond, direction, partner, croker, rts, figure, pointing, tapping, responded, location, action, motion, ring, movement, interaction, compatibility, tracking, responding, sebanz, hand, component, attracted, coding, longer, rightdirection, reach]
A Framework for Evaluating Speech Representations
Caitlin Richter, Naomi Feldman, Harini Salgado, Aren Jansen


Listeners track distributions of speech sounds along perceptual dimensions. We introduce a method for evaluating hypotheses about what those dimensions are, using a cognitive model whose prior distribution is estimated directly from speech recordings. We use this method to evaluate two speaker normalization algorithms against human data. Simulations show that representations that are normalized across speakers predict human discrimination data better than unnormalized representations, consistent with previous research. Results further reveal differences across normalization methods in how well each predicts human data. This work provides a framework for evaluating hypothesized representations of speech and lays the groundwork for testing models of speech perception on natural speech recordings from ecologically valid settings.
[categorization, tested, exemplar, stimulus, statistical, target, test, advantage] [cognitive, consistent, work, front] [speech, vtln, speaker, normalization, discrimination, perceptual, mfccs, acoustic, vowel, dialect, normalized, mfcc, female, formant, gender, divergence, vocal, tract, unnormalized, male, nsp, previous, phonetic, production, directly, implemented, variability, error] [high, effective, performance] [corpus, computed, similarity, distance] [model, distribution, prior, data, likelihood, method, predict, evaluating, set, higher, log, estimated, probability, provide, fit, posterior, sample] [human, perception, feature, signal, figure, input, dimensionality, represented, representation, automatic, corresponding, mcmurray, allows]
Biases and Benefits of Number Lines and Pie Charts in Proportion Representation
Michelle Hurst, Charlotta Relander, Sara Cordes


In two experiments, we investigate how adults think about proportion across different symbolic and spatial representations in a comparison task (Experiment 1) and a translation task (Experiment 2). Both experiments show response patterns suggesting that decimal notation provides a symbolic advantage in precision when representing numerical magnitude, whereas fraction notation does not. In addition, pie charts may show some advantages above number lines when translating between representations. Lastly, our findings suggest that the translation between number lines and fractions may be particularly error-prone. We discuss what these performance patterns suggest in terms of how adults represent proportional information across these different formats and some potential avenues through which these advantages and disadvantages may arise, suggesting new questions for future work.
[task, presented, suggesting, journal, response, continuous, advantage, type, finding, suggests, trial, block, repeated] [experiment, distinct, anova, indicated, investigating, participant, representational] [spatial, main, experimental] [number, pie, decimal, fraction, ratio, magnitude, symbolic, involving, proportional, partial, symbol, chart, notation, comparison, translating, performance, larger, avg, numerical, smaller, comparing, circle, better, accurate, strategy, correct, largest, included, discrete, instruction, boston, investigate, college, precision, difficult, format, hurst, provided, approximate] [large, small, order, translation, bias, table] [proportion, data, rational] [representation, represented, involved, representing, screen, represent, pattern, left]
Critical Features of Joint Actions that Signal Human Interaction
Tianmin Shu, Steven Thurman, Dawn Chen, Song-Chun Zhu, Hongjing Lu


We examined the visual perception of joint actions, in which two individuals coordinate their body movements in space and time to achieve a joint goal. Animations of interacting action pairs (partners in human interactions) and non-interacting action pairs (individual actors sampled from different interaction sequences) were shown in the experiment. Participants were asked to rate how likely the two actors were interacting. The rating data were then analyzed using multidimensional scaling to recover a two-dimensional psychological space for representing joint actions. A descriptive model based on ordinal logit regression with a sparseness constraint was developed to account for human judgments by identifying critical features that signal joint actions. We found that identification of joint actions could be accomplished by assessing inter-actor correlations between motion features derived from body movements of individual actions. These critical features may enable rapid detection of meaningful inter-personal interactions in complex scenes.
[dimension, type, pair, evidence, training, attention, journal, time] [social, rating, temporal, person, psychological, drink, variable, biological, experiment, frame] [meaningful, argue, van, spatial] [interactivity, high] [entropy, order, derived] [model, correlation, rank, set, based, capture, individual, data, average, selected, true] [joint, action, human, interaction, motion, arm, feature, actor, critical, body, visual, interacting, figure, space, limb, coordinated, ranking, matrix, salsa, play, threaten, shake, touching, moving, left, wrestle, dance, movement, leg, developed, whip, perception, fitted, achieve, catch, input, pull, defined, walking]
Are There Hidden Costs to Teaching Mathematics with Incorrect Examples?
Min Kyung Hong, Darren J. Yeo, Bethany Rittle-Johnson, Lisa K. Fazio


This study aims to address potential costs of using incorrect worked examples in teaching mathematics. While such practice has been shown to be effective in educational research, previous findings in the memory literature suggest that exposure to an incorrect solution may lead students to later believe that it is correct due to increased familiarity. We designed a two-session experiment with 1-week delay in which students studied correct and incorrect worked out examples. We found only small changes in students’ ability to successfully distinguish between correct and incorrect solutions over time. Students did rate the previously studied incorrect examples as being more correct after the 1-wk delay, but this did not affect their correctness ratings of new correct and incorrect worked examples or their problem solving accuracy. We conclude that the unique nature of mathematical problem solving may protect students from the dangers of using incorrect worked examples.
[learning, journal, repeated, presented, forgetting, test, time, learn, accuracy, novel, phase, task, learned] [rated, truth, rating, source, event, experiment, psychology, false, delay, cognitive, social, examined] [memory, delayed, remember, distinguish, experimental, error, studied, studying, specific, filler] [incorrect, correct, worked, solution, problem, study, solving, difference, correctness, knowledge, illusory, feedback, ability, change, example, solve, mathematics, solved, vanderbilt, asked, week, forget, appleton, peabody, educational, help, place, college, procedure, department, usa, answered, mse, instructional, answer] [order, analysis, examine, small, reflect] [probability, rate, prior, true] [figure, human, design]
The comprehension of English Garden-path sentences by Mandarin and Korean learners of English as a second language
Zhiying Qian


The present study investigated the relative contributions of verb bias and plausibility in sentence processing in native English speakers and L2 learners. Ten direct-object-biased and ten sentential-complement-biased verbs were used in Experiment 1 to construct 80 items containing embedded clauses in ambiguous and unambiguous versions. Verb bias and complementizer cues were each sufficient for native speakers for disambiguation, but both had to be present for L1-Mandarin learners. Both higher and lower proficiency L1-Mandarin learners could use verb bias cues but only higher proficiency L1-Korean learners could do so (Lee, Lu, & Garnsey, 2013), suggesting that L1 word order (Mandarin SVO; Korean SOV) influences how quickly L2 learners learn word-order-dependent cues about L2 structures. Experiment 2 showed that neither native speakers nor L2 learners (L1-Mandarin & L1-Korean) used plausibility cues, replicating previous findings in English and challenging the claim that L2 learners rely primarily on lexical-semantic cues during on-line sentence processing.
[cue, slower, learn, second, processing, accuracy, journal, age, time, revealed] [experiment, summarized, rated, lee, scientist] [native, language, object, ambiguity, main, rely, previous, memory, university] [group, lower, question, difference, study, hard] [verb, bias, ambiguous, proficiency, plausibility, complementizer, reading, english, direct, unambiguous, noun, disambiguating, read, sentence, embedded, table, word, syntactic, clause, comprehension, residual, club, frequency, understood, upcoming, plausible, subject, ticket, order, korean, mandarin, article, applied, admitted, structure, implausible, efficient, heavily] [higher, agent, based, true] [interaction, region, figure, pattern]
Choice adaptation to increasing and decreasing event probabilities
Samuel Cheyette, Emmanouil Konstantinidis, Jason Harman, Cleotilde Gonzalez


A constant element of our modern environment is change. In decision-making research however, very little is known about how people make choices in dynamic environments. We report the results of an experiment where participants were asked to choose between two options: a dynamic and risky option that resulted in either a high or a low outcome, and a stationary and safe option that resulted in a medium outcome. The probability of the high outcome in the risky option decreased or increased linearly over the course of the task while the probability of the medium outcome stayed the same throughout. We find that adaptation to change is related to the direction of that change, and that the way people adapt to changing probabilities relates to their willingness to explore available options. A cognitive model based on Instance-Based Learning Theory reproduces the behavioral patterns.
[condition, half, repeated, learning, trial, second, compared, early, time, paradigm, test] [people, cognitive, experience, psychological, experiment, low, result] [adaptation, memory, adapt, instance, experimental, select] [change, changing, high, better, study, course, difference, investigated, three] [frequent, panel] [option, decreasing, risky, model, increasing, probability, safe, outcome, choice, observed, stationary, average, decision, ibl, higher, function, gradual, data, proportion, adapting, rare, binary, rakow, gonzalez, behavior, maximizing, rate, recency, reflects, continual, making, stayed, observe, preference, noise, selecting] [dynamic, human, figure, environment, direction, left, activation, represents, associated]
Factors Influencing Categorization Strategy in Visual Category Learning
Sujith Thomas, Harish Karnick


Studies in visual category learning show that participants use different category generalization strategies. Some studies report a preference for a rule-based strategy, while others report a preference for a similarity-based strategy. We conducted category learning experiments in which we varied three variables - family resemblance of a category, saliency of the defining rule and presentation of transfer stimulus after a delay. Our results show that these factors influence the choice of category generalization strategy. Our study offers a possible explanation for the divergent results in the literature.
[category, saliency, rule, defining, type, target, stimulus, family, categorization, learning, resemblance, time, presented, training, generalization, response, identify, datapoints, testing, trial, dimension, polygon, presentation, lab, ith, quantify, boundary, pth] [experiment, participant, false, common, explain, cognitive, influence] [color, contrast, experimental, separate, memory, varied, calculated, thomas] [transfer, strategy, study, equation, difference, report, number, three, high, science, feedback, observational, linear, correctly] [entropy, minimum, abstract, divergent] [true, preferred, maximum, regression, model, choice, multinomial, preference, generated, data, correlation, average, randomly, range, distribution, decide] [figure, feature, visual]
Simulating Developmental Changes in Noun Richness through Performance-limited Distributional Analysis
Daniel Freudenthal, Julian Pine, Gary Jones, Fernand Gobet


In this paper we examine how a mechanism that learns word classes from distributional information can contribute to the simulation of child language. Using a novel measure of noun richness, it is shown that the ratio of nouns to verbs in young children’s speech is considerably higher than in adult speech. Simulations with MOSAIC show that this effect can be partially (but not completely) explained by an utterance-final bias in learning. The remainder of the effect is explained by the early emergence of a productive noun category, which can be learned through distributional analysis.
[early, child, developmental, learning, accuracy, category, advantage, reported, novel, increased] [work, cognitive, basis, framing, explained, fact, consistent] [utterance, context, language, speech, grammatical, emergence, building] [number, high, young] [noun, richness, analysis, distributional, mosaic, mechanism, word, freudenthal, table, mlu, redington, verb, bias, frequent, lexical, productivity, rote, approach, increase, productive, relative, substitution, large, length, tend, similarity, linked, manchester, preceding, expressed, mintz, corpus, plausible, build, simulating, jaccard, inclusion, distributionally, developmentally] [data, model, provide, fit, average, individual, well, generated] [output, input, classified, decrease, focus]
A Computational Exploration of Problem-Solving Strategies and Gaze Behaviors on the Block Design Task
Maithilee Kunda, Mohamed El Banani, James Rehg


The block design task, a standardized test of nonverbal reasoning, is often used to characterize atypical patterns of cognition in individuals with developmental or neurological conditions. Many studies suggest that, in addition to looking at quantitative differences in block design speed or accuracy, observing qualitative differences in individuals' problem-solving strategies can provide valuable information about a person's cognition. However, it can be difficult to tie theories at the level of problem-solving strategy to predictions at the level of externally observable behaviors such as gaze shifts and patterns of errors. We present a computational architecture that is used to compare different models of problem-solving on the block design task and to generate detailed behavioral predictions for each different strategy. We describe the results of three different modeling experiments and discuss how these results provide greater insight into the analysis of gaze behavior and error patterns on the block design task.
[block, target, task, test, time, standard, size, match, development, age] [mental, cognitive, bank, clinical, work, including, experiment, participant, scale, understanding] [module, perceptual, specific, spatial, memory, error] [performance, strategy, solve, solving, number, guided, lower] [construction, computational, similarity, random, table, detailed, analysis, form] [model, search, threshold, qualitative, intelligence, well, simulated, provide, simulation, individual, modeling] [design, visual, gaze, image, architecture, current, face, area, environment, neuropsychological, hand, figure, level, transition, stored, quantitative, human, single, imagery, diagonal, placing, nonverbal, behavioral]
Causal Action: A Fundamental Constraint on Perception of Bodily Movements
Yujia Peng, Steven Thurman, Hongjing Lu


Human actions are more than mere body movements. In contrast to other dynamic events in the natural world, human actions involve mental processes that enable willful bodily movements. We reported two experiments to demonstrate that human observers spontaneously assign the role of cause to relative limb movements, and the role of effect to body motion (i.e., the position changes of the body center of mass) when observing actions of others. Experiment 1 showed that this causal action constraint impacts people’s impression on the naturalness of observed actions. Experiment 2a/b revealed that the causal constraint guides the integration of different motion cues within a relational schema. We developed an ideal observer model to rule out the possibility that these effects resulted from the learning of statistical regularity in action stimuli. These findings demonstrate that causal relations concerning bodily movements play an important role in perceiving and understanding actions.
[condition, position, presented, time, revealed, sequence, indicating, stimulus, task, evidence] [causal, temporal, experiment, asymmetry, psychological, key, perceived, biological, cover, causality, people, understanding, preceded, rating, shifted, person, physical, work, story, judged, common, sensitive] [matched, object, experimental] [dot, change, magnitude, study, included, video] [relative, relation, natural, large] [observer, model, observed, ideal, proportion, based, agent, assign] [body, motion, limb, action, human, offset, figure, posture, role, perception, ahead, naturalness, lag, visual, walking, movement, bodily, direction, moving, actor, corresponding, binding, constraint, forward, gps, center, uneven, environment, involved, interaction, perceiving, laser]
A Robust Implementation of Episodic Memory for a Cognitive Architecture
David Menager, Dongkyu Choi


The ability to remember events plays an important role in human life. People can replay past events in their heads and often make decisions based on the retrieved information. In this paper, we describe a novel extension to a cognitive architecture, ICARUS, that enables it to store, organize, generalize, and retrieve episodic traces that can help the agent in a variety of manners. After discussing previous work on the related topic, we review ICARUS and explain the new extension to the architecture in detail. Then we discuss four architectural implications of the new capability and list some future work before we conclude.
[generalization, cue, time, generalized, block, match, journal, generalize, learn, learning, general] [cognitive, situation, work, explain, experience, person, distinct, discussion, event, future, robot, inserted, notion] [episodic, memory, carus, retrieval, remembering, knowing, matching, impasse, describe, perceptual, module, rainbow, soar, cache, architectural, sibling, named, modified, buffer] [concept, knowledge, ability, number, skill, three] [table, order, semantic, frequency, mechanism, computational, similarity, predicate, amount, glass] [agent, tree, search, state, based, true, provide] [episode, architecture, current, process, system, figure, encoding, stored, goal, review, level, representation, human, resolution, box, represent, environment, automatic]
A Deep Siamese Neural Network Learns the Human-Perceived Similarity Structure of Facial Expressions Without Explicit Categories
Sanjeev Jagannatha Rao, Yufei Wang, Garrison Cottrell


In previous work, we showed that a simple neurocomputational model {The Model, or TM) trained on the Ekman & Friesen Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA) dataset to categorize the images into the six basic expressions can account for wide array of data (albeit from a single study) on facial expression processing. The model demonstrated categorical perception of facial expressions, as well as the so-called facial expression circumplex. Here, we extend this work by 1) using a new dataset, NimsStims, that is much larger than POFA, and is not as tightly controlled for the correct Facial Action Units; 2) using a completely different neural network architecture, a Siamese Neural Network (SNN) that maps two faces through twin networks into a 2D similarity space; and 3) training the network only implicitly, based on a teaching signal that pairs of faces are in either in the same or different categories.
[training, learning, category, suggests, size, categorical, classify, journal, generalize, presented, stimulus, second, learn] [emotion, consistent, low, angry, work, anger, happy, distinct, inherent] [basic, university, dissimilar] [three, reduction, number, usa, science] [similarity, structure, order, large] [model, data, loss, set, function, probability, ordering, well, point, reflects] [facial, network, siamese, neural, figure, convolutional, expression, layer, representation, fear, input, trained, perception, dimensional, surprise, circumplex, dailey, face, disgust, human, deep, fully, internal, computer, dataset, dimensionality, nimstim, space, connected, fine, evolved, developed, multidimensional, supposed, closer, image, train]
The Influence of Reputation Concerns and Social Biases on Children’s Sharing Behavior
Haleh Yazdi, David Barner, Gail Heyman


The present research builds on prior work on the social-contextual nature of children’s generosity by systematically examining both observer effects and whether the recipient is an in-group or out-group member. Although previous research has examined these factors independently, no study to date has examined them in conjunction. We also extend prior research by including both measures of sharing behavior and children’s evaluations of sharing scenarios, and by investigating a larger sample (N=164) with a broader age range than is typical of prior research (5- to 9-year-olds). We found that, across the entire age range tested, children were generous when observed and gave more to in-group members than out-group members, and that there was no interaction between these effects. We also found that children’s own sharing behavior predicted their evaluations of sharing scenarios, with children rating in-group sharing as "nicer" than out-group sharing.
[child, condition, task, status, journal, target, developmental, predictor, age, older, younger, categorization] [social, intergroup, evaluation, examined, presence, told, desire, relationship, behave, public, work, including, absence, motivated, psychology, personality, expectation, future, sensitive, participant, scenario, neutral] [manipulated, gender, expect, basic, previous, shared, occurs, audience] [sharing, group, resource, allocation, reputation, young, recipient, versus, differ, donated, included, member, generous, minimal, fairness, study, prosocial, giver, nicer, heyman, equal, sticker] [random] [observer, model, behavior, potential, cooperative, full, consider, prior, green, orange, data, observed] [interaction, human, figure, identity]
Blink durations reflect mind wandering during reading
Stephanie Huette, Ariel Mathis, Art Graesser


Mind wandering is a prevalent but highly subjective phenomenon that is difficult to measure. Typically studies use probes at random points throughout at study that pop in and ask participants “Are you mind wandering” where they indicate yes or no, and then resume the study. This study investigated a method of extracting eye blinks from raw eye tracking data while participants were reading texts that varied in degree of engagingness on a similar topic. Blink durations were found to increase for less engaging texts. We hypothesize eye blink durations may increase with mind wandering and discuss implications for mind wandering research.
[task, blank, continuous, processing, indicating] [experiment, participant, work, thinking, psychological, cognitive, psychology, low, future, detection, missing] [default, degree, directly, listening, varied, language] [mind, wandering, blink, study, engaging, difficult, three, tobii, measurement, difficulty, external, high, bar, blinking, international, intelligent, help, wander, course] [text, reading, mode, engagement, track, induce, increase, reflect, order, read, measure, linked, engagingness, subsequent] [data, individual, state, prior, varying, observe, well, loss, function, boring, average, planning, observed] [eye, network, duration, current, screen, brain, process, focus, space, tracking, reveal]
Unifying Conflicting Perspectives in Group Activities: Roles of Minority Individuals
Kazuhisa Miwa, Yugo Hayashi, Hitoshi Terai


For drawing higher-level perspectives in group activities, resolving conflicts among group members is crucial. We investigated group activities with four members wherein one member had a different perspective from the other three. Four members engaged in a rule discovery task in which they were required to unify conflicts for the solution. Through two experiments, we investigated two hypotheses: 1) Innovative high-level perspectives are more likely to emerge from a minority individual than from the majority of group members, 2) Group members on the majority side might tend to have more egocentric perspectives than an individual on the minority side. Both hypotheses were supported.
[regularity, conflict, task, presented, journal, condition, finding, pair, rule, stimulus, sequence, arrangement, monitor, reversal] [experiment, black, white, indicated, understanding, result, social, asymmetry, team, deliberate] [background, experimental, color, egocentric, produce, previous, main, twenty, identification] [group, minority, majority, reversed, perspective, drew, incorrect, number, correct, three, problem, performance, square, correctly, questionnaire, unifying, innovative, stage, difference, example, engaged, member, investigated, required, understand] [table, understood, post, tend] [individual, distribution, discovery, emerge, total, intermediate, hypothesis] [figure, side, pattern, interaction, current, role, consisting, fixation, symmetry]
Preferring the Mighty to the Meek: Toddlers prefer Superior to Subordinate Individuals.
Ashley J. Thomas, Meline Abramyan, Angela Lukowski, Lotte Thomsen, Barbara W. Sarnecka


Every human society includes social hierarchies—relationships between individuals and groups of unequal rank or status. Recent research has shown that even preverbal infants represent hierarchical relationships, expecting larger agents and agents from larger groups to win dominance contests. However, to successfully navigate social hierarchies, infants must also integrate information about social rank into their own behavior, such as when deciding which individuals to approach and which to avoid. Here we demonstrate that two-year-old children (ages 21-31 months) preferred novel dominant agents to subordinates. That is, by the age of 21 months, toddlers not only use phylogenetically stable cues to predict the winner of dominance contests, they also like the dominant agents better. This finding suggests that young children use their ability to infer relative rank to selectively approach dominant individuals.
[child, sequence, dominance, avoid, novel, testing, suggests, statistical, familiarization, time, repeated, room, second, compare] [social, experiment, prefer, black, positive, cognitive, stable, strong, experience, psychological] [expect, university, retrieved, null, evolution, plaza] [puppet, moved, stage, experimenter, study, hispanic, crossed, board, department, bowed, ability, curtain, contributed, win, preverbal, academy, ranked, three, procedure, attached, larger] [relative, approach, form] [rank, preference, choice, individual, choosing, data, hierarchy, preferred, choose, behavior, model, alternative, distribution, chose] [dominant, human, goal, parent, figure, side, view, reaching, interaction]
Hysteresis in Processing of Perceptual Ambiguity on Three Different Timescales
Marieke van Rooij, Harald Atmanspacher, Jürgen Kornmeier


Sensory information is a priori incomplete and ambiguous. Our perceptual system has to make predictions about the sources of the sensory information, based on concepts from perceptual memory in order to create stable and reliable percepts. We presented ambiguous and disambiguated lattice stimuli (variants of the Necker cube) in order to measure a hysteresis effects in visual perception. Fifteen healthy participants observed two periods of ordered sequences of lattices with increasing and decreasing ambiguity and indicated their percepts, in two experimental conditions with different starting stimuli of the ordered sequence. We compared the stimulus parameters at the perceptual reversal between conditions and periods and found significant differences between conditions and periods, indicating memory contributions to perceptual outcomes on three different time scales from milliseconds over seconds up to lifetime memory. Our results demonstrate the fruitful application of physical concepts like hysteresis and complementarity to visual perception.
[stimulus, hysteresis, lattice, sfrb, sflt, pflt, response, pfrb, time, second, reversal, necker, luminance, condition, presented, samb, disambiguated, continuous, inflection, nrev, presentation, indicating, type, kornmeier, quantify, indicate, disambiguation, journal, occurred, occur, half, ndiff] [series, influence, history, experiment, long, medical, front] [perceptual, memory, ambiguity, experimental, university, context, percept] [three, reflecting, study, difference, fifteen, science] [ambiguous, order, aggregated, interpretation, measure, quality] [parameter, increasing, decreasing, probability, intermediate, bottom, varying, observation] [perception, figure, period, sensory, left, visual, view, apparent, fully, behaviour, top, system, critical, morphing]
Social Cues Modulate Cognitive Status of Discourse Referents
Kara Hawthorne, Anja Arnhold, Emily Sullivan, Juhani Järvikivi


We use visual world eye-tracking to test if a speaker’s eye gaze to a potential antecedent modulates the listener’s interpretation of an ambiguous pronoun. Participants listened to stories that included an ambiguous pronoun, such as “The dolphin kisses the goldfish… He….” During the pre-pronominal context, an onscreen narrator gazed at one of the two characters. As expected, participants looked more at the subject character overall. However, this was modulated by the narrator’s eye gaze and the amount of time the participant spent looking at the gaze cue. For trials in which participants attended to the narrator’s eye gaze for > 500ms, participants were significantly more likely to interpret the pronoun as referring to the object if the narrator had previously looked at the object. Results suggest that eye gaze – a social cue – can temper even strong linguistic/cognitive biases in pronoun resolution, such as the subject/first-mention bias.
[time, attention, looked, cue, evidence, response, appeared, tested, presented, fixed, recorded] [participant, social, cognitive, long, character, salience, experiment, story] [object, referent, context, linguistic, van, referring, university, language, experimental, speaker, memory, affect, intercept, listener, previous, mixed] [department, linear, included, study] [narrator, pronoun, subject, gazed, ambiguous, discourse, earlier, sentence, dolphin, animal, goldfish, short, table, offline, onset, probe, gazedatrole, interpret, interpretation, mentioned, bias, earlierattentntonarr] [potential, model, proportion, data, full] [gaze, eye, visual, action, role, resolution, location, interaction, figure, attended, image, forward, longer]
A neurocomputational model of the effect of learned labels on infants’ object representations
Arthur Capelier-Mourguy, Katherine Twomey, Gert Westermann


The effect of labels on nonlinguistic representations is the focus of substantial debate in the developmental literature. A recent empirical study (Twomey & Westermann, under review) suggested that labels are incorporated into object representations, such that infants respond differently to objects for which they know a label relative to unlabeled objects. However, these empirical data cannot differentiate between two recent theories of integrated label-object representations, one of which assumes labels are features of object representations, and one which assumes labels are represented separately, but become closely associated with learning. We address this issue using a neurocomputational (autoencoder) model to instantiate both theoretical approaches. Simulation data support an account in which labels are features of objects, with the same representational status as the objects’ visual and haptic characteristics.
[label, westermann, time, category, familiarization, presented, compound, status, mareschal, learned, laf, developmental, learning, training, categorization, trial, stimulus, journal, development, consisted, shape, early, condition, twomey, infant, decreased, unlabeled, task, presentation] [account, work, cognitive, relationship, presence, united, absence, issue] [object, language, perceptual, communicative, error, affect, experimental, support, memory, mismatch, rapidly, university] [haptic, number, study, difference] [computational] [model, empirical, data, assumes, capture, total] [input, visual, current, representation, output, figure, labeled, network, represented, neurocomputational, play, neural, overlap, encoded, architecture, activation, integrated, view, represent, wooden, associated, feature, hidden]
Intentionality and the Role of Labels in Categorization
Felix Gervits, Megan Johanson, Anna Papafragou


Language has been shown to influence the ability to form categories. Here we investigate whether linguistic labels are privileged compared to other types of cues (e.g., numbers or symbols), and whether labels exert their effects regardless of whether they are introduced intentionally. In a categorization task, we found that adults were more likely to use labels to determine category boundaries compared to numbers or symbols, and that these effects persisted in all intentionality manipulations. These findings suggest that labels have a powerful effect on categorization compared to other cues; most strikingly, labels (but not other cues) are used during categorization even when people are specifically asked to ignore them. These results provide novel support for the position that labels indicate category membership.
[category, categorization, novel, presented, cue, intentionality, compared, condition, label, attention, position, target, task, accidental, trial, learning, child, journal, perceptually, intentionally, adult, powerful, facilitate, lupyan, appeared, treat, verbal, chance] [people, intentional, psychological, serve, kind, representational, cognitive, neutral, influence, formation] [perceptual, linguistic, object, experimental, support, language, privileged, highly, context, shared, salient, communicative, specific, introduced] [study, performance, three, group, symbolic, asked, mark] [ambiguous, form, unambiguous, similarity, natural, conceptual] [set, sample, randomly, function] [role, figure, image, visual, top, nonverbal]
Constraining the Search Space in Cross-Situational Word Learning: Different Models Make Different Predictions
Giovanni Cassani, Robert Grimm, Steven Gillis, Walter Daelemans


We test the predictions of different computational models of cross-situational word learning that have been proposed in the literature by comparing their behavior to that of young children and adults in the word learning task conducted by Ramscar, Dye, and Klein (2013). Our experimental results show that a Hebbian learner and a model that relies on hypothesis testing fail to account for the behavioral data obtained from both populations. Ruling out such accounts might help reducing the search space and better focus on the most relevant aspects of the problem, in order to disentangle the mechanisms used during language acquisition to map words and referents in a highly noisy environment.
[learning, evidence, learner, obja, presented, label, dax, objb, objc, klein, pid, hebbian, learn, htm, trial, discriminative, cue, task, psychol, crosssituational, occurred, trueswell, training, time, test, learned, reported, compare] [account, mapping, evaluate, case, cognitive, consistent, experiment] [object, referent, encountered, retrieve, retrieved, language, occurs, updated, consistently, map] [three, correct, provided, study, help] [word, association, order, computational, ndl, proposed, mechanism, table] [model, probability, hypothesis, data, set, update, outcome, fail, probabilistic, successful, fit, higher, selected, parameter, paper] [behavioral, input, current, original, focus, figure]
Concept Membership vs Typicality in Sentence Verification Tasks
Francesca Zarl, Danilo Fum


In the paper we discuss the relation between fuzzy sets and the graded membership and typicality effects found in the study of concepts. After a short overview of the topic, we present three experiments, carried out using the same method but with different situational contexts, which examine whether graded membership and typicality could be considered as independent factors capable of influencing the performance of human participants involved in sentence verification tasks, or they are somehow interrelated. The paper concludes with a general discussion of the experimental findings and the problems they pose for models of concepts based on the theory fuzzy sets.
[category, condition, pair, general, presented, verbal, journal] [experiment, negative, positive, fact, anova, sense, case, neutral, common, prototype, assigned, people, account, variable, factor, discussion, relationship] [membership, typicality, fuzzy, instance, context, graded, pmt, degree, experimental, nmt, mixed, typical, main, previous, carried, verification, varied, interesting, university, directly, introduced, criterion, trieste, adopted, clearly] [concept, member, three, study, asked, better] [sentence, similarity, table, considered, determining, semantic, phrase, class, relation, natural, entity] [higher, set, theory, classical, function, paper, point, depend, based, determine, consider] [interaction, polarity, view]
Better safe than sorry: Risky function exploitation through safe optimization
Eric Schulz, Quentin Huys, Dominik Bach, Maarten Speekenbrink, Andreas Krause


Exploration-exploitation of functions, that is learning and optimizing a mapping between inputs and expected outputs, is ubiquitous to many real world situations. These situations sometimes require us to avoid certain outcomes at all cost, for example because they are poisonous, harmful, or otherwise dangerous. We test participants' behavior in scenarios in which they have to find the optimum of a function while at the same time avoid outputs below a certain threshold. In two experiments, we find that Safe-Optimization, a Gaussian Process-based exploration-exploitation algorithm, describes participants' behavior well and that participants seem to care firstly whether a point is safe and then try to pick the optimal point from all such safe points. This means that their trade-off between exploration and exploitation can be seen as an intelligent, approximate, and homeostasis-driven strategy.
[learning, task, time, condition, avoid, learn, fixed, block, chance] [initial, experiment, cognitive, focused, work] [intercept, membership, expand, expanding] [example, lower, active] [random, distance, analysis, exponential] [safe, function, set, point, behavior, normal, threshold, optimization, maximize, decision, probability, sampled, unknown, kernel, expected, bandit, find, sampling, higher, chosen, maximizer, tree, average, bivariate, expander, regression, conference, squared, upper, provide, data, choose, posterior, screenshot, maximizing, well, model, homeostasis, lead, exploration, distribution, jmin, assume, risk, minimizing, exploitation, confidence, sample, avoiding] [input, gaussian, figure, output, process, human, focus, indicates, current]
A Neural Model of Context Dependent Decision Making in the Prefrontal Cortex
Sugandha Sharma, Brent Komer, Terrence Stewart, Chris Eliasmith


In this paper, we present a spiking neural model of context dependent decision making. Prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a fundamental role in context dependent behaviour. We model the PFC at the level of single spiking neurons, to explore the underlying computations which determine its contextual responses. The model is built using the Neural Engineering Framework and performs input selection and integration as a nonlinear recurrent dynamical process. The results obtained from the model closely match behavioural and neural experimental data obtained from macaque monkeys that are trained to perform a context sensitive perceptual decision task. The close match suggests that the low-dimensional, nonlinear dynamical model we suggest captures central aspects of context dependent decision making in primates.
[response, evidence, task, trial, irrelevant, integration, condition, time, learned, trajectory, analogous] [relevant, axis, experiment, work, positive] [context, experimental, sign, produce, combination] [equation, number, comparison, provided] [coherence, dependent, contextual, length, analysis] [model, data, choice, decision, population, based, regression, underlying, set, total, making, determine, note, preferred, simple, implies] [motion, colour, neural, sensory, monkey, figure, input, pfc, mante, selection, direction, neuron, nneuron, behavioural, spike, network, recurrent, prefrontal, trained, plot, spiking, perform, output, cortex, averaged, nonlinear, indicates, dynamical, moving, visual, built, corresponds, pca, dynamic, integrated, current, movement, represented, eye]
Discourse Analysis as a Solution to Interpretive Problems in Cognitive Development Research
Patrick Byers


Cognitive development researchers have drawn conclusions about young children’s developing knowledge of number by studying their behavior, while at the same time acknowledging that behavior is an imperfect index of knowledge, e.g., it may be disputed whether a given behavioral task accurately measures, overestimates, or underestimates children’s knowledge. The texts of published research articles from these investigations are the focus of a discourse analysis described in the present article. The results of the discourse analysis suggest that claims about what a person knows are actually generalized descriptions of behavior. Therefore, in studying behavior on tasks to draw conclusions about participants’ conceptual knowledge, researchers are merely making behavioral generalizations, not investigating hidden cognitive or epistemic content.
[child, general, development, task, evidence, developing] [claim, understanding, disposition, described, cognitive, justification, fact, inconsistent, distinction, person, assertion, relevant, variety, gelman, displacement, clear, discursive, basis, case, claimed, focused, truth, statement] [typical, specific, memory, description] [knowledge, number, cardinal, cardinality, performance, counting, understand, young, study, competence, analyzed, published, example, subtraction, ability, asked, addition, barner, insofar, sarnecka, concept] [analysis, conceptual, discourse, count, concrete, abstract, indicative, interpretation, accurately, principle, relative, semantic, similarity] [behavior, set, justified, well, provide, range, counted] [behavioral, current, apparent]
A rational speech-act model of projective content
Ciyang Qing, Noah Goodman, Daniel Lassiter


Certain content of a linguistic construction can project when the construction is embedded in entailment-canceling environments. For example, the conclusion that John smoked in the past from "John stopped smoking" still holds for "John didn't stop smoking," where the original utterance is embedded under negation. There are two main approaches to account for projection. The semantic approach adds restrictions of the common ground to the conventional meaning. The pragmatic approach tries to derive projection from general conversational principles. In this paper we build a probabilistic model of language understanding in which the listener jointly infers the world state and the common ground the speaker has assumed. We take change-of-state verbs as an example and model its projective content under negation. Under certain assumptions, the model correctly predicts the projective behavior and its interaction with the question under discussion, without any special semantic treatment of projective content.
[standard, hearing, general, negation, second] [common, explain, inference, account, discussion, equally, summarized, consistent, reason, introduce] [context, john, utterance, listener, ground, speaker, content, literal, bob, conversational, language, previous, experimental, informative, meaning] [question, example, answer, change, problem] [approach, semantics, table, semantic, universe] [set, model, probability, pragmatic, prior, projective, projection, qudmax, rsa, qud, smoking, qudnow, smoked, predicts, alice, distribution, uniform, stopped, goodman, granted, infer, capture, assuming, smoke, quds, marginal, actual, consider, formalizing, maximal, return, rational, predicted, assumption, probabilistic, entire, jointly, motivate, paper] [figure, defined, define, column, current, fully]
Infants’ speech and gesture production in Mozambique and the Netherlands
Chiara De Jong, Paul Vogt


In this paper, we explore the cultural differences in the production of speech and speech+gesture combinations by infants at the age of 17-18 months in Mozambique and the Netherlands. We found that Dutch infants produce more speech and gestures compared to Mozambican infants. Infants in both communities make most use of content words. The results further show that Dutch infants make more use of proximal pointing than Mozambicans, whereas Mozambicans make more use of the offering gesture. Finally, the amount of semantically coherent speech+gesture combinations of the Mozambican infants is higher than of the Dutch infants.
[infant, development, child, compared, early, vocabulary, attention, category, age, learning, deictic, developmental, size, target, congruent] [low, explained, case, social, concerning, cognitive] [speech, mozambique, gesture, netherlands, produced, language, dutch, content, urban, mozambican, coded, produce, object, cultural, rowe, combination, accompanied, coherent, proximal, offering, rural, vogt, production, express, utterance, meaningful, university, communicative, communication, gestural, meaning, contained, recording, iverson, mastin] [number, education, difference, three, study, high, video, purpose] [semantic, semantically, amount, word, table, frequency, onset, order, considered, diversity] [average, higher, data, observed, well, based, individual] [pointing, environment, input, hand]
Feature-based Joint Planning and Norm Learning in Collaborative Games
Mark Ho, James MacGlashan, Amy Greenwald, Michael Littman, Elizabeth Hilliard, Carl Trimbach, Stephen Brawner, Josh Tenenbaum, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Joseph Austerweil


People often use norms to coordinate behavior and accomplish shared goals. But how do people learn and represent norms? Here, we formalize the process by which collaborating individuals (1) reason about group plans during interaction, and (2) use task features to abstractly represent norms. In Experiment 1, we test the assumptions of our model in a gridworld that requires coordination and contrast it with a “best response” model. In Experiment 2, we use our model to test whether group members’ joint planning relies more on state features independent of other agents (landmark-based features) or state features determined by the configuration of agents (agent-relative features).
[learning, task, learn, learned, generalize, simultaneously, test] [people, experiment, social, reasoning, reason, cognitive, work] [previous, shared, converge, directly] [strategy, group, number, differ, international, scored] [direct, indirect, pass, entropy, computational] [model, agent, norm, reward, row, player, state, individual, set, behavior, function, courtyard, best, success, optimal, hallway, game, reinforcement, round, respective, choose, based, follow, jointly, note, planning, collided, bottom, decision] [joint, human, figure, represent, center, action, goal, feature, top, passing, coordination, grid, switched, represented, representation, move]
Metaphor & Emotion: Metaphorical Frames for Coping with Hardship
Rose Hendricks, Lera Boroditsky


Do metaphors shape people’s emotional states and mindsets for dealing with hardship? Natural language metaphors may act as frames that encourage people to reappraise an emotional situation, changing the way they respond to it. Recovery from cancer is one type of adversity that many people face, and it can be mediated by the mindset people adopt. We investigate whether two common metaphors for describing a cancer experience – the battle and the journey – encourage people to make different inferences about the patient’s emotional state. After being exposed to the battle metaphor participants inferred that the patient would feel more guilt if he didn’t recover, while after being exposed to the journey metaphor participants felt that he had a better chance of making peace with his situation. We discuss implications of this work for investigations of metaphor and emotion, mindsets, and recovery.
[journal, learned, evidence, reported, suggests, family, response] [metaphor, people, cancer, battle, emotional, journey, experience, social, joe, feel, influence, mindset, positive, work, metaphorical, peace, mental, disease, framing, cognitive, health, talk, breast, guilt, anger, guilty, situation, character, diagnosed, psychological, reappraisal, affective, emotion, statement, common, described, adversity, clinical, dealing, consistent, reason, recover, recovery, belief, imagine, penson] [support, main, gender, language, adjustment, linguistic, describe, affect, attribute] [encourage, coping, difficult, difference, science, help, better, mediate, greater] [read, mentioned, reading, turn, written] [making, based] [figure, role, experienced, interaction]
Attentive and Pre-Attentive Processes in Multiple Object Tracking: A Computational Investigation
Paul Bello, Will Bridewell, Christina Wasylyshyn


The rich literature on multiple object tracking (MOT) conclusively demonstrates that humans are able to visually track a small number of objects (Pylyshyn & Storm 1988, Alvarez & Franconeri 2007). There is considerably less agreement on what perceptual and cognitive processes are involved. While it is clear that MOT is attentionally demanding, various accounts of MOT performance centrally involve pre-attentional mechanisms as well. In this paper we present an account of object tracking in the ARCADIA framework (Bridewell & Bello 2015) that treats MOT as dependent upon both pre-attentive and attention-bound processes. We show that with minimal addition this model replicates a variety of core phenomena in the MOT literature and provides an algorithmic explanation of human performance limitations.
[attention, speed, attentional, saliency, evidence, task, processing, second, correspondence, target, accuracy, journal] [cognitive, discussion, described, psychological, account, work, explain, frame, capacity, pylyshyn] [object, content, blue, main] [number, performance, strategy, science, literature, correctly, problem, larger] [computational, mechanism, core, construction, identified, proximity] [set, selected, model, heuristic, update, updating, simulation, theory, proportion, modeling, simple] [tracking, mot, visual, arcadia, vstm, multiple, spacing, locator, human, location, accessible, focus, figure, highlighter, motion, component, extrapolation, system, encoded, franconeri, image, role, apparent, perception, vision, interlingua, inhibition, involved, interaction, region, tracked, nearest, encoding, hemifield, orientation]
The face-space duality hypothesis: a computational model
Jonathan Vitale, Mary-Anne Williams, Benjamin Johnston


Valentine's face-space suggests that faces are represented in a psychological multidimensional space according to their perceived properties. However, the proposed framework was initially designed as an account of invariant facial features only, and explanations for dynamic features representation were neglected. In this paper we propose, develop and evaluate a computational model for a twofold structure of the face-space, able to unify both identity and expression representations in a single implemented model. To capture both invariant and dynamic facial features we introduce the face-space duality hypothesis and subsequently validate it through a mathematical presentation using a general approach to dimensionality reduction. Two experiments with real facial images show that the proposed face-space: (1) supports both identity and expression recognition, and (2) has a twofold structure anticipated by our formal argument.
[dimension, classification, journal, separation, general] [mapping, prototypical, psychological, perceived, introduce, cognitive, experiment, understanding, account] [support, experimental, trace] [reduction, number, better, solution, linear] [proposed, similarity, computational, structure, analysis, class, computed, minimum, min, considered] [function, objective, set, hypothesis, model, optimal, sample, data, point, provide, paper, observed, based, estimated] [identity, expression, facial, matrix, face, dynamic, dimensionality, invariant, recognition, multidimensional, space, representation, framework, associated, twofold, duality, penalty, process, voverall, single, corresponding, suggested, component, represented, human, input, integral, perception, vpca, smallest, eigenvectors, dataset, algorithm, belonging, maximising, figure]
Chinese and English speakers’ neural representations of word meaning offer a different picture of cross-language semantics than corpus and behavioral measures
Benjamin Zinszer, Andrew Anderson, Rajeev Raizada


Speakers of Chinese and English share decodable neural semantic representations, which can be elicited by words in each language. We explore various, common models of semantic representation and their correspondences to each other and to these neural representations. Despite very strong cross-language similarity in the neural data, we find that two versions of a corpus-based semantic model do not show the same strong correlation between languages. Behavior-based models better approximate cross-language similarity, but these models also fail to explain the similarities observed in the neural data. Although none of the examined models explain cross-language neural similarity, we explore how they might provide additional information over and above cross-language neural similarity. We find that native speakers’ ratings of noun-noun similarity and one of the corpus models do further correlate with neural data after accounting for cross-language similarities.
[target, reported, task, stimulus, compare] [strong, explained, representational, cognitive, power, explain, described, explanatory] [language, meaning, functional, native, relatedness, shared, highly, null, degree, encode, university] [three] [semantic, chinese, english, similarity, word, corpus, leeds, translation, table, broadened, correlated, decoding, noun, analysis, zinszer, broad, correlate, measure, variance, unique, multivariate, mitchell, crosslanguage, eleven, reflect] [data, model, correlation, based, set, respective, provide, capture] [neural, brain, behavioral, representation, space, fmri, averaged, activity, gyrus, roi, represented, figure]
Modeling developmental and linguistic relativity effects in color term acquisition
Barend Beekhuizen, Suzanne Stevenson


We model two patterns related to the acquisition of color terms in Russian and English: children produce overextension errors for some colors but not others, and language-specific distinctions affect color discrimination in a non-linguistic task. Both effects, as well as a reasonable convergence with adult linguistic behavior, are shown by a Self-Organizing Map trained on naturalistic input. We investigate the effect of different ways of representing colors, i.e., as perceptual features or in terms of the cognitive biases on categorization extracted from crosslinguistic color naming data. We also consider the influence of color term frequency. Our results suggest effects of all three of term frequency, cognitive biases, and perceptual features.
[developmental, adult, category, development, dark, test, stimulus, target, boundary, learning, child, explore, mapped, learner, learned] [cognitive, property] [color, term, russian, blue, linguistic, perceptual, map, cell, chip, language, discrimination, crosslinguistic, sdisc, goluboj, scorec, conc, overextension, relativity, convergence, acquiring, typological, distracter, affect, beekhuizen] [difference, correct, study] [english, acquisition, semantic, frequency, corpus, vector, naming, frequent, distance] [model, set, behavior, data, find, uniform, fit, observed, distribution, well, prevalence, probability, sampling, evaluating] [feature, som, light, input, ranking, figure, pattern, space, represent, labeled, trained]
Distinguishing processing difficulties in inhibition, implicature, and negation
Ann Nordmeyer, Erica Yoon, Mike Frank


Despite their considerable communicative abilities, young children often have difficulty interpreting complex linguistic structures in context. Two examples of this phenomenon are negation and pragmatic implicature, both of which pose sometimes surprising difficulties for preschoolers. Both of these structures require children to resist a more salient alternative interpretation; since executive function abilities develop extensively during childhood, perhaps failures are due to problems in inhibition. To test this hypothesis, we designed speeded tasks to measure inhibitory control, negation, and implicature comprehension in children and adults. Using standard analyses as well as drift diffusion models, we found different patterns of processing on all three tasks, and no support for the hypothesis that inhibitory control per se is playing a role in either adults' or children's negation or implicature processing. Instead, our analyses reveal qualitatively different developmental trajectories for each task, suggesting task-specific factors driving these changes.
[negation, drift, task, implicature, target, processing, age, compared, trial, developmental, time, inhibitory, reaction, evidence, picture, accuracy, slower, separation, development, implicatures, response, suggesting, boundary, executive, test, type, plate, general, early, explore, struggle, revealed, banana, appeared] [work, cognitive, despite, positive, negative, version, key] [language, object, linguistic, named, select, university] [control, three, performance, incorrect, difference, correct, difficulty, group, young, require, traditional] [bias, comprehension, analysis, increase, word] [decision, diffusion, parameter, data, individual, rate, pragmatic, model, fit, higher, function, making, set, hypothesis, well] [inhibition, process, figure, side, longer]
The Charon Model of Moral Judgment
Deirdre Kelly, Jim Davies


We present a model of moral judgment, Charon, which adds to previous models several factors that have been shown to influence moral judgment: 1) a more sophisticated account of prior mental state, 2) imagination, 3) empathy, 4) the feedback process between emotion and reason, 5) self-interest, and 6) self-control. We discuss previous classes of models and demonstrate Charon’s extended explanatory power with a focus on psychopathy and autism.
[journal, general, autism, evidence, switch, presented, processing, wrong, response] [moral, people, judgment, emotional, cognitive, empathy, emotion, person, reasoning, utilitarian, social, account, mental, greene, ethical, reason, explain, charon, deontological, case, influence, psychopath, affective, psychological, personality, imagination, trolley, haidt, psychopathy, result, situation, application, understanding, work, arrive, morality, unsuccessful, save, defence, stressed, autistic] [previous, affect, university, argue] [better, ability, change, study, concept, feedback] [involve, approach, earlier] [model, successful, making, state, empirical, higher, well, decision, prior, good, pay] [role, process, focus, visual, disgust, box, action, pull, train]
The Impact of Granularity on the Effectiveness of Students' Pedagogical Decisions
Guojing Zhou, Collin Lynch, Thomas Price, Tiffany Barnes, Min Chi


In this study we explored the impact of student versus tutor pedagogical decision-making on learning. We examined this impact at two levels of granularity: problem vs. step. 279 students were randomly assigned to four conditions and the domain content and required steps were strictly controlled to be equivalent across four conditions. The only differences among them were decision agency {Student vs. Tutor} and granularity {Problem vs. Step}. Our results showed a significant interaction effect between decision agency and granularity. That is, step level decisions can be more effective than problem level decisions but the students were more likely to make effective pedagogical decisions at problem level than step level. In general, on both problem and step levels, the students were significantly more likely to decide to do problem solving rather than study it as a worked example.
[learning, time, training, fixed, test, compared, task, condition, journal] [generally, agency, cognitive, focused] [domain, content, main] [problem, pedagogical, student, worked, step, tutprob, tutor, effective, granularity, studprob, tutstep, group, solve, studstep, impact, study, number, solving, difference, fwe, pyrenees, example, tutoring, help, isomorphic, received, spent, fading, investigate, intelligent, better, versus, performance, outperformed, required, science, control, answer, equal, asked, pretest, strictly, solution, course] [principle, random, table, analysis, complete, order] [decision, making, prior, decide, adaptive, policy, probability, total] [level, process]
Can Musical Engagement Alleviate Age-Related Decline in Inhibitory Control?
Ruben Vromans, Marie Postma-Nilsenova


The purpose of our study was to determine whether active musical engagement alleviates decline in inhibitory control due to cognitive aging. Given that musical training in young adults improves attentional performance, we can expect this benefit to persist for older adults as well. With the help of the stop-signal procedure, we measured response inhibition of young and older adults who provided a self-reported assessment of their musical engagement, using the recently validated Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index. The Gold-MSI addresses a variety of musical activities and thus offers a more comprehensive measure than ability to play a musical instrument used in the past. Results of the experiment showed that older participants had longer stop-signal reaction times, independently of their musical training and engagement, but musical training and ensemble practice were negatively related to the proportion of missed responses suggesting a weak effect of certain types of musical activities on inhibitory control.
[inhibitory, training, response, age, reaction, general, older, executive, task, auditory, time, aging, suggesting, selective, presented, enhanced, decline, complex, subscales, tested, nosignal] [cognitive, variable, experience, emo, life, comprehensive, negative, including] [perceptual, expect, tilburg, instrument, memory] [control, performance, ability, practice, study, young, active, working, improve, strategy, additional] [musical, ensemble, missed, engagement, ssrt, music, sophistication, table, relation, singing, order, verbruggen, stopsignal, moreno, orchestra, measure, analysis, symphony] [proportion, regression, based, waiting] [inhibition, figure, human, visual, brain, perception, focus]
A 6-month longitudinal study on numerical estimation in preschoolers
Pierina Cheung, Emily Slusser, Anna Shusterman


The current study investigated the development of numerical estimation in 3- to 5-year-old children sampled monthly for six months. At each session, children completed a task that assesses verbal number knowledge (Give-N task) and a numerical estimation task that assesses approximate number knowledge (Fast Cards). Results showed that children who acquired the cardinal principle (CP) during the course of the study showed marked improvement on the estimation task. Following CP acquisition, estimation became more accurate overall but also fluctuated widely. We discuss the implications of our findings for number word learning, particularly the mapping between verbal number and the approximate number system (ANS).
[session, verbal, child, task, remained, development, suggesting, size, developmental, mapped, tested] [mapping, fish, positive] [error, previous, main, university, variability, criterion] [number, cardinal, estimation, fast, corre, study, group, asked, larger, improvement, numerical, approximate, acquired, knowledge, carey, included, counting, exact, odic, acquire, mapper, acuity, understand, covs, cardinality, experimenter, difference, smaller, shusterman, course, linear] [word, large, principle, longitudinal, acquisition, analysis, count, small, identified] [set, range, data, average, generate, prior] [figure, parallel, system, current]
The distorting effect of deciding to stop sampling
Anna Coenen, Todd Gureckis


People usually collect information to serve specific goals and often end up with samples that are unrepresentative of the underlying population. This can introduce biases on later judgments that generalize from these samples. Here we show that goals influence not only what information we collect, but also when we decide to terminate search. Using an optimal stopping analysis, we demonstrate that even when learners have no control over the content of a sample (i.e., natural sampling), the simple decision of when to stop sampling can yield sample distributions that are non-representative and could potentially bias future decision making. We test the prediction of these theoretical analyses with two behavioral experiments.
[size, condition, task, rule, early, evidence, selective, test, statistical] [experiment, people, continue, coin] [mixed, affect, blue] [estimation, teacher, number, difference, impact, group, correct, card, question, high, answer, greater] [natural, bias, composition, earlier] [sample, sampling, stopping, binary, distribution, expected, estimate, average, extreme, optimal, probability, decision, model, choice, bonus, outcome, potential, cost, repeatedly, lead, good, red, terminate, find, state, simple, collected, collect, biased, utility, posterior, true, assume, decide, uniform, search, making, data, deck] [figure, goal, current, process]
Inferring Individual Differences Between and Within Exemplar and Decision-Bound Models of Categorization
Irina Danileiko, Michael Lee


Different models of categorization are often treated as competing accounts, but specific models are often used to understand individual differences, by estimating individual-level parameters. We develop an approach to understanding categorization that allows for individual differences both between and within models, using two prominent categorization models that make different theoretical assumptions: the Generalized Context Model (GCM) and General Recognition Theory (GRT). We develop a latent-mixture model for inferring whether an individual uses the GCM or GRT, while simultaneously allowing for the use of special-case simpler strategies. The GCM simple strategies involve attending to a single stimulus dimension, while the GRT simple strategies involve using unidimensional decision bounds. Our model also allows for simple contaminant strategies. We apply the model to four previously published categorization experiments, finding large and interpretable individual differences in the use of both models and specific strategies, depending on the nature of the stimuli and category structures.
[category, categorization, stimulus, general, response, attention, dimension, exemplar, unidimensional, selective, condition, kruschke, journal, categorize, presented, attend, generalization] [people, experiment, person, psychological, cognitive, work, including, possibility] [specific, vertical, memory] [strategy, number, graphical, special, three, science, majority] [subject, approach, large, include, distance, table, similarity, random, involve] [model, inferred, individual, decision, gcm, contaminant, grt, bound, bayesian, modeling, filtration, selected, probability, based, maddox, assumes, condensation, zeithamova, total, bartlema, data, mixture, navarro, uncertainty, varying, guess, load, behavior, posterior, parameter, depending] [figure, diagonal, horizontal, level, perception, recognition, defined, represent, involved]
Adults' guesses on probabilistic tasks reveal incremental representativeness biases
Habiba Azab, David Ruskin, Celeste Kidd


Participants in most binary-choice tasks with multiple trials tend to probability-match (Vulkan, 2000) — i.e., provide re- sponses that match the probability distribution of the presented population. Given a single trial, however, participants usually choose the majority option (James & Koehler, 2011). By us- ing a method that visually presents the probabilities of the two competing options, we examine responses when participants are given only a single trial, and initial responses when partic- ipants are given multiple trials. While we still observe aggre- gate probability-matching in the multiple-trial condition, we find robust sequence effects in participants’ initial responses, including robust maximizing behavior on the first response. This suggests that both maximizing in single-trial experiments and aggregate probability-matching in multiple-trial ones can be explained by a single, underlying mechanism; one that seeks to provide a representative sample at each point during sequence generation.
[trial, condition, sequence, journal, task, response, presented, suggests, learning, exclusively] [experiment, percentage, initial, psychology, excluded, rating] [experimental, previous, color, james, matching] [majority, number, asked, three, feedback] [order, random, mechanism, subject, tend] [orange, gumballs, proportion, behavior, gumball, probability, distribution, hypothesis, maximizing, machine, green, population, representative, provide, guess, button, sample, estimate, chose, aggregate, choice, likelihood, underlying, estimating, rank, individual, observe, higher, well, maximize, signed, entire, predict, data, choose, option, observed, point, binary, reward] [figure, single, human, image, indicates, multiple]
Cultural Evolution Across Domains: Language, Technology and Art
Monica Tamariz, Simon Kirby, Jon W. Carr


The social and cognitive mechanisms of cultural evolution have been studied in detail for different domains: language, technology, the economy, art, etc. However, a model that incorporates the function of a cultural tradition and that is able to compare evolutionary dynamics across cultural domains has not been formulated. By exploring the dynamics of comparable linguistic, technological, and artistic experimental tasks, we test the effect of domain-specific function on evolutionary mechanisms such as inheritance, innovation, and selection. We find evidence that cultural domain shapes both the structure of the traditions and the way the cultural-evolutionary mechanisms operate. The simplifying effects of cultural transmission are noticeable in language and technology, but not in art; innovation is highest in art and lowest in language; and functional pressures lead to different morphological adaptations across domains. This speaks of a crucial role of function and domain in the evolution of culture.
[condition, evidence, learning, task, pressure, pair, statistical, selective] [participant, social, distinct, cognitive, low, told, explained, simplicity, flower, experiment, inheritance, absence] [cultural, domain, language, art, evolution, transmission, lego, technology, innovation, evolutionary, object, culture, artistic, university, functional, drop, communicative, linguistic, generation, experimental, communication, iterated, produced, edinburgh, morphological, simplification, kirby, chicago, interlocutor, society] [three, change, number, high, linear, volume, question, study] [complexity, structure, random, diversity, increase, construction, word, order] [predicted, success, predict, model, function] [human, selection, figure, height, chain, trained, horizontal, top]
Reading experience shapes the mental timeline but not the mental number line
Benjamin Pitt, Daniel Casasanto


People conceptualize both time and numbers as unfolding along a horizontal line, either from left to right or from right to left. The direction of both the mental timeline (MTL) and the mental number line (MNL) are widely assumed to depend on the direction of reading and writing within a culture. Although experimental evidence supports this assumption regarding the MTL, there is no clear evidence that reading direction determines the direction of the MNL. Here we tested effects of reading experience on the direction of both the MTL and MNL. Participants read English text either normally (from left to right) or mirror-reversed (from right to left). After normal reading, participants showed the space-time associations and space-number associations typical of Westerners. After mirror reading, participants’ space-time associations were significantly reduced but their space-number associations were unchanged. These results suggest that the MTL and MNL have different experiential bases.
[standard, time, condition, response, evidence, training, task, orthography, position, appeared, reliable, test, presented, phase, indicating, half] [experience, mental, people, influence, timeline, key, causal, temporal] [experimental, university, dehaene, spatial] [number, reversed, study, counting, greater, ordinal, progress, three, smaller, larger, differ] [reading, snarc, mnl, text, congruity, english, earlier, read, writing, written, experiential, arabic, determining, large, small, order, spacenumber, random, spacetime] [correlation, provide, normal, determined, data, determine, opposite] [direction, left, mtl, space, hand, rts, finger, associated, role, side, interaction]
Talking with tact: Polite language as a balance between informativity and kindness
Erica J. Yoon, Michael Henry Tessler, Noah D. Goodman, Michael C. Frank


Conveying information in a false or indirect manner in consideration of listeners' wants (i.e., being polite) seemingly contradicts an important goal of a cooperative speaker: information transfer. We propose that a cooperative speaker considers both "epistemic utility," or utility of providing the listener new information, and "social utility," or utility of maintaining or boosting the listener's self-image (being polite). We formalize this tradeoff within a probabilistic model of language understanding and test it with empirical data on people's inferences about the relation between a speaker's goals, utterances and the true states of the world.
[condition, compare] [social, experiment, epistemic, positive, bad, negative, understanding, cognitive, consistent, inference, work, participant, scale, united, talk, rated] [speaker, utterance, listener, language, literal, bob, context, speech, meaning, experimental, degree] [difference, knowledge, performance, asked, balance, high] [read, semantics, order] [model, state, true, honest, utility, polite, inferred, nice, niceness, data, politeness, cooperative, pragmatic, assume, terrible, honesty, based, parameter, good, wanted, function, posterior, distribution, meanness, amazing, expected, infer, prior, rational, rsa, proportion, truthful, empirical, density, infers, probabilistic, method, full, likelihood] [goal, figure, weight, design, human, represent, component, framework]
A Neural Field Model of Word Repetition Effects in Early Time-Course ERPs in Spoken Word Perception
Andrew Valenti, Michael Brady, Matthias Scheutz, Phillip Holcomb, He Pu


Previous attempts at modeling the neuro-cognitive mechanisms underlying word processing have used connectionist approaches, but none has modeled spoken word architectures as the input is presented in real-time. Hence, such models rely on the ingenuity of the modeler to establish a mapping of real-time stimulus to the model’s input which may not preserve processing that happens during each time step. We present a neural field model which successfully replicates the effect of immediate auditory repetition of monosyllabic words and fits it to a component of a well-studied mechanism for analyzing language processing, the event-related potential (ERP). This represents a new modeling approach to studying the neuro-cognitive processes, one that is based on the bottom-up inter-action of real-time sensory information with higher-level cate- gories of cognitive processing.
[erp, processing, time, training, learning, presentation, auditory, spoken, erps, monosyllabic, early, repeated, response, category, target, stimulus, sound, task, recorded, presented] [cognitive, influence, implicit, negative, fall, biological] [speech, experimental, error, language, contained, updated] [equation, primary, three, usa, boston, change, difference] [word, vector, equilibrium, random, lexical, semantic, computed, mechanism] [model, state, data, modeling, interval, fit, prediction, potential] [field, neural, repetition, input, modulator, figure, signal, trained, unit, activation, component, perception, filter, sensory, connectionist, human, deeper, layer, dynamic, eye, interaction, associated, driver, area, single, polarity]
Cross-linguistic similarities aid third language learning in bilinguals
James Bartolotti, Viorica Marian


Learning a new language involves significant vocabulary acquisition. Learners can accelerate this process by relying on words with native-language overlap, such as cognates. For bilingual third language learners, it is necessary to determine how their two existing languages interact during novel language learning. A scaffolding account predicts transfer from either language for individual words, whereas an accumulation account predicts cumulative transfer from both languages. To compare these accounts, twenty English-German bilingual adults were taught an artificial language containing 48 novel written words that varied orthogonally in English and German wordlikeness (neighborhood size and orthotactic probability). Wordlikeness in each language improved word production accuracy, and similarity to one language provided the same benefit as dual-language overlap. In addition, participants' memory for novel words was affected by the statistical distributions of letters in the novel language. Results indicate that bilinguals utilize both languages during third language acquisition, supporting a scaffolding learning model.
[novel, learning, accuracy, vocabulary, picture, target, improved, time, size, learn, indicate, baseline, journal, response, increased, task, block, evidence, faster, condition, learned, orthotactic, training, fixed, artificial] [account, participant, experience] [language, german, wordlikeness, production, memory, scaffolding, curve, bilingual, term, foreign, intercept, phonological, growth, meaning, germanlike, combination, englishlikeness, wordlike, englishlike] [knowledge, third, benefit, quadratic, high, transfer, three, working, better] [word, english, proficiency, similarity, lexical, existing, relative, acquisition, random, written, form, neighborhood, orthographic, linking] [model, higher, individual, accumulation, fit, predicts] [recognition, single, overlap, current, process, height, associated]
Learning in the wild - how labels influence what we learn
Samuel Rivera, Chris Robinson


Learning concepts and categories in the real world is often accompanied by verbal labels. The existing theoretical accounts of how labels influence what we learn range from facilitation to overshadowing, with changes occurring over development. Studies investigating how labels influence what people learn have typically been confined to a category learning framework, where participants were tasked to learn how to discriminate categories or infer missing category properties. Here, we investigate how the absence or presence of labels, both common and unique, alter how people attend and what they remember in a more general setting. Our results suggest that unique labels may promote visual exploration of objects; whereas, there was no evidence to support the claim that hearing the same label associated with different members of a to-be-learned category directed attention to common features.
[category, attention, silent, label, deterministic, condition, learning, training, defining, test, time, presented, learn, repeated, categorization, denote, lure, labeling, standard, accuracy, evidence, facilitate, revealed, novel, testing, examining, auditory, individuation, early, sound, trial, robinson, directing, child, development, fixated, showing] [common, participant, anova, cognitive, relevant, presence, influence] [main, latency, error, bonferroni, object, linguistic, support, language, affect, perceptual, studied, experimental] [study, number, young, three, difference, statistically] [unique, direct, phrase, mechanism] [proportion, pairwise, underlying] [figure, visual, associated, fixation, feature, focus, current, plot]
Active Overhearing: Development in Preschoolers’ Skill at ‘Listening in’ to Naturalistic Overheard Speech
Ruthe Foushee, Fei Xu


Overhearing can be seen as active learning, and overheard speech provides an increasingly viable source of linguistic input across development. This study extends previous results showing learning from overhearing simplified, pedagogic speech to a more ecologically valid context. Children learn multiple words and facts corresponding to novel toys either through an overheard phone call or through direct instruction. Remarkably, 4.5–6-year-olds learned four new words equally well in both conditions. Their performance on a set of six facts was even better, especially when taught directly. Analysis of the videos revealed that older children with high test accuracy both looked toward the experimenter often, and tracked objects as she discussed them. 3–4.5-year-olds only learned facts from overhearing, and exhibited greater varability in attention. These results suggest learning from overhearing is driven by attention to the indirect input, and may be a skill that undergoes substantial development during the preschool years.
[learning, overhearing, condition, test, novel, child, learn, accuracy, attention, target, didactic, overheard, familiar, younger, familiarity, older, age, touch, development, vocabulary, attend, spoke, tested, explicit, decreased, suggesting, chance, advantage] [experiment, fact, social, positive, mapping, discussion, result] [speech, object, linguistic, previous, coded, language] [experimenter, better, performance, study, active, video, included, playing, greater, toy, impact, score, received, skill, additional, difference, correct] [word, demonstrated, measure, random, substantial, table, direct] [model, fit, call, aic, well, odds] [interaction, phone, joint, figure, performed, gaze, naturalistic, input, multiple, tracking]
Varieties of experience: A new look at folk philosophy of mind
Kara Weisman, Carol Dweck, Ellen Markman


Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have often divided the mind into fundamental component parts. Does this intuition carry over into folk philosophy of mind? In a series of large-scale studies, we explore intuitive distinctions among different kinds of mental phenomena and consider how these distinctions might organize the conceptual space of the diverse “intelligent” and “social” entities in the modern world. Across studies, independent exploratory factor analyses reveal a common latent structure underlying mental capacity attributions, centered on three types of phenomenal experiences: physiological experiences of biological needs (e.g., hunger, pain); social-emotional experiences of self- and other-relevant emotions (e.g., guilt, pride); and perceptual-cognitive abilities to detect and use information about the environment (e.g., hearing, memory). We argue for an expanded model of folk philosophy of mind that goes beyond agency and experience (H. M. Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007) to make basic and important distinctions among different varieties of experience.
[dimension, target, revealed, age, attention, stanford, presented, explore] [mental, factor, feeling, physiological, experience, experiencing, social, gray, people, folk, philosophy, lay, moral, accounted, intuitive, reasoning, distinct, capacity, agency, cognitive, soc, biological, emo, perceptualcognitive, beetle, discussion, judged, cog, phy, distinction, evaluate, ontology, excluded, ontological, weisman, survey, work, psychology, rated, capable, priori, understanding] [perceptual, affect, item, university] [mind, study, three, providing, additional] [variance, table, analysis, structure, large] [total, model, set, range, making, exploratory, check, consider, full] [current, perception, framework, human, component]
How people differ in syllogistic reasoning
Sangeet Khemlani, P.n. Johnson-Laird


Psychologists have studied syllogistic inferences for more than a century, but no extant theory gives an adequate account of them. Reasoners appear to reason using different strategies. A complete account of syllogisms must explain them and the resulting differences from one individual to another. We propose a dual-process theory that solves these two problems. It is based on the manipulation of mental models, i.e., iconic simulations of possibilities. A computer program implementing the theory, mReasoner, generates initial conclusions by building and scanning models. The theory accounts for individual differences in an early study on syllogisms (Johnson-Laird & Steedman, 1978). The computational model provides an algorithmic account of the different processes on which three subsets of performance relied (Simulation 1). It also simulates the performance of each individual participant in the study (Simulation 2). The theory and its implementation constitute the first robust account of individual differences in syllogistic reasoning.
[valid, journal, size] [conclusion, reasoning, mental, intuitive, account, initial, systematic, appear, inference, explain, cognitive, quantified] [program, experimental, carried, separate, characterize] [subset, performance, three, study] [analysis, computational, cluster, small, canonical, order] [individual, parameter, syllogistic, data, theory, model, search, simulation, mreasoner, set, oba, deliberative, consider, aba, abc, iba, ibc, iab, aab, eab, ocb, eba, ebc, alternative, icb, acb, obc, oab, ecb, fit, simulated, based, banker, steedman, optimal, correlation, propensity, datasets, chef, khemlani, yield, best] [figure, system, architect, corresponding, implementation]
Grounded Distributional Semantics for Abstract Words
Katsumi Takano, Akira Utsumi


Since Harnad (1990) pointed out the symbol grounding problem, cognitive science research has demonstrated that grounding in perceptual or sensorimotor experience is crucial to language. Recent embodied cognition theories have argued that language is more important for grounding abstract than concrete words; abstract words are grounded via language. Distributional semantics has recently addressed the embodied nature of language and proposed multimodal semantic models. However, these models are not cognitively plausible because they do not address the recent embodiment view of abstract concepts. Therefore, we propose a novel multimodal distributional semantics in which abstract words are represented indirectly through grounded representations of their semantically related concrete words. A simulation experiment demonstrated that the proposed model achieved better performance in computing the word similarity than other multimodal or text-based distributional models. This finding suggests that the indirect embodiment view is plausible and contributes to the improvement of multimodal distributional semantics.
[standard, learned, processing, test, finding, compared, vocabulary] [cognitive, experience, cognition, result] [perceptual, language, linguistic, directly, meaning, degree, highly, basic] [grounded, symbol, performance, number, improve, better, international, acquired, step, stage] [abstract, semantic, word, distributional, concrete, proposed, multimodal, vector, embodiment, semantics, similarity, kiela, computed, indirect, computational, mediator, dsmg, psychologically, dsmv, plausible, concreteness, dsml, lexical, approach, cosine, semantically, table, demonstrated, pabs, constructed, construct, acquisition] [model, method, theory, correlation, conference, dispersion, data, propose] [visual, embodied, grounding, view, represented, image, representation, space, figure, sensorimotor, human, represent, pointed, neural, achieved, matrix]
Shakers and Maracas: Action-Based Categorisation Choices in Triads Are Influenced by Task Instructions
Nicholas Shipp, Frederic Vallee-Tourangeau, Susan Anthony


Shipp, Vallée-Tourangeau, and Anthony (2014) used the triad task to show that when participants select items that ‘goes best with the target’, they tend to select the choice that shares both an action and a taxonomic relation. However such instructions are non-explicit and vague, and might encourage a strategy other than a categorical decision. The present experiment used the same triads as in Shipp et al. to test whether participants were actually engaging in a categorisation strategy. The task instructions were manipulated so that participants either selected the item that “goes best”, “goes best to form a category” or is “most similar” to the target. The results found no differences between the instructions of “goes best to form a category” and “goes best”. Therefore the triad task does encourage a natural categorisation strategy and differences in task instructions across research are a result of the stimuli used.
[category, task, target, condition, presented, journal, test, categorization, chance, compared, second, reported] [designed, experiment, led, percentage, cognitive, key, work, united] [triad, item, taxonomic, perceptual, shared, select, object, categorisation, shipp, dco, thematic, pco, sco, context, gbfc, share, rifle, lin, pistol, experimental, membership, main, functional, murphy, sword, instructed, anthony, previous, manipulated, thematically, hoc] [sharing, example, strategy, water, asked, three, difference, addition, lower, instruction] [form, similarity, analysis, relation, conceptual, list] [choice, best, higher, proportion, option, set, selecting, selected, full, additive] [action, interaction, selection, side, role, figure]
Training prospective abilities through conversation about the extended self
Nadia Chernyak, Kathryn Leech, Meredith Rowe


The ability to act on behalf of our future selves is related to uniquely human abilities such as planning, delay of gratification, and goal attainment. While prospection develops rapidly during early childhood, little is known about the mechanisms that support its development. Here we explored whether encouraging children to talk about their extended selves (self outside the present context) boosts their prospective abilities. Preschoolers (N = 81) participated in a 5-minute interaction with an adult in which they were asked to talk about events in the near future, distant future, near past, or present. Compared with children discussing their present and distant future, children asked to discuss events in their near future or near past displayed better planning and prospective memory. Additionally, those two conditions were most effective in eliciting self-projection (use of personal pronouns). Results suggest that experience communicating about the close-in-time, extended self contributes to children’s future-oriented thinking.
[child, time, training, condition, developmental, early, picture, age, journal, second, revealed, looked, development, suggests, powerful] [future, prospective, talk, extended, distant, cognitive, work, conversation, thinking, personal, talking, prospection, mental, bed, going, long, told, social, delay, happen, discussing, remind, proceeded, distinct, temporal, feel, cognizing] [item, episodic, context, memory, support, language] [experimenter, asked, three, young, linear, square, help, preschool, score, ability, school, greater, mind, atance, travel, playing, received, study] [tense, class, amount, upcoming, listed, conceptual] [generate, planning, proportion, game, draw, generated, provide, theory] [box, labeled]
There is more to gesture than meets the eye: Visual attention to gesture’s referents cannot account for its facilitative effects during math instruction
Miriam Novack, Elizabeth Wakefield, Eliza Congdon, Steve Franconeri, Susan Goldin-Meadow


Teaching a new concept with gestures – hand movements that accompany speech – facilitates learning above-and-beyond instruction through speech alone (e.g., Singer & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are still being explored. Here, we use eye tracking to explore one mechanism – gesture’s ability to direct visual attention. We examine how children allocate their visual attention during a mathematical equivalence lesson that either contains gesture or does not. We show that gesture instruction improves posttest performance, and additionally that gesture does change how children visually attend to instruction: children look more to the problem being explained, and less to the instructor. However looking patterns alone cannot explain gesture’s effect, as posttest performance is not predicted by any of our looking-time measures. These findings suggest that gesture does guide visual attention, but that attention alone cannot account for its facilitative learning effects.
[attention, learning, condition, time, training, learn, type, novel, indicating, spoken, increased, presented, visually] [work, explanation, missing, understanding, focused, positive] [gesture, speech, previous, produced, aoi, directly, university, affect] [instructional, instruction, problem, performance, solve, posttest, addend, strategy, math, equivalence, instructor, spent, correct, study, differ, singer, equal, mathematical, tobii, equation, answer, better, watching, correctly, ability, asked, allocation, pretest, answered, difference, ping, help, idea] [form, grouping, increase, natural] [data, proportion, woman, sample, lead] [visual, eye, segment, figure, side, tracking, focus, current, gaze, directs, aois, behavioral, facilitates, space]
Measuring and modeling distraction by self-referential processing in a complex working memory span task
Jeroen Daamen, Marieke van Vugt, Niels Taatgen


Two experiments using novel complex working memory span tasks were performed, both requiring the participants to remember a span of letters whilst being distracted by the processing of words. Word processing could either be self-referential (SRP) or not. In the first experiment recall performance was compared between SRP and non-SRP conditions using the same words. In the second experiment, we compared SRP and non-SRP in two tasks equalized in semantic processing but using different words. In both experiments recall performance was significantly lower after SRP compared to non-SRP, indicating that SRP has a disruptive effect on the recall task. A cognitive model implemented in PRIMs, using goal competition during SRP, interfering with rehearsal of letters, could account for the observed experimental results. If SRP interferes with subsequent tasks in this manner it should also interfere with tasks other than recall, such as SRP occurring in daily life.
[srp, condition, processing, distraction, task, span, presented, response, rehearsal, time, phase, distracting, trial, presentation, compared, blank, complex, second, reported, selfreferential] [experiment, neutral, caused, mental, participant, cognitive, fact, including, explained, negative, account, percentage, elaboration, inconsistency, factor] [recall, memory, item, chunk, experimental, prevent, remember, store, retrieval] [score, difference, performance, lower, working, scored, modeled, included, example, better, number, answer, prims, mind] [word, analysis, measure, semantic, confusion, positional] [model, data, well, average, allow, set, observed, confidence, chosen] [letter, current, figure, cwm, screen, serial, goal, multiple, internal]
Statistical Learning Ability Can Overcome the Negative Impact of Low Socioeconomic Status on Language Development
Leyla Eghbalzad, Joanne Deocampo, Christopher Conway


Statistical learning (SL) is believed to be a mechanism that enables successful language acquisition. Language acquisition in turn is heavily influenced by environmental factors such as socioeconomic status (SES). However, it is unknown to what extent SL abilities interact with SES in affecting language outcomes. To examine this potential interaction, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) in 38 children aged 7-12 while performing a visual SL task consisting of a sequence of stimuli that contained covert statistical probabilities that predicted a target stimulus. Hierarchical regression results indicated that SL ability moderated the relationship between SES (average of both caregiver’s education level) and language scores (grammar, and marginally with receptive vocabulary). For children with high SL ability, SES had a weaker effect on language compared to children with low SL ability, suggesting that having good SL abilities could help ameliorate the disadvantages associated with being raised in a family with lower SES.
[learning, statistical, erp, development, predictor, condition, target, child, task, standard, compared, vocabulary, socioeconomic, presented, status, receptive, evidence, revealed, grammaticality, early, nopredictor, erps, reaction, georgia, magician, jost, sequence, administered, reported] [low, relationship, social, cognitive, variable, biological, consistent, influence, appear, negative] [language, environmental, raised, linguistic, ppvt, highly] [high, ability, impact, education, lower, difference, assessment, study, department, larger] [amplitude, grammar, measure, demonstrated] [probability, data, measured, average, higher, potential, posterior, good, based, state] [figure, level, visual, eeg, brain, net, region, intrinsic, environment, neural, component, box]
The Influence of Group Interaction on Creativity in Engineering Design
Trina Kershaw, Rebecca Peterson, Sankha Bhowmick


Group work is frequently part of idea generation, despite evidence that group interaction may reduce productivity during brainstorming sessions. Idea quantity is one aspect of creativity, but the originality of ideas generated is also important. In this paper, we examine how different aspects of group interaction, such as who makes the most contributions to an idea and the number of group members contribute to an idea, impact the originality of concepts generated by engineering students. We found that the most original concepts were produced when the concept originator was the top contributor to the design, and when the majority of group members contributed to the concept, particularly among senior students. These results are discussed in relation to previous work and suggestions are made for future research that assesses the interaction between design fixation and group processes.
[second, standard, suggests, completed] [examined, work, agreement, led, technical, experience, social, common] [generation, produced, previous, produce, modified, university, coded, innovation, nominal] [group, originality, concept, engineering, contribution, contributor, idea, score, originator, received, litter, member, contributed, senior, curriculum, working, collection, number, brainstorming, paulus, product, improvement, picker, minor, quantity, undergraduate, blair, freshman, contribute, nijstad, high, asme, circulated, isolated, performance, subset] [creativity, creative, analysis, productivity, applied, final] [individual, higher, method, decision, generated, sample, paper, tree, based] [design, top, level, figure, multiple, interaction, original, coding, system]
Exploring the Cost Function in Color Perception and Memory: An Information-Theoretic Model of Categorical Effects in Color Matching
Chris R. Sims, Zheng Ma, Sarah R. Allred, Rachel A. Lerch, Jonathan I. Flombaum


Recent evidence indicates that color categories can exert a strong influence over color matching in both perception and memory. We explore this phenomenon by analyzing the cost function for perceptual error. Our analysis is developed within the mathematical framework of rate–distortion theory. According to our approach, the goal of perception is to minimize the expected cost of error while subject to a constraint on the capacity of perceptual processing. We propose that the cost function in color perception is defined by the sum of two components: a metric cost associated with the magnitude of error in color space, and a cost associated with perceptual errors that cross color category boundaries. A computational model embodying this assumption is shown to produce an excellent fit to empirical data. The results generally suggest that what appear as 'errors' in working memory performance may reflect reasonable and systematic behaviors in the context of costs.
[category, response, stimulus, categorical, evidence, indicate, journal] [capacity, influence, strong, experiment, cognitive, conditional, psychological, result, described] [color, delayed, memory, channel, undelayed, perceptual, error, experimental, parameterized, identification, circular, bae, matching, wheel, university, angular] [estimation, working, additional, difference, solution, equation, performance, department, comparing, conducted, three, precision] [subject, approach, cosine, relative, computational, probe] [cost, model, function, metric, hue, fit, theory, probability, distribution, paper, based, assumes, optimal, data, estimated, best, bayesian, empirical, maximum, catmet, simple, expected] [perception, figure, visual, current, constraint, goal, developed, represents, brain, angle, illustrated, framework, sensory]
Abstraction in time: Finding hierarchical linguistic structure in a model of relational processing
Leonidas Doumas, Andrea Martin


Abstract mental representation is fundamental for human cognition. Forming such representations in time, especially from dynamic and noisy perceptual input, is a challenge for any processing modality, but perhaps none so acutely as for language processing. We show that LISA (Hummel & Holyaok, 1997) and DORA (Doumas, Hummel, & Sandhofer, 2008), models built to process and to learn structured (i.e., symbolic) representations of conceptual properties and relations from unstructured inputs, show oscillatory activation during processing that is highly similar to the cortical activity elicited by the linguistic stimuli from Ding et al. (2016). We argue, as Ding et al. (2016), that this activation reflects formation of hierarchical linguistic representation, and furthermore, that the kind of computational mechanisms in LISA/DORA (e.g., temporal binding by systematic asynchrony of firing) may underlie formation of abstract linguistic representations in the human brain.
[relational, processing, analogical, learn, structured, response] [proposition, reasoning, cognitive] [language, linguistic, modified, object] [active, symbolic, closely, propositional, code] [lisa, sentence, structure, semantic, english, fire, phrase, noun, computational, mandarin, direct, order, structural, form, forming, abstract] [bound, well, model, observed, rate, data, compositional] [binding, ding, dora, coding, figure, firing, chase, goblin, representing, gnome, driver, representation, cortical, hierarchical, doumas, activation, process, conjunctively, chaser, represented, chased, human, represent, pattern, tracking, phrasal, connectionist, role, current, hummel, oscillatory, perform, tracked, dynamic, unit, synchrony, bind, connected, distributed, activity, burst, fur, localist]
Modeling sampling duration in decisions from experience
Nisheeth Srivastava, Johannes Mueller-Trede, Paul Schrater, Edward Vul


Cognitive models of choice almost universally implicate sequential evidence accumulation as a fundamental element of the mechanism by which preferences are formed. When to stop evidence accumulation is an important question that such models do not currently answer. We present the first cognitive model that accurately predicts stopping decisions in individual economic decisions-from-experience trials, using an online learning model. Analysis of stopping decisions across three different datasets reveals three useful predictors of sampling duration - relative evidence strength, how long it takes participants to see all rewards, and a novel indicator of convergence of an underlying learning process, which we call predictive {\em volatility}. We quantify the relative strengths of these factors in predicting observers' stopping points, finding that predictive volatility consistently dominates relative evidence strength in stopping decisions.
[evidence, predictor, sequence, learning, sequential, baseline, trial, learn, response, statistical, task] [experience, influence, strength, cognitive, long, variable] [error, perceptual, consistently, experimental] [three, counting, difference, larger, greater, magnitude, number, estimation, equation, quantity, problem] [length, relative, large] [sampling, volatility, model, dfe, stopping, predictive, evd, sample, prediction, probability, decision, data, individual, expected, choice, best, fit, option, observer, risky, terminate, point, distribution, predict, hazard, correlation, reward, log, datasets, regression, parameter, measured, modeling, simple, accumulation, call, actual, choose, safe, outcome, load, empirical] [figure, duration, human, multiple, dataset, role, associated]
Experience as a Free Parameter in the Cognitive Modeling of Language
Brendan Johns, Michael Jones, Douglas Mewhort


To account for natural variability in cognitive processing, it is standard practice to optimize the parameters of a model to account for behavioral data. However, variability reflecting the information to which one has been exposed is usually ignored. Nevertheless, most language theories assign a large role to an individual’s experience with language. We present a new way to fit language-based behavioral data that combines simple learning and processing mechanisms using optimization of language materials. We demonstrate that benchmark fits on multiple linguistic tasks can be achieved using this method and will argue that one must account not only for the internal parameters of a model but also the external experience that people receive when theorizing about human behavior.
[standard, learning, test, older, type, adult] [cognitive, account, split, source, psychological, strength, power, people] [linguistic, language, environmental, memory, specific, priming, variability, context, retrieval] [young, group, performance, knowledge, better, provided, free, number, three] [semantic, lexical, word, experiential, large, corpus, frequency, random, sdm, variance, complete, natural, order, contextual, measure, increase, form, examine, document, attained, diversity, combined, beagle] [model, fit, data, fitting, set, method, decision, best, selected, behavior, determine, provide, correlation, individual, simple, parameter] [figure, behavioral, representation, algorithm, human, environment, space, internal, process, multiple]
Syntax Accommodation in Social Media Conversations
Reihane Boghrati, Joe Hoover, Kate M. Johnson, Justin Garten, Morteza Dehghani


The psycholinguistic theory of Communication Accommodation proposes that people modify communication dynamics to minimize (or maximize) their social differences. Research on communication accommodation has shown that people who want social approval will modify their linguistic style to match that of their interactant; however, most studies have been conducted on small-scale datasets and in laboratory situations. In this work, we investigate the relationship between linguistic syntax usage and conversation participation in a more naturalistic conversational setting: social media conversations on Reddit.com. We introduce a novel approach for calculating document-level syntax similarity by relying on natural language processing methods and graph theory techniques. Using the proposed method, we present the results of two experiments which demonstrate that users who comment on a post tend to use syntax similar to that of the original post.
[compared, evidence, pair, journal, novel] [social, people, historical, experiment, conversation, relationship, psychological, hypothesize, suppose] [language, communication, previous, matching, linguistic, van, priming, convergence] [study, number, group, conducted, three] [syntactic, similarity, syntax, post, accommodation, comment, parse, random, style, written, structure, graph, subreddit, perfect, syntactically, edit, approach, subreddits, distance, hungarian, tend, document, sentence, minimum, complete, text, reddit, word, order, writing, considered, calculating, calculate, commented, measure, edge] [theory, data, hypothesis, tree, set, method, higher, follow, function, provide, minimize] [original, algorithm, bipartite, weight, dataset, cat, figure, output, mimicry, side, user]
How Different Frames of Reference Interact: A Neural Network Model
Weizhi Nan, Yanlong Sun, Xun Liu, Hongbin Wang


People use multiple frames of reference (FORs) for representing and updating spatial relationships between objects in a complex environment. “Frame of Reference-based Map of Salience” theory (FORMS) suggests that FORs with high salience may be processed in priority. Here, we report a computational neural network model for a two-cannon task, which naturally involves multiple FORs with different levels of salience: intrinsic frame of reference (IFOR) and egocentric frame of reference (EFOR). The goal is to investigate the computational neural mechanisms underlying human spatial performance. Our simulation results fit earlier behavioral results well. The model suggests although multiple FORs may be initially represented independently, they interfere with each other by the inhibitory competition of neurons in the later process (in hidden layer) for conflict resolution. Moreover, salience may modulate the competition by prioritizing FORs with high salience levels. These results represent a connectionist support for the FORMS theory.
[target, condition, trial, competition, training, response, inhibitory, testing, presented, suggests, complex, conflict, task, time, sun] [salience, cognitive, frame, stable, positive] [color, spatial, blue, reference, encode, main, egocentric, updated] [ratio, three, group, larger, number] [analysis, table, computational, anchored, earlier] [red, model, set, simulation, data, correlation, based, opposite, prediction, potential, theory, predictive] [cannon, pellet, angle, orientation, layer, fors, multiple, neural, efor, ifor, behavioral, interaction, hidden, network, intrinsic, figure, location, input, fewer, column, represent, environment, process, human, output, longer, represents, tamborello, center, current, excitatory, represented]
Animal, dog, or dalmatian? Level of abstraction in nominal referring expressions
Caroline Graf, Judith Degen, Robert Hawkins, Noah Goodman


Nominal reference is very flexible---the same object may be called a dalmatian, a dog, or an animal when all are literally true. What accounts for the choices that speakers make in how they refer to objects? The addition of modifiers (e.g. "big dog") has been extensively explored in the literature, but fewer studies have explored the choice of noun, including its level of abstraction. We collected freely produced referring expressions in a multi-player reference game experiment, where we manipulated the object's context. We find that utterance choice is affected by the contextual informativeness of a description, its length and frequency, and the typicality of the object for that description. Finally, we show how these factors naturally enter into a formal model of production within the Rational Speech-Acts framework, and that the resulting model predicts our quantitative production data.
[target, condition, compared, category, label, deterministic, indicating] [sufficient, cognitive, long, rating, experiment, treated, case, evaluate] [basic, typicality, term, reference, referring, super, speaker, utterance, object, typical, ite, distractor, nominal, listener, production, van, refer, language, context, specific, referential, contained, map, referent, distractors, main, experimental, literal, mentioning] [three, difference, number, free, ratio, greater] [length, frequency, short, noun, contextual, includes, word, order] [model, choice, empirical, informativeness, cost, data, set, log, probability, rsa, probabilistic, collected, game, preference, determine, posterior, pragmatic, selected, parameter, choose, rational, slider, goodman, preferred, predicts, higher] [level, figure, quantitative]
Do classifier categories affect or reflect object concepts?
Laura Speed, Jidong Chen, Falk Huettig, Asifa Majid


We conceptualize objects based on sensorimotor information gleaned from real-world experience. To what extent is conceptual information structured according to higher-level linguistic features? We investigate whether classifiers, a grammatical category, shape the conceptual representations of objects. In three experiments native Mandarin speakers (a classifier language) and native Dutch speakers (a language without classifiers) judged the similarity of a target object with four objects (presented as words or pictures). One object shared a classifier with the target, the other objects did not. Overall, the target object was judged as more similar to the object with the shared classifier than distractor objects in both Dutch and Mandarin speakers, with no difference between the two languages. Thus, even speakers of a non-classifier language are sensitive to object similarities underlying classifier systems, and using a classifier system does not exaggerate these similarities. This suggests that classifier systems reflect, rather than affect, conceptual structure.
[target, type, presented, category, journal, match, compared, evidence, task, numeral, explicit, shape, advantage] [experiment, cognitive, judged, judge] [classifier, language, object, grammatical, dutch, linguistic, gender, affect, shared, distractor, saalbach, native, experimental, main, lucy, previous, share, relativity, university, spanish, salient, german, specific, matching, masculine, grammatically, typical, yucatec] [comparison, three, thought, study, sharing, procedure, asked, difference, example, greater] [similarity, mandarin, conceptual, reflect, word, noun, english, organization, chinese] [find, higher, range, simple, data] [figure, system, associated, visual, representation, interaction, reveal, feature]
Using Motor Dynamics to Explore Real-time Competition in Cross-situational Word Learning: Evidence From Two Novel Paradigms
John Bunce, Drew Abney, Chelsea Gordon, Michael Spivey, Rose Scott


Adults can use cross-situational information to learn words, but it is unclear how much information they retain about the potential referents that occur with a word on each observation. We tested this question using novel mouse-tracking and finger-tracking paradigms. Adults encountered novel words in ambiguous training trials and were then tested on the words’ referents. In some test trials, participants saw both the target and a high-probability competitor that had repeatedly occurred with the word. Participants’ mouse trajectories were slower, less accurate, and more complex when the competitor was present, indicating participants were aware that both the target and competitor had occurred with the word. This suggests that learners can retain multiple potential referents for a word and mouse tracking provides a promising way of assessing this knowledge. However, this knowledge was not evident in participants’ finger movements, suggesting that finger tracking might not capture real-time competition between referents.
[target, competitor, competition, mouse, test, occurred, trajectory, revealed, novel, trial, retain, learning, training, label, tested, crosssituational, suggests, time, encounter, heard, position, response, accuracy, complex, conjecture, slower, yurovsky, exhibited, statistical, appeared] [experiment, series, anova, participant, cognitive, psychological] [referent, object, select, main, referential, previous, university, language] [correct, incorrect, dot, knowledge, three, differ, impact] [word, entropy, measure, complexity, examine, computed, analysis] [potential, selected, sample, capture, alternative, provide, data, green, set] [angle, tracking, finger, single, multiple, computer, motor, process, experienced, planned]
Decision contamination in the wild: Sequential dependencies in Yelp review ratings
David Vinson, Rick Dale, Michael Jones


Current judgments are systematically biased by prior judgments. Such biases occur in ways that seem to reflect the cognitive system’s ability to adapt to the statistical regularities within the environment. These cognitive sequential dependencies have been shown to occur under carefully controlled laboratory settings as well as more recent studies designed to determine if such effects occur in real world scenarios. In this study we use these well-known findings to guide our analysis of over 2.2 million business review ratings. We explore how both within-reviewer and within-business (between reviewer) ratings are influenced by previous ratings. Our findings, albeit exploratory, suggest that current ratings are influenced in systematic ways by prior ratings. This work is couched within a broader program that aims to determine the validity of laboratory findings using large naturally occurring behavioral data.
[sequential, stimulus, time, journal, statistical, occur, trial, occurring, presented, type, processing, categorization] [rating, cognitive, judgment, work, temporal, scale, experience, moral, future, influence] [previous, contrast, influenced, experimental, perceptual, expect] [absolute, number, difference, study, online, linear, magnitude] [distance, natural, preceding, relative, large, measure, analysis, reflect, frequency, subsequent, table] [star, distribution, provide, average, prior, making, regression, decision, determine, data, well, model, observed, naturally, exploration, opposite, simple] [review, current, business, laboratory, assimilation, reviewer, dataset, yelp, perception, farther, figure, successive, assimilate, controlled, neural, displaced]
Grammatical gender affects odor cognition
Laura Speed, Asifa Majid


Language interacts with olfaction in exceptional ways. Olfaction is believed to be weakly linked with language, as demonstrated by our poor odor naming ability, yet olfaction seems to be particularly susceptible to linguistic descriptions. We tested the boundaries of the influence of language on olfaction by focusing on a non-lexical aspect of language (grammatical gender). We manipulated the grammatical gender of fragrance descriptions to test whether the congruence with fragrance gender would affect the way fragrances were perceived and remembered. Native French and German speakers read descriptions of fragrances containing ingredients with feminine or masculine grammatical gender, and then smelled masculine or feminine fragrances and rated them on a number of dimensions (e.g., pleasantness). Participants then completed an odor recognition test. Fragrances were remembered better when presented with descriptions whose grammatical gender matched the gender of the fragrance. Overall, results suggest grammatical manipulations of odor descriptions can affect odor cognition.
[verbal, journal, test, presented, processing, explicit, suggests, suggesting] [influence, cognitive, perceived, cognition, perceive, told, work, rated, talking, rating, explicitly, described, people, implicitly, buy, judged] [gender, grammatical, fragrance, odor, language, masculine, male, feminine, german, memory, female, olfactory, french, olfaction, experimental, affect, smelled, linguistic, clearly, description, matched, smell, grammatically, pleasantness, previous, perceptual, marketed, herz, spanish, native, carefully, context] [difficult, easily, thought, study, correctly, product, number, annual, three] [semantic, natural, conceptual, read, english, table, linked] [based, making, selected, set] [perception, interaction, recognition, figure, box, labeled, brain, sensory, encoding]
Modeling N400 amplitude using vector space models of word representation
Allyson Ettinger, Naomi Feldman, Philip Resnik, Colin Phillips


We use a vector space model (VSM) to simulate semantic relatedness effects in sentence processing, and use this connection to predict N400 amplitude in an ERP study by Federmeier and Kutas (1999). We find that the VSM-based model is able to capture key elements of the authors' manipulations and results, accounting for aspects of the results that are unexplained by cloze probability. This demonstration provides a proof of concept for use of VSMs in modeling the particular context representations and corresponding facilitation processes that seem to influence non-cloze-like behavior in the N400.
[target, processing, structured, journal, explicit] [influence, cognitive, key, result, fact, strong] [context, language, relatedness, main] [study, linear, greater, collective, comparison, three] [semantic, word, federmeier, similarity, relation, cloze, cosine, vector, amplitude, kutas, facilitation, reflect, sentence, computational, vsms, averaging, underlie, anchored, distance, association, direct, simulate, lexical, vsm, plausibility, incoming, agnostic, natural, untimed, measure, track, workshop] [expected, model, based, average, probability, modeling, predict, selected, fit, capture, simple, simulation, making, find, observed, higher, roughly] [figure, representation, space, constraint, brain, represented, computer]
An Information-Processing Account of Representation Change: International Mathematical Olympiad Problems are Hard not only for Humans
Takuya Matsuzaki, Munehiro Kobayashi, Noriko H. Arai


We present a new information-processing model of math problem solving in which representation change theory can be implemented. The problem representation process is divided into two. One is to translate a problem into a formula in a conservative extension of Zermelo-Fraenkel's set theory, and the other is to interpret the translated formulas in local mathematical theories. A ZF formula has several interpretations, and representation change is thus implementable as a choice of an interpretation. Adopting the theory of real closed fields as an example of local theory, we develop a prototype system. We use more than 400 problems from three sources as benchmarks: exercise books, university entrance examination, and the International Mathematical Olympiad problems. Our experimental results suggest that our model can serve as a basis of a quantitative study on representation change in the sense that the performance of our prototype system reflects difficulties of the problems quite precisely.
[processing, time, quantifier, size] [prototype, appropriate, basis, real, variable, account, logic, reasoning] [language, module, experimental, university, recall] [problem, change, mathematical, solving, formula, difficulty, propositional, primary, insight, imo, math, number, three, rcf, called, exercise, univ, example, solved, draughtboard, mutilated, solve, solution, entrance, reformulation, geometry, require, performance, secondary, arithmetic, presburger, international, precision, free, knowledge] [table, local, syntactic, natural, discourse, sentence, semantic, expressed, computational, logical, benchmark, mechanism, analysis, theoretical, complexity] [theory, model, search, set, choice, formulation, find, assume, requires] [representation, process, system, perception, consists, algorithm, implementation, human, transformation, current, unit, space]
Inductive Ethics: A Bottom-Up Taxonomy of the Moral Domain
Justin Landy, Daniel Bartels


Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) posits that people moralize at least six distinct kinds of virtues. These virtues are divided into “individualizing” and “binding” virtues. Despite widespread enthusiasm for MFT, it is unknown how plausible it is as a model of people’s conceptualizations of the moral domain. In this research, we take a bottom-up approach to characterizing people’s conceptualization of the moral domain, and derive a taxonomy of morality that does not resemble MFT. We find that this model more accurately reflects people’s theories of morality than does MFT.
[inductive, superordinate, category, baseline, presented, development, journal] [moral, taxonomy, strength, liberty, sanctity, mft, person, care, conclusion, loyalty, authority, morality, participant, premise, gained, social, foundation, belong, people, man, rated, personality, dissimilarity, cognitive, positive, violate, differing, nephew, dendrogram, exemplify, qualified] [relatedness, university, domain, coded, resemble] [study, fairness, closely, greater, larger, versus] [table, derived, considered, expressed, conceptual, analysis] [likelihood, model, behavior, correlation, randomly, method, sample, theory] [figure, indicates, multidimensional, belonging]
Extracting Human Face Similarity Judgments: Pairs or Triplets?
Linjie Li, Vicente Malave, Amanda Song, Angela Yu


Two experimental protocols, pairwise rating and triplet ranking, have been commonly used for eliciting perceptual similarity judgments for visual objects. Pair has the advantage of greater precision, but triplet is potentially cognitive less taxing, thus resulting in less noisy responses. Here, we introduce several information-theoretic measures of how useful the two protocols are for response prediction and parameter estimation. We demonstrate that triplet is significantly better for extracting subject-specific preferences, while the two are comparable across subjects. While the specific conclusions should be interpreted cautiously, the work provides an information-theoretic framework for quantifying how repetitions within and across subjects can help to combat noise in human responses, as well as giving some insight into the nature of similarity representation and response noise in humans. More generally, this work demonstrates that substantial noise and inconsistency corrupt similarity judgments, both within- and across-subjects, with consequent implications for experimental design and data interpretation.
[response, stimulus, pair, learning, quantify, accuracy, presented, compare, scaling, advantage] [future, rating, cognitive, consistent, systematic, work] [error, experimental, perceptual, generation] [comparison, greater, number, better, three, provided, asked, precision, numerical, science, numeric] [similarity, subject, relative, analysis, order, measure] [triplet, pairwise, data, model, predictive, distribution, gain, correlation, prediction, noise, compute, posterior, bayesian, well, total, predicting, average, based, higher, simple, predict, find, upper, comparable, prior, utility, individual, rate, obvious, making, provide, paper, theory] [human, figure, face, multidimensional, ranking, facial, design, indicates, extracting, representation]
Investigating Semantic Conflict between General Knowledge and Novel Information in Real-Time Sentence Processing
Angele Yazbec, Michael Kaschak, Arielle Borovsky


There is extensive evidence that listeners use general knowledge to predict upcoming sentence endings; however, less is known about how novel information is integrated when there is disagreement between general knowledge and novel information. The present studies use the visual world paradigm to study the semantic competition between new information and general knowledge. Experiment 1 demonstrates that listeners learn to use limited exposure to new information and their general knowledge to anticipate sentence endings that align with the action of the sentence. Experiment 2 demonstrates participants learn to use combinatorial information from stories to elicit anticipatory eye movements to the target over the general knowledge distractor. Evidence from these experiments indicates even in the presence of semantic conflict with general knowledge, listeners rapidly increase the weight of novel information rather than general knowledge.
[general, target, novel, evidence, spoken, second, learn, journal, increased, processing, time, starting, presented, override, learned, suggests, conflict, task, explore] [story, experiment, appear, cartoon, street] [distractor, object, anticipate, rapidly, weigh, pilot, van, support, acting, adapt, fixating, rely, thematic, borovsky, mismatch] [knowledge, procedure, study, conducted] [sentence, anticipatory, comprehension, semantic, onset, analysis, article, exceed, peanut, noun, generalknowledge, interpretation, contextual, interpret] [agent, log, potential, measured, expected, based, proportion, pragmatic, call] [action, eye, screen, image, reveal, visual, computer, movement, figure]
Geometric representations of evidence in models of decision-making
Peter Kvam


Traditionally, models of the decision-making process have focused on the case where a decision-maker must choose between two alternatives. The most successful of these, sequential sampling models, have been extended from the binary case to account for choices and response times between multiple alternatives. In this paper, I present a geometric representation of diffusion and accumulator models of multiple-choice decisions, and show how these can be analyzed as Markov processes on lattices. I then introduce psychological relationships between choice alternatives and show how this impacts the sequential sampling process. I conclude with two examples showing how one can predict distributions of responses on a continuum as well as response times by incorporating psychological representations into a multi-dimensional random walk diffusion process.
[evidence, response, stimulus, time, task, lattice, starting, sequential, type, scaling, presented] [psychological, case, person, initial, described, account, participant] [geometric, color, identification, orthogonal, modified] [three, number, absolute, step, additional, sum, free] [random, relative, order, walk, construct, structure, existing] [decision, choice, model, alternative, log, diffusion, accumulator, odds, state, sampling, accumulation, theory, rate, set, distribution, von, point, provide, simple, well, making, favor, modeling, piece, confidence, data, vary, hue, note] [representation, space, process, orientation, direction, corresponding, figure, multidimensional, transition, represent, markov, represented, allows, triggered, multiple]
Centering and the meaning of conditionals
Nicole Cruz, David Over, Mike Oaksford, Jean Baratgin


The centering inference - p & q, therefore if p then q - is important in reasoning research because it is logically valid for some accounts of conditionals (e. g. the material and the probability conditionals), but not for others (e. g. the inferential conditional, according to which a conditional is true if and only if there is an inferential connection between p and q). We tested participants' acceptance of centering compared to valid and invalid inferences not containing conditionals, varying the presence of an inferential connection and of a common topic of discourse between p and q. Participants' acceptance of centering was more similar to valid inferences than to invalid inferences, and there was no reliable effect of a connection between p and q. Acceptance rates were higher when there was a common topic of discourse, independently of the type of inference. The findings support the probability conditional account.
[valid, invalid, test, finding, journal, compared, general, evidence] [conditional, connection, inference, centering, conditionals, common, inferential, inferentialism, belief, reasoning, people, presence, absence, thinking, logically, causal, truth, factor, strong, liaku, mental, premise, cognitive, conclusion, psychological, scope, amri, oberauer, psychology, philosophical, arb, logic, anova, oaksford, covariation, version, consequent, experiment, led, account] [degree, university, specific, bird, experimental, support, main, language, context, acceptance, mixed, memory, varied] [group, lower, high, difference, online, three, science, equation] [topic, argument, discourse, oxford, form, semantic, logical] [probability, theory, higher, true, validity, pragmatic, probabilistic, hypothesis, assume, uncertain] [interaction, human]
Investigating the Effects of Transparency and Ambiguity on Idiom Learning
Mehrgol Tiv, Evelyn Milburn, Tessa Warren


The purpose of this study was to learn how transparency and ambiguity affect idiom learning. To start, 157 French idioms were translated to English and normed for familiarity, transparency, and ambiguity. Experiment 1 was a training study in which 32 of these idioms were taught to 25 native English speakers over two days of training. A cued recall test during a third session showed a reliable effect of transparency, but performance was close to ceiling. In Experiment 2, the amount of training was reduced to one session and a semantic relatedness test was included after the cued recall test. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that high transparency idioms are recalled with greater accuracy in a cued-recall test but low transparency idioms are recalled with greater accuracy in a semantic relatedness test. No significant effect of or interaction with ambiguity was found.
[test, learning, accuracy, training, task, second, learned, completed, session, span, journal, learn, presented, participated, cued, novel] [experiment, low, influence, hair, indicated, history, participant, focused, strong] [transparency, idiom, ambiguity, figurative, language, meaning, literal, idiomatic, recall, relatedness, memory, university, abbreviated, french, typed, pittsburgh, torrance, translated, definition, variability, tongue, highly] [high, study, included, performance, better, correct, asked, three, working, answer, author, software, difference, greater, questionnaire] [semantic, word, table, ambiguous, phrase, measure, norming, random, english, sentence, comprehension] [individual, higher, set, predict, potential, model] [interaction, current, transparent, operation, unfamiliar, recognition]
Using Prior Data to Inform Model Parameters in the Predictive Performance Equation
Michael Collins, Kevin Gluck, Matthew Walsh, Michael Krusmark, Glenn Gunzelmann


The predictive performance equation (PPE) is a mathematical model of learning and retention that attempts to capitalize on the regularities seen in human learning to predict future performance. To generate predictions, PPE’s free parameters must be calibrated to a minimum amount of historical performance data, leaving PPE unable to generate valid predictions for initial learning events. We examined the feasibility of using the data from other individuals, who performed the same task in the past, to inform PPE’s free parameters for new individuals (prior-informed predictions). This approach could enable earlier and more accurate performance predictions. To assess the predictive validity of this methodology, the accuracy of PPE’s individualized and prior-informed predictions before the point in time where PPE can be fully calibrated using an individual’s unique performance history. Our results show that the prior data can be used to inform PPE’s free parameters, allowing earlier performance predictions to be made.
[learning, training, accuracy, time, calibration, retention, task] [event, future, cognitive, initial, historical, psychological, examined] [error, calculated] [performance, educational, free, three, practice, difference, education, accurate, step, tutoring, number, ability, student, force, comparing, equation, knowledge, mathematical] [approach, amount, earlier, minimum, existing, complete] [data, ppe, individualized, prior, prediction, model, sample, decay, rmsd, inform, calibrated, generated, rate, predict, parameter, based, average, method, generate, generating, calibrating, edm, calibrate, predicted, predictive, predicting, datasets, datashop, distribution, fit, set, observed, individual, collected, air, remaining, elapsed, allowing, scalar] [level, single, performed, dataset]
Using Statistics to Learn Words and Grammatical Categories: How High Frequency Words Assist Language Acquisition
Rebecca Frost, Padraic Monaghan, Morten Christiansen


Recent studies suggest that high-frequency words may benefit speech segmentation (Bortfeld, Morgan, Golinkoff, & Rathbun, 2005) and grammatical categorisation (Monaghan, Christiansen, & Chater, 2007). To date, these tasks have been examined separately, but not together. We familiarised adults with continuous speech comprising repetitions of target words, and compared learning to a language in which targets appeared alongside high-frequency marker words. Marker words reliably preceded targets, and distinguished them into two otherwise unidentifiable categories. Participants completed a 2AFC segmentation test, and a similarity judgement categorisation test. We tested transfer to a word-picture mapping task, where words from each category were used either consistently or inconsistently to label actions/objects. Participants segmented the speech successfully, but only demonstrated effective categorisation when speech contained high-frequency marker words. The advantage of marker words extended to the early stages of the transfer task. Findings indicate the same high-frequency words may assist speech segmentation and grammatical categorisation.
[marker, test, target, category, segmentation, condition, statistical, appeared, learning, task, indicate, stream, assist, identify, continuous, alongside, reliably, compared, presented, type, training, learn, half, receiving, early, chance, picture, indicating] [consistent, preceded, mapping, psychological, possibility, inconsistent, version, consistency, examined, anova, cognitive, lasted] [speech, language, grammatical, categorisation, contained, membership, variability] [high, performance, knowledge, transfer, help, created, better, benefit, versus, number, helpful, required, study] [word, frequency, demonstrated, monaghan, natural, similarity, acquisition] [prior, data] [figure, performed, interaction, comprised, segment, role]
Explaining December 4, 2015: Cognitive Science Ripped from the Headlines
Samuel Johnson


Do the discoveries of cognitive science generalize beyond artificial lab experiments? Or do they have little hope of helping us to understand real-world events? Fretting on this question, I bought a copy of the Wall Street Journal and found that the three front page headlines each connect to my own research on explanatory reasoning. I report tests of the phenomena of inferred evidence, belief digitization, and revealed truth in real-world contexts derived from the headlines. If my own corner of cognitive science has such explanatory relevance to the real world, then cognitive science as a whole must be in far better shape yet.
[evidence, base, revealed, chance, artificial, type, condition] [explanation, cognitive, explanatory, people, monetary, low, combat, aggressive, terrorist, bank, social, modest, serve, suppose, equally, belief, engage, work, truth, inference, causal, introduce, future, terrorism, military, motive, neutral, reasoning, responsibility, diagnostic, favoring, conditional, consistent, led, united, discussion, front, mental, statement] [error] [science, high, group, three, question, asked, allowed, study, difference] [order, organization, ambiguous, major] [probability, rate, inferred, based, making, prior, conference, policy, uncertain, risk, method, favor, hypothesis, everyday, validity] [action, interpersonal, central, current]
Modeling category learning using a dual-system approach: A simulation of Shepard, Hovalnd and Jenkins (1961) by COVIS
Charlotte Edmunds, Andy Wills


This paper examines the ability of a dual-system, formal model of categorization COVIS (Ashby, Paul & Maddox, 2011) to predict the learning performance of participants on the six category structures described in Shepard, Hovland and Jenkin’s (1961) seminal study. COVIS assumes that category learning is mediated by two dissociable neural systems that compete to control responding. The verbal system explicitly tests verbalizable rules, whereas the implicit system gradually associates each stimulus with the appropriate response. Although COVIS is highly influential, there are no published evaluations of the formal model against classic category learning data (COVIS is most typically applied heuristically to the design of new experiments). In the current paper, we begin to address this gap in the literature. Specifically, we demonstrate that COVIS is able to accommodate the ordinal pattern found by Shepard et al., provided that adjustments consistent with the model’s theoretical framework are made.
[category, covis, rule, learning, trial, verbal, stimulus, type, response, shepard, jenkins, adjusted, rpe, dslope, journal, dbase, nosofsky, dmax, discriminant, competition, categorization, presented] [implicit, psychological, described, initial, salience, cognitive, positive, capable, account] [previous, experimental, calculated, memory] [feedback, formal, ordinal, correct, three, difficulty, equation, dopamine, incorrect, included, larger, stated] [include, amount, theoretical] [model, parameter, reward, simulation, capture, data, set, function, constant, confidence, determined, randomly, conjunction, hovland, decision, based, modeling, trust, theory, predict, binary] [system, unit, current, activation, represents, sensory, space, respond, pattern, behavioral, figure, selection, representation]
Modeling Impairments in Lexical Development
Michael Vinos, Angeliki Andrikopoulou, Christina F. Papaeliou, Athanassios Protopapas


We implemented the connectionist model of social-pragmatic word learning (Caza & Knott, 2012) to test the hypothesis that reduced joint attention between infant and mother would increase the difference in acquisition between nouns and verbs as observed in Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The ratio of objects to actions in the observed event stream was manipulated to create an original noun-verb asymmetry. Ten simulations were run for each of the combinations of three conditions of communicative reliability and two conditions of unfiltered random associative learning, which is regarded by some researchers as the primary mechanism of language learning in ASD. The simulations indicated that the reduction in the reliability of communicative actions does not lead to increased noun-verb asymmetry within the originally planned training epochs. A trend in the predicted direction appeared toward the end of training, suggesting that further simulations may help resolve the issue within the current architecture.
[learning, attention, training, reliability, asd, child, journal, vocabulary, condition, learned, development, developmental, reliable, sli, early, autism, time, spectrum, baseline, increased, learn] [social, event, low, consistent, asymmetry, gate, extent, cognitive, future, work] [communicative, language, associative, university, object, specific, affect, differentiated, implemented] [number, difference, correctly, modeled, high, correct, ratio, three, mother, study, young] [word, gating, acquisition, caza, lexical, ral, residual, subnetwork, frequency, maternal, differential, greece, verb, amount] [model, rate, observed, successful, set, theory, probability, well] [joint, action, filter, figure, network, knott, epoch, current, neural, activation]
Monolinguals’ and Bilinguals’ Use of Language in Forming Novel Object Categories
Sarah Fairchild, Anna Papafragou


Monolinguals and bilinguals differ along a number of dimensions, including the way they label existing object categories (Pavlenko & Malt, 2011). In the present study, we asked whether English monolinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals, and English-Spanish bilinguals also differ in the way they use language when forming novel categories. Previous research with monolinguals shows that a shared label encourages children (e.g., Waxman & Markow, 1995) and adults (e.g., Lupyan, Rakison, & McClelland, 2007) to place objects together. Extending this work, we demonstrate that, when two objects shared a Licit Word label like “zeg,” monolinguals and bilinguals alike were encouraged to group them together. Illicit Words like “gxz,”, on the other hand, only influenced the categorization decisions of bilinguals. Thus bilinguals appear to be more flexible in their use of linguistic information in categorization. Neither group made use of non-linguistic cues (patterned frames), suggesting a unique role for language in category formation.
[cue, novel, categorization, category, standard, type, compared, target, second, label, condition, presented, facilitate, child, task, journal, advantage, learned, powerful, indicate, increased] [frame, experience, cognitive, equally, influence, participant, experiment, simply, grouped, work] [language, licit, illicit, linguistic, bilingual, compliance, monolingual, object, perceptual, shared, patterned, experimental, influenced, discriminable, phonologically, main, spanish, previous, male, native] [group, differ, three, high, asked, effective, young, difference, facilitating, control] [similarity, word, english, proficiency, flexibility, existing, unique, forming, flexible, considered] [higher, observed] [tool, figure, role, represent]
Essays about service-learning events can be mined for program assessment
Anne Gilman, Deborah Roney, Victoria Rehr, Helen Hu, Mark Peterson


Psychological applications of human language technology combined with multidisciplinary approaches to similarity calculations and data visualization offer avenues to broaden the use of students' own words in program assessment. We compared multiple analysis approaches on both simple token counts (word roots and character trigrams) and top-down language indicators from 85 student essays about service-learning events. Bioinformatic distance calculations on word root counts provided useable assessment information on attitude change, showing patterns of word use that match the holistic goals of the assignment. Although these patterns were not found in a subsequent batch of 81 essays, the tools we are providing may facilitate other efforts to detect attitude change in student writing about service-learning events.
[learning, compared, processing, test, scaling] [attitude, including, rated, psychological, key, character, version, common] [program, language, retrieved, expert, specific, context, american, university, culture] [assessment, student, college, educational, knowledge, reduction, addition, software, perspective, usa, annual, measuring, comparison] [word, analysis, package, text, liwc, writing, computational, clustering, count, token, bioinformatic, essay, lim, horn, natural, usage, similarity, root, identified, distance, visualization, accurately, differential, written, cluster, applying, large, core, mining, document, genome] [data, provide, higher, determine, row, allow, paper, aid] [single, dimensional, developed, central]
The Variable Relationship Between On-Task Behavior and Learning
Karrie Godwin, Howard Seltman, Ma. Victoria Almeda, Shimin Kai, Ryan Baker, Anna Fisher


The Time-on-Task hypothesis asserts that learning is a function of time one allocates to a learning task. Thus, time off-task reduces learning opportunities and is therefore thought to be detrimental to learning. To date, the available research suggests a positive relationship between time on-task and achievement; however, the strength of the correlation fluctuates dramatically. One potential explanation that has been put forth to account for the mixed results is differences in the operational definition of time. The present study tests this hypothesis by examining whether a more stable relationship between on-task behavior and learning can be obtained if time is operationalized in a uniform way. The results of the present study indicate that while on-task behavior was positively correlated with learning outcomes overall, marked variability was still found across classrooms suggesting that the divergent results obtained in previous research are not driven solely by differences in how time is measured.
[learning, time, child, journal, consisted, second, session, examining, mellon, standardized, utilized, suggests] [relationship, work, strength, future, variable, positive, consistent, composite, discussion, issue, moderated] [variability, university, fourth, academic] [school, classroom, educational, grade, instructional, department, achievement, fraction, study, high, karweit, elementary, number, student, ontask, ranged, usa, report, engaged, literature, spent, teacher, operationalized, kindergarten, slavin, education, slope, charter, larger, instruction, godwin, college, quiz, moderation] [order, amount, class, analysis] [behavior, total, outcome, observed, prior, observation, function, average, sample, hypothesis, individual, well] [level, figure, coding]
Language Informativity: Is starfish more of a fish in English than in Dutch?
Farah M. Djalal, Wouter Voorspoels, Tom Heyman, Gert Storms


Two studies examined how lexical information contained in words affects people’s category representations. Some words are lexically suggestive regarding the taxonomic position of their referent (e.g., bumblebee, starfish). However, this information differs from language to language (e.g., in Dutch the equivalent words hold no taxonomic information: hommel, vlinder). Three language groups, Dutch, English, and Indonesian speakers, were tested in similarity and typicality judgment tasks. The results show that the lexical information affects only the users of the language (e.g., Dutch speakers rated Dutch-informative items, both in similarity and typicality tasks, higher than English and Indonesian speakers). Results are discussed in light of theories of concept representation and the language relativity hypothesis.
[category, presented, response, finding, position, evidence, test] [influence, people, cognitive, fish, judgment, judge, discussion, rated, consistent] [language, informative, typicality, dutch, indonesian, item, bahasa, starfish, object, taxonomic, influenced, typical, university, linguistic, expect, refers, rely, contained, suggestive, share, burung, informativity, meaning, affect, filler] [study, three, group, concept, question, included, number, knowledge] [similarity, lexical, english, word, considered, structure, goldfish, order, interpretation, panel, examine, random, list] [higher, hypothesis, method, data, model, consider, average] [representation, figure, interaction, performed]
Effect of Aging on Inhibitory Attentional Mechanisms
Maegen Walker, Margeaux Ciraolo, Andrew Dewald, Scott Sinnett


The ability to inhibit the processing of irrelevant information declines as adults age (Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Lustig, Hasher and Tonev, 2006; Mayr, 2001). However, previous research investigating inhibitory control in older adults has not evaluated the extent to which irrelevant information is processed and later recognized. Using a dual task paradigm with young adults, Dewald, Sinnett, and Doumas (2011) demonstrated inhibited recognition for previously ignored words, provided they had appeared infrequently with targets in the primary task, compared to words that did not appear with targets. The current study adapted this paradigm to examine inhibitory mechanisms in a sample of older adults. Here, older adults exhibited inhibited recognition for all words while young adults continued to show greater inhibition for words that had appeared with targets compared to words that had not. This finding suggests that older adults may experience a decline in the selective inhibition of irrelevant information.
[older, task, irrelevant, processing, age, inhibitory, inhibit, picture, presented, block, ignored, selective, attentional, chance, compared, test, younger, target, stroop, attention, accuracy, recognized, second, adult, aging, superimposed, processed, paradigm, journal, presentation, decline, inhibited, stimulus, dewald, finding, reduced, suggests, indicating, distraction, learning, repeated] [cognitive, psychology, detection, extent, version, experiment] [distractor, experimental, color, previous] [young, performance, primary, ability, control, study, lower, conducted, difficult, science, greater, additional] [word, written, order, demonstrated] [selected, higher, randomly, well] [recognition, surprise, visual, attended, repetition, inhibition, figure, role, brain, current, prefrontal, inhibiting, cortex, moving, human]
Analytic Eye Movement Patterns in Face Recognition are Associated with Better Performance and more Top-down Control of Visual Attention: an fMRI Study
Cynthia Y. H. Chan, J. J. Wong, Antoni B. Chan, Tatia M. C. Lee, Janet H. Hsiao


Recent research has revealed two different eye movement pat-terns during face recognition: holistic and analytic. The present study investigated the neural correlates of these two patterns through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A more holistic pattern was associated with more activation in the face-selective perceptual areas, including the occipital face area and fusiform face area. In contrast, participants using a more analytic pattern demonstrated more activation in areas important for top-down control of visual attention, including the frontal eye field and intraparietal sulcus. In addition, participants using the analytic strategy had better recognition performance than those showing holistic patterns. These results suggest that analytic eye movement patterns are associated with more engagement of top-down control of visual attention, which may consequently enhance recognition performance.
[attention, test, processing, displayed, task, verbal, executive, evidence, increased, reported, finding] [cognitive, people, including, relationship, scale, located, consistent] [memory, spatial, functional, perceptual, university, adopted, previous] [control, performance, working, study, better, number, three, functioning, active] [analysis, engagement] [data, planning, higher, individual, set, average, model, total, green] [eye, face, movement, holistic, analytic, recognition, visual, hong, pattern, activation, associated, figure, cortex, facial, kong, brain, ofa, left, role, prefrontal, neural, chuk, markov, hidden, frontal, fmri, screen, center, area, chan, tracking, ffa, fixation, network, imaging, involved, occipital, perception]
An Analysis of Frame Semantics of Continuous Processes
Clifton McFate, Ken Forbus


Qualitative Process theory provides a formal representation for human-like models of continuous processes. Prior research mapped qualitative process elements onto English language constructions, but did not connect the representations to existing frame semantic resources. Here we identify and classify QP language constituents through their instantiation in FrameNet frames to provide a unified semantics for linguistic and non-linguistic representations of processes. We demonstrate that all core QP relations can map to FN, though larger QP evoking phrasal constructions do exist outside of this mapping. We conclude with a corpus analysis showing that these frames occur in natural text involving a variety of continuous processes.
[continuous, indicate, pressure] [frame, valence, mapping, influence, appear, work, mental, reasoning, event] [language, specific, map, frequently] [water, quantity, example, additional, difference, required, change, science, measurement, providing] [framenet, direct, table, semantic, evoking, analysis, limit, include, natural, entity, semantics, lexical, constrained, indirect, qtype, causative, corpus, sentence, core, construction, includes, evoked, den, temperature, approach, comparative, inchoative, northwestern, amount, possession, qunit, correlative, constrainer, flow, prepositional, mcfate, dependent] [qualitative, rate, theory, well, model, provide, agent] [process, motion, pattern, figure, representation, element, system]
Inferring Generic Meaning From Pragmatic Reference Failure
Philip Crone, Mike Frank


Generic sentences (e.g., “birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about kinds, in contrast to non-generic sentences that express facts about specific individuals or sets of individuals (e.g., “all birds lay eggs”). Although generics are pervasive in natural language, there is no unique linguistic marker of genericity, making the identification of generics a challenge. We investigate the morphosyntactic cues that listeners use to identify whether a sentence should receive a generic interpretation or not. We find that two factors – the definiteness of a sentence’s subject NP and the tense of the sentence – are extremely important in guiding intuitions about whether a sentence should receive a generic interpretation. We argue that the importance of these factors can be explained by taking generic interpretations to arise due to a failure to ground expressions as referring to specific entities or events.
[task, classification, presented, identify, time, reported, test, second, training, finding, accuracy] [generic, experiment, work, singular, judged, failure, rated, influence, explained, discussion, kind, viewed] [reference, speaker, previous, produced, specific, refer, university, language, morphosyntactic, express, native, bird, referent, main, context, meaning, referring, classifying, ground] [number, knowledge, example, receive, aspect, study] [subject, tense, sentence, definite, definiteness, plural, interpretation, indefinite, genericity, english, noun, animacy, progressive, bare, random, completion, interpret, intended, interpreted] [set, simple, pragmatic, find, model, decision, consider] [interaction, role]
The Impact of Interactivity on Simulation-Based Science Inquiry with Variable-Setting Controls
Jung Aa Moon, Michelle Lamar, Carolyn Forsyth, Madeleine Keehner


The current study investigated how interactivity of simulation controls affects data collection in science inquiry. A chemistry simulation was designed to allow either low or high interactivity in setting experimental variables. Adult participants were randomly assigned to one of the interactivity conditions and solved a series of assessment items. The results from the first item indicated that the highly interactive controls posed challenges in conducting a thorough investigation. Performance in the last item which is a repetition of the first item suggested that the participants were able to overcome the initial challenges over the course of their investigations. The results provide implications for designing educational simulations for learning and assessment.
[learning, condition, response, time, test] [low, cognitive, variable, scientific, negative, multimedia, despite] [item, experimental, manipulated, error, scaffolding] [high, interactivity, solute, science, educational, greater, water, collection, number, tweak, interactive, concentration, assessment, saturation, limited, workload, performance, differ, three, click, study, control, question, drag, correct, knowledge, asked, middle, smaller, usa, difference, group] [amount, table, order, increase] [data, simulation, sampling, range, inquiry, button, load, choice, round, slider, sampled, allow, average, selected, point, preference, chose, prior, total] [current, figure, level, design, involved, associated]
Causal Reasoning in Infants and Adults: Revisiting backwards-blocking
Deon Benton, David Rakison


Causal learning is a fundamental ability that enables human reasoners to learn about the complex interactions in the world around them. The available evidence with children and adults, however, suggests that the mechanism or set of mechanisms that underpins causal perception and causal reasoning are not well understood; that is, it is unclear whether causal perception and causal reasoning are underpinned by a Bayesian mechanism, associative mechanism, or both. It has been suggested that a Bayesian mechanism, rather than an associative mechanism, underpins causal reasoning because such a mechanism can better explain the putative backward-blocking finding in children and adults (e.g., Sobel, Tenenbaum, & Gopnik, 2004). In this paper, we report two experiments to examine to what extent infants and adults exhibit backward blocking and whether humans’ ability to reason about causal events is underpinned by an associative mechanism, a Bayesian mechanism, or both.
[test, trial, revealed, suggests, underpinned, learning, second, processed, developmental, presented, infant, differed, development, evidence, looked, reliably, task, increased, gopnik, compared, time, tested, finding, familiar, pre, older] [causal, reasoning, experiment, detector, event, blicket, reason, perceive, blickets, sobel, causality, extent, associatively, caused, inference, launching, despite, result] [object, associative, previous, habituation, activated, habituated, varied] [ability, study, differ, cube, young, activate, cohen, three] [analysis, examine, emerges, mechanism, entered] [bayesian, machine, based, simple, model] [process, perception, longer, figure, design]
A Dynamic Neural Field Model of Speech Cue Compensation
Gavin Jenkins, Paul Tupper


Categorical speech content can often be perceived directly from continuous auditory cues in the speech stream, but human-level performance on speech recognition tasks requires compensation for contextual variables like speaker identity. Regression modeling by McMurray and Jongman (2011) has suggested that for many fricative phonemes, a compensation scheme can substantially increase categorization accuracy beyond even the information from 24 un-compensated raw speech cues. Here, we simulate the same dataset instead using a neurally rather than abstractly implemented model: a hybrid dynamic neural field model and connectionist network. Our model achieved slightly lower accuracy than McMurray and Jongman’s but similar accuracy patterns across most fricatives. Results also compared similarly to more recent models that were also less neurally instantiated but somewhat closer fitting to humans in accuracy. An even less abstracted model is an immediate future goal, as is expanding the present model to additional sensory modalities and constancy/compensation effects.
[cue, accuracy, learning, categorization, compared, advantage, training, attention, shape, test, tested, auditory, dimension, journal, receptive, time, portion] [including, future, long, perceived, profile, shifted] [speech, speaker, memory, adjustment, vowel, context, ltm, term, gender, acoustic, specific] [number, performance, lower] [relative, mechanism, involve, abstract, large] [model, data, set, rate, provide, fit, well, individual] [dnf, neural, field, compensation, figure, mcmurray, phoneme, activation, dynamic, network, human, jongman, input, performed, neurally, architecture, fricative, single, raw, current, connectionist, constancy, dimensional, visual, organized, apfelbaum, side, perception, angle, pdp, compensating, layer, signal, recognition, transform]
Predicting Overprecision in Range Estimation
Matthew Kaesler, Matthew Welsh, Carolyn Semmler


Overprecision (overconfidence in interval estimation) is a bias with clear implications for economic outcomes in industries reliant on forecasting possible ranges for future prices and unknown states of nature, such as mineral and petroleum exploration. Prior research has shown the ranges people provide are too narrow given the knowledge they have; that is, they underestimate uncertainty and are overconfident in their knowledge. The underlying causes of this bias are, however, still unclear and individual differences research has shed little light on traits predictive of susceptibility. Taking this as a starting point, this paper directly contrasts the Naïve Sampling Model and Informativeness-Accuracy Tradeoff accounts of overprecision, seeing which better predicts performance in an interval estimation task. This was achieved by identifying traits associated with these theories – Short Term Memory and Need for Cognitive Closure, respectively. Analyses indicate that NFCC but not STM predicts interval width and thus, potentially, impacts overprecision.
[span, task, accuracy, general, test, predictor, learning, reduced, age] [relationship, cognitive, capacity, scale, low, people, explanation, narrow, future, judgment, wide, personality] [memory, support, production, van, ltm, informative, error, degree] [nfcc, overprecision, width, stm, digit, online, estimation, score, closure, absolute, high, knowledge, nsm, hansson, study, working, wider, better, ability, performance, overconfidence, yaniv, narrower, thought, correct, linear, apm, petroleum, conducted, number] [bias, table, reflect, form, measure] [interval, confidence, individual, sampling, model, search, true, prior, measured, predict, estimate, correlation, observed, regression, higher, predicts, decision, potential, population] [multiple, level, role, achieve]
Distributed Cognition in the Past Progressive: Narratives as Representational Tools for Clinical Reasoning
Katherine Lippa, Valerie Shalin


Cognition may require access to past events, for example to understand undesirable outcomes or diagnose failures. When cognition is distributed between multiple participants, a particular representational challenge occurs because not all of the participants may have directly experienced the focal event. Language can transcend temporal and physical limitations on event accessibility. We suggest that people create complex linguistic constructs as tools to facilitate retrospective cognition. We illustrate this process by analyzing the use of a particular linguistic construct (narrative) in the domain of clinical reasoning. Results demonstrated that narratives support clinical cognition during practitioner-patient interactions. Narratives extended access to clinically relevant events providing information about circumstances, subjective experiences, patient functioning, and prior decisions. Whereas, the hermeneutic nature of narrative allowed collaborative hypothesis testing and creation of meaning. The use of narrative in clinical cognition challenges Bruner’s (1991) distinction between narrative and paradigmatic reasoning and enriches the understanding of medical narratives.
[facilitate, attention, testing, complex, time, suggests, served] [narrative, cognition, cognitive, reasoning, clinical, medical, including, understanding, practitioner, temporal, event, symptom, relevant, physical, causal, kind, key, hermeneutic, representational, people, paradigmatic, case, experience, history, discussion, significance, retrospective, lasted, intentional, bruner, phenomenological, nature, mutually] [language, functional, specific, access, linguistic, support, content, directly, context, memory, psycholinguistic, basic] [example, problem, understand, study, create, external, thought] [contextual, structure, table, analysis, construction, record] [hypothesis, individual, decision, provide, subjective] [distributed, patient, tool, environment, interaction, facilitates, creation, involved, allows, space, experienced, joint]
Tit-for-Tat: Effects of Feedback and Speaker Reliability on Listener Comprehension Effort
Nicole Craycraft, Zoe Kriegel, Michael Tanenhaus, Jennifer Roche


Miscommunication is often seen as a detrimental aspect of human communication. However, miscommunication can differ in cause as well as severity. What distinguishes a miscommunication where conversation partners continue to put forth the effort from miscommunication where conversation partners simply give up? In this eye-tracking study, participants heard globally ambiguous statements that were either a result of an experimental error or speaker underspecification; participants either received positive or negative feedback on these ambiguous trials. We found that negative feedback, paired with the reliability of the message, will impact the amount of processing effort a comprehender puts forth—specifically, listeners were less forgiving of errors when they were penalized and when speakers’ instructions lacked effort. This suggests that language users weigh conversational contexts and outcomes as well as linguistic content during communication.
[time, processing, type, condition, task, indicating, presented, heard, second, polynomial, sound, journal, suggests, attention, paired] [negative, cognitive, consequence, future, experience] [listener, error, speaker, ambiguity, lazy, effort, orthogonal, globally, miscommunication, communication, confederate, growth, affect, penalized, language, curve, memory, object, experimental, main, referential, eyelink, context, previous, specific, unreliable, referring] [feedback, experimenter, perspective, received, understand, correct, course, differentially, young, school] [ambiguous, global, comprehension, amount, word, measure, analysis, unambiguous] [based, model, chose, predict, provide, red, function, cooperative, choice] [dwell, visual, screen, design, figure, interest, partner, process, interaction, area, experienced, computer]
A connectionist model for automatic generation of child-adult interaction patterns
Moinuddin M. Haque, Paul Vogt, Afra Alishahi, Emiel Krahmer


This study introduces a neural network that models the social interactions from a video corpus. The corpus consists of recordings of naturalistic observations of social interactions among children and their environment. The videos are annotated multimodally including features like gestures. We explore how this video corpus can be utilized for modelling by training our model on a portion of the annotated data extracted from the corpus, and then by using the model to predict novel interaction sequences. We evaluate our model by comparing its automatically generated sequences to an unseen portion of the corpus data. The initial results show strong similarities between the generated interactions and those observed in the corpus.
[training, child, time, learning, test, sequence, attention, accuracy, infant, baseline, development, replicate, formed, novel, early] [social, series, cognitive, evaluate, interact] [language, speech, gesture, generation, vogt, linguistic, unseen, communication, share, contained] [study, mother, video, three, toy, division, exact, better] [corpus, word, engagement, distance, vector, computational, table, analysis] [data, model, generated, set, observed, probability, based, distribution, predict, method, modelling, well, function, macro] [network, neural, figure, annotated, interaction, joint, hellinger, narx, input, transition, nng, naturalistic, output, architecture, bit, level, trained, process, coordinated, represents, incorporated, layer]
Causal Contrasts Promote Algebra Problem Solving
Jian-Ping Ye, Jessica Walker, Patricia Cheng


The causal-contrast approach is a new teaching method that recruits learners’ implicit causal discovery process to improve math learning by juxtaposing information critical to discovering the goal of each solution step. Students often memorize mathematical procedures and have difficulty transferring their knowledge to novel problems. By enabling learners to infer the goal of each step, the causal-contrast approach substantially improved high-school algebra problem solving compared to a traditional instructional control (Walker et al., 2014). The present study developed Walker et al.’s instructional materials into a computer-based teaching program and tested the new approach on community-college students. The study added two new conditions: a baseline that received no instruction and a condition using a video from Khan Academy, a well-regarded online educational website representative of the traditional approach. A delayed post-test indicated that the causal-contrast condition produced greater success in solving transfer problems than the other three conditions.
[learning, condition, baseline, journal, novel, identify, presented, second] [causal, understanding, cognitive, implicit, reason, explicitly] [experimental, instructed, perceptual, contrast, previous, support] [problem, pretest, mathematical, transfer, instructional, equation, traditional, solving, solve, performance, educational, knowledge, three, group, quadratic, mathematics, algebra, instruction, solution, study, khan, intervention, teaching, discover, academy, asked, contrasting, solved, subgoals, worked, student, comparison, comparing, challenging, conducted, international, received, step, difference, video, outperformed, isolate, online, procedural, benefit] [approach, structure, table, natural] [fail, prior, set, method] [figure, top, process, goal, critical, human]
Dynamics of Strategy Adaptation in a Temporally Extended Monty Hall Dilemma
Stephanie Petrusz, Theo Rhodes, Joshua Shields, Abisha Munroe


We present the results of two temporally extended experimental implementations of the Monty Hall dilemma in order to examine the dynamics of belief. In the first experiment, we used the standard three-door version of the dilemma, but biased the probability of the winning door positionally. Participants capitalized on the increased probabilities but did not discover the optimal switch strategy. In the second experiment, we increased the number of doors, in each case removing all but two doors. As the number of doors increased, participants converged on the optimal switch strategy, as well as increasing their confidence in their strategy. This suggests that the information relevant to the MHD is not win frequencies but how the different elements of the dilemma are related.
[block, switch, presented, second, response, task, trial, standard] [experiment, belief, fact, dilemma, participant, reasoning, psychological, basis, case, people, version, understanding, explained, designed, extended] [experimental, degree, normalized, salient, color, van, attempted] [number, group, correct, strategy, partial, performance, win, course, change, better, changing, guide, difficulty] [measure, considered, approach, text, manipulating, order] [door, confidence, mhd, squared, eta, winning, probability, monty, hall, remaining, lowest, highest, total, chosen, higher, unchosen, evaluating, chose, optimal, probabilistic, unequal, based, hypothesis, making, classic, successful, assent, agent, obvious, choose] [switching, figure, design, represented, dynamical]
Influencing Categorical Choices through Physical Object Interaction
Nicholas Shipp, Frederic Vallee-Tourangeau, Susan Anthony


Recent research has shown that action knowledge influences categorical decisions. Shipp, Vallée-Tourangeau, and Anthony, (2014) showed that action influences categorisation using a triad task when combined with taxonomic information and presented within a functional context. The present experiment examined whether participants would be more likely to match items based on shared actions following priming with the functional actions of the objects. Participants engaged in the triad task after a priming phase where they either interacted with a series of objects for their functional capacity, grouped them into or moved them from one table to another. Consistent with Shipp et al. the results showed that action was primarily used to base choices on the triad task when the action choice also shared a taxonomic relation, and was presented in context. Participants were more likely to select the action item when they had been primed with the functional action of the objects.
[task, condition, presented, category, target, completed, interference, appeared, journal, chance, phase, time, pick, stream, revealed] [experiment, percentage, physical, united] [priming, triad, taxonomic, functional, object, shipp, context, item, pco, sco, dco, perceptual, select, shared, main, jax, categorisation, instructed, interacted, hoc, buxbaum, experimental, borghi, primed, adjustment, potentiation, situated, sort, hertfordshire, matched, university] [sharing, example, knowledge, asked, three, difference] [analysis, structural, relation, table, conceptual, post, order] [choice, higher, selected, based, set, prior, simulation] [action, movement, performed, interaction, figure, grasp, associated, activation, visual, brain, system, current, facilitates, side]
Establish Trust and Express Attitude for a Non-Humanoid Robot
Mei Si, J. Dean McDaniel


In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in designing social robots to interact with people to provide therapy and companionship. Most social robots currently being used are light-weight and much smaller in size compared to people. In this work, we investigate designing interactions for larger and more physically capable robots as they have more potential to assist people physically. A modified version of Baxter robot was used, by sitting Baxter on top of an electronic wheelchair. Two experiments were designed for studying the role of facial expressions and body movements in establishing trust with the user and for expressing attitudes. Our results suggest that the robot is capable of expressing fine and distinguishable attitudes (proud vs. relaxed) using its body language, and the coupling between body movements and speech is essential for the robot to be viewed as a person.
[condition, second, test, compared, touch, arbitrary, reported] [baxter, robot, routine, social, experiment, relaxed, participant, people, virtual, hesitation, comfortable, designed, emotion, perceived, institute, digital, version, hesitated, attitude, interact, feel, comfortability, physically, close, negative, work, physical, polytechnic, ten, indicated] [meaningful, modified, speech, expressing, express, voice] [group, score, control, difference, creating, asked, create, limited, impact] [approach, amount, natural, table, residual, post] [trust, designing, behavior, observed, higher, increasing] [face, arm, body, figure, human, facial, interaction, interacting, nonverbal, movement, shake, robotic, friendly, expression, coupled, hand, user, associated]
Attractivity Weighting: Take-the-Best's Foolproof Sibling
Paul Thorn, Gerhard Schurz


We describe a prediction method called "Attractivity Weighting" (AW). In the case of cue-based paired comparison tasks, AW's prediction is based on a weighted average of the cue values of the most successful cues. In many situations, AW's prediction is based on the cue value of the most successful cue, resulting in behavior similar to Take-the-Best (TTB). Unlike TTB, AW has a desirable characteristic called "access optimality": Its long-run success is guaranteed to be at least as great as the most successful cue. While access optimality is a desirable characteristic, concerns may be raised about the short-term performance of AW. To evaluate such concerns, we here present a study of AW's short-term performance. The results suggest that there is little reason to worry about the short-run performance of AW. Our study also shows that, in random sequences of paired comparison tasks, the behavior of AW and TTB is nearly indiscernible.
[cue, sequence, paired, journal, rule, reported] [ecological, event, percentage, concerning, case, including, character] [object, access, criterion, experimental, highly, university, raised] [performance, score, comparison, called, number, linear, greater, problem, participating] [order, table, weighted, considered, random, preceding] [prediction, method, ttb, data, average, round, predicts, behavior, weighting, based, attractivity, decision, best, validity, genuine, making, adaptive, set, determined, observed, hypothesis, optimality, mlr, rieskamp, compensatory, goldstein, regression, higher, vaw, respective, scoring, schurz, ordering, simple, worry, simulation, consider] [human, perform, accessible, element, defined]
Sentire Decision Making in a Mixed-Motive Game
Joana Campos, Ana Paiva


The complexity of situations makes individuals use emotions to make sense of their environment and interdependent others. In this paper, we build on the idea that physiological reactions give emotional information about the subject and we focus on Electrodermal Activity (EDA), an index of arousal, to inspect deep processes of a dyadic interaction in a mixed-motive game. Our interest lies on how conflict episodes unfold, to design intelligent agents that are more socially aware and thus able to express and recognise dyadic forms of conflict. A qualitative analysis of the data allowed us to identify moments where players made choices to cope with ongoing conflict or prospects of it in the future.
[conflict, response, stimulus, journal, type] [emotional, physiological, emotion, elicited, event, arousal, social, intense, experiment, focused, negative, work, guilt, avoidance, participant, people] [affect, experimental, studied, previous] [card, three, study, number, better] [analysis, minimum, measure, linked, small, reflect, natural, subject] [skin, decision, conductance, game, eda, scrs, round, electrodermal, making, data, negotiation, player, offer, bargaining, opponent, scr, played, negotiator, call, tonic, potential, proposer] [interaction, action, activity, dyadic, design, process, level, figure, focus, behaviour, system, play, experienced, interest, human, signal, role]
Understanding "almost": Empirical and computational studies of near misses
Tobias Gerstenberg, Josh Tenenbaum


When did something almost happen? In this paper, we investigate what brings counterfactual worlds close. In Experiments 1 and 2, we find that participants' judgments about whether something almost happened are determined by the causal proximity of the alternative outcome. Something almost happened, when a small perturbation to the relevant causal event would have been sufficient to bring it about. In contrast to previous work that has argued that prior expectations are neglected when judging the closeness of counterfactual worlds (Kahneman & Varey, 1990), we show in Experiment 3 that participants are more likely to say something almost happened when they didn't expect it. Both prior expectations and causal distance influence judgments of "almost". In Experiment 4, we show how both causal proximity and beliefs about what would have happened in the absence of the cause jointly explain judgments of "almost caused" and "almost prevented".
[target, test, absent, trajectory, condition, presented, journal, trial] [ball, causal, counterfactual, experiment, clip, agreement, low, wall, close, happened, character, gate, black, long, influence, tended, cognitive, throw, white, hit, caused, kahneman, statement, agreed, gerstenberg, event, grass, discussion, happen, perturbation, jordan, rating, relevant, sufficient, situation, nfemale, work, sdage] [spatial, main, contrast, society] [high, practice, performance, science, difference, question, asked] [distance, missed, short, proximity, small, manipulating] [outcome, prior, model, actual, shot, well, alternative, normal, game, norm, probability, simulation, max] [region, figure, center, reached, angle, reach, interaction, design, labeled, performed, penalty]
A 3D shape inference model matches human visual object similarity judgments better than deep convolutional neural networks
Goker Erdogan, Robert A. Jacobs


In the past few years, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on large image data sets have shown impressive visual object recognition performances. Consequently, these models have attracted the attention of the cognitive science community. Recent studies comparing CNNs with neural data from cortical area IT suggest that CNNs may—in addition to providing good engineering solutions—provide good models of biological visual systems. Here, we report evidence that CNNs are, in fact, not good models of human visual perception. We show that a 3D shape inference model explains human performance on an object shape similarity task better than CNNs. We argue that deep neural networks trained on large amounts of image data to maximize object recognition performance do not provide adequate models of human vision.
[shape, categorization, accuracy, base, target, evidence, size, category, suggesting, child, learned, suggests] [inference, biological, experiment, cognitive] [object, calculated, experimental, production] [performance, change, better, comparison, example, three, annual] [similarity, semantic, large, parse, random, structure, calculate, node, variance, calculating] [model, good, data, set, randomly, sample, observer, provide, probability, ideal, maximize, solely, note, capture, assume] [visual, cnns, human, neural, image, face, deep, trained, connecting, recognition, alexnet, figure, cnn, picked, representation, viewpoint, vision, layer, forward, convolutional, monkey, computer, imagenet, move, extract, space, perception, comput, input]
Extraction of Event Roles From Visual Scenes is Rapid, Automatic, and Interacts with Higher-Level Visual Processing
Alon Hafri, John Trueswell, Brent Strickland


A crucial component of event recognition is understanding the roles that people and objects take: did the boy hit the girl, or did the girl hit the boy? We often make these categorizations from visual input, but even when our attention is otherwise occupied, do we automatically analyze the world in terms of event structure? In two experiments, participants made speeded gender judgments for a continuous sequence of male-female interaction scenes. Even though gender was orthogonal to event roles (whether the Agent was male or Female, or vice-versa), a switching cost was observed when the target character’s role reversed from trial to trial, regardless of whether the actors, events, or side of the target character differed. Crucially, this effect held even when nothing in the task required attention to the relationship between actors. Our results suggest that extraction of event structure in visual scenes is a rapid and automatic process.
[repeated, trial, task, pair, reaction, evidence, target, faster, slower, standard, attention, journal, response, condition, saliency, reliable, paradigm, processing, time] [event, experiment, character, people, cognitive, excluded, appear, held, explicitly, hit] [male, previous, gender, item, female, main, university, orthogonal, mixed] [included, difference, magnitude, additional, better, greater, primary] [semantic, table, structure, subject, list, small, mention, animacy, multilevel] [cost, agent, model, observed, average, data, making, set] [switching, role, actor, side, visual, rts, patient, catch, exp, reprole, interaction, image, body, human, design, automatic, extraction, driven, repactors]
Integrating identification and perception: A case study of familiar and unfamiliar face processing
Kelsey Allen, Ilker Yildirim, Josh Tenenbaum


We are very familiar with certain objects; we can quickly recognize our cars, friends and collaborators despite heavy occlusion, unusual lighting, or extreme viewing angles. We can also determine if two very different views of a stranger are indeed of the same person. How can we recognize familiar objects quickly, while performing deliberate, perceptual inference on unfamiliar objects? We describe a model combining an identity classification network for familiar faces with an analysis by synthesis approach for unfamiliar faces to make rich inferences about any observed face. We additionally develop an online non-parametric clustering algorithm for recognition of repeatedly experienced unfamiliar faces, and show how new faces can become familiar by being consolidated into the identity recognition network. Finally, we show that this model predicts human behavior in viewpoint generalization and identity clustering tasks, and predicts processing time differences between familiar and unfamiliar faces.
[familiar, processing, training, accuracy, test, shape, learned, classification, task, cue, presented, reaction, learning, cued, condition, compared] [inference, account, described, experiment, person, including, cognitive, work, profile] [latent, object, identification, perceptual] [correctly, young, performance, three, online, difference] [cluster, clustering, structural, vector, entropy, computed, random, approach] [model, set, likelihood, individual, observed, predict, well, generated, determine, projection] [unfamiliar, face, recognition, network, identity, image, latents, figure, generative, neural, rendered, lighting, pose, trained, classified, space, texture, viewpoint, behavioral, frontal, perception, viewing, associated, performed, morphable, system, vision, layer, consolidated, human, convolutional]
Statistical Learning of Prosodic Patterns and Reversal of Perceptual Cues for Sentence Prominence
Sofoklis Kakouros, Okko Räsänen


Recent work has proposed that prominence perception in speech could be driven by predictability of prosodic patterns, connecting prominence perception to the concept of statistical learning. In the present study, we tested the predictability hypothesis by conducting a listening test where subjects were first exposed to a 5-minute stream of sentences with a certain proportion of sentence-final words having either a falling or rising pitch trajectory. After the exposure stage, subjects were asked to grade prominence in a set of novel sentences with similar pitch patterns. The results show that the subjects were significantly more likely to perceive words with low-probability pitch trajectories as prominent independently of the direction of the pitch change. This suggests that even short exposure to prosodic patterns with a certain statistical structure can induce changes in prominence perception, supporting the connection between prominence perception and attentional orientation towards low-probability events in an otherwise predictable context.
[pitch, predictability, test, journal, statistical, standard, trajectory, testing, processing, condition, attention, stimulus, prosody, spectral, spoken, learning, presented, heard, task] [perceived, cognitive, stress, experiment, fundamental, ten, work] [speech, acoustic, language, habituation, society, linguistic, acoustical, utterance, perceptual, production, listening, van, affect, basic] [number, science, international, asked, annual, idea] [prominence, prosodic, falling, rising, word, sentence, prominent, excursion, frequency, lexical, subject, structure, aalto, order, frequent, corpus, exactly, contour] [probabilistic, set, hypothesis, conference, distribution, proportion, modeling, subjective] [perception, figure, duration, level, signal, role, direction, human]
The paradox of relational development: Could language learning be (temporarily) harmful?
Christian Hoyos, Ruxue Shao, Dedre Gentner


Recent studies report a striking decline in children’s ability to notice same-different relations around age 3 (Walker et al., 2015). We propose that such a decline results from an object focus related to children’s avid noun-learning. To test this, we examine children’s performance on a classic relational task – the relational match-to-sample task (RMTS). Prior work has shown that 4-year-olds can pass this task (Christie & Gentner, 2014). However, if nominal language induces an object focus, their performance should be disrupted by a noun-labeling pretask. In two experiments, 4-year-olds either labeled objects or actions in a naming pretask. Then they completed the RMTS task. Consistent with the noun-focus explanation, the object-naming group failed the RMTS task, whereas the action-naming group and a control group both succeeded. This suggests that nominal language can lead to an object focus, and that this could explain the temporary decline in children’s relational processing.
[relational, rmts, task, child, gentner, early, learning, processing, decline, christie, pair, development, condition, baseline, completed, age, presented, standard, older, developmental, journal, evidence, generalize, tested, general, vocabulary, chance, walker, analogical, trial, dominance, impaired, rattermann] [experiment, cognitive, notice, work, causal, failed, focused, psychological] [object, language, nominal, spatial, shift, occurs, support, specific, university, experimental] [group, ability, asked, performance, young, experimenter, difference, card, improve, three, procedure] [naming, noun, similarity, verb, temporarily] [set, lead, proportion, individual, hypothesis, sample, machine] [focus, action, current, performed, catch, multiple, labeled, behavioral, brain]
On the Link between Fact Learning and General Cognitive Ability
Florian Sense, Rob R. Meijer, Hedderik van Rijn


Adaptive fact learning systems have been developed to make optimal use of testing and spacing effects by taking into account individual differences in learning efficiency. Measures derived from these systems, capturing the individual differences, predict later performance in similar and different fact learning tasks. Additionally, there is a rich body of literature showing that individual differences in general cognitive ability or working memory capacity can predict scores on achievement tests. If these measures also influence fact learning, incorporating them might further enhance adaptive systems. However, here we provide evidence that performance during fact learning is neither related to working memory capacity nor general cognitive ability. This means that the individual differences captured by our adaptive learning system encapsulate characteristics of learners that are independent of their general cognitive ability. Consequently, adaptive learning methods should focus primarily on memory-related processes.
[general, forgetting, test, span, learning, second, complex, task, executive, journal, suggests, session, foster, presented, response, learn, attentional, time, learner, learned, standardized, interference, completed] [cognitive, capacity, fact, composite, participant, psychological, commonly, psychology, low] [memory, van, variation, university, dutch, experimental, item, studied, highly, netherlands] [ability, working, wmc, study, high, three, performance, department, knowledge, score, fluid, identical] [measure, list, order, table] [rate, individual, estimated, data, model, correlation, adaptive, well, predict, set, provide, optimal, parameter, based, range, compute] [spacing, figure, indicates, developed, activation, goal]
Modeling the Visual Word Form Area Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network
Sandy Wiraatmadja, Garrison Cottrell


The visual word form area (VWFA) is a region of the cortex located in the left fusiform gyrus, that appears to be a waystation in the reading pathway, but there is a disagreement as to whether or not the VWFA is selective for whole words or sublexical structures. A recent study using fMRI adaptation (Glezer, et al., 2009) provided evidence that neurons in the VWFA are selectively tuned to real words, but not pseudowords, suggesting the VWFA is tuned to real words and not sublexical structure. Here, we develop a realistic model of the VWFA by training a deep convolutional neural network to map printed words to their labels. The network is able to achieve an accuracy of 98.5% on the test set. We then analyze this network to see if it can account for the data Glezer et al. found for words and pseudowords, and find that it does.
[pseudowords, accuracy, training, prime, target, evidence, test, pair, response, size, learning, compared, stimulus, selective] [real, work, consistent, cognitive] [map, share, adaptation, basic, error, previous, activated] [high, change, bar, step, difference, study] [word, distance, form, small, temperature, reading, large] [model, set, probability, modeling, observe, function, rate, chose] [network, visual, vwfa, figure, layer, activation, neural, output, glezer, convolutional, vwfanet, trained, letter, euclidean, deep, area, feature, tuned, neuroimaging, consisting, softmax, computer, region, fusiform, input, pooling, brain, represents, architecture, stride, sublexical, signal, selectivity, bold, dataset, relu, single, current, represented, unit]
Linguistic Priming and Learning Adjacent and Non-Adjacent Dependencies in Serial Reaction Time Tasks
Hao Wang, Elsi Kaiser


Although syntactic priming is well studied and commonly assumed to involve implicit learning, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon are still under debate. We tested whether implicit learning of adjacent and non-adjacent sequences occurs in a non-linguistic, finger sequence task (Serial Reaction Time task), and if so, whether these implicitly-learned dependencies can cause syntactic priming in the linguistic domain. We followed the logic that exposure to statistical patterns in the SRT task may influence language users’ relative clause (RC) attachment biases, and trained participants on SRT sequences with adjacent or non-adjacent dependencies. Participants then wrote completions to relative clause fragments in a situation where they could opt for adjacent or non-adjacent linguistic structures. Participants successfully learned the adjacent and non-adjacent dependency implicitly during the SRT task, but, strikingly, their RC continuations did not exhibit priming effects. Implications for theories of syntactic priming and its relations to implicit learning are discussed.
[learning, adjacent, position, srt, dog, attachment, task, block, explicit, dependency, evidence, trial, predictable, sequence, target, reaction, time, condition, artificial, second, unpredictable, prime, display, faster, modifies, statistical] [implicit, low, experiment, work, result, cognitive, los] [priming, language, previous, linguistic, coded, domain, item] [high, number, knowledge, example, three, difference, group, modify] [syntactic, relative, sentence, clause, completion, head, order, induce, existing, verb, noun, structure, intended, structural, random, asrt, involve, menon, music, ambiguous] [predicts, data, predictive, doctor] [figure, current, serial, finger, image, coding, representation]
Simple trees in complex forests: Growing Take The Best by Approximate Bayesian Computation
Eric Schulz, Maarten Speekenbrink, Björn Meder


How can heuristic strategies emerge from smaller building blocks? We propose Approximate Bayesian Computation as a computational solution to this problem. As a first proof of concept, we demonstrate how a heuristic decision strategy such as Take The Best (TTB) can emerge from smaller, probabilistically updated building blocks. Based on a self-reinforcing sampling scheme, different building blocks are combined and, over time, tree-like non-compensatory heuristics emerge. This new algorithm, coined Approximately Bayesian Computed Take The Best (ABC-TTB), is able to recover a data set that was generated by TTB, leads to sensible inferences about cue importance and cue directions, can outperform traditional TTB, and allows to trade-off performance and computational effort explicitly. Our findings demonstrate how a strategy from the heuristic tool box can emerge.
[cue, learning, size, learned, second, training] [cognitive, inference, recover] [building, effort, updated, university, trace, item] [performance, approximate, correct, computation, science, smaller, example, subset, number, annual, better, three, strategy] [computational, order, approach, proposed, node, ordered, applied] [data, model, proposal, ttb, bayesian, sampled, probability, decision, heuristic, tree, set, generated, emerge, posterior, successful, simple, based, reinforcement, prior, generate, best, chosen, proportion, sampling, accepted, classic, beta, urn, higher, underlying, distribution, prediction, abc, likelihood, city, summary, drawn, simulated] [figure, algorithm, top, averaged, direction, plot, associated, process, learns]
Think Fast! Mental-state Language is Related to the Speed of False-belief Reasoning in Adulthood
Erin Roby, Rose Scott


When tested appropriately, infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding in the first year of life. Some have argued that this is inconsistent with the well-established relationship between social experience and preschoolers’ false-belief performance. We argue that these two sets of findings are not inconsistent because the ability to attribute false beliefs to others is necessary but not sufficient for false-belief performance, and we propose several ways that one social factor, hearing and using mental-state language, might relate to false-belief performance throughout the lifespan. We tested this account by examining the relationship between adults’ use of mental-state language and their false-belief understanding. Participants’ use of mental-state language was related to how quickly they could accurately predict the behavior of agents on the basis of desires and beliefs. These findings provide the first evidence that mental-state talk and false-belief performance are related into adulthood.
[task, reaction, child, avoid, evidence, time, developmental, type, tested, hearing, completed, journal, presented, suggests, examining, stroop, year] [false, belief, mental, social, reasoning, story, relationship, cognitive, understanding, talk, percentage, people, psychological, mentalstate, desire, strange, experience, falsebelief, san, capacity, described, physical, consistent, account, scott, personal, backwards] [language, object, attribute, experimental, calculated] [performance, difference, correct, ability, control, impact, marble, working, sally] [approach, table, word, order, accurately] [agent, theory, behavior, total, prior, well, true, predict] [represent]
Curiosity-Driven Development of Tool Use Precursors: a Computational Model
Sébastien Forestier, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer


Studies of child development of tool use precursors show successive but overlapping phases of qualitatively different types of behaviours. We hypothesize that two mechanisms in particular play a role in the structuring of these phases: the intrinsic motivation to explore and the representation used to encode sensorimotor experience. Previous models showed how curiosity-driven learning mechanisms could allow the emergence of developmental trajectories. We build upon those models and present the HACOB (Hierarchical Active Curiosity-driven mOdel Babbling) architecture that actively chooses which sensorimotor model to train in a hierarchy of models representing the environmental structure. We study this architecture using a simulated robotic arm in a 2D environment. We show that overlapping phases of behaviours are autonomously emerging in hierarchical models using active model babbling. To our knowledge, this is the first model of curiosity-driven development of simple tool use and of the self-organization of overlapping phases of behaviours.
[learning, position, development, condition, developmental, explore, learn, infant, trajectory, category] [autonomous, motivated, mental, robot] [object, evolution, emergence] [active, study, progress, motivation, number, three, control] [structure, random, considered, small] [model, exploration, choice, agent, inverse, chooses, hierarchy, chosen, provide] [tool, sensory, motor, goal, sensorimotor, arm, space, babbling, overlapping, stick, reached, reach, intrinsic, play, interest, gripper, ject, architecture, hierarchical, environment, movement, robotic, behavioural, single, role, flat, figure, joint, define, hacob, ieee, interaction, abrupt, associated, representation]
Beyond Markov: Accounting for Independence Violations in Causal Reasoning
Bob Rehder


Although many theories of causal cognition are based on causal graphical models, a key property of such models—the inde-pendence relations stipulated by the Markov condition—is routinely violated by human reasoners. Two accounts of why people violate independence are formalized and subjected to experimental test. Subjects’ inferences were more consistent with a dual prototype model in which people favor network states in which variables are all present or all absent than a leaky gate model in which information is transmitted through network nodes when it should normatively be blocked. The article concludes with a call for theories of causal cognition that rest on foundations that are faithful to the kinds of causal inferences people actually draw.
[presented, test] [common, causal, leaky, gate, dual, prototype, independence, normative, variable, elaborated, treated, described, rehder, presence, low, explaining, diagram, retirement, people, inference, waldmann, unconditionally, cognitive, dependence, separated, key, reasoning, consistent, experiment, account, absence] [domain, experimental, error, previous, description] [three, high, magnitude, number, difference, asked, greater, chart, graphical, versus] [dependent, table, small, article] [model, predicts, empirical, predicted, conditioned, independent, trade, distribution, confidence, probability, probabilistic, based, assuming, fit] [network, interest, joint, figure, markov, represents, pattern, corresponding, human, direction, controlled]
Temporal Expressions in Speech and Gesture
İdil Bostan, Ahmet Börütecene, Oğuzhan Özcan, Tilbe Goksun


People use spatial metaphors to talk about temporal concepts and gesture frequently during speech. The characteristics of these gestures give information regarding the mental timelines people form to experience time. The present study investigates the expression of temporal concepts on a natural setting with Turkish speakers. We found that Turkish speakers used more metaphoric temporal phrases (e.g., short period) than words referring to time without spatial content (e.g., today) in a session where they talked about people’s fortune. Spontaneous gestures were mainly classified as metaphoric and beat gestures and were mostly produced on the sagittal axis, which contradicts with the previous findings. Yet, we also found that people used vertical axis to represent current and future events. These findings suggest that lateral axis may not always be the most common direction for co-speech temporal gesture use, and the pragmatic constraints of the environment may influence the spatial conceptualization of time.
[time, deictic, type, evidence] [temporal, axis, people, future, sagittal, metaphorical, talk, common, cognitive, front, drinking, experience, mental] [gesture, spatial, metaphoric, turkish, vertical, speech, beat, zaman, lateral, language, literal, fortune, telling, coded, spontaneous, bir, produced, native, university, accompanied, refer, experimental, previous, refers, referred, referring, produce, categorized, express, cup, manipulative, gestural, sonra, meaning, map, combination, content] [study, difference, concept] [english, abstract, natural, table, expressed, involve, form, word, earlier, writing] [setting, coffee, provide, based, opposite] [left, space, diagonal, figure, direction, represent, level, interaction, pointing, current, involved, representation]
Spatial Memory and Foraging: How Perfect Spatial Memory Improves Foraging Performance
Bryan Kerster, Chris Kello


Foraging is a search process common to all mobile organisms. Spatial memory can improve foraging efficacy, and evidence indicates that many species actively utilize spatial memory to aid in their foraging, yet most current models of foraging do not include spatial memory. In this study, an online game was used to replicate and extend findings from a recent study to investigate the role of spatial memory in foraging. The game involved searching a 2d space to find as many resources as possible. Spatial information was displayed that provided complete information about search history in order test how “perfect” spatial memory improves search performance. Over 1000 participants were recruited to participate using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which allowed this test to be performed across a wide range of different resource distributions. Results replicated the findings of earlier studies, and demonstrated that spatial memory can have a dramatic effect on search performance.
[indicate, task, time, displayed, presented, journal, compared, test] [experiment, factor, cognitive, power, key, work, described] [spatial, memory, normalized, previous] [number, resource, performance, study, score, efficiency, difference, click, example, square, provided, high, allowed] [clustering, perfect, path, random, animal, length, demonstrated, increase, analysis, table] [foraging, search, kerster, model, observed, game, allan, density, optimal, higher, distribution, marginal, find, simple, searched, fit, lognormal, replicated, uniform, foraged, marine] [human, visual, current, clustered, movement, figure, law, single, environment, space, screen, searching, process, indicates]
More than Words: The Many Ways Extended Discourse Facilitates Word Learning
Sumarga Suanda, Linda Smith, Chen Yu


Child-directed speech is often temporally organized such that successive utterances refer to the same topic. This type of extended discourse on the same referent has been shown to possess several verbal signatures that could facilitate learning. Here, we reveal multiple non-verbal correlates to extended discourse that could also aid learning. Multimodal analyses of extended discourse episodes reveal that during these episodes, toddlers and parents exhibit greater sustained attention on objects, and greater coordination between their behaviors. The results indicate the interconnections between multiple aspects of the language-learning environment, and suggest that parents’ speech may both shape and be shaped by non-verbal processes. Implications for understanding how the learning environment influences development are discussed.
[attention, learning, child, verbal, target, time, development, facilitate, session, baseline, learn, early, depicts, sustained, adjacent] [extended, social, temporal, series, hold] [object, speech, referential, language, transparency, utterance, referent, distractor, degree, referring, previous, perceptual, rich] [greater, three, national, course] [discourse, short, word, table, engagement, referentially, considered, linked] [manual, data, observed, total, played, correlation, set, well, provide, measured] [joint, coupling, figure, gaze, parent, eye, toddler, holding, multiple, environment, current, coupled, play, nonverbal, visual, transparent, duration, camera, view, classified, role, talked, dyad, equipped, period]
Examining the specificity of the seductive allure effect
Emily Hopkins, Deena Weisberg, Jordan Taylor


Previous work has found that people feel significantly more satisfied with explanations of psychological phenomena when those explanations contain neuroscience information — even when this information is entirely irrelevant to the logic of the explanations. This seductive allure effect was first demonstrated by Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, & Gray (2008), and has since been replicated several times in independent labs (e.g., Fernandez-Duque, Evans, Christian, & Hodges, 2014; Rhodes, Rodriguez, & Shah, 2014; Weisberg, Taylor, & Hopkins, 2015). However, these studies only examined psychological explanations with added neuroscience information. The current study thus investigated the generality of this effect and found that the seductive allure effect occurs across several scientific disciplines whenever the explanations include reference to smaller components or more fundamental processes. These data suggest that people have a general preference for reductive explanations.
[general, irrelevant, journal, presented, adjacent, task, increased, trial] [explanation, neuroscience, reductive, psychology, seductive, mturk, bad, allure, rated, scientific, social, psychological, people, work, biological, mating, phenomenon, chemistry, discipline, fundamental, perceive, described, assigned, explanatory, judge, engage, chemical, season, participant, pairing, excluded, understanding, sense, attract] [male, select, language, reference, previous, item, main] [science, better, study, biology, undergraduate, three, difference] [quality, random, unique, form] [good, preference, sample, average, higher, randomly, behavior, data, determined, range, rate, method, regression, hierarchy] [level, horizontal, interaction, field, role, current, figure, brain]
Construal level affects intuitive moral responses to narrative content
Nicholas Lester, René Weber


This study proposes that moral judgments of media content are not only related to intuitive moral domain salience and exemplars, but also to the processing state of the individual at the moment of exposure. An experiment manipulating construal level prior to exposure to a narrative text was conducted to test this proposal. The results suggest that evaluations of moral violations are modulated by construal level. High-level construal led to harsher, more consistent judgments of domain-violator morality, eliminating the effect of baseline moral intuitions. Low-level construal induced an apparent trade-off in moral evaluation strategy which is sensitive to both narrative outcome and domain salience. When domain violators were punished, intuitive moral salience was negatively correlated with moral evaluations; however, when domain violators were rewarded, the opposite trend emerged. These findings suggest that the strength and quality of moral intuitions are not robust to broader cognitive processes, but interact with them.
[response, test, presented, general, exposure] [moral, construal, salience, narrative, intuitive, character, morality, negative, gong, positive, tamborini, social, cognitive, punishment, mitigating, judgment, intensification, clt, eyal, harsher, evaluation, interact, violation, mitigation, perceived, experiment, affective, mime, disposition, result, transgression, medin, emotional, psychological, rewarded, rated, relationship, participant] [domain, main, support, content, description, priming] [study, difference] [relative, principle, include, word] [outcome, prior, reward, model, based, theory, predict, data, allow, individual] [level, interaction, activation, system, basal]
Two Potential Mechanisms Underlying the Link between Approximate Number Representations and Symbolic Math in Preschool Children
Ariel Starr, Rachel Roberts, Elizabeth Brannon


The approximate number system (ANS) is frequently considered to be a foundation for the acquisition of uniquely human symbolic numerical capabilities. However, the mechanism by which the ANS influences symbolic number representations and mathematical thought remains poorly understood. Here, we tested the relation between ANS acuity, cardinal number knowledge, approximate arithmetic, and symbolic math achievement in a one-year longitudinal investigation of preschoolers’ early math abilities. Our results suggest that cardinal number knowledge is an intermediary factor in the relation between ANS acuity and symbolic math achievement. Furthermore, approximate arithmetic performance contributes unique variance to math achievement that is not accounted for by ANS acuity. These findings suggest that there are multiple routes by which the ANS influences math achievement. Therefore, interventions targeting both the precision and manipulability of the ANS may prove to be more beneficial for improving mathematical reasoning compared to interventions targeting only one of these factors.
[developmental, second, child, task, early, training, completed, predictor, session, test, tested, year, general, age, learn] [influence, cognitive, including, series, serve, consistent, understanding, focused, psychological, work, sense] [meaning, contained, remains, support, varied] [math, symbolic, number, approximate, arithmetic, achievement, numerical, acuity, nonsymbolic, knowledge, counting, performance, ability, precision, cardinal, comparison, mathematical, contribute, manipulability, contributes, controlling, mathematics, correct, array, provided, tema, preschool, quantity, larger, mediate, national, young, formal, school, appears, schooling, assessment] [relation, variance, unique, acquisition, small] [model, data, individual, regression, underlying, total] [system, visit, performed, multiple]
Conflict-based regulation of control in language production
Michael Freund, Barry Gordon, Nazbanou Nozari


Is language production dynamically regulated by cognitive control? If so, how domain-general is this process? In two experiments, we studied conflict adaptation, or conflict-driven adjustments of control, in two paradigms: Picture-Word Interference (PWI), which induces linguistic conflict, and Prime-Probe (PP), which induces visuospatial conflict. Exp. 1 tested within-task conflict adaptation separately in PWI and PP. Exp. 2 tested cross-task adaptation by alternating the two tasks in a task-switching paradigm. We found reliable within-task conflict adaptation in both PWI and PP, but neither an analysis of individual differences (Exp. 1), nor a direct manipulation of between-task conflict (Exp. 2) revealed cross-task adaptation. We further report a robust 2-back within-task adaptation in Exp. 2 to refute alternative accounts of null cross-task adaptation. These findings support models of dynamic, top-down control in language production that posit at least some degree of domain-specificity.
[conflict, pwi, incongruent, congruent, task, tested, evidence, trial, response, target, interference, journal, stroop, test, monitoring, kan, reliable, size, avoid, hopkins, revealed, regulation, robust, sequence, stimulus, regulatory, completed, necker, forster] [cognitive, congruency, detection, power, low, vice] [adaptation, language, production, memory, experimental, previous, error, support, specificity, linguistic, speech, phonological] [control, performance, study, working, better, number, online, department, difference] [analysis, subject, semantic, amount, word, order, random] [function, alternative, lead, correlation] [current, rts, system, level, pattern, design, interaction, figure, human]
Active Viewing in Toddlers Facilitates Visual Object Learning: An Egocentric Vision Approach
Sven Bambach, David Crandall, Linda Smith, Chen Yu


Early visual object recognition in a world full of cluttered visual information is a complicated task at which toddlers are incredibly efficient. In their everyday lives, toddlers constantly create learning experiences by actively manipulating objects and thus self-selecting object views for visual learning. The work in this paper is based on the hypothesis that active viewing and exploration of toddlers actually creates high-quality training data for object recognition. We tested this idea by collecting egocentric video data of free toy play between toddler-parent dyads, and used it to train state-of-the-art machine learning models (Convolutional Neural Networks, or CNNs). Our results show that the data collected by parents and toddlers have different visual properties and that CNNs can take advantage of these differences to learn toddler-based object models that outperform their parent counterparts in a series of controlled simulations.
[training, learning, test, child, accuracy, testing, learn, size, compared, advantage, classification, early] [work, appear, frame, understanding] [object, color, appearance, egocentric, experimental] [toy, video, better, study, active, create, performance, created, number, investigate, recognize] [large, diversity, small, floor, diverse] [data, collected, simulation, set, average, based, everyday, well, higher, machine, compute] [visual, parent, toddler, figure, view, trained, image, controlled, play, cnns, convolutional, network, captured, recognition, cnn, grayscale, field, box, train, occluded, neural, camera, bounding, multiple, dataset, focus, joint, computer, viewing, center, firstperson]
The Pragmatics of Spatial Language
Tomer Ullman, Yang Xu, Noah Goodman


How do people understand the pragmatics of spatial language? We propose a rational-speech act model for spatial reasoning, and apply it to the terms `in' and `near'. We examine people's fine-grain spatial reasoning in this domain by having them locate where an event occurred, given an utterance. Our pragmatic listener model provides a quantitative and qualitative fit to people's inferneces.
[implicature, indicate, task] [people, participant, reasoning, told, account, experiment, work, flower, person, cognitive, understanding] [spatial, listener, language, literal, blue, lily, utterance, context, plaza, speaker, quarter, map, grew, victory, domain, lexicon, color, denotation, adjust, production, slack, speech, previous, specific] [example, equation, inside, place, prompted, estimation, department] [distance, gold, edge, panel, small, natural] [pragmatic, red, model, city, guess, goodman, probability, set, qualitative, uniform, infer, true, distribution, rational, bottom, depend, prior, probabilistic, uncertainty] [figure, location, region, top, pattern, center, quantitative, framework, space, left, area]
Measuring Interest in Science: The Science Curiosity Scale
Asheley Landrum, Joseph Hilgard, Heather Akin, Nan Li, Dan Kahan


In the current study, we present the methods for creating and validating a science curiosity scale. We find that the scale presented here is unidimensional and highly reliable. Moreover, it predicts engagement with a science documentary clip more accurately than do measures of science intelligence or education. Although more steps are needed, this provides initial evidence for the utility of our measure of science curiosity.
[response, reported, journal, valid, evidence, standard, indicate, task] [scale, clip, public, scientific, story, people, indicated, power, social, told, survey, disposition, purport, going, aim] [item, module, latent, interesting] [science, curiosity, documentary, asked, interested, study, news, performance, included, international, closely, national, government, measurement, ordinary, attending, watched, desirable, high, answer, entertainment, lecture, request, visiting, precision] [measure, engagement, comprehension, irt, reading, read, order, determining, combined] [set, full, theory, based, intelligence, measured, find, entire, behavior, predict, predicted, regression] [interest, figure, behavioral, episode, selection, image, business, current, level, validate]
An Ecological Model of Memory and Inferences
Daniela Link, Julian N. Marewski, Lael J. Schooler


In this paper, we develop a memory model that predicts retrieval characteristics of real-world facts. First, we show how ACT-R’s memory model can be used to predict people’s knowledge about real-world objects. The model assumes the probability of retrieving a chunk of information about an object and the time to retrieve this information depend on the pattern of prior environmental exposure to the object. Second, we use frequencies of information appearing on the Internet as a proxy for what information people would encounter in their natural environment, outside the laboratory. In two Experiments, we use this model to account for subjects’ associative knowledge about real-world objects as well as the associated retrieval latencies. Third, in a computer simulation, we explore how such model predictions can be used to understand the workings and performance of decision strategies that operate on the contents of declarative memory.
[time, response, cue, accuracy, task, base, size] [experiment, cognitive, people, person, strength, psychological, low] [retrieval, memory, attribute, chunk, declarative, criterion, environmental, web, marewski, object, discriminating, associative, retrieve, retrieved, latency, vertical] [knowledge, equation, number, strategy, sum, performance, science, included] [relation, frequency, table] [city, model, decision, noise, empirical, expected, probability, predicted, total, estimated, predict, simulated, based, set, modeling, assume, parameter, function, making, unknown, distribution, search, berlin, correlation, median, internet, smoothed, well, observed] [activation, figure, environment, encoding, responded, corresponding]
Children’s Awareness of Authority to Change Rules in Various Social Contexts
Xin Zhao, Tamar Kushnir


To investigate children’s awareness of authority to change rules, we showed children (ages 4-7) videos of one child playing a game alone or three children playing a game together. In the group video, the game rule was initiated either: by one of the children, by three children collaboratively or by an adult. They then were asked whether the characters in the videos could change the rules. Children believed that the character could change the rule when playing alone. Their responses to the group video depended on how the rule was initiated. They attributed authority to change rules only to the child who initiated the rule, unless the rule was created collaboratively. We also asked children whether they could change norms (school/moral/artifact norms) in daily life; and found moral/artifact distinction in children’s endorsement of norm changing. These results suggest that children recognize flexibility in changing rules even in preschool years.
[rule, child, condition, age, task, developmental, adult, half, development, showing, older, awareness, suggests, second] [authority, moral, social, understanding, consistent, endorse, character, reasoning, story, changed, normative, work, cognitive, agreement, yellow, fact, distinction] [manipulated, blue] [change, young, mom, video, collaborative, three, answered, playing, changing, group, artifact, school, initiated, asked, question, difference, conventional, majority, experimenter, score, understand, ownership, questionnaire, exact, rigid, solitary, preschool, freedom, recognize] [flexibility, correlated, order] [game, norm, binomial, red, based, proportion, prior, green, correlation, consider] [center, figure, human, play, joint]
Systems Factorial Analysis of Item and Associative Retrieval
Gregory Cox, Amy Criss


Using hierarchical Bayesian estimation of RT distributions, we present a novel application of Systems Factorial Technology (Townsend & Nozawa, 1995) to the retrieval of item and associative information from episodic memory. We find that item and associative information are retrieved concurrently, with positive memory evidence arising from a holistic match between the test pair and the contents of memory, in which both item and associative matches are pooled together into a single source. This retrieval architecture is inconsistent with both strictly serial processing and independence of item and associative information. Pooling of item and associative matches implies that while item and associative information may be separable, they are not qualitatively different, nor are qualitatively different processes (e.g., familiarity vs. recollection) used to retrieve these kinds of information.
[processing, response, journal, test, pair, time, evidence, inhibitory, match, half, presented, novel, appeared, interference] [strength, positive, negative, psychological, low, consistent, capacity, cognitive, independence] [associative, item, memory, retrieval, experimental, exhaustive, sic, facilitatory, quadrant, retrieved, factorial, coactive, intact, rearranged, sft, mismatch, pooled, townsend, characterize, studied, priming, retrieve] [correct, study, assessment, high, allowed] [table, list, minimum] [independent, function, theory, model, posterior, remaining, based, well, qualitative, credible, allow] [recognition, image, parallel, serial, process, figure, architecture, left, qualitatively, interaction, hierarchical, multiple, holistic, human, single, design]
Children learn non-exact number word meanings first
Junyi Chu, Katie Wagner, David Barner


Children acquire exact meanings for number words in distinct stages. First, they learn one, then two, and then three and sometimes four. Finally, children learn to apply the counting procedure to their entire count list. Although these stages are ubiquitous and well documented, the foundation of these meanings remains highly contested. Here we ask whether children assign preliminary meanings to number words before learning their exact meanings by examining their responses on the Give-a-Number task to numbers for which they do not yet have exact meanings. While several research groups have approached this question before, we argue that because these data do not usually conform to a normal distribution, typical methods of analysis likely underestimate their knowledge. Using non-parametric analyses, we show that children acquire non-exact meanings for small number words like one, two, three, four and possibly for higher numbers well before they acquire the exact meanings.
[child, learning, learn, chance, evidence, response, task, second, target, development, early, tested] [positive, cognitive, ten, lee, understanding, consistent] [sign, language, bilingual] [number, correct, knower, knowledge, exact, incorrect, subset, slope, counting, acquire, larger, three, gunderson, limited, asked, wagner, preliminary, numerical, approximate, requested, analyzed, experimenter, lower, sarnecka, comparing, corre, provided, statistically, cardinal] [word, small, table, count, large, analysis, english, principle, abstract, list] [data, median, higher, well, find, set, entire, provide] [figure, level, system, parallel, representing, driven, represent]
Inferring priors in compositional cognitive models
Eric Bigelow, Steven Piantadosi


We apply Bayesian data analysis to a structured cognitive model in order to determine the priors that support human generalizations in a simple concept learning task. We modeled 250,000 ratings in a "number game" experiment where subjects took examples of a numbers produced by a program (e.g. 4, 16, 32) and rated how likely other numbers (e.g. 8 vs. 9) would be to be generated. This paper develops a data analysis technique for a family of compositional "Language of Thought" (LOT) models which permits discovery of subjects' prior probability of mental operations (e.g. addition, multiplication, etc.) in this domain. Our results reveal high correlations between model mean predictions and subject generalizations, but with some qualitative mismatch for a strongly compositional prior.
[rule, learning, processing, inductive, structured] [cognitive, inference, work, strong] [language, domain, meaning, map, production, apply] [concept, number, math, high, example, three, digit] [grammar, analysis, relative, bias, structure, large, variance, table] [model, probability, data, prior, compositional, set, independent, mixture, expr, bayesian, posterior, infer, pcfg, hypothesis, distribution, lot, interval, parameter, generate, generated, inferring, simple, fit, noi, likelihood, assumed, uniform, sampling, conditioned, well, game, range, highest, method, total, assign] [human, figure, space, associated, start, behavioral, box, allows, neural, representation, represents, representing]
Which is in front of Chinese people: Past or Future? A study on Chinese people’s space-time mapping
Yan Gu, Yeqiu Zheng, Marc Swerts


Research shows that Chinese, when they gesture about time, tend to put the past “ahead” and future “behind”. Do they think of time in the way as suggested by their gestures? In Exp1 we show that when time conceptions are constructed with neutral wording, Chinese are more likely to have past-in-front-mappings than Spaniards. This could be due to cultural differences in temporal focus of attention, as Chinese people are more past-oriented than Europeans. However, Exp2&3 show that, independent of culture, Chinese’s past-in-front mapping is sensitive to the wording of sagittal spatial metaphors. In comparison to neutral wording, they have more past-in-front mappings when time conceptions are constructed with past-in-front spatial metaphors, whereas fewer past-in-front mappings are constructed with future-in-front metaphors. There thus appear to be both long-term effects of cultural attitudes on the spatialization of time, and also immediate effects of the space-time metaphors used to probe people’s mental representations.
[time, task, condition, wald, day, evidence, sequence, tested, explore] [temporal, people, future, front, mapping, neutral, metaphor, experiment, wording, fuente, sagittal, mental, diagram, cognitive, psychological, happened, corresponded, aymara, consistent, appear, discussion, event, tomorrow, result, yesterday, character, conception, spatialization] [spatial, cultural, language, gesture, vertical, refers, spanish, culture, sign] [study, ratio, comparison, group, procedure, place, asked] [chinese, earlier, lexical, mandarin, constructed, expressed, eating, table, bias, english] [odds, friend, proportion, hypothesis, rate] [focus, box, perform, visit, representation, space]
Inattentional Blindness in a Coupled Perceptual--Cognitive System
Will Bridewell, Paul Bello


Attention is thought to be a part of a larger cluster of mechanisms that serve to orient a cognitive system, to filter contents with respect to their task relevance, and to devote more computation to certain options than to others. All these activities proceed under the plausible assumption that not all information can be or ought to be processed for a system to satisfice in an ever changing world. In this paper, we describe an attention-centric cognitive system called ARCADIA that demonstrates the orienting, filtering, and resource-skewing functions mentioned above. The demonstration involves maintaining focus on cognitive tasks in a dynamic environment. While ARCADIA carries out a task, limits on its attentional capacity result in "inattentional blindness" under circumstances analogous to those where people fail to perceive otherwise salient stimuli.
[attention, task, stimulus, trial, attentional, cross, time, saliency, segmentation, processed, presented, reported, attend, novel, processing] [cognitive, blindness, perceive, distinction, people, cognition, result] [object, memory, salient, content] [comparison, strategy, working, receive, report, three, width, video, course] [file, length, operates, construct] [model, full, note, modeling, reflects, assumed, roughly] [visual, inattentional, arcadia, critical, focus, system, inhibition, figure, accessible, vision, component, location, covert, process, fixation, vstm, mack, receives, interlingua, divided, representation, rock, perception, carry, multiple, cycle, inattentionally, height, highlighter, output, image, attended, reporter, element, human, bello]
Recursive belief manipulation and second-order false-beliefs
Torben Braüner, Patrick Blackburn, Irina Polyanskaya


The literature on first-order false-belief is extensive, but less is known about the second-order case. The ability to handle second-order false-beliefs correctly seems to mark a cognitively significant step, but what is its status? Is it an example of *complexity only* development, or does it indicate that a more fundamental *conceptual change* has taken place? In this paper we extend Braüner's hybrid-logical analysis of first-order false-belief tasks to the second-order case, and argue that our analysis supports a version of the conceptual change position.
[task, rule, modal, time, child, response, training, asd] [belief, reasoning, logic, formation, work, manipulation, cognitive, version, perspectival, application, crucial, statement, person, falsebelief, mental, psychology] [van, shift, term, nominal, experimental, linguistic, language, refer] [sally, anne, marble, proof, hybrid, satisfaction, deduction, perspective, correct, basket, formula, peter, change, competence, secondorder, propositional, operator, moved, derivation, formalization, called, concluding, study, science, example, mastery, correctly] [analysis, natural, principle, logical, conceptual, complexity, approach, earlier, typically] [call, theory, model, point, true, paper, tree, note] [figure, move, human, action, system, view]
Syntactic Flexibility in the Noun: Evidence from Picture Naming
Nicholas Lester, Fermin Moscoso del Prado Martin


Does syntactic information affect the production of bare nouns? Research into this issue has explored word-specific features (e.g., gender). However, word-independent syntactic distributions may also play a role. For example, studies of word recognition have uncovered strong effects of the diversity of a word's syntactic distribution – its syntactic flexibility – on response times in visual lexical decision. By contrast, studies of sentence production have produced strong but conflicted effects of syntactic flexibility. We propose that syntactic flexibility also affects production of individual words. We reanalyze a database of previously collected timed picture naming data using two novel measures of syntactic flexibility, one based on the relations stemming from the noun, and one based on the relations extending to the noun. Our results show that nouns that project a diverse array of structures are produced faster, and those that are integrated into a diverse array of structures are produced slower.
[picture, target, interference, journal, dependency, processing, slower, occur, evidence] [cognitive, possibility, respect] [production, access, grammatical, gender, produced, language, facilitatory, support, produce, affect, contrast, university, memory, speech, refer] [study, number, array, greater, asked, three] [syntactic, flexibility, noun, word, diversity, lexical, measure, sentence, dependent, head, naming, relation, determiner, semantic, syntactically, english, onset, opportunistic, diverse, abstract, entropy, include, del, oxford, frequency, prado, moscoso, preposition, root, typically, strategist, form] [data, hypothesis, observed, theory, total, set, individual, model] [activation, cat, figure, visual, space, rts]
Alien species and alienable traits: An artificial language game investigating the spread of cultural variants between antagonistic groups
Betsy Sneller, Gareth Roberts


The spread of cultural variants, such as dress or speech patterns, may be promoted or inhibited by different types of bias. In model-based bias, variants are differentially adopted according to characteristics of individuals exhibiting them. Based on a hypothesis from sociolinguistic fieldwork, we posit two types of model-based bias: bias associated with alienable traits such as “tough” and inalienable traits such as “male.” We tested this by conducting a laboratory experiment in which participants played a computer game using an artificial language with two different dialects. Players were significantly more likely to borrow features of the other dialect when the variation was explicitly associated with toughness than when it was associated with another alien race. This suggests that cultural variants linked to alienable traits are more likely to be adopted than those linked to inalienable ones, even if the practical implications of the two traits are very similar.
[condition, artificial, displayed, learning, consisted, presented, learned] [talk, white, social, experiment, trait, told, explicitly, participant, assigned, result, case, consistent] [wiwos, burl, cultural, language, variation, alienable, tough, inalienable, experimental, linguistic, wiwo, university, borrowing, african, american, interlocutor, dialect, fight, alien, sneller, pennsylvania, spread, adoption, tougher, speech, chatting, chat, toughness, variant, south, adopted, borrowed, vocalic, consonantal, meet, urban, antagonistic, wordlist] [difference, study, practice, stage, question, three, working] [linked, typing, table, phonology] [game, player, based, hypothesis, well] [associated, feature, practical, figure, role, action, involved]
Cognitive Strategies in HCI and Their Implications on User Error
Marc Halbrügge, Michael Quade, Klaus-Peter Engelbrecht


Human error while performing well-learned tasks on a computer is an infrequent, but pervasive problem. Such errors are often attributed to memory deficits, such as loss of activation or interference with other tasks (Altmann & Trafton, 2002). We are arguing that this view neglects the role of the environment. As embodied beings, humans make extensive use of external cues during the planning and execution of tasks. In this paper, we study how the visual interaction with a computer interface is linked to user errors. Gaze recordings confirm our hypothesis that the use of the environment increases when memory becomes weak. An existing cognitive model of sequential action and procedural error (Halbrügge, Quade, & Engelbrecht, 2015) is extended to account for the observed gaze behavior.
[task, time, sequential, sequence, recorded, type, journal, compared, test, trial, training, general] [cognitive, experiment, account, assistant, application, physical] [error, memory, retrieval, priming, experimental, previous, retrieve, van] [procedural, strategy, external, correct, interactive] [obligatory, theoretical, analysis, subject, large] [model, based, data, behavior, theory, rate, assumption, fit, higher, search, berlin, paper, modeling, empirical, good] [human, visual, figure, user, gaze, fixation, goal, mfg, element, postcompletion, kitchen, activation, current, computer, role, level, action, interaction, technische, erroneous, screen, environment, design, eye, revised, omission, planned]
Connectionist Semantic Systematicity in Language Production
Jesus Calvillo, Harm Brouwer, Matthew Crocker


A novel connectionist model of sentence production is presented, which employs rich situation model representations originally proposed for modeling systematicity in comprehension (Frank, Haselager, & van Rooij, 2009). The high overall performance of our model demonstrates that such representations are not only suitable for comprehension, but also for modeling language production. Further, the model is able to produce novel encodings (active vs. passive) for a particular semantics, as well as generate such encodings for previously unseen situations, thus demonstrating both syntactic and semantic systematicity. Our results provide yet further evidence that connectionist approaches can achieve systematicity, in production as well as comprehension.
[training, condition, testing, test, time, novel, second, type] [situation, described, street, event] [basic, bedroom, microworld, frank, heidi, language, sophia, seek, hide, dssi, produced, produce, object, girl, contained, meaning, production, rich, systematicity, highly, charlie, unseen, fold, playground] [passive, active, performance, number, high, demonstrating, won, toy] [semantic, sentence, table, similarity, ease, vector, word, syntactic, order, comprehension, loses, grammar, semantically, perfect] [model, set, game, generate, queried, well, completely, probability] [output, space, connectionist, corresponding, layer, associated, hidden, defined, matrix, dimensionality, activation, represented, unit, representation]
Grammatical Bracketing Determines Learning of Non-adjacent Dependencies
Hao Wang, Jason Zevin, Toben Mintz


Grammatical dependencies often involve elements that are not adjacent. However, most experiments in which non-adjacent dependencies are learned bracketed the dependent material with pauses, which is not how dependencies appear in natural language. Here we report successful learning of embedded NAD without pause bracketing. Instead, we induce learners to compute structure in an artificial language by entraining them through processing English sentences. We also found that learning becomes difficult when grammatical entrainment causes learners to compute boundaries that are misaligned with NAD structures. In sum, we demonstrated that grammatical entrainment can induce boundaries that can carry over to reveal structures in novel language materials, and this effect can be used to induce learning of non-adjacent dependencies.
[artificial, learning, dependency, training, novel, phase, block, test, position, counterbalancing, processing, bracketing, presented, facilitate, entrainment, learn, testing, nonadjacent, stream, southern, statistical, adjacent, presentation, prosody, half, swech, fixed, alignment, sequence, recorded, repeated] [experiment, detection, result, kind, possibility, cognitive, discussion, presence] [language, grammatical, linguistic, university, chunk, mixed] [correct, incorrect, three, difference, material, created, number, hard, acquire, department] [english, syntactic, sentence, word, verb, structure, natural, analysis, parsing, mechanism, dependent, subject, induce, random, window, concatenated, length] [randomly, making, successful, data, success] [design, figure, interaction, level]
Natural science: Active learning in dynamic physical microworlds
Neil Bramley, Tobias Gerstenberg, Joshua Tenenbaum


In this paper, we bring together research on active learning and intuitive physics to explore how people learn about "microworlds" with continuous spatiotemporal dynamics. Participants interacted with objects in simple two-dimensional worlds governed by a physics simulator, with the goal of identifying latent physical properties such as mass, and forces of attraction or repulsion. We find an advantage for active learners over passive and yoked controls. Active participants spontaneously performed several kinds of "natural experiments" which reveal the objects' properties with varying success. While yoked participants' judgments were affected by the quality of the active participant they observed, they did not share the learning advantage, performing no better than passive controls overall. We discuss possible explanations for the divergence between active and yoked learners, and outline further steps to categorize and explore active learning in the wild.
[learning, target, condition, accuracy, evidence, test, learn, mouse, compared, time, explore, differed, advantage, trial] [physical, causal, intuitive, cognitive, people, participant, experiment, relationship, interact, paid] [object, distractor, pilot, society, memory, main, experimental] [active, passive, force, yoked, question, grab, mass, better, performance, punch, control, puck, science, attraction, microworlds, shaking, annual, three, grabbed, repel, answered, controlling, accurate, limited, ullman, worse, encroaching, allowed, practice, correct, number] [global, local, identifying, random, identified, distance] [average, randomly, conference, simulation, confidence, setup, observed] [figure, controlled, experienced, current, space, performed]
Coalescing the Vapors of Human Experience into a Viable and Meaningful Comprehension
Tomer Ullman, Max Siegel, Josh Tenenbaum, Samuel Gershman


Models of learning concepts or theories often invoke a stochastic search process, in which learners generate hypotheses through some structured random process and then evaluate them on some data measuring their quality or value. To be successful within a reasonable time-frame, these models need ways of generating good candidate hypotheses before the data are considered. Schulz (2012a) has proposed that studying the origins of new ideas in more everyday contexts, such as how we think up new names for things, can provide insight into the cognitive processes that generate good hypotheses for learning. We propose a simple generative model for how people might draw on their experience to propose new names in everyday domains such as pub names or action movies, and show that it captures surprisingly well the names that people actually imagine. We discuss the role for an analogous hypothesis-generation mechanism in enabling and constraining causal theory learning.
[task, learning, general, time, response, det, match] [thinker, relevant, people, real, rating, cognitive, causal, evaluation, bad, low, psychological, sense, coming, thinking, experience, rated, white, source, evaluate] [production, generation, language, produce] [better, concept, example, high, problem, thought, number, step, difference, answer, asked, department] [quality, structure, structural, considered, order, plausible, large, construct, proposed, small] [model, pub, everyday, search, average, theory, hypothesis, good, distribution, generate, stochastic, consider, propose, reasonable, randomly, proportion, movie, choosing, total, challenge, provide, paper, proposing, schulz, bear, proposal, rose, draw] [space, figure, process, generative, action]
Music Reading Expertise Modulates Visual Spans in both Music Note and English Letter Reading
Tze Kwan Li, Susana T. L. Chung, Janet H. Hsiao


Here we investigated how music reading experience modulates visual spans in language reading. Participants were asked to identify music notes, English letters, Chinese characters, and novel symbols (Tibetan letters) presented at random locations on the screen while maintaining central fixation. We found that for music note reading, musicians outperformed non-musicians at some peripheral positions in both visual fields, and for English letter reading, musicians outperformed non-musicians at some peripheral positions in the RVF but not in the LVF. In contrast, in both Chinese character and novel symbol reading, musicians and non-musicians did not differ in their performance at peripheral positions. Since both music and English reading involve a left-to-right reading direction and a RVF/LH advantage, these results suggest that the modulation of music reading experience on visual spans in language reading depends on the similarities in the cognitive processes involved.
[span, processing, testing, position, novel, presented, task, advantage, stimulus, size, suggests, training, target, attention] [character, cognitive, consistent, experience, mapping, result] [expertise, language, perceptual, matching, contrast, vertical, university, previous, background] [larger, number, performance, symbol, difference, outperformed, study, playing, better, chess, lower, education, started] [music, reading, chinese, english, tibetan, subtended, rvf, piano, read, word, progressive, nonmusicians, examine, modulates] [note, upper, measured] [visual, letter, level, central, peripheral, hong, angle, figure, kong, fixation, identity, reaching, eye, horizontal, modulation, ensure, performed, brain, lateralization, hsiao, vision, screen, involves, reached, location]
Design from Zeroth Principles
Jordan W. Suchow, Michael D. Pacer, Thomas L. Griffiths


A successful design accounts for the structure of the problem it is aimed at solving. When it is a human-directed design, this includes the expectations of its users. How do we arrive at such a design? One approach starts from first principles to evaluate the quality of proposed designs. Here, we introduce a form of human-in-the-loop computation that synthesizes a design conforming to its users’ expectations. The technique begins by constructing a transmission chain seeded with a random design. Each user in the chain is exposed to the design and then recreates it. Through this iterative process, the users’ perceptual, inductive, and reconstructive biases transform the initial design into one better matched to human cognition, being easier to learn and harder to forget. We evaluated the approach in three domains — stimulus–response mappings, vanity phone numbers, and typesetting — and show that it produces a good design in each.
[switch, position, learned, inductive, starting, stimulus, tested, second, type] [participant, experiment, cognitive, initial, mapping, discussion, mechanical, evaluated, recruited] [transmission, directly, memory, generation] [number, better, highlighted, passed, performance, equal, correctly, three, computation, solution] [random, technique, final, constructed, approach, form, minimum, order] [method, set, state, distribution, good, model, prior, estimating, probability, randomly, amazon, collected, requires, row, call, successful] [design, chain, letter, telephone, zeroth, light, phone, vanity, spacing, human, markov, seeded, placement, typeset, reconstructive, process, bounding, passing, user, font, kerning, turned, space, transform, market, figure]
Should moral decisions be different for human and artificial cognitive agents?
Evgeniya Hristova, Maurice Grinberg


Moral judgments are elicited using dilemmas presenting hypothetical situations in which an agent must choose between letting several people die or sacrificing one person in order to save them. The evaluation of the action or inaction of a human is compared to those of two artificial agents – a humanoid robot and an automated system. Ratings of rightness, blamefulness and moral permissibility of action or inaction in incidental and instrumental moral dilemmas are used. The results show that for the artificial cognitive agents the utilitarian action is rated as more morally permissible than inaction. The humanoid robot is found to be less blameworthy for his choices compared to the human agent or to the automated system. Action is found to be more appropriate, more permissible, more right, and less blameworthy than inaction only for the incidental scenarios. The results are interpreted and discussed from the perspective of perceived moral agency.
[artificial, presented, compared, standard, explore, type] [moral, robot, utilitarian, humanoid, automated, harm, cognitive, agency, inaction, rated, morally, incidental, permissibility, instrumental, permissible, worker, people, instrumentality, blameworthiness, rightness, blameworthy, hanging, trolley, perceived, person, scale, evaluation, hristova, likert, judged, scenario, evaluate, heavy, fact, described, concerning, malle, death, anova, grinberg] [description, main, factorial] [difference, container, study, control, activate, mind, analyzed] [table] [agent, choice, choosing, higher, paper, completely, expected, based, data, button, rate, chooses] [human, action, identity, figure, system, goal, interaction, moving]
Developmental Differences in Children's Statistical Learning Abilities
Limor Raviv, Inbal Arnon


Infants, children and adults are capable of implicitly extracting regularities from their environment through statistical learning (SL). SL is present from early infancy and found across tasks and modalities, raising questions about its domain generality. However, little is known about SL's developmental trajectory: Is SL fully developed capacity in infancy, or does it improve with age, like other cognitive skills? While SL is well established in infants and adults, only few studies looked at SL across development with conflicting results: some find age-related improvements while others do not. Importantly, despite its postulated role in language learning, no study has examined the developmental trajectory of auditory SL throughout childhood. Here, we conduct a large-scale study of children's auditory SL across a wide age-range (5-12y, N=115). Results show that auditory SL does not change much across development. We discuss implications for modality-based differences in SL and for its role in language acquisition.
[learning, auditory, age, statistical, developmental, development, task, trajectory, early, infancy, accuracy, test, youngest, trial, journal, saffran, heard, half, evidence, older, general, arciuli, suggests, learn, asl, second, finding, syllable, compared, foil, simpson, presentation, modality, postulated, artificial, improves, showing, chance, younger] [implicit, cognitive, examined, childhood, capacity, develop, work, claim, nature] [language, domain, alien, affect, gender, memory, support, appearance, item] [study, improve, better, performance, group, number, change, improvement, difference, young, score, worse] [order, word, table, structure, random, small] [model, regression] [visual, role, pattern, sensory, input]
Under Pressure: How Time-Limited Cognition Explains Statistical Learning by 8-Month Old Infants
Martyn Lloyd-Kelly, Fernand Gobet, Peter Lane


In a classic experiment, Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996) used a headturn preference procedure to show that infants can discriminate between familiar syllable sequences ("words”) and new syllable sequences ("non-words" and "part-words"). While several computational models have simulated aspects of their data and proposed that the learning of transitional probabilities could be mediated by neural-net or chunking mechanisms, none have simulated the absolute values of infants' listening times in the different experimental conditions. In this paper, we used CHREST, a model based on chunking, to simulate these listening times. The model simulated the fact that infants listened longer to novel words (non-words and part-words) than familiar words. While the times observed with the model were longer than those observed with infants, we make a novel finding with regard to phonological store trace decay. We also propose how to modify CHREST to produce data that fits closer to the human data.
[learning, time, presentation, syllable, familiar, test, novel, learn, loop, segmentation, statistical, modality, phase, verbal, testing, artificial, stream, general, recorded, learned] [participant, experiment, cognitive, san, implicit, capacity] [phonological, chrest, trace, store, discrimination, ltm, memory, headturn, familiarisation, rmse, language, listening, default, university, recognised, speaker, speech, chunk, discriminate, uttered, minute] [study, stm, better, three, procedure, composed, report, working, created] [word, node, transitional, root, simulate, order, acquisition, computational, include] [simulated, decay, model, data, fit, preference, best, average, set, observed, based, paper, simulation] [figure, pattern, human, image, forward, implement]
Exploring the Neural Mechanisms Supporting Structured Sequence Processing and Language Using Event-Related Potentials: Some Preliminary Findings
Gretchen Smith, Gerardo Valdez, Anne Walk, John Purdy, Christopher Conway


Structured sequence processing (SSP) refers to the neurocognitive mechanisms used to learn sequential patterns. SSP seems to be important for language knowledge; however, there are few neural studies showing an empirical connection between SSP and language. The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between SSP and language processing by comparing underlying neural components elicited during each type of task. Healthy adults completed a visual, non-linguistic SSP task and a visual morpho-syntactic language task. Both tasks were designed to cause violations in expectations of items occurring in a series. Event-related potentials were used to examine the neural mechanisms associated with these expectancy violations. The results indicated the P3a elicited by the SSP task and the P600 elicited by the language task shared similarities in their topographic distribution. These preliminary analyses suggest the P3a and P600 may reflect processes involving detection of sequential violations in non-language and language domains.
[ssp, task, learning, processing, sequence, phase, sequential, artificial, test, electrophysiological, stimulus, erp, structured, ungrammatical, response, showing, occurring, presentation, statistical, presented, early, conway, inspection, second, explicit, displayed, christiansen, evidence, compared] [elicited, cognitive, implicit, consistent, bad, violation, indicated] [language, grammatical, previous] [correct, score, study, department, usa, performance] [measure, natural, grammar, sentence, word, reflect, syntactic, relative, expectancy, topographic] [data, distribution, full, button, underlying, posterior, correlation, probability] [neural, visual, element, figure, component, central, associated, left, eeg, anterior, frontal, press]
Bifurcation analysis of a Gradient Symbolic Computation model of incremental processing
Pyeong Whan Cho, Paul Smolensky


Language is ordered in time and an incremental processing system encounters temporary ambiguity in the middle of sentence comprehension. An optimal incremental processing system must solve two computational problems: On the one hand, it has to keep multiple possible interpretations without choosing one over the others. On the other hand, it must reject interpretations inconsistent with context. We propose a recurrent neural network model of incremental processing that does stochastic optimization of a set of soft, local constraints to build a globally coherent structure successfully. Bifurcation analysis of the model makes clear when and why the model parses a sentence successfully and when and why it does not---the garden path and local coherence effects are discussed. Our model provides neurally plausible solutions of the computational problems arising in incremental processing
[second, processing, indicate, target, journal, presented, arrow, time, continuous] [stable, inconsistent, consistent, case, cognitive, initial] [incremental, language, grammatical, ambiguity] [symbolic, change, discrete, investigate, reject, discover] [equilibrium, word, energy, gsc, sentence, branch, structure, panel, local, bifurcation, global, reading, computational, graph, grammar, analysis, disconnectivity, harmony, continuation, parsing, path, attractor, blend, quantization, manifold, garden, build, topology, harmonic, coherence, syntactic, major, discovered, comprehension, evolves, small, interpretation] [model, state, point, landscape, method, set, consider, optimal, parameter] [system, figure, activation, neural, unstable, gradient, representing, representation, multiple, human, network]
A Tale of Two Disasters: Biases in Risk Communication
Matthew Welsh, Sandy Steacy, Steve Begg, Daniel Navarro


Risk communication, where scientists inform policy-makers or the populace of the probability and magnitude of possible disasters, is essential to disaster management – enabling people to make better decisions regarding preventative steps, evacuations, etc. Psychological research, however, has identified multiple biases that can affect people’s interpretation of probabilities and thus risk. For example, availability (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) is known to confound probability estimates while the description-experience gap (D-E Gap) (Hertwig & Erev, 2009) shows low probability events being over-weighted when described and under-weighted when learnt from laboratory tasks. This paper examines how probability descriptions interact with real world experience of events. Responses from 294 participants across 8 conditions showed that people’s responses, given the same described probabilities and consequences, were altered by their familiarity with the disaster (bushfire vs earthquake) and its salience to them personally. The implications of this for risk communication are discussed.
[familiarity, condition, base, test, suggests, year, increased, occurring, presentation, presented] [people, salience, experience, participant, described, low, indicated, gap, discussion, percentage, survey, common, real] [recalled, communication, affect, university, select, recall] [format, number, asked, better, school, absolute, reduce, operational, three, difference] [frequency, natural, table, analysis, occurrence, relative] [risk, disaster, probability, earthquake, adelaide, data, house, bushfire, availability, proportion, theory, prospect, bushfires, rate, higher, decision, selecting, choice, actual, tendency, option, risky, sell, predicted, learnt, forecasting, selected] [figure, interaction, respond, unfamiliar, fewer, perception]
What Makes You Feel You Are Learning: Cues to Self-Regulated Learning
Jessie Chin, Elizabeth Stine-Morrow


While learning in a multitext environment increases with the rise of electronic environments, little is known about what makes learners feel that they should continue learning or already learn enough from one text. The current study aimed at examining what cues learners use to regulate their effort among multiple sources in a multitext environment. By manipulating the amount of new information and conceptual overlap across texts within a topic, we created three types of text environments to generate different trajectories of two cues to perceived learning, new information (measured by rating of perceived new information) and encoding fluency (measured by ratings of reading ease). Results showed that the dominant cue to gauge perceived learning was the perceived amount of new information. The study extended theories in animal foraging and metacognition, and established a novel paradigm to better investigate adult learning in the wild.
[condition, learning, cue, learn, processing, journal, time, monitoring, test, age, learned] [perceived, low, perceive, experience, rated, judge, feel, psychology, people] [introduced, content, proximal, previous, main, experimental, recall, mixed] [three, high, study, number, performance, knowledge, metacognition, operationalized, thought, difference] [amount, conceptual, fluency, text, reading, ease, article, topic, subsequent, table, comprehension, read, examine, introducing, order, meant, con, word, relative, sentence, frequency, measure, regulate, multitext, analysis, manipulating] [expected, function, estimate, average, foraging, well, determine] [encoding, overlap, figure, current, suggested, dominant]
Modeling Commonsense Reasoning via Analogical Chaining: A Preliminary Report
Joseph Blass, Kenneth Forbus


Understanding the nature of commonsense reasoning is one of the deepest questions of cognitive science. Prior work has proposed analogy as a mechanism for commonsense reasoning, with prior simulations focusing on reasoning about continuous behavior of physical systems. This paper examines how analogy might be used in commonsense more broadly. The two contributions are (1) the idea of common sense units, intermediate-sized collections of facts extracted from experience (including cultural experience) which improves analogical retrieval and simplifies inferencing, and (2) analogical chaining, where multiple rounds of analogical retrieval and mapping are used to rapidly construct explanations and predictions. We illustrate these ideas via an implemented computational model, tested on examples from an independently-developed test of commonsense reasoning.
[analogical, analogy, base, automatically, test, training, generalization, artificial, learning] [reasoning, case, inference, causal, work, cognitive, common, relevant, future, abduction, experience, logically, sense, mapping, logic, event, quantified, candidate] [retrieved, language, domain, aaai, specific, separate] [answer, question, three, knowledge, larger, correct, require, answering, involving, score, formal, required] [logical, plausible, natural, similarity, large, probe, computational, include] [commonsense, csus, copa, csu, chaining, sme, companion, model, paper, theory, derivational, nlu, prior, set, conference, well, generated, ambulance, forbus, potential, loved, son, fell, requires] [system, figure, human, multiple, current, extracted, plan]
Individual Differences in Pupil Dilation during Naming Task
Kaidi Lõo, Jacolien van Rij, Juhani Järvikivi, Harald Baayen


The present study investigates individual differences in pupil dilation during standard word naming. We looked at (i) how individual subjects’ pupil size changes over the course of time and (ii) how well pupil size is predicted by the frequency of the stimuli. The time course of the pupil size was analysed with generalized additive modeling. The results show large individual variations in the pupil response pattern in this very simple task. Although, we see a pupil response to both stimulus onset and articulation onset and offset, both the amplitude of change and the direction of change differ substantially between subjects. This raises the question of what makes the pupil response functions so diverse, and one factor indicated by the frequency effect or the lack thereof might be shallow reading versus reading for content.
[time, size, second, stimulus, response, task, processing, journal, compared, general, presented, generalized, trial, verbal, suggests] [cognitive, yellow, experiment, clear, version, indicated, engage] [speech, van, main, language, experimental, vertical, mixed, university, recall] [group, three, high, study, partial, product, third, included, change, conducted] [pupil, frequency, dilation, subject, articulation, onset, naming, word, lexical, dotted, contour, reading, smooth, analysis, sentence, panel, pupillary, shallow, baayen, exactly, tensor, weak, read, package, pupillometry, diameter] [function, individual, median, data, additive, increasing, green, load, well] [peak, figure, eye, screen, interaction, computer, pattern]
Fuse to be used: A weak cue's guide to attracting attention
Zara Harmon, Vsevolod Kapatsinski


Several studies examined cue competition in human learning by testing learners on a combination of conflicting cues rooting for different outcomes, with each cue perfectly predicting its outcome. A common result has been that learners faced with cue conflict choose the outcome associated with the rare cue (the Inverse Base Rate Effect, IBRE). Here, we investigate cue competition including IBRE with sentences containing cues to meanings in a visual world. We do not observe IBRE. Instead we find that position in the sentence strongly influences cue salience. Faced with conflict between an initial cue and a non-initial cue, learners choose the outcome associated with the initial cue, whether frequent or rare. However, a frequent configuration of non-initial cues that are not sufficiently salient on their own can overcome a competing salient initial cue rooting for a different meaning. This provides a possible explanation for certain recurring patterns in language change.
[cue, zon, mik, presented, mapped, learn, configural, base, learning, eliminative, kruschke, training, appeared, competition, picture, creature, consisted, artificial, ibre, attention, task, position, exposure, suggests, processing, conflict, isolation, finding, evidence, development, conflicting, reliance, predictor, condition, test, occurred, postpositional] [initial, experiment, mapping, common, presence, work, absence, explanation, disease, strong, inference, develop, reason, influence] [meaning, language, combination, previous, university, salient] [difference, ratio] [frequent, form, sentence, frequency, association, table, word, large, small, perfect, structure] [inverse, rare, rate, predicts, well, stronger, pas, observe, compete] [associated, figure, screen]
How do Distributions of Item Sizes Affect the Precision and Bias in Representing Summary Statistics?
Midori Tokita, Akira Ishiguchi


Many studies have shown that observers can accurately perceive and evaluate the statistical summary of presented objects’ attribute values, such as the average, without attending to each object. However, it remains controversial how the visual system integrates the attribute values (e.g., information on size) of multiple items and computes the average value. In this study, we tested how distributions of item sizes affect the precision and bias in judging average values. We predicted that if observers utilize all of the available size information equally, the distribution would have no effect, and vice versa. Our results showed that, with novice observers, judgement precision differed among size distributions and that the observers overestimated the size of the average value compared to the actual size under all conditions. However, this was not the case for experienced observers, who showed no effects of distribution type on average assessment performance.
[size, presented, statistical, tested, standard, accuracy, journal, test, suggests, standardized, compared, stimulus, blank, attention, trial, repeated] [positively, equally, possibility, negatively, judgment, cognitive, people, emotional] [item, novice, affect, perceptual, percept] [precision, comparison, number, performance, larger, limited, conducted, three, smaller, fraction, idea] [bias, analysis, ensemble, mechanism, computed, averaging, accurately, variance] [average, distribution, set, summary, individual, weber, skewed, pse, uniform, unaffected, overestimated, function, data, normal, actual, computing, judgement, noise, marchant] [representing, experienced, figure, visual, representation, process, perception, multiple, single, represent, extracting, psychometric, vision]
Mechanisms for storing and accessing event representations in episodic memory, and their expression in language: a neural network model
Martin Takac, Alistair Knott


We present a neural network model of how events are stored in and retrieved from episodic long-term memory (LTM). The model is novel in giving an explicit account of the working memory (WM) medium mediating access to episodic memory: it makes a specific proposal about how representations of events and situations in semantic WM interface with representations of events and situations in episodic memory. It also provides the framework for an account of how operations accessing temporally remote situations are reported in language.
[time, type, learn, dog, presented, sequence, evidence] [situation, cognitive, temporal, hold, person, experience, account] [episodic, ltm, memory, reference, retrieved, language, specific, linguistic, retrieve, pat, afternoon, hippocampal, john, hippocampus, evening, sleep, hide] [working, material, active] [token, discourse, semantic, antecedent] [model, agent, distribution, query, probability, individual, set, provide] [episode, som, figure, activity, network, medium, pattern, patient, system, representation, takac, neural, current, process, knott, interface, input, representing, reconstruct, recurrent, localist, associated, action, trained, cortex, represent, sing, allows, morning, distributed, stored, holding, chair, represented, involves, unit, pfc]
Stereotype-Based Intuitions: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Experimental Philosophy’s ‘Sources Project’
Eugen Fischer, Paul Engelhardt


Experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess their evidentiary value. This paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by brief philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception (‘argument from hallucination’). We trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension. We employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to show that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are made from less salient uses of the verb “to see”. This yields a debunking explanation which resolves the philosophical paradox.
[time, journal, second, evidence, explicit, directional, verbal, suggests] [epistemic, philosophical, aware, sense, phenomenal, physical, inappropriate, macbeth, dagger, experience, intuition, relevant, salience, philosophically, contextually, intuitive, competent, cognitive, conclusion, consistent, philosophy, fischer, evidentiary, psychology, explanation, key, vitiating, anglia, debunking, inference, engender, work] [experimental, salient, spatial, stereotypical, object, psycholinguistic, university, perceptual] [problem, study, example] [argument, verb, direct, word, approach, sentence, proximity, abstract, semantic] [preferred, paper, preference, hypothesis, infer, well] [visual, associated, critical, activation, perception, figure, automatic, review, process]
What Were They Thinking? Diagnostic Coding of Conceptual Errors in a Mathematics Learning Software Data Archive
Christine Massey, Jennifer Kregor, Laura Cosgrove, Himchan Lee


Decades of research have demonstrated that students face critical conceptual challenges in learning mathematics. As new adaptive learning technologies become ubiquitous in education, they bring opportunities both to facilitate conceptual development in more focused ways and to gather data that may yield new insights into students’ learning processes. The present study analyzes data archives from a perceptual learning intervention designed to help students master key concepts related to linear measurement and fractions. Using algorithmic data coding on a database of 78,034 errors from a sample of sixth graders, both conceptual errors and other errors were captured and analyzed for change over time. Results indicate that conceptual errors decreased significantly. This approach suggests additional ways that such datasets can be exploited to better understand how the software impacts different students and how next generations of adaptive software may be designed to code and respond to common error patterns in real time.
[learning, response, type, indicate, time, decreased, half, accuracy, phase, reported] [designed, understanding, focused, ball, cognitive, algorithmic] [error, perceptual, coded, specific, mixed, occurs] [problem, hash, mathematics, integer, fraction, measurement, software, linear, student, number, mark, regrouping, plm, study, endpoint, fractional, mastery, unproductive, ruler, educational, answer, difficult, national, targeted, sixth, code, change, counting, massey, mastered, correct, recognize, discrete] [conceptual, distance, large, examine, structure, table, approach, relative] [data, total, adaptive, set, point, unknown, average, rate] [figure, captured, encoding, process, multiple, coding, start, level, represented]
Trust, Communication, and Inequality
Joanna Bryson, Paul Rauwolf


Inequality in wealth is a pressing concern in many contemporary societies, where it has been show to co-occur with political polarization and policy volatility, however its causes are unclear. Here we demonstrate that inequality can covary reliably with other cooperative behavior, despite a lack of exogenous cause or deliberation. Under simulated cultural evolution via social learning selecting for trust and cooperative exchange, we find both cooperation and inequality to be more prevalent in contexts where the same agents play both the roles of the trusting investor and the trusted investee, in contrast to conditions where roles are divided between subpopulations. Cooperation is more likely in contexts of high transparency about potential partners and with a high amount of partner choice; while inequality is more likely with high information but no choice in partners. Our approach holds promise for examining the causality and social contexts underlying shifts in income inequality.
[learning, competition, condition, journal, time] [social, political, stable, causality, work, low, understanding, united, held, contemporary, result, sufficient] [evolution, university, context, previous, spatial, evolutionary, generation, knowing, cultural, environmental, experimental] [high, unified, number, partial, greater, concern, extend] [local, substantial] [inequality, trust, return, population, rate, investor, cooperation, wealth, demand, economic, potential, bryson, polarization, investees, investment, probability, rauwolf, drawn, costly, game, model, selected, behavior, money, cooperative, choice, round, extreme, investee, row, max, adaptive, generate, note, manapat, princeton, randomly, disjoint, set, trustee, emerge, bottom] [partner, top, figure, human, focus, single, driven]
Singular Interpretations Linger During the Processing of Plural Noun Phrases
Nikole Patson


Plural nouns do not strictly refer to more than one object, which suggests that they are not semantically marked to mean “more than one” and that plurality inferences are made via a scalar implicature. Consistent with that hypothesis, recent evidence using a picture-matching paradigm supports founds that participants were equally fast to respond to a picture of a single object as a picture of multiple objects after reading a sentence containing a plural. This suggests that comprehenders activate both a semantic (i.e., singular) and a pragmatic interpretation (i.e., plural). The current study found that even after a 1500 ms delay, comprehenders still maintain activation of both meanings after reading a sentence containing a plural. This suggests that the activation of the singular meaning may not be due to the processing of a scalar implicature, but rather may be due to the nature of plural conceptual representations.
[picture, implicature, faster, suggests, processing, evidence, time, finding, spatially, presented, type, reaction, compared, reported, explicit, journal] [singular, consistent, account, work, negated, experiment, judgment, delay, relevant] [meaning, context, experimental, object, language, contained, linguistic, spatial, filler, mismatched, matched, configuration] [number, study, computation] [plural, noun, comprehenders, conceptual, patson, sentence, interpretation, semantic, ate, sentential, argued, semantically, conceptually, token, kaup, ben, zoe, reading, read, tieu, interpreted, intended, affirmative, mentioned, comprehension] [scalar, set, state, preference, pragmatic, based, implied, intermediate, compute] [representation, single, activation, respond, represent, multiple, current, figure, distributed]
Generalisable patterns of gesture distinguish semantic categories in communication without language
Gerardo Ortega, Asli Özyürek


There is a long-standing assumption that gestural forms are geared by a set of modes of representation (acting, representing, drawing, moulding) with each technique expressing speakers’ focus of attention on specific aspects of referents (Müller, 2013). Beyond different taxonomies describing the modes of representation, it remains unclear what factors motivate certain depicting techniques over others. Results from a pantomime generation task show that pantomimes are not entirely idiosyncratic but rather follow generalisable patterns constrained by their semantic category. We show that a) specific modes of representations are preferred for certain objects (acting for manipulable objects and drawing for non-manipulable objects); and b) that use and ordering of deictics and modes of representation operate in tandem to distinguish between semantically related concepts (e.g., “to drink” vs “mug”). This study provides yet more evidence that our ability to communicate through silent gesture reveals systematic ways to describe events and objects around us.
[silent, iconicity, shape, showing, revealed, deictic, category, target, evidence] [elicited, cognitive, depicting, systematic] [gesture, sign, object, language, manipulable, acting, referent, gestural, drawing, produced, specific, communication, depicted, gesturers, remains, express, speech, describe, pantomime, production, expressing, degree, generalisable, calculated, outline, favour, produce, manner, distinguish, linguistic] [strategy, study, high, number, asked, three, effective] [semantic, mode, form, word, order, tend, table, emerging] [proportion, observed, manual, empirical] [representation, represent, representing, affordances, single, focus, figure, action, multiple, pointing, represented, visual, motion]
Scarcity captures attention and induces neglect: Eyetracking and behavioral evidence
Brandon Tomm, Jiaying Zhao


Resource scarcity poses challenging demands on the human cognitive system. Budgeting with limited resources induces an attentional focus on the problem at hand. This focus enhances processing of relevant information, but it also comes with a cost. Specifically, scarcity may cause a failure to notice beneficial information that helps alleviate the condition of scarcity. In three experiments, participants were randomly assigned with a small budget (“the poor”) or a large budget (“the rich”) to order a meal from a restaurant menu. The poor participants looked longer at the prices of the items and recalled the prices more accurately, compared to the rich participants. Importantly, the poor neglected a useful discount that would save them money. This neglect may arise as a result of attentional narrowing, and help explain a range of counter-productive behaviors of low-income individuals. The current findings have important implications for public policy and services for low-income individuals.
[time, condition, attention, attentional, suggests, processing, looked, enhanced, reliable] [experiment, cognitive, people, explanation, result, assigned, public, social, discussion, explain, focused, work] [rich, memory, recall, error, recalled] [limited, number, spent, proportional, difference, absolute, help, asked, benefit, working, beneficial, study, place, procedure] [order, reflect, large, small, measure, clause] [price, financial, average, predict, randomly, ordering] [poor, scarcity, calorie, discount, dwell, menu, visual, food, neglect, encoding, current, budget, figure, focus, meal, assistance, process, neglected, human, prioritization, behavioral, fewer, facilitates, oecd, longer, environment, enrollment]
Using determiners as contextual cues in sentence comprehension: A comparison between younger and older adults
Nazbanou Nozari, Daniel Mirman


Younger adults use both semantic and phonological cues to quickly localize the referent during sentence comprehension. ERP studies have shown that older adults, as a group, are less apt at using contextual semantic cues to predict upcoming words. The current study extends the investigation of contextual cue processing beyond semantic cues, by comparing younger and older adults in their ability to use phonological cues in indefinite articles (a/an) in an eye-tracking paradigm. Our results suggest that both age groups use such contextual phonological information, but with different timelines: younger adults use the cues to anticipate an upcoming word, whereas older adults show delayed cue processing after the target word has been spoken. Together with past research, these findings support a model of sentence comprehension in which the use of contextual cues continues with aging, but is no longer as efficient as in the young system for anticipatory word retrieval.
[older, younger, target, age, processing, cue, time, condition, compared, erp, early, presented, aging, response, finding, polynomial, evidence, showing, journal, second, suggests, wlotko, spoken, arttype, recorded, type, delong, auditory] [late, cognitive, focused, psychology, timeline] [phonological, context, language, referent, experimental, memory, delayed, anticipate, main, specific] [control, three, quadratic, linear, young, continued, study, subset] [article, contextual, sentence, word, semantic, comprehension, analysis, indefinite, upcoming, anticipatory, window, noun, table, frequency, reading, locate, boy, gca] [set, model, marginal, explored, data] [interaction, visual, current, process, fixation, figure]
Surprising blindness to conversational incoherence in both instant-messaging and face-to-face speech
Gareth Roberts, Benjamin Langstein, Bruno Galantucci


Language is widely assumed to be a well designed tool for reliably communicating propositional information between people. This suggests that its users should be sensitive to failures of communication, such as utterances that are blatantly incoherent with respect to an ongoing conversation. We present experimental work suggesting that, in fact, people are surprisingly tolerant of conversational incoherence. In two previous studies, participants engaged in instant-messaging conversations that were either repeatedly crossed with other conversations or had lines inserted into them that deliberately contradicted available information. In both cases, a substantial proportion of participants failed to notice. In a new study, confederates inserted unexpected, nonsensical lines into face-to-face conversations. The majority of participants failed to notice. We argue these findings suggest that we should be wary of modeling spontaneous communication in terms of faithful information transmission, or language as a well designed tool for that purpose.
[condition, pair, identify, chance, time, suggests, task, reliable] [participant, inserted, conversation, detection, focused, nonsensical, incoherence, crossing, inconsistent, people, fact, famous, broadly, social, failed, work, narrowly, server, blatant, notice, sensitive, cartoon, consistent, communicating, flower, butterfly, teresa, instant, respect, case, guessed, surprisingly] [language, communication, message, evolution, communicative, linguistic, meaning, confederate, conversational, spontaneous, university, referred, identification] [study, question, group, asked, transcript, received, three, thought, answered, crossed, answer, procedure, guy, help, mother] [sentence, window, distance] [rate, green, well, red, guess] [human, involved, figure, left, controlled]
The Influence of Religious Beliefs on False Memory of Fabricated Events
Ellen Searle, Jennifer Vonk, Brock Brothers


Previous research has indicated that memories can be modified in conjunction with one’s attitudes, in particular, political beliefs. The current study extended this finding by focusing on the relationship between differing religious beliefs and false memories for news events. We predicted that religious people would be more inclined to remember fabricated news events positively depicting religion and less likely to remember events negatively depicting religion compared to non-religious people. Opposite effects were predicted for events depicting atheism. In contrast, we found that religious people were more likely to falsely remember both events depicting religion positively and negatively compared to non-religious individuals. However, the extent to which individuals felt positively about the events interacted with religious beliefs to predict reported false memories. Religious individuals were more likely to remember events if they felt positively about them whereas atheists were more likely to remember events if they felt negatively about them.
[category, presented, finding, journal, reported, standardized, standard] [religious, false, event, valence, negative, positively, depicting, positive, negatively, felt, religiosity, religion, falsely, people, scale, consistent, strength, atheist, fabricated, political, influence, social, low, nonreligious, belief, personality, real, frenda, christian, psychological, fundamentalism, psychology, god, interact, relationship, pope, likert, squirrel] [memory, remember, depicted, remembered, experimental, recall, illustrating, influenced] [study, high, step, conducted, controlling, news, group, impact, investigate, score, asked] [entered] [true, predicted, regression, correlation, predict, individual, point, affiliation, respective, prior, simple, expected] [associated, interaction, figure, role, current, corresponding]
Gender Differences in the Effect of Impatience on Men and Women’s Timing Decisions
Moojan Ghafurian, David Reitter


Decisions over the timing of actions are critical in several safety, security and healthcare scenarios. These decisions, similar to discrete decisions, can be influenced by biases and individual traits. In this paper, a bias of impatience is studied in an experiment with 626 participants, with a focus on gender differences. Impatience was moderated with a manipulation of a variable-speed countdown. Men and women differed in how they expressed impatience. While men systematically and irrationally act earlier when become impatient following the slower countdowns, women react by irrationally requesting earlier information about the outcome of each trial, and impulsively pressing an inactive key.
[timing, early, time, reliably, condition, slower, speed, second, compared] [experiment, late, positive, story, hypothesize, manipulation, cover, key, participant, people, long, psychological, cognition, mechanical, experience] [gender, experimental, frequently, intercept] [number, study, discrete, watching, strategy, difference, covariate, investigate] [count, table, earlier, reflect, analysis] [men, game, check, impatience, countdown, round, wait, model, choice, num, live, risk, cookie, played, opponent, monster, based, set, individual, point, propensity, decision, impulsive, nfc, financial, option, choose, predicting, average, decide, waiting, tendency, estimate, genderm, potential, amazon, nowait, pressed, behavior] [duration, figure, start, play, press, catch]
Analytical Thinking Predicts Less Teleological Reasoning and Religious Belief
Jeffrey Zemla, Samantha Steiner, Steven Sloman


Individual differences in reflectiveness have been found to predict belief in God. We hypothesize that this association may be due to a broader inclination for intuitive thinkers to endorse teleological explanations. In support of our hypothesis, we find that scientifically unfounded teleological explanations are more likely to be endorsed by intuitive compared to analytical thinkers, and that those who endorse teleological explanations are more likely to have religious beliefs.
[test, reported, completed, age, half, presented, journal, suggests] [teleological, reasoning, religious, causal, belief, endorse, analytical, crt, god, experiment, intuitive, thinking, cognitive, conditional, religion, religiosity, familial, scale, strong, scientifically, existence, leading, childhood, negatively, willingness, life, engage, discussion, explanation, tversky, kelemen, people, influence, excluded, shenhav, understanding, forum] [support, abbreviated, experimental, affect, gender, blue, highly] [control, correct, performance, three, answer, ability, reflection, high, report, score, correctly, scored, change] [order, style, correlated, bias, natural, measure, proposed] [probability, hypothesis, correlation, predicts, predict, find, aid] [numeracy, figure, eye, neglect, design]
Longitudinal L2 Development of the English Article in Individual Learners
Akira Murakami, Theodora Alexopoulou


We investigate the accuracy development of the English article by learners of English as a second language. The study focuses on individual learners, tracking their learning trajectories through their writings in the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT), an open access learner corpus. We draw from 17,859 writings by 1,280 learners and ask whether article accuracy in individual learners fluctuates randomly or whether learners can be clustered according to their developmental trajectories. In particular, we apply k-means clustering to automatically cluster in a bottom up fashion learners with similar learning curves. We follow learners for a period covering one CEFR level. Given the relatively short learning window, the majority of learners follow a horizontal line. Nevertheless, we also identify groups of learners showing a power-function and U-shaped curve. Crucially, these groups are ‘hidden’ when the aggregate of learners is considered, a finding highlighting the importance of individual level analysis.
[accuracy, development, learning, developmental, learner, second, span, absent, shape, identify, showing] [axis, systematic] [language, null, calculated, variation, grammatical, van] [number, three, study, included, teaching, investigate, score, procedure, difference] [cluster, writing, longitudinal, tlu, window, english, article, clustering, silhouette, large, panel, obligatory, ocs, chinese, include, short, order, measure, open, corpus, englishtown, applied, proficiency, calculate, small, trend, acquisition, random, definite, aggregated, exponential, loess] [individual, data, average, observed, distribution, range, consider, entire, note, metric, aggregate, point, follow] [figure, pattern, multiple, horizontal, represents, correspond, corresponds, left, represent, focus]
Spatializing emotion: A mapping of valence or magnitude?
Benjamin Pitt, Daniel Casasanto


People implicitly associate different emotions with different locations in left-right space. Which dimensions of emotion do they spatialize? Across many studies people spatialize emotional valence, mapping positive emotions onto their dominant side of space and negative emotions onto their non-dominant side. Yet, other results suggest a contradictory 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 valence. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we first tested whether people implicitly spatialize whichever dimension of emotion they attend to. Results showed the predicted valence mapping, but no intensity mapping. We then tested an alternative explanation of findings previously interpreted as showing an intensity mapping; these data may reflect a left-right mapping of spatial magnitude, not emotion. People implicitly spatialize emotional valence, but there is no clear evidence for an implicit lateral mapping of emotional intensity.
[evidence, task, response, tested, standard, test, presented, standardized, dimension, journal, faster, stimulus, half, size, appeared, reliably] [intensity, valence, emotional, mapping, experiment, mouth, people, implicitly, spatialize, emotion, extremely, intense, negative, happy, speeded, positive, drts, judged, implicit, consistent, explanation, psychological, angry, discussion, regressed, rating, valenced, inconsistent, participant] [spatial, experimental, varied, lateral, previous, university, cultural] [magnitude, larger, slope, greater, difference, drt, three] [associate, order, word, interpreted, abstract, subject, random] [data, predicted, observed, provide, alternative, making, set] [area, left, space, rts, polarity, associated, side, facial, apparent, figure, hand, dominant, pattern]
Questions in informal teaching: A study of mother-child conversations
Yue Yu, Elizabeth Bonawitz, Patrick Shafto


Questioning is a core component of formal pedagogy. Parents commonly question children, but do they use questions to teach? Research has shown that informal pedagogical situations elicit stronger inferences than the same evidence observed in non-pedagogical situations. Certain questions (“pedagogical questions”) have similar features. We investigate the frequency and distribution of pedagogical questions from mother-child conversations documented in the CHILDES database. We show that pedagogical questions are commonplace, are more frequent for middle-class mothers compared to working-class mothers, are more frequent during free play than during daily routines, and are more frequent in mothers who ask more questions. The results serve as a first step towards understanding the role of questions in informal pedagogy.
[learning, child, developmental, journal, type, status, target, evidence, age, suggests, development, explore, adult, facilitate] [conversation, understanding, cognitive, percentage, social, work, serve] [context, informal, specific, language, academic] [pedagogical, question, questioning, rhetorical, free, daily, asked, study, knowledge, three, teaching, answer, informationseeking, number, differ, coder, science, pedagogy, help, transcript, knowledgeable, formal, young, demonstrating, documented, teach, majority] [frequency, composition, childes, correlated, subcategories, frequent] [proportion, total, sample, higher, well, everyday, function, provide, data, individual] [play, role, coding, analyzing, figure, meal]
Comparing Predictive and Co-occurrence Based Models of Lexical Semantics Trained on Child-directed Speech
Fatemeh Torabi Asr, Jon Willits, Michael Jones


Distributional Semantic Models have been successful at predicting many semantic behaviors. The aim of this paper is to compare two major classes of these models – co-occurrence-based models, and prediction error-driven models – in learning semantic categories from child-directed speech. Co-occurrence models have gained more attention in cognitive research, while research from computational linguistics on big datasets has found more success with prediction-based models. We explore differences between these types of lexical semantic models (as representatives of Hebbian vs. reinforcement learning mechanisms, respectively) within a more cognitively relevant context: the acquisition of semantic categories (e.g., apple and orange as fruit vs. soap and shampoo as bathroom items) from linguistic data available to children. We found that models that perform some form of abstraction outperform those that do not, and that co-occurrence-based abstraction models performed the best. However, different models excel at different categories, providing evidence for complementary learning systems.
[learning, learn, size, target, categorization, accuracy, category, classification, family, tested, compare, training, second, performing, compared, vocabulary, learned] [cognitive, abstraction, experiment] [context, linguistic, previous, latent, studied, discrimination, speech, memory] [performance, better, outperformed, smaller, number, larger, literature, comparing] [word, semantic, distributional, window, cbow, skipgram, corpus, vector, similarity, large, ndl, rva, lexical, computational, baroni, frequency, small, mechanism, random, applied, syntactic, levy] [model, predictive, based, data, best, simple, predicting, prediction, parameter, predicted, set, well, reinforcement] [hidden, layer, pca, trained, input, figure, network, neural, output, matrix, performed, architecture, distributed, perform, practical]
A Developmental Shift in the Relationship Between Sequential Learning, Executive Function, and Language Ability as Revealed by Event-Related Potentials
Joanne Deocampo, Christopher Conway


Previous research has shown a link between sequential learning (SL) and language as well as links between executive function (EF) and both language and SL. However, little research has focused on both the development of the relationship between these factors and their neurological underpinnings. Here we report a study of the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of SL and behavioral measures of language and EF in a sample of 7-12-year-old children. Results revealed that both SL and EF had independent associations with language development but that the contribution that both made toward language development shifted dramatically between the ages of 7 to 11-12 years. The results furthermore suggest that this developmental shift may be due in part to the maturation of EF abilities and changes due to neural entrenchment and commitment as a consequence of language acquisition.
[learning, age, statistical, time, predictor, sequential, erp, task, block, developmental, evidence, presented, second, executive, older, target, erps, development, younger, revealed, sequence, processing, half, standard, spoken, medial, jost, positivity, increased, condition, inspection, tested, learn, scatter] [relationship, cognitive, implicit, conditional, appear, positive, told, strong] [language, shift, previous] [ability, three, change, study, assessment, high, score, appears] [window, sentence, post, measure, table, link, structure, amount] [model, based, function, outcome, individual, posterior, chose, predict, predicted, higher, sample] [figure, neural, visual, process, region]
Ambiguity and Representational Stability: What is the role of embodied experiences?
Ramon D. Castillo, Talia Waltzer, Heidi Kloos


The influence of embodied experiences on cognition is not yet fully understood. To explore its effects, we analyzed the responses of adults in a high-ambiguity prediction task: Adults had to decide which of two objects would sink faster (or slower) in water. Ambiguity was achieved by pitting object volume and object mass against buoyancy: The winning object was sometimes heavy and big, and sometimes it was light and small. Thus, the task could not be solved with a simplistic rule alone. The crucial manipulation was whether adults haptically explored the objects, either prior to feedback training or afterward. Findings showed a clear disadvantage of hands-on experiences: When allowed to hold the objects, participants were likely to show a simplistic focus on object heaviness. These results call for a more a nuanced understanding of the effect of embodied experiences on the stability of representations.
[training, trial, phase, presented, explore, task, faster, condition, type, pair, sinking, heaviness, sink, picture, heavier, sank, slower, learned, developmental, mjar, haptically, lighter, dropped] [experience, real, cognitive, cognition, manipulation, held, extent, anova, participant, systematic, experiment, hold] [object, main, van, ambiguity, support, university, situated, highly] [performance, difference, mass, jar, feedback, volume, smaller, water, example, number, place, asked, difficult, provided, filled, high] [embodiment] [prediction, winning, well, decide, making, bigger, behavior, prior] [embodied, visual, figure, dynamic, view, current, perform, focus, bodily, performed]
Interaction of Instructional Material Order and Subgoal Labels on Learning in Programming
Laura Schaeffer, Lauren Margulieux, Richard Catrambone


Subgoal labeled expository instructions and worked examples have been shown to positively impact student learning and performance in computer science education. This study examined whether problem solving performance differed based on the order of expository instructions and worked examples and the presence of subgoal labels within the instructions for creating applications (Apps) for phones. Participants were 132 undergraduates. A significant interaction showed that when learners were presented with the worked example followed by the expository instructions containing subgoal labels, the learner was better at outlining the procedure for creating an application. However, the manipulations did not affect novel problem solving performance or explanations of solutions. These results suggest that some limited benefit can be gained from presenting a worked example before expository instructions when subgoal labels are included.
[task, learner, learning, general, presented, novel, journal, learn, learned] [cognitive, explanation, explain, street, experience] [specific, fortune, affect, main, experimental, apply, domain, contained] [worked, subgoal, problem, example, app, instructional, solving, expository, performance, study, assessment, procedural, material, subgoals, knowledge, creating, better, procedure, asked, presenting, group, practice, score, teller, margulieux, programming, needed, inventor, create, transfer, solution, international, modify, high, correct, received, scored, awarded, limited] [text, order, written, abstract, table, organization, analysis, structure] [provide, well, based, point, method, data, maximum, aid] [level, computer, advance, interaction, process, allows]
Visual constraints modulate stereotypical predictability of agents during situated language comprehension
Alba Rodríguez, Michele Burigo, Pia Knoeferle


We investigated how constraints on the concurrent visual context modulate the use of prior gender and action cues and stereotypical knowledge during situated language comprehension. Participants saw videos of hands performing actions, then inspected the pictures of potential agents (one female one male) during auditory German OVS sentences. Unlike in Rodríguez et al. 2015, the concurrent context included a picture of the videotaped object and a ‘competitor object’. Fixations to the agents' faces were measured during comprehension. We manipulated the match between videotaped actions and those described by the sentence and the stereotypicality match between the described actions and the gender of videotaped agents. We replicated the preference for the target agent's face (gender-matching the videotaped hands). Action-verb mismatch effects emerged earlier and were modulated by stereotypicality. Results suggest that visual availability of objects during comprehension facilitates the activation of representations from recent events and unseen events, favoring stereotypical expectations.
[target, competitor, attention, match, display, compared, time, response, spoken, pair, showing, picture] [event, described, experiment, cognitive, presence] [language, female, gender, male, previous, object, stereotypicality, matched, stereotypically, concurrent, stereotypical, context, situated, inspected, mismatch, cake, mismatched, building, baking, apple, inspecting, german, contained, boost, experimental, modulate, verbally, inspect, manipulated, item, memory, gleichadv, rodriguez, incremental] [video, knowledge, stereotype, study] [sentence, comprehension, verb, preceding, derived, noun, upcoming] [agent, prior, preference, model, well, alternative, potential, opposite, based] [action, visual, scene, region, eye, congruence, representation, face, associated, figure]
Examining Search Processes in Low and High Creative Individuals with Random Walks
Yoed Kenett, Joseph Austerweil


The creative process involves several cognitive processes, such as working memory, controlled attention and task switching. One other process is cognitive search over semantic memory. These search processes can be controlled (e.g., problem solving guided by a heuristic), or uncontrolled (e.g., mind wandering). However, the nature of this search in relation to creativity has rarely been examined from a formal perspective. To do this, we use a random walk model to simulate uncontrolled cognitive search over semantic networks of low and high creative individuals with an equal number of nodes and edges. We show that a random walk over the semantic network of high creative individuals “finds” more unique words and moves further through the network for a given number of steps. Our findings are consistent with the associative theory of creativity, which posits that the structure of semantic memory facilitates search processes to find creative solutions.
[cue, test, novel, starting] [cognitive, low, initial, work, examined, thinking, psychological, future, simply] [memory, associative, previous, produce] [number, high, score, performance, difference, equal, science, free, mind, ranged, ability, thought] [semantic, creative, walk, hsc, random, lsc, similarity, creativity, node, visited, unique, final, uncontrolled, amount, structure, association, kenett, examine, computational, spreading, fluency, unweighted, divergent, word, weaker, computed, approach] [search, average, theory, behavior, generate, based, individual, probability, capture, varying, data, rank, well, model] [network, process, representation, controlled, matrix, figure, activation, reach, facilitates, transition, connected, plan]
Determining the alternatives for scalar implicature
Benjamin Peloquin, Mike Frank


Successful communication regularly requires listeners to make pragmatic inferences --- enrichments beyond the literal meaning of a speaker's utterance. For example, when interpreting a sentence such as "Alice ate some of the cookies," listeners routinely infer that Alice did not eat all of them. A Gricean account of this phenomenon assumes the presence of alternatives (like "all of the cookies") with varying degrees of informativity, but it remains an open question precisely what these alternatives are. To address this question, we collect empirical measurements of speaker and listener judgments about varying sets of alternatives across a range of scales and use these as inputs to a computational model of pragmatic inference. This approach allows us to test hypotheses about how well different sets of alternatives predict pragmatic judgments by people. Our findings suggest that comprehenders likely consider a broader set of alternatives beyond those logically entailed by the initial message.
[condition, implicature, target, training, presented, test, standard, task] [experiment, scale, rating, excluded, understanding, leaving, negative, work, discussion, participant, judgment] [literal, listener, van, utterance, item, speaker, meaning, native, message, context, experimental, previous] [included, number, three, larger, addition, thought, question] [semantic, semantics, pass, english, random, intended, considered, measure, substantial, plausible, computational] [scalar, pragmatic, model, alternative, set, entailment, fit, star, tiel, empirical, data, total, generate, rsa, consider, predict, compatible, classic, sample, provide, denotes, probability, loved, best, restaurant, considering, generated] [figure, compatibility, human, design, framework]
Lasting Political Attitude Change Induced by False Feedback About Own Survey Responses
David Sivén, Thomas Strandberg, Lars Hall, Petter Johansson, Philip Pärnamets


False feedback on choices has been documented to induce lasting preference change. Here we extend such effects to the political domain and investigate the temporal persistence of induced preferences, as well as, the possible role the length of confabulatory justifications may play. We conducted a two-day choice blindness experiment using political statements, with sessions being roughly one week apart. Changes in political preferences remained one week after initial responses, and were most prominent in participants who were allowed to confabulate freely. These findings, being the first to demonstrate lasting preference change using choice blindness, are discussed in light of constructivist approaches to attitude formation through a process of self-perception.
[condition, time, second, directional, target, presented, response, session, journal, paradigm, consisted, compared, evidence] [attitude, political, false, manipulation, blindness, correction, participant, rating, elaboration, confabulation, survey, long, induced, lasting, cognitive, lund, influence, experiment, social, interpreting, confabulatory, axis, public, concerning, detection, told, swedish, persuasion, sweden, strength, conditional, initial, concerned] [manipulated, corrected, previous, specific, domain, main, reference, shift, supporting] [change, feedback, asked, week, difference, comparing, school, science] [short, large, constructed, amount] [choice, preference, well, model, state, confidence, data, full] [original, interaction, direction, box, central, performed]
How should autonomous vehicles behave in moral dilemmas? Human judgments reflect abstract moral principles
Derek Powell, Patricia Cheng, Michael Waldmann


Self-driving autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the potential to make the world a safer and cleaner place. A challenge confronting the development of AVs is how these vehicles should behave in traffic situations where harm is unavoidable. It is important that AVs behave in ethically appropriate ways to mitigate harm. Ideally, they should obey a system of principles that both concur with human moral judgments and are ethically defensible. Here we compare people’s moral judgments of AV programming with their judgments about the behavior of human drivers, with the goal of beginning to identify such principles. As many debates within ethics remain unresolved, empirical investigations like ours may guide the development of ethical AVs (Bonnefon et al., 2015). In addition, people’s judgments about the behavior of AVs may serve as a window into the abstract principles people apply in their moral reasoning.
[switch, condition, development, compared, general] [moral, push, car, causal, dilemma, experiment, people, traffic, yellow, trolley, autonomous, abstraction, approval, save, sacrifice, truck, situation, appropriate, street, scenario, assigned, sacrificial, programmed, driverless, paid, judgment, kill, behave, indicated, vehicle, account, morally, man, harm, possibility, steering, appropriateness, runaway, case, ethically, examined, utilitarian, person, road, generally, rating] [blue, program, main, manipulated] [lower, study, programming, three, greater] [abstract, concrete, turn, structure, acceptable] [observed, red, simple] [human, driver, side, chain, figure, level, design, goal, interaction, symmetry, system, computer, driven]
Effects of Working Memory Training on L2 Proficiency and Working Memory Capacity
Gregory Colflesh, Valerie Karuzis, Polly O'Rourke


The current study examined the effects of working memory training on working memory capacity and second language ability in adult learners of Spanish. In order to maximize the effect of the training for language learners, the stimuli for the training tasks were Spanish words and sentences. While the training group did not show greater improvements on working memory assessments relative to controls, they did show more native-like patterns in a Spanish self-paced reading task. The combination of second language materials with working memory training may be helping users learn to cope with the increased processing demands associated with learning a new language, even if they are not necessarily improving their working memory.
[training, task, span, presented, second, processing, increased, position, journal, time, condition, grammaticality, complex, completed, presentation, shapebuilder, improving, accuracy, psychonomic, session, learning, leveled, leveling, suggests, nback, sorter, target, executive, evidence] [cognitive, version, capacity, examined, judgment, agreement] [memory, spanish, language, experimental, grammatical, recall, university, morphosyntactic] [working, control, group, assessment, study, performance, ability, correct, impact, improve, wmc, greater, needed, online, better, modeled, additional, transfer] [reading, word, sentence, running, comprehension, bulletin, list, order, measure, proficiency] [adaptive, demand] [current, performed, interaction, level, simon, serial, associated, role]
Representation: Problems and Solutions
Nancy Salay


The current orthodoxy in cognitive science, what I describe as a commitment to deep representationalism, faces intractable problems. If we take these objections seriously, and I will argue that we should, there are two possible responses: 1. We are mistaken that representation is the locus of our cognitive capacities; or, 2. Our representational capacities do give us critical cognitive advantages, but they are not fundamental to us qua human beings. As Andy Clark has convincingly argued, anti-representationalism, option one, is explanatorily weak. Consequently, I will argue, we need to take the second option seriously. In the first half of the paper I rehearse the problems with the current representational view and in the second half of the paper I defend and give a sketch of a two-systems view of cognition – a non-representational perceptual system coupled with a representational language-dependent one – and look at some consequences of the view.
[time, meditation, dog, developing, intentionality, second] [representational, cognitive, account, mental, capacity, experience, cognition, fundamental, rtm, future, result, comprehensive, reason, scrub, appeal, positive, consequence, precisely, cartesian, mit, barking, thinking, explanatorily, contra, overuse, appear, explained, rudder] [language, perceptual, university, argue, functional, sort, share, evolutionary, argues, support, memory] [require, problem, ability, mind, science, dennett, mentally, desirable] [relation, theoretical, conceptual, animal, clark, experiential, large] [theory, set, best, agent] [perception, representation, view, human, environment, level, current, move, behaviour, naturalistic, neural, deep, cat, system, activity, responding, sensory]
No Effect of Verbal Labels for the Shapes on Type II Categorization Tasks
Fotis A. Fotiadis, Athanassios Protopapas


Category learning is thought to be mediated—in at least some category structures—by hypothesis-testing processes. Verbal labels for the stimuli and stimulus individuation have been shown to facilitate the formation, testing, and application of category membership rules (Fotiadis & Protopapas, 2014). We sought to replicate the phenomenon of facilitation due to verbal names for the stimuli by training participants for two consecutive days to either learn new names for abstract shapes, or learn shape-ideogram pairings; a third group was unexposed to the shapes. After training, participants were given a Type II categorization task—thought to be mediated by verbal processes of rule discovery—utilizing the trained shapes. We hypothesized that verbal labels for the shapes and shape individuation would provide facilitative effects in learning to categorize. Results revealed no effect of training on categorization performance. This study suggests that caution should be taken when generalizing findings across perceptual modalities or different experimental paradigms.
[learning, training, category, categorization, verbal, task, type, evidence, condition, rule, ideogram, stimulus, facilitate, label, consecutive, journal, pseudowords, trial, learn, revealed, auditory, presented, second, day, size, shape, mock, categorize, modality, shepard, administered, compared, presentation, learned, explicit, utilized, unexposed, finding, accuracy, session, statistical, testing, familiarity, minda, paradigm] [mediated, version] [experimental, memory, perceptual, criterion, membership, university] [performance, study, number, provided, thought, three, group, analyzed, asked] [associate, abstract, structure] [hypothesis, simple, favor, selected, data, probabilistic, empirical, model] [human, trained, visual, reach]
Context-dependent Processes and Engagement in Reading Literature
Miho Fuyama, Shohei Hidaka


It does not do the act of reading literature any justice to describe it as simply processing text to acquire information or knowledge. We enjoy reading stories, we become absorbed in them. Our absorption into stories is related to their contextual structure. We develop a statistical method for the analysis of reading time distributions which allows us to assess the context of a story rather than merely its text. This analysis detects statistically distinct distributions of reading times, with each distribution representing a distinct process or mode of reading. Our experiments support the hypothesis that the temporal change in these modes of reading are related to changes in the degrees of absorption of the subjects and also in the contextual structure of the stories being read.
[time, statistical, shape, novel, processing, suggests, pair, second, session] [experiment, temporal, story, distinct, consistent, scale, participant, profile, result, long, discussion] [degree, context] [number, asked, analyzed, change, study, report, knowledge, procedure, author, literature] [reading, analysis, absorption, gamma, mode, read, short, contextual, introductory, text, table, structure, order, engagement, subprocesses, subject, reader, book, technique, word, interpreted, grammar, major, subprocess, exponential] [data, estimated, distribution, correlation, mixture, parameter, regression, full, average, hazard, probability, function, aggregate] [figure, process, multiple, single, performed, involved, indicator]
On the adaptive nature of memory-based false belief
Hidehito Honda, Toshihiko Matsuka, Kazuhiro Ueda


Previous studies have shown that people’s memories are changeable, and systematic incorrect memories (e.g., false memory) can be created. We hypothesize that people’s beliefs about the real world can be changed similarly to the way systematic incorrect memories and systematic incorrect beliefs (which we call memory-based false belief) are generated. We also predict that since memory-based false beliefs are consistent with abstract knowledge that is consisted with prototypical patterns and organization found in the real world, false beliefs work adaptively in making inferences about environmental information in the real world. We conducted behavioral and simulation studies in order to examine our hypotheses on people’s beliefs and inferences about the real world. The results showed that participants had systematic false beliefs about cities’ attributes (e.g., whether they have a professional baseball team), and that such false beliefs worked adaptively in making inferences about population size.
[size, condition, presented, japanese] [false, people, systematic, belief, inference, missing, real, examined, cognitive, professional, relationship, nature, fpb, adaptively, football, baseball, prototypical, team, fnb, participant, tokyo, syst, psychological, tally, consistent, capital, positive, result] [attribute, memory, university, calculated, previous, affect] [knowledge, correct, study, larger, conducted, number, accurate, incorrect, answer, asked, strategy, three, recognize, limited] [large, amount, order, small, table, examine, list, tend] [population, city, proportion, making, based, adaptive, hypothesis, correlation, simulated, simulation, abc, predict, denotes, pleskac, individual, generated, validity, gigerenzer] [recognition, behavioral, figure, human, computer]
The Role of Similarity in Constructive Memory: Evidence from Tasks with Children and Adults
Georgi Petkov, Margarita Pavlova


Literature on memory research shows that when memorizing, people may blend two situations, i.e. when memorizing one story, they add elements from another story. Most of the cognitive models assume that the superficial similarity between two episodes is the primary factor for blending. However, there is evidence that people blend dissimilar stories as well, if these stories share the same relational structure. We contrasted the two factors in a single study and performed experiments with the same design and stimuli with adults and with 4-5-year-old children. The results show that there is no qualitative difference between the performance of adults and children. Also, both adults and children blend either pictures that have surface or structural similarity depending on the abstractness of the objects in them.
[relational, superficially, analogous, blending, distracters, type, analogical, evidence, kokinov, presented, age, test, pavlova, development, journal, recognized, analogy, compared, second, phase, consisted, repeated, stimulus] [cognitive, experiment, people, designed, reasoning, mapping, result, false, factor] [memory, dissimilar, share, main, university, experimental, combining, shift, shared, bulgarian] [difference, science, three, knowledge, procedure, constructive, example, correct, annual, superficial, study, answer, performance, correctly, comparison, young] [similarity, blend, abstract, structure] [data, qualitative, assume, theory, conference, depending, blended, higher, distribution] [figure, recognition, human, role, performed, pattern, design, current]
Dual process theory of reasoning and recognition memory errors: Individual differences in a memory prose task
Giorgio Gronchi, Stefania Righi, Giacomo Parrini, Lapo Pierguidi, Maria Pia Viggiano


Cognitive factors can mediate the tendency to create false memory. We explored the role of the two systems of reasoning in the production of false memories. Such difference can be assessed through the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), a measure of the propensity to reflect rather than producing an intuitive response. By the use of a DRM-like paradigm in a prose recognition memory task, we measured CRT-related individual differences in producing false memories. We observed that intuitive thinkers are more likely to produce false memories.
[response, target, task, journal, presented, half, second, paradigm, day] [false, crt, intuitive, analytical, unrelated, cognitive, pad, mild, reasoning, story, people, cover, psychology, dual, thinking, italy, health, san, result, drug, salvi, ten, psychological, ball, bat, initial, relationship, judgment, long, low, engage, social, explained, capacity, series] [memory, experimental, lily] [score, group, high, three, problem, department, reflection, statistically, working, greater, material, free] [word, similarity, producing, measure, semantic, list, order] [individual, nfc, patch, tendency, higher, theory, observed, set, point, entire, total, prediction, rate, obvious, chosen] [recognition, process, activation]
Consistency and credibility in legal reasoning: A Bayesian network approach
Saoirse Connor Desai, Stian Reimers, David Lagnado


Witness credibility is important for establishing testimonial value. The story model posits that people construct narratives from evidence but does not explain how credibility is assessed. Formal approaches use Bayesian networks (BN) to represent legal evidence. Recent empirical work suggests people might also reason using qualitative causal networks. In two studies, participants read a realistic trial transcript and judge guilt and witness credibility. Study 1 varied testimonial consistency and defendant character. Guilt and credibility assessments were affected by consistency but not prior convictions. Study 2 constructed a BN to represent consistency issues. Individual parameter estimates were elicited for the corresponding BN to compute posterior predictions for guilt and credibility. The BN provided a good model for overall and individual guilt and credibility ratings. These results suggest people construct causal models of the evidence and consider witness credibility. The BN approach is a promising direction for future research in legal reasoning.
[evidence, reliability, appeared, condition, trial] [credibility, guilt, testimony, defendant, people, legal, witness, inconsistent, consistency, consistent, victim, causal, story, reason, key, reasoning, evidential, drunk, provoked, conviction, belief, crime, defence, appear, prosecution, bartender, provoke, juror, conditional, relating, disclosing, closing, claim, police, establishing, explain, character, cognitive] [previous, manipulated] [study, three, impact, provided, lower] [correlated, approach, construct, order, considered, constructed, read] [model, probability, prior, posterior, bayesian, credible, observed, individual, modeling, decision, good, qualitative, probabilistic, paper, higher, predicted, empirical, officer] [represent, framework, network, figure, corresponding]
Is it a nine, or a six? Prosocial and selective perspective taking in four-year-olds
Xuan Zhao, Bertram F. Malle, Hyowon Gweon


To successfully navigate the complex social world, people often need to solve the problem of perspective selection: Between two conflicting viewpoints of the self and the other, whose perspective should one take? In two experiments, we show that four-year-olds use others’ knowledge and goals to decide when to engage in visual perspective taking. Children were more likely to take a social partner’s perspective to describe an ambiguous symbol when she did not know numbers and wanted to learn than when she knew numbers and wanted to teach. These results were shown in children’s own responses (Experiment 1) and in their evaluations of others’ responses (Experiment 2). By preschool years, children understand when perspective taking is appropriate and necessary and selectively take others’ perspectives in social interactions. These results provide novel insights into the nature and the development of perspective taking.
[child, test, condition, learn, developmental, explicit, appeared, evidence, development, age, learning, journal, task, selective, trial] [social, experiment, mental, people, explicitly, nature, cognitive, epistemic, understanding, engage, work, reason, future, appropriate, reasoning] [ignorant] [perspective, number, emma, experimenter, question, practice, ability, asked, knowledge, report, photo, answer, better, puppet, perspectivetaking, young, answered, annual, identical, informant, moll, symbol, science, guy, video, prosocial, help, group, preschool, gweon, problem, pedagogical] [ambiguous, reading, table] [decide, prior, consider, provide, theory, conference, wanted, choice] [visual, side, critical, respond, level, figure, apparent]
Collective search on rugged landscapes: A cross-environmental analysis
Daniel Barkoczi, Pantelis Pipergias Analytis, Charley Wu


In groups and organizations, agents use both individual and social learning to solve problems. The balance between these two activities can lead collectives to very different levels of performance. We model collective search as a combination of simple learning strategies to conduct the first large-scale comparative study, across fifteen challenging environments and two different network structures. In line with previous findings in the social learning literature, collectives using a hybrid of individual and social learning perform much better than specialists using only one or the other. Importantly, we find that collective performance varies considerably across different task environments, and that different types of network structures can be superior, depending on the environment. These results suggest that recent contradictions in the social learning literature may be due to methodological differences between two separate research traditions, studying disjoint sets of environments that lead to divergent findings.
[learning, task, type, time, modality, lattice, journal, sequential, simultaneously, explore] [social, cognitive, influence] [studied, experimental, environmental, communication, fitness, variability, cultural, specific] [collective, performance, hybrid, number, solution, study, strategy, better, contradictory, problem, investigated, challenging] [local, random, structure, global, organization, efficient, table, large] [search, mason, individual, lazer, payoff, friedman, population, average, lead, schaffer, landscape, rugged, best, optimization, simulation, locally, range, exploration, eggholder, adaptive, behavior, higher, function, imitation, agent, paper, simple, langermann, total, making, machine, parameter] [network, connected, environment, fully, performed, figure, perform, behavioral]
Combining Multiple Perspectives in Language Production: A Probabilistic Model
Mindaugas Mozuraitis, Suzanne Stevenson, Daphna Heller


While speakers tailor referring expressions to the knowledge of their addressees, they do so imperfectly. Our goal here is to provide an explanation for this type of pattern by extending a probabilistic model introduced to explain perspective-taking behavior in comprehension. Using novel production data from a type of knowledge mismatch not previously investigated in production, we show that production patterns can also be explained as arising from the probabilistic combination of the speaker’s and the addressee’s perspectives. These results show the applicability of the multiple-perspectives approach to language production, and to different types of knowledge mismatch between conversational partners.
[target, type, condition, baseline, display] [influence, experiment, common, cognitive, variable] [appearance, referring, vmo, shared, addressee, contrast, modification, privileged, domain, speaker, production, reference, language, object, heller, experimental, lego, weighing, obj, modified, vmos, mismatch, share, referential, modifier, main, combination, university, adapt, crayon, distinguish, egocentric] [knowledge, perspective, control, formula, contrasting] [approach, intended, comprehension, demonstrated, regular, random] [function, model, probability, data, modeling, probabilistic, state, consider, proportion, based, preference, choosing, assume, fit, note, set, hypothesis, behavior] [expression, pattern, multiple, figure, goal, critical, design, fully, corresponding, component, human]
The development of heuristics in children: Base-rate neglect and representativeness
Samantha Gualtieri, Stephanie Denison


This paper examines the development of the representativeness heuristic in early childhood. Using a novel paradigm, we investigated 3- to 6-year-old children’s ability to use base-rate and individuating information in their predictive inferences. In Experiment 1, we presented children with base-rate and individuating information separately to test their ability to use each independently. In Experiment 2, we presented children with base-rate and individuating information together. Two critical trial types were used, one in which the base-rate information and individuating information pointed to the same response and one in which the base-rate and individuating information pointed to conflicting responses. Results suggest that children progress to adult-like heuristic-based responding at 6 years of age.
[individuating, wearing, type, age, presented, conflict, child, chance, response, revealed, counterbalanced, completed, representativeness, half, indicate, condition, development, shape, slide, park, adult, heard, examining, coat, position, suggesting, naughty] [robot, experiment, white, trait, normative, told, factor, established, including, corresponded, person, cognitive] [color, gender, blue, description, main, previous, rely] [group, problem, performance, experimenter, asked, young, majority, additional, ability, score, provided, help, investigated, received] [order, bias] [heuristic, predictive, nice, provide, green, range] [side, figure, play, associated, performed, neglect, interaction, separately, design, standing, responding]
Testing the Tolerance Principle: Children form productive rules when it is more computationally efficient to do so
Kathryn D. Schuler, Charles Yang, Elissa L. Newport


During language acquisition, children must learn when to generalize a pattern – applying it broadly and to new words (‘add –ed’ in English) – and when to restrict generalization, storing the pattern only with specific lexical items. One effort to quantify the conditions for generalization, the Tolerance Principle, accurately predicts children’s generalizations in corpus-based studies. This principle hypothesizes that a general rule will be formed when it is computationally more efficient than storing lexical forms individually. Here we test the principle in an artificial language of 9 nonsense nouns. As predicted, children exposed to 5 regular forms and 4 exceptions generalized, applying the regular form to 100% of novel test words. Children exposed to 3 regular forms and 6 exceptions did not extend the rule, even though the token frequency of the regular form was still high. The Tolerance Principle thus captures a basic principle of generalization in rule formation.
[rule, novel, test, inflection, formed, exposure, learning, child, adult, condition, artificial, time, learner, marker, exposed, heard, categorical, generalization, evidence, generalize, type, newport, category] [singular, formation, cognitive, appear, distinction, consistent] [language, produce, production, matching, apply] [number, difference, asked, mark, required, high, precise, strategy, appears] [productive, tolerance, principle, lexical, form, frequency, plural, regular, efficient, exception, noun, acquisition, token, english, corpus, irregular, yang, complexity, frequent, computationally, verb, applying, tense, forming, storing, list, applied, productivity, computational, nonsense, childes] [predicts, data, probability, based, model, predicted, behavior, individual, follow] [figure, pattern, input, fewer]
Variability in category learning: The Effect of Context Change and Item Variation on Knowledge Generalization
Dustin Finch, Paulo Carvalho, Robert Goldstone


We explore how context change and item variation during natural category learning influence memory and generalization to new examples. Participants studied either images of the same bird or varied birds from each of several categories. These images could be presented in a constant background color or different background colors. During test, birds were presented in only one of the studied background colors. Performance at test depended on the context overlap between study and test, with better performance when there was minimal context change during study. Also, contrary to previous findings, we found that learners generalized better when items were repeated during study and remembered old items better when items were varied during study. When there is a moderate degree of context change, there is no benefit of repetition or variation for either novel or old items. These results indicate that context change and item variation have complementary effects on learning.
[test, category, novel, presented, generalization, learning, repeated, compared, journal, room, smith, evidence, counterbalanced, categorization, half, testing, classification, tested, learn, classify] [experiment, people, psychological, positive, twelve, influence, work] [context, variation, memory, item, studied, background, bird, color, previous, varied, studying, experimental, degree, variability, environmental, classifying, remember, manipulated, illustrating, underwater, specific, recall] [change, study, better, performance, high, knowledge, ability, asked, third, group, number, department, benefit, promote, concept, usa, classroom] [natural, similarity, amount, contextual] [row, increasing, theory, total, confidence, chosen] [repetition, figure, medium, overlap, represent, human, performed, brain]
Performance Pressure and Comparison in Relational Category Learning
John Patterson, Kenneth Kurtz


The study of relational categories has emphasized the importance of within-category comparison for learning and transfer – guided by predictions from structure mapping theory (Gentner, 1983). Recent research has yielded the predicted comparison advantage under the supervised observational learning mode (over sequential exposures) but, puzzlingly, not under the supervised classification mode. In the present study we evaluate performance pressure as a possible contributor to the ineffectuality of comparison under classification by crossing performance pressure (elevated and standard) with two classification learning formats (single-item and within-category pairs). We found: (1) that pressure hindered single-item learning, but not comparison learning; and (2) a novel comparison advantage under standard classification. We conclude: (1) that performance pressure exerts a deleterious effect on relational category learning that comparison may compensate for; and (2) that pressure does not seem to underlie lackluster classification + comparison performance (relative to observational learning). Implications and new evidence are discussed.
[pressure, category, relational, learning, classification, wald, training, elevated, condition, presentation, standard, accuracy, trial, distraction, presented, reliable, kurtz, patterson, indicating, regulatory, rfq, alignment, test, journal, stimulus, revealed, task, showing, categorization, examining, analogical, statistical, suggests, advantage, sequential] [cognitive, psychological, percentage, manipulation, nature, evaluate] [attribute, shared, memory, main, item, produce] [comparison, performance, transfer, study, group, knowledge, feedback, number, difference, received, three, correct, working, science, observational, linear] [mode, structure, similarity, analysis, random, structural] [weighting, data, model, marginal, based] [interaction, focus, role, figure, supervised, rock, interest, perform, cycle]
Intermediate Judgments Inhibit Belief Updating: Zeno’s Paradox in Decision Making
James Yearsley, Emmanuel Pothos


Rational agents should update their beliefs in the light of new evidence. Equally, changes in belief should depend only on the quality of the evidence, and not on factors such as the order in which the evidence is acquired, or whether intermediate judgements are requested during evidence acquisition. In contrast we show that requests for intermediate judgments can inhibit belief updating for real decision makers, which represents a new type of decision making fallacy. This behaviour is paradoxical from the point of view of classical Bayesian models, but we show that it is consistent with an a priori, parameter free prediction of a cognitive model based on quantum theory.
[evidence, smith, presented, second, prob, fixed, test, time, presentation] [belief, judgment, cognitive, participant, guilty, case, cognition, initial, fact, simply, excluded, possibility, experiment, absence, property, consistent] [memory, evolution, error, previous] [change, number, asked] [order, small, large, computed, construct, final, lim] [intermediate, model, bayesian, probability, quantum, decision, survival, classical, data, state, making, piece, opinion, parameter, yearsley, pothos, function, extra, realistic, rational, imperfect, based, dixon, paradox, full, fit, updating, note, innocent, depend, prediction, reproduce, provide, average, set, best, initially, simple, empirical, behavior, primacy, depends] [expression]
Working memory encoding of events and their participants: a neural network model with applications in sensorimotor processing and sentence generation
Martin Takac, Alistair Knott


In this paper we present a model of how events and their participants are represented in semantic working memory (WM). The model's central assumption is that events are experienced through sequentially structured sensorimotor (SM) routines - as are the individuals that participate in them. In the light of this assumption, we propose that events and individuals are stored in semantic WM as *prepared SM routines*. This proposal allows a new mechanism for binding representations of individuals to semantic roles such as AGENT and PATIENT. It also enables a novel account of how expectations about forthcoming events can influence SM processing in real time as events are perceived. Finally, it supports an account of the interface between semantic WM representations and language.
[sequence, type, dog, attention, presented, sequential, status, processing, training] [event, candidate, account, black, white, situation, experience, person] [memory, language, object, activated, argue, perceptual] [active, working, created, three, number, activate, idea] [semantic, syntactic, structure, mechanism, sentence] [model, individual, agent, distribution, well, expected, generated, predicted, population, point, propose, set] [episode, patient, network, representation, layer, som, current, prepared, location, medium, binding, represent, action, representing, figure, system, takac, scheme, neural, localist, input, involves, unit, knott, space, colour, activity, represented, stored, perception, motor, represents, sensorimotor, learns]
What do you expect from an unfamiliar talker?
Dave Kleinschmidt, T. Florian Jaeger


Speech perception is made much harder by variability between talkers. As a result, listeners need to adapt to each different talker's particular acoustic cue distributions. Thinking of this adaptation as a form of statistical inference, we explore the role that listeners' prior expectations play in adapting to an unfamiliar talker. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that listeners will have a harder time adapting to talkers whose cue distributions fall outside the range of normal variation across talkers. We also show that it is possible to infer listeners' shared prior expectations based on patterns of adaptation to different cue distributions. This provides a potentially powerful tool for directly probing listeners' prior expectations about talkers that does not rely on speech produced by many different talkers, which is costly to collect and annotate, and only indirectly related to listeners' subjective expectations.
[cue, classification, exposure, category, learning, evidence, journal, statistical, heard, boundary] [cognitive, work, experience, consistent, percentage, psychological] [talker, adaptation, typical, speech, variability, shift, adapt, phonetic, society, contrast, produced, acoustical, accent, kronrod, previous, perceptual, shared, acoustic, expect, vots, informative] [science, study, differ, annual] [order, distributional, english, variance, table, complete] [prior, vot, model, confidence, based, distribution, expected, data, observed, range, bayesian, posterior, behavior, well, ideal, inferred, modeling, adapting, adapter, infer, probability, higher, actual, predicted, set, probing, conference, determine] [unfamiliar, figure, current, perception, input, framework, corresponding, play, corresponds]
Working Memory Affects Attention to Loss Value and Loss Frequency in Decision-Making under Uncertainty
Bo Pang, Kaileigh Byrne, Darrell Worthy


Decision-making under uncertainty is pervasive. This work sought to understand the role of working memory (WM) in loss sensitivity by utilizing two widely used tasks, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Soochow Gambling Task (SGT), and manipulating WM with a dual-task paradigm. We hypothesized that WM load would reduce attention to both loss value and frequency in the decision-making tasks. To better delineate the psychological processes underpinning choice behavior, we developed an Expectancy-Frequency-Perseveration (EFP) model which parsimoniously captures three critical factors driving choices: expected value, frequency of gains and losses, and perseveration. Behavioral and computational modeling results indicate that WM load compromised performance in the IGT due to reduced attention to loss value but enhanced performance in the SGT because of diminished attention to loss frequency. Our findings suggest that WM heightens attention to losses, but that greater attention is given to loss frequency than loss value.
[attention, task, condition, compared, trial, attend, learning, evidence, suggests, block, impaired, stroop, exhibited, indicate] [experiment, work, sensitivity, psychological, cognitive, implicitly] [intact, memory, term, specific] [performance, versus, better, greater, larger, number, working, numerical, contributes, three] [frequency, frequent, examine, computational, table] [igt, model, expected, load, loss, efp, parameter, sgt, choice, option, fit, aversion, decision, vpp, behavior, gambling, tendency, bic, data, iowa, function, advantageous, median, modeling, uncertainty, perseveration, disadvantageous, prediction, pvl, utilizing, lead, selected, making, provide, chosen, good] [weight, net, performed, role, figure, behavioral, brain]
Adapting Deep Network Features to Capture Psychological Representations
Joshua Peterson, Joshua Abbott, Thomas Griffiths


Deep neural networks have become increasingly successful at solving classic perception problems such as object recognition, semantic segmentation, and scene understanding, often reaching or surpassing human-level accuracy. This success is due in part to the ability of DNNs to learn useful representations of high-dimensional inputs, a problem that humans must also solve. We examine the relationship between the representations learned by these networks and human psychological representations recovered from similarity judgments. We find that deep features learned in service of object classification account for a significant amount of the variance in human similarity judgments for a set of animal images. However, these features do not capture some qualitative distinctions that are a key part of human representations. To remedy this, we develop a method for adapting deep features to align with human similarity judgments, resulting in image representations that can potentially be used to extend the scope of psychological experiments.
[stimulus, learning, categorization, classification, baseline, learned, complex, correspondence, category, learn, classify] [psychological, cognitive, explained, depth, work] [object, typicality, produce] [performance, number, problem, better, three, solved, linear, science] [similarity, animal, large, final, approach, variance, table, amount, natural] [set, model, predict, predicting, well, predicted, method, data, adapting, regression, rate, find] [human, deep, feature, neural, network, matrix, layer, image, convolutional, figure, representation, cnn, original, extracted, computer, visual, memorability, arxiv, vision, preprint, hierarchical, cnns, performed, cortex, transformation, googlenet, imagenet, multidimensional, caffenet, architecture, recognition, regularization]
A Computational Model of Perceptual Deficits in Medial Temporal Lobe Amnesia
Patrick Sadil, Rosemary A. Cowell


Damage to the Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) impairs declarative memory and perception. The Representational-Hierarchical (RH) Account explains such impairments by assuming that MTL stores conjunctive representations of items and events, and that individuals with MTL damage must rely upon representations of simple visual features in posterior visual cortex. A recent study revealed a surprising anti-perceptual learning effect in MTL-damaged individuals: with exposure to a set of visual stimuli, discrimination performance worsened rather than improved. We expand the RH account to explain this paradox by assuming that visual discrimination is performed using a familiarity heuristic. Exposure to a set of highly similar stimuli entails repeated presentation of simple visual features, eventually rendering all feature representations equally (maximally) familiar and hence inutile for solving the task. Since the unique conjunctions represented in MTL do not occur repeatedly, healthy individuals are shielded from perceptual interference. We simulate this mechanism with a neural network.
[stimulus, familiarity, interference, learning, task, second, exposure, pair, novelty, journal, medial, half, impaired, evidence] [low, account, experiment, temporal, representational, appear, experience] [discrimination, ambiguity, perceptual, memory, item, shared, contained, object, highly, share, mismatch] [high, performance, score, control, number, sharing] [unique, abstract, mechanism, simulate] [posterior, model, data, maximum, individual, simulation, simple, empirical, set, heuristic, differs] [visual, prc, barense, mtl, feature, damage, network, layer, conjunctive, activation, figure, brain, grid, recognition, input, mnemonic, lesion, kohonen, switching, reach, lobe, perirhinal, neural, critical, repeat, ventral, represented]
Learning biases may prevent lexicalization of pragmatic inferences: a case study combining iterated (Bayesian) learning and functional selection
Thomas Brochhagen, Michael Franke, Robert van Rooij


Natural languages exhibit properties that are difficult to explain from a purely functional perspective. One of these properties is the systematic lack of upper-bounds in the literal meaning of scalar expressions. This investigation addresses the development and selection of such semantics from a space of possible alternatives. To do so we put forward a model that integrates Bayesian learning into the replicator-mutator dynamics commonly used in evolutionary game theory. We argue this synthesis to provide a suitable and general model to analyze the dynamics involved in the use and transmission of language. Our results shed light on the semantics-pragmatics divide and show how a learning bias in tandem with functional pressure may prevent the lexicalization of pragmatic inferences.
[learning, type, advantage, sequence, complex, development] [reasoning, case, explain, virtue, account] [language, literal, lexica, functional, speaker, lexicon, contrast, meaning, university, fitness, linguistic, evolutionary, message, convey, combination, lexicalization, iterated, communication, communicative, communal] [larger, science] [semantic, bias, semantics, natural, analysis, weighted, length, encodes, table, logical] [pragmatic, model, true, lack, prior, expected, well, scalar, game, lead, hearer, stronger, bayesian, behavior, simpler, data, probability, population, proportion, prevalence, bound, assumption, rational, franke, probabilistic, state, player] [selection, figure, signaling, level, representation, involved, allows, matrix, space]
The Plausible Impossible: Causal Constraints on Magical Reasoning
Andrew Shtulman, Caitlin Morgan


A common intuition, often captured in fiction, is that some impossible events (e.g., levitating a stone) are “more impossible” than others (e.g., levitating a feather). We investigated the source of this intuition, hypothesizing that it arises from explanatory considerations logically precluded by the violation at hand but still taken into account. In Study 1, adults saw pairs of magical events (spells) that violated one of 18 causal principles and were asked to indicate which would be more difficult to learn. Both spells violated the same causal principle but differed in their relation to a subsidiary principle. Participants’ judgments of spell difficulty consistently honored the subsidiary principle. Study 2 replicated the effects of Study 1 with Likert-type ratings, and Study 3 replicated those effects in children. These findings suggest that events that defy causal explanation are interpreted in terms of explanatory considerations that hold in the absence of such violations.
[child, journal, modal, time, half, size, participated, pair, task, learn] [causal, impossible, spell, magical, violate, ontological, cognitive, fictional, physical, magic, psychological, harry, reasoning, cognition, turning, possibility, connection, prefer, biological, float, bucket, version, disney, implicit, hogwarts, honor, discussion, anticipated, person, violation, plausibly, levitating, presumably, explanatory] [object, cultural, graded] [study, difficulty, knowledge, three, number, difficult, asked, difference, young, school, greater, differ] [structure, principle, relation, violated, plausible, conceptual] [making, probability, point, density] [involved, weight, multiple]
Linguistic input is tuned to children’s developmental level
Daniel Yurovsky, Gabriel Doyle, Michael Frank


Children rapidly learn a tremendous amount about language despite limitations imposed on them by their developing cognitive abilities. One possible explanation for this rapid learning is that caregivers tune the language they produce to these limitations, titrating the complexity of their speech to developmentally-appropriate levels. We test this hypothesis in a large-scale corpus analysis, measuring the contingency between parents’ and children’s speech over the first 5 years. Our results support the linguistic tuning hypothesis, showing a high degree of mostly parent-led coordination early in development that decreases as children become more proficient language learners and users.
[alignment, category, child, learning, baseline, age, learn, developmental, developing, naima, test, adult, journal, indicate, logit, early, statistical, tune, aligning, evidence, response, robust, younger] [social, cognitive, person, psychological, aligned, contingency, work] [language, linguistic, speech, conversational, previous, production, produce, university, utterance, support, web, memory, produced] [change, number, mom, appears, high] [word, liwc, tuning, producing, pronoun, syntactic, complexity, measure, corpus, analysis, contingent, hayes, amount, increase] [model, probability, parameter, align, hypothesis, function, posterior, data, predicts, simpler, vary, estimating, individual, independent, highest, estimated, binary] [parent, level, figure, coordinate, hierarchical, input]
The Permeability of Fictional Worlds
Meghan Salomon, Lance Rips


Real people sometimes appear in fiction, for example, Napoleon in War and Peace. Readers may also believe that a person who never actually appears in a novel could potentially appear there. In two experiments, we find evidence that readers think that a real person could appear in specific novels and physically interact with a character. This effect is magnified when the person and character share spatial and temporal elements of their setting.
[novel, time, country, general] [real, fictional, person, people, appear, experiment, exist, character, historical, fiction, famous, temporal, robert, jay, modern, coolidge, lee, calvin, era, queen, contemporary, reality, gatsby, interact, exists, scarlett, govern, psychological, fame, possibility, publication, judged, import, political, century, sherlock, existed, war, fdr, franklin, holmes, discussion, wind, olivia, gerrig, hypothetical, victoria, mechanical] [spatial, appearance, expect, meet, varied, university, american] [answered, difference, transfer, question, absolute, place, greater] [table, distance, read, text] [well, setting, proportion, set, find, based] [direction, figure, leader]
Statistical learning bias predicts second-language reading efficiency
Luca Onnis, Stefan Frank, Hongoak Yun, Matthew Lou-Magnuson


Statistical learning (SL) is increasingly invoked as a set of general-purpose mechanisms upon which language learning is built during infancy and childhood. Here we investigated the extent to which SL is related to adult language processing. In particular, we asked whether SL proclivities towards relations that are more informative of English are related to efficiency in reading English sentences by native speakers of Korean. We found that individuals with a stronger statistical learning sensitivity showed a larger effect of conditional word probability on word reading times, indicating that they more efficiently incorporated statistical regularities of the language during reading. In contrast, L2 English proficiency was related to overall reading speed but not to the use of statistical regularities.
[learning, statistical, processing, task, backward, sequential, test, second, artificial, sequence, time, presented, adult, training, pair, journal, early] [cognitive, strength, low, sensitivity, sensitive, consistent, implicit] [language, native, university, linguistic, previous, speech] [high, study, efficiency, example, better, knowledge, ability] [bias, word, reading, english, proficiency, transitional, lohi, hilo, korean, sentence, read, frequency, grammar, occurrence, onnis, bigram, phrase, thiessen, natural, syntactic, measure, freq, length, random, parse, shae, literacy] [probability, data, individual, model, predicts, probabilistic, predict, independent, stronger, higher] [forward, process, pattern, longer]
The Effects of Discourse Cues on Garden Path Processing
Ana Besserman, Elsi Kaiser


We report a self-paced reading study that investigated garden-path sentences like While the man hunted {a/the} deer ran into the woods. In such sentences, the critical noun (deer) tends to be misparsed as an object of the preceding verb, and has to be re-analyzed as a subject of the following clause when the disambiguating verb (e.g. ran) is encountered. We build on earlier corpus work which found a relationship between syntactic function and information status: Subjects tend to be already-mentioned information/definite, while objects are typically new/indefinite. We investigated whether the noun’s information status influences processing and whether this effect depends on the verb’s argument structure. Results showed that information status matters when processing the noun after optionally transitive verbs (hunt) but not after reflexive absolute verbs (wash). These results suggest that access to discourse-level representations during noun phrase re-analysis is modulated by verb argument structure.
[processing, status, condition, accuracy, dog, response, journal, second, target, position] [man, initial, work, strong, extent, sensitive] [object, ambiguity, overt, reference, manipulated, context] [study, analyzed, question] [verb, noun, discourse, opt, ambiguous, rat, sentence, boy, reading, washed, syntactic, subject, definiteness, argument, phrase, indefinite, barked, interpretation, interpreted, lingering, temporarily, definite, structure, parsing, unambiguous, word, mentioned, hunted, semantic, givenness, modulated, slowdown, entity, comprehension, disambiguating, transitive, clause, tend, spillover, misparse, definites, christianson, preceding] [prior, higher, data] [critical, covert, role, reflexive]
Analogical Generalization and Retrieval for Denominal Verb Interpretation
Clifton McFate, Ken Forbus


The creativity of natural language poses a significant theoretical problem. One example of this is denominal verbs (those derived from nouns) such as spoon in “She spooned me some sugar”. Traditional generative approaches typically posit a unique entry in the lexicon for this usage, though this approach has difficulty scaling. Construction Grammar has evolved as a competing theory which instead allows the syntactic form of the sentence itself to contribute semantic meaning. However, how people learn syntactic constructions remains an open question. One suggestion has been that they are learned through analogical generalization. We evaluate this hypothesis using a computational model of analogical generalization to simulate Kaschak and Glenberg’s (2000) study regarding interpretation of denominal verbs.
[generalization, analogical, training, learning, novel, child, baseline, target, analogy, alignment, evidence, relational, compared, learned, presented, second] [cognitive, frame, evaluate, work, future, consistent, experiment, case, account, evaluated, understanding, claim, result] [language, linguistic, meaning, retrieval, priming, chunking, produced] [transfer, example, correct, correctly, performance, comparison, additional, young] [construction, transitive, semantic, denominal, sentence, verb, sage, random, kaschak, grammar, computational, form, progressive, syntactic, interpretation, glenberg, structural, constructionist, argument, order, phrase, structure, interpret, theoretical, probe, spoon, acquisition, english, approach] [model, simulation, based, set, conference, total, theory, threshold] [figure, role, trained, system, action]
Perceived Momentum Influences Responsibility Judgments
Jeffrey Parker, Iman Paul, Nicholas Reinholtz


This work examines the extent to which people hold independent sequential events (e.g., players making correct/incorrect guesses) responsible for overall outcomes (e.g., the team winning/losing the game). Two types of events are found to garner the majority of responsibility for overall outcomes: (1) final events and (2) events that are perceived to disrupt momentum (e.g., an incorrect guess after a sequence of correct guesses). While previous research has shown that final events tend to be perceived as more responsible for overall outcomes, the current experiments are the first to document the role of perceived momentum on responsibility judgments. Specifically, we demonstrate that the effect is mediated by perceived momentum changes after the time of the event and moderated when exogenous factors (e.g., a delay between events) disrupt perceived momentum. We discuss how these findings relate to pivotality, the counterfactual simulation model, and the role of unexpectedness in responsibility judgments.
[sequence, repeated, sequential, indicating, participated, journal, suggests, occurred, tested] [perceived, momentum, responsibility, aligned, event, experiment, blame, team, series, assigned, people, result, objectively, counterfactual, responsible, cognitive, unexpected, causal, described, explicitly, perceive, preceded, felt, pivotality, told, delay, held, paid, examined, influence, guessed, indicated, percentage, failure, amt, equally, reasoning, hold, halpern, hot] [previous, specific, university] [incorrect, correct, versus, group, three, science, change, course, usa, example, greater] [final, tend, table, forming] [outcome, game, guess, player, success, making, independent, proportion, guessing, likelihood, probability, predict, tendency, tenenbaum, higher] [role, current, associated]
Using Violations of Fitts’ Law to Communicate during Joint Action
Cordula Vesper, Laura Schmitz, Günther Knoblich


When people perform joint actions together, task knowledge is sometimes distributed asymmetrically such that one person has information that another person lacks. In such situations, inter¬¬personal action coordination can be achieved if the know¬ledgeable person modulates basic parameters of her goal-directed actions in a way that provides relevant infor¬mation to the less knowledgeable partner. We investigated whether systematic violations of predicted movement duration provide a sufficient basis for such communication. Results of a joint movement task show that knowledgeable partners spontaneously and systematically violated the pre¬dictions of Fitts’ law in order to communicate if their partners could not see their movements. Unknowing partners had a benefit from these violations and more so if the violations provided a good signal-to-noise ratio. Together, our findings suggest that generating and perceiving systematic deviations from the predicted duration of a goal-directed action can enable non-conventionalized forms of communication during joint action.
[target, task, pitch, time, condition, tone, position, standard, indicate] [instrumental, person, experiment, systematic, aware, case, participant] [communication, communicative, experimental, previous, access, calculated, modulate] [three, performance, study, moved, create, correct, ratio, understand, purpose, knowledgeable, help, created, online] [analysis, order, onset, short, distance] [based, interval, provide, predicted, expected, well, chose, data, inform, good, individual] [movement, joint, action, duration, follower, leader, law, visual, motor, start, velocity, partner, vision, location, signaling, perform, signal, figure, performed, goal, human, role, modulation, snr, move, interaction, motion, system, achieve, computer, kinematic]
Evolution of polysemous word senses from metaphorical mappings
Yang Xu, Barbara Malt, Mahesh Srinivasan


What forces have shaped the evolution of the lexicon? Languages evolve under the pressure of having to communicate an unbounded set of ideas using a finite set of linguistic structures. This suggests why the transmission of ideas should be compressed such that one word will develop multiple senses. Previous theory also suggests how a word might develop new senses: Abstract concepts may be construed in terms of more concrete concepts. Here, we bring these two perspectives together to examine metaphorical extensions of English word meanings over the past millennium, analyzing how senses from a source domain are extended to new ones in a target domain. Using empirical and computational methods, we found that metaphorical mappings are highly systematic and can be explained in terms of a compact set of variables. Our work shows how metaphor can provide a cognitive device for compressing emerging ideas into an existing lexicon.
[target, explore, suggests, development] [metaphorical, sense, historical, source, mapping, metaphor, asymmetry, externality, valence, cognitive, explained, intersubjectivity, serve, animate, variable, account, rated, explain, nature, diachronic, systematic, extension, explaining, valenced, experience, work, compression] [domain, language, university, evolution, communicative, communication, support, degree, highly, directly] [external, change, three] [word, semantic, english, embodiment, concreteness, animacy, relative, concrete, tend, correlated, existing, variance, synchronic, database, abstract, emerging, table, large, polysemy] [predicted, set, data, model, based, theory, empirical, prediction, predict, average, predictive, provide] [direction, figure]
From Words to Behaviour via Semantic Networks
Armand S. Rotaru, Gabriella Vigliocco, Stefan L. Frank


The contents and structure of semantic networks have been the focus of much recent research, with major advances in the development of distributional models. In parallel, connectionist modeling has extended our knowledge of the processes engaged in semantic activation. However, these two lines of investigation have rarely brought together. Here, starting from a standard textual model of semantics, we allow activation to spread throughout its associated semantic network, as dictated by the patterns of semantic similarity between words. We find that the activation profile of the network, measured at various time points, can successfully account for response times in the lexical decision task, as well as for subjective concreteness and imageability ratings.
[baseline, journal, response, task, learning, time, accuracy, psychonomic, verbal, processing] [cognitive, close, account, distant, representational, psychological, negative] [language, experimental] [number, free, performance, concept, study, integrating] [semantic, word, lexical, richness, distributional, concreteness, abstract, association, imageability, similarity, computational, large, measure, table, diversity, variance, concrete, english, structure, vector, direct, amount, order, structural, frequency, british, orthographic, distance, bulletin, dependent, ferrer, contextual, approach, analysis, include, neighborhood] [model, behavior, decision, well, data, log, probabilistic, set, theory, method, provide] [activation, human, network, visual, feature]
Examining Cardiac and Behavioral Responses in a Modality Dominance Task
Chris Robinson, Krysten Chadwick, Jessica Parker, Scott Sinnett


The current study examined cardiac and behavioral responses to changing auditory and visual information while using modified oddball tasks. When instructed to press the same button for auditory and visual oddballs, auditory dominance was found with cross-modal presentation slowing down visual response times and decreasing visual accuracy. When instructed to make separate responses to auditory and visual oddballs, visual dominance was found with cross-modal presentation slowing down response times and decreasing auditory accuracy. However, examination of cardiac responses that were time-locked to stimulus onset show cross-modal facilitation effects, with discrimination of oddballs and standards occurring earlier in the course of processing in the cross-modal condition than in the unimodal conditions. These findings shed light on potential mechanisms underlying modality dominance effects and have implications on tasks that require simultaneous processing of auditory and visual information.
[auditory, dominance, oddball, response, modality, unimodal, presented, standard, presentation, condition, heart, stimulus, cardiac, hrv, attention, processing, attentional, colavita, crossmodal, dog, denote, task, consisted, compared, sinnett, revealed, resting, paired, faster, time, slowed, reported, ibi, robinson, suggesting, robust, learning, trial, executive, integration, dell] [experiment, low, changed, examined, cognitive, hit, anova, worth] [discrimination, university, instructed, error, calculated, variability] [study, high, course, procedure, differ, additional] [examine, reflect, double, onset, earlier, frequent] [rate, button, individual, underlying] [visual, current, sensory, figure, behavioral, goal, perception, reverse, component, computer, pattern, press]
Allocation of attention during auditory word learning
Keith Apfelbaum, Vladimir Sloutsky


The deployment of selective attention has been studied in depth as a mechanism of visual categorization for decades. However, little work has investigated how attentional mechanisms operate for non-visual domains, and many models of categorization tacitly presume domain-general attention use. In three experiments, we investigated whether learners deploy attention to novel auditory features when learning novel words in a similar fashion to the prevailing visual categorization findings. These studies yielded evidence of non-isomorphism, as selective attention in the auditory domain shows high context specificity, in contrast to the wide generalization of attention in the visual domain.
[attention, selective, learning, auditory, category, irrelevant, training, generalization, novel, type, categorization, test, dimension, pitch, generalize, decreased, evidence, second, learned, isomorphism, journal, learn, testing, processing, operate, developmental, differentiate, accuracy, yielded] [relevant, experiment, relevance, examined, discussion, including, nature, cognitive] [discrimination, contrast, domain, context, talker, error, criterion, experimental, language, voice, speech, vowel, alien, gender, main, phonological] [step, included, procedure, identical, change, performance, received] [lexical, word, random, analysis, small, measure] [data, threshold, model, function, measured, set] [visual, feature, duration, reached, pattern, allows, figure, perception, interaction]
Don't Blink! Evaluating Training Paradigms for Overcoming the Attentional Blink
Trudy Buwalda, Jelmer Borst, Marieke van Vugt, Niels Taatgen


A lot of people show a decline in performance when they have to report a second target stimulus in a stream of distractor stimuli. Curiously, this decline only happens when the second target appears approximately 200-500ms after the first target. Recently, Choi, Chang, Shibata, Sasaki, and Watanabe (2012) have shown that a short, one-hour training can eliminate this "attentional blink". Up to now, it is still unclear why this training works. In this paper, we have evaluated a range of different training paradigms to test several hypotheses about the mechanism behind the reduction of the attentional blink. Our results show that none of these training paradigms have a large training effect when administered in isolation. The training by Choi et al. (2012) outperforms them all. The most likely explanation for this effect are temporal expectations relative to the first target.
[training, task, attentional, target, position, second, presented, stimulus, size, choi, accuracy, test, stream, reported, processing, time, presentation, tested, speed, reduced, trial, paradigm, standard, tang, pressing, consisted, block, compared, condition] [temporal, people, explanation, influence, experiment, expectation, percentage, implicit, factor, participant, cognitive] [item, experimental, van, distractors] [blink, feedback, posttest, pretest, control, strategy, correct, report, reduction, practice, number, performance, study, larger, three, difference, digit, answer, identical] [relative, increase, random, small] [find, chosen, randomly, hypothesis, model] [lag, figure, letter, role, play, start, visual, fixation, current]
Why Sense-Making through Magnitude May Be Harder for Fractions than for Whole Numbers
Eliane Wiese, Rony Patel, Kenneth Koedinger


What is the role of fraction magnitude knowledge in learning fraction addition? An experiment with 71 6th and 7th grade students compared fraction addition instruction and practice with a magnitude representation to a tightly controlled non-magnitude condition. In the magnitude condition, students with better fraction magnitude estimation skills benefitted more from the conceptual instruction and this relationship was moderated by students’ knowledge of how magnitude relates to fraction addition and equivalence. However, students with better fraction magnitude estimation skills benefitted less from the practice problems with magnitude. In the non-magnitude condition, fraction magnitude estimation was not predictive of learning. This study indicates that students with magnitude knowledge can leverage it to learn fraction addition concepts from magnitude representations, but, for those students, magnitude representations may be a distraction from practicing the procedure.
[accuracy, learning, condition, presented, learn, incongruent, predictor] [initial, positive, relationship, cognitive, low] [error] [fraction, addition, magnitude, knowledge, number, pretest, sum, pae, instruction, estimation, incorrect, equivalence, arithmetic, study, answer, correct, midtest, linear, greater, practice, posttest, intervention, question, grade, high, asked, strategy, procedure, addend, adding, worked, example, control, reject, procedural, three, understand, assessment, science, help, better, difficulty, improve, equivalent, problem, department, mathematics, included] [conceptual, combined, include] [predictive, regression, confidence, note, yield, hypothesis] [direction, interaction, representation, role]
The Primary and Convergent Retrieval Model of Recall
William J. Hopper, David E. Huber


Memory models typically assume that recall is a two-stage process with learning affecting both processes to the same degree. This equal learning assumption is difficult to reconcile with studies of the 'testing effect', which reveal different forgetting rates following learning from test practice versus learning from restudy. Here we present a new memory model, termed Primary and Convergent Retrieval (PCR) that assumes successful recall leads to a selective enhancement for the second stage of recall (Convergent Retrieval). We applied this model to existing testing effect data. In two new experiments, we confirmed novel predictions of the PCR model for transfer between retrieval cues and for recall latencies. This is the first formally specified model of the testing effect and it has broad implications for the nature of learning and retrieval.
[test, learning, time, accuracy, testing, retention, target, second, forgetting, formed, cued, response] [initial, temporal, psychological, experiment] [recall, retrieval, item, memory, pcr, restudy, activated, recalled, occurs, context, latency, produce, roediger, finite, subsequently, karpicke] [practice, active, number, free, study, primary, stage, activate, passive, change, example, allowed] [final, irt, considered, order, irts, list, subsequent] [model, binomial, assume, successful, probability, initially, observed, distribution, predicted, threshold, interval, prior, data, fit, considering, requires, parameter, extra, fail, attempt, assumption] [figure, convergent, process, feature, activation, encoding, output, encoded, interaction, current]
Modelling the co-development of word learning and perspective-taking
Marieke Woensdregt, Simon Kirby, Chris Cummins, Kenny Smith


Word learning involves mapping observable words onto unobservable speaker intentions, and intention-reading co-develops with language. To explore this interaction we present an agent-based model in which an individual simultaneously learns a lexicon and learns about the speaker's perspective, given a shared context and the speaker's utterances, through Bayesian inference. Simulations with this model show that (i) lexicon-learning and perspective-learning are interdependent: learning one is impossible without some knowledge of the other, (ii) lexicon- and perspective-learning can bootstrap each other, resulting in successful inference of both even when the learner starts with no knowledge of the lexicon and unhelpful assumptions about the minds of others, and (iii) receiving initial input from a `helpful' speaker (who adopts the learner's perspective on the world) paves the way for later learning from speakers with perspectives which diverge from the learner's. This approach represents a first exploration of the co-development dynamics of language and mindreading.
[learning, learner, learn, development, statistical, child, second, learned, early, evidence, bootstrap, half, target] [social, mental, described, belief, simply, false, case, inference, situation, mapping, understanding, impossible] [lexicon, speaker, referential, language, object, context, tom, intention, refer, meaning, mindreading, unobservable, associative, partly, deaf, pyers, sign, salient, communicative] [perspective, ability, knowledge, study, correct, equation] [word, turn, intended, ambiguous, rise] [model, hypothesis, infer, probability, inferring, data, based, set, prior, opposite, prediction, state, bayesian, simulates, function, posterior, likelihood] [input, figure, consists, allows, role, represent, behaviour]
The effect of "mood": Group-based collaborative problem solving by taking different perspectives
Yugo Hayashi


Collaborative problem solving based on different perspectives is an effective strategy for constructing new knowledge and discoveries. It remains unclear what kind of interaction process underlies development of an abstract or integrated perspective upon experiencing conflict with different perspectives in a group. The present study investigates two factors in an experimental setting: (1) groups with a single opposing perspective (maverick) would hold an advantage over groups and (2) groups with positive moods would hold an advantage over groups with negativity. We investigate the factors influencing perspective taking in problem-solving groups using conversational agents. Results showed that (1) a single different perspective in the group can be accepted for perspective taking compared to several members with an opposing perspective, and (2) positive mood generated by group members facilitating perspective taking compared to negative mood.
[task, conflict, compared, rule, condition, presented, facilitate, journal, trial, development] [black, positive, white, negative, cognitive, social, influence, evaluation, emotion, experience, keywords, work, psychology, affective, participant, emotional, consistent, experiment] [conversational, experimental, previous, main, chat, produce, manipulated, affect, degree] [perspective, group, mood, number, problem, study, collaborative, hayashi, solving, member, opposing, better, performance, mere, investigate, discover, science, focusing, knowledge, inside, difference, maverick, conducted, annual, investigated, nega, facilitating] [abstract] [based, agent, cooperative, provide, discovery, conference, generated] [figure, single, interaction, controlled, role, process, partner, indicates, respond, computer, current]
Creative Interaction with Blocks and Robots
Daniel Smithwick, Larry Sass, David Kirsh


In order to creatively interact with robots we need to understand how creative thinkers work with objects to explore new ideas physically. Our approach involves comparing the model-making strategies of architects with students to expose the creative extras architects bring to working with physical models. To study this we coded students and architects performing a design task. Architects differed from students along three dimensions. First, architects were more selective; they used fewer blocks overall and fewer variations. Second, architects appear to think more about spatial relationships and material constraints. Lastly, architects more often experiment with re-orientations: they position a block one way to see its relations to its neighbors; they reposition it another way to see how that changes how things look and feel. These findings suggest that designers interact with the material more effectively than students. This embodied know-how is something next generation robots can support and possibly enhance.
[block, time, sequence, explore, type] [physical, thinking, participant, experiment, cognitive, interact, percentage, explain, work] [configuration, spatial, novice, expert, architectural, functional, suggestive, dream] [three, material, student, modify, study, science, depiction, number, spent, usa, reject, group] [table, abstract, linked, structural, analysis, structure, small, manipulating, aloud] [model, making, total, exploratory, based, set, simple] [design, interaction, action, site, figure, coding, scheme, activity, sketching, perform, gero, performed, suwa, robotic, protocol, primitive, placing, fewer, involves, relocate, assemble, visual, process, side]
A Hierarchical Probabilistic Language-of-Thought Model of Human Visual Concept Learning
Matthew Overlan, Robert Jacobs, Steven Piantadosi


How do people rapidly learn rich, structured concepts from sparse input? Recent approaches to concept learning have found success by integrating rules and statistics. We describe a hierarchical model in this spirit in which the rules are stochastic, generative processes, and the rules themselves arise from a higher-level stochastic, generative process. We evaluate this probabilistic language-of-thought model with data from an abstract rule learning experiment carried out with adults. In this experiment, we find novel generalization effects, and we show that the model gives a qualitatively good account of the experimental data. We then discuss the role of this kind of model in the larger context of concept learning.
[learning, rule, training, test, learn, statistical, general, generalize, category, size, novel, position, learned, exemplar] [cognitive, experiment, work, people, account, consistent, long] [language, specific, program, item, van] [concept, example, number, three, ability, science] [abstract, natural, token, grammar, structure, discussed, computational, small, theoretical] [model, set, hypothesis, probability, distribution, data, probabilistic, aba, sampling, xbb, prior, full, stochastic, bottom, function, defines, likelihood, tree, simple, bayesian, posterior, generated, follow, string, gcm, ideal] [generative, figure, framework, output, visual, top, process, human, representation, built, allows]
Integrating physical reasoning and visual object recognition for fully occluded scene interpretation
Ilker Yildirim, Max Siegel, Josh Tenenbaum


Conventional theories of visual object recognition treat objects effectively as abstract patterns of image features. They do not explicitly represent objects as physical entities in the world, with physical properties such as three-dimensional shape, mass, stiffness, elasticity, surface friction, and so on. However, for many purposes, an object's physical existence is central to our ability to recognize it and think about it. This is certainly true for recognition via haptic perception, i.e., perceiving objects by touch, but even in the visual domain an object's physical properties may directly determine how it looks and thereby how we recognize it. Here we show how a physical object representation can allow the solution of video problems, like perceiving an object under a cloth, that are otherwise difficult to accomplish without extensive experience, and we provide behavioral and computational evidence that people can use such a representation.
[test, trial, task, presented, standard, type, category, shape] [physical, experiment, causal, people, explicitly, future] [object, item, distractor, error, university] [performance, study, recognize, example, knowledge, three] [canonical, approach] [model, randomly, average, denotes, simulated, likelihood, distribution, uncertainty, conference, underlying, simulation, true, generated, posterior] [unoccluded, occluded, image, neural, visual, rotation, figure, network, cloth, perception, convolutional, mesh, fully, scene, perceiving, invariant, recognition, rendered, deep, blender, viewpoint, vision, view, engine, chair, represented, trained, rotating, human, rendering, computer, behavioral, process, representation, brain, performs]
“This problem has no solution”: when closing one of two doors results in failure to access any.
Hippolyte Gros, Emmanuel Sander, Jean-Pierre Thibaut


We investigated what happens when the spontaneous encoding of a problem is incongruent with its solving strategy. We created word problems from which two distinct semantic representations could be abstracted. Only one of these representations was consistent with the solving strategy. We tested whether participants could recode a semantically incongruent representation in order to access another, less salient, solving strategy. In experiment 1, participants had to solve arithmetic problems and to indicate which problems were unsolvable. In experiment 2, participants received solved problems and had to decide whether the solution was appropriate or not. In both experiments, participants had more difficulties acknowledging that problems inducing an incongruent representation could be solved than they had for problems inducing a congruent representation. This was confirmed by response times. These results highlight how semantic aspects can lead even adults to fail or succeed in the solving of arithmetic problems requiring basic mathematical knowledge.
[incongruent, response, congruent, time, task, journal, indicate, presented, type, continuous, second, identify, denote] [experiment, nature, cognitive, sander, induced, situation, reasoning, fact, property] [access, spontaneous, experimental, vertical, previous] [problem, solving, strategy, cardinal, ordinal, solve, solvable, mathematical, solution, difference, solved, correct, arithmetic, correctly, confirmed, comparison, recoding, unsolvable, inducing, complementation, versus, solver, discrete, created, ability, three, highlighted, numerical, hypothesized, question, needed] [semantic, semantically, structure, order, word, abstract, removed, interpreted, analysis] [find, rate, success, data, depending, lead, total, confidence, making, alternative] [representation, figure, associated, algorithm, process, congruence]
L2 Idiom Processing: Figurative Attunement in Highly Idiomatic Contexts
Sara Beck, Andrea Weber


Using cross-modal priming, we investigated the processing of idioms in non-native listeners in varying experimental contexts. As idiomatic processing models have presented evidence for an idiomatic mode of processing that can be activated for non-native speakers in highly figurative contexts (Bobrow & Bell, 1973), this experiment revisits those claims while also examining access to figurative meaning in addition to the literal meaning of individual words within an idiom. This experiment showed increased priming for visual targets related to the figurative meaning of an idiom when the experimental list contained a large proportion of idiomatic sentences compared to when the list contained only a small proportion of idiomatic sentences. Non-native speakers not only showed online access to figurative meaning but were also sensitive to highly idiomatic contexts; though, responses to the targets related to literal meaning of the final word of the idiom were faster in all instances than figuratively-related targets.
[processing, second, target, presented, faster, evidence, compared, journal, novel, auditory, prime, increased] [experiment, unrelated, strong, presence, salience] [figurative, literal, meaning, idiom, idiomatic, experimental, language, context, priming, access, highly, variation, constituent, attunement, relatedness, bell, bobrow, native, facilitatory, contained, filler, main, separate, activated, production, formulaic, adaptation, psycholinguistic, occurs, priority, swinney, schmitt, anna] [online, control, addition, comparison] [word, mode, list, lexical, english, sentence, comprehension, proposed, final, table] [based, model, data, individual, total, hypothesis, varying, decision] [rts, current, visual, activation, representation, interaction, controlled]
Synthesized size-sound sound-symbolism
Gwilym Lockwood, Peter Hagoort, Mark Dingemanse


Studies of sound-symbolism have shown that people can associate sound and meaning in consistent ways when presented with maximally contrastive stimulus pairs of nonwords such as bouba/kiki (rounded/sharp) or mil/mal (big/small). Recent work has shown the effect extends to antonymic words from natural languages and has proposed a role for shared cross-modal correspondences in biasing form-to-meaning associations. An important open question is how the associations work, and particularly what the role is of sound-symbolic matches versus mismatches. We report on a learning task designed to distinguish between three existing theories by using a spectrum of sound-symbolically matching, mismatching, and neutral (neither matching nor mismatching) stimuli. Synthesized stimuli allow us to control for prosody, and the inclusion of a neutral condition allows a direct test of competing accounts. We find evidence for a sound-symbolic match boost, but not for a mismatch difficulty compared to the neutral condition.
[nonwords, sound, learning, symbolism, condition, match, evidence, nonword, big, learned, learn, mismatching, journal, iconicity, size, lockwood, accuracy, ideophones, fixed, japanese, test, presented, spectrum, synthesized, planck, klein, soundsymbolic, processing, replication, soundsymbolically, suggests, nijmegen] [neutral, mapping, real, experiment, rating, people, philosophical, participant, cognitive, initial, biological, consistent, institute, work] [language, graded, matching, mismatch, dutch, experimental, boost, meaning, groot, psycholinguistics] [better, study, difference, help, three, larger] [word, random, small, association, meant, table, adjective, prosodic] [provide, model, round, sample, set, max, opposite, lack, chose] [figure, role, screen]
Information-Seeking, Learning and the Marginal Value Theorem: A Normative Approach to Adaptive Exploration
Andra Geana, Robert Wilson, Nathaniel Daw, Jonathan Cohen


Daily life often makes us decide between two goals: maximizing immediate rewards (exploitation) and learning about the environment so as to improve our options for future rewards (exploration). An adaptive organism therefore should place value on information independent of immediate reward, and affective states may signal such value (e.g., curiosity vs. boredom: Hill & Perkins, 1985; Eastwood et al. 2012). Here, we augment the classic serial foraging scenario to more explicitly reward the development of knowledge. We develop a formal model that quantifies the value of information in this setting and how it should impact decision making, paralleling the treatment of reward by the marginal value theorem (MVT) in the foraging literature. We then present the results of an experiment designed to provide an initial test of this model, and discuss the implications of this information-foraging framework on boredom and task disengagement.
[time, learning, task, learned, learn, switch, fixed, journal, compared, accuracy, position, faster] [consistent, future, experiment, initial, normative] [studied, error] [number, spent, better, step, improve] [global, local, structure, earlier, variance, increase, relative] [reward, patch, model, agent, foraging, wave, optimal, behavior, prediction, data, exploration, distribution, minion, well, estimate, point, sampling, choose, boredom, game, average, estimated, archer, function, rate, marginal, provide, staying, earn, uncertainty, decision, stay, choice, adaptive, predicted, hitting, expected, higher, stochastic, decide, cost, increasing] [current, environment, human, switching, longer, figure, location, associated]
Learning that numbers are the same, while learning that they are different
Jon Willits, Michael Jones, David Landy


It has been suggested that the way that number words are used may play an important role in the development of number concepts. However, little is currently known about the overall ways in which number words are used in child-directed speech. To address this, we performed an analysis of how number words are used in the CHILDES database. We looked at four statistics: 1) lexical frequency, 2) contextual diversity, 3) word co-occurrence, and 4) distributional similarity, to see if these distributional statistics suggest why some aspects of number acquisition are easy and others are hard, and if these statistics are informative about specific debates in number acquisition. We found that that are many important differences in how small and large number words are used (such as differences in frequency, co-occurrence patterns, and distributional similarity), differences that may play an role in shaping hypotheses about children’s acquisition of number concepts.
[learn, learning, category, accuracy, statistical, time, age, evidence, development, big, developmental, occur] [psychological, experience, belong, extent, cognitive, distinct, common] [language, speech, highly, principal, linguistic, specific, meaning, interesting, university, american, informative] [number, three, counting, larger, young, numerical, concept, answer, score, lower, difference, composed, usa, cardinal, magnitude] [word, frequency, large, distributional, structure, analysis, frequent, childes, diversity, small, usage, form, similarity, corpus, contextual, acquisition, lexical, count, semantic, verb, final, indiana, cluster, eighteen, structural] [based, proportion, set] [figure, role, performed, input, hierarchical, behavioral, brain]
Probabilistic Simulation Predicts Human Performance on Viscous Fluid-Pouring Problem
James Kubricht, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yixin Zhu, Song-Chun Zhu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Hongjing Lu


The physical behavior of moving fluids is highly complex, yet people interact with them daily with relative ease. To investigate how humans achieve this remarkable ability, the present study extended the classical water-pouring problem (Schwartz & Black, 1999) to examine how humans consider physical properties of fluids (e.g., viscosity) and perceptual variables (e.g., volume) in a reasoning task. We found that humans do not rely on simple heuristic rules to reason about fluid dynamics. Instead, they rely on perceived viscosity and volume to make their judgments. Computational results from a probabilistic simulation model reliably account for human sensitivity to latent fluid attributes and their performance on our task. In contrast, non-simulation models based on statistical learning fail to fit human performance. Our results provide converging evidence supporting mental simulation strategies in physical reasoning, and outline experimental conditions that rectify the dissociation between explicit prediction and tacit judgment.
[response, task, explicit, test, reported] [physical, reasoning, mental, judgment, intuitive, account, cognitive, experiment, people, perceived, viewed, reason] [perceptual, latent, experimental] [fluid, volume, viscosity, vlv, container, ife, vhv, performance, pour, tilted, viscous, problem, svm, greater, demonstration, filled, three, particle, inside, video, water, study, science, annual, tilting, discretized, schwartz] [flow, relative, computational, bates] [simulation, model, noisy, method, predict, proportion, probabilistic, heuristic, conference, simulated, realistic, provide, making] [human, computer, input, motion, angle, visual, tilt, figure, rotation, side]
Similarity-Based Reasoning is Shaped by Recent Learning Experience
Paul Thibodeau, David Myers, Stephen Flusberg


Popular approaches to modeling analogical reasoning have captured a wide range of developmental and cognitive phenomena, but the use of structured symbolic representations makes it difficult to account for the dynamic and context sensitive nature of similarity judgments. Here, the results of a novel behavioral task are offered as an additional challenge for these approaches. Participants were presented with a familiar analogy problem (A:B::C:?), but with a twist. Each of the possible completions (D1, D2, D3), could be considered valid: There was no unambiguously “correct” answer, but an array of equally good candidates. We find that participants’ recent experience categorizing objects (i.e., manipulating the salience of the features), systematically affected performance in the ambiguous analogy task. The results are consistent with a dynamic, context sensitive approach to modeling analogy that continuously updates feature weights over the course of experience.
[analogy, training, shape, size, brightness, condition, task, relational, trial, label, match, analogical, response, novel, revealed, target, learning, category, completed, phase, compared, development, dimension, developmental, predictor, attend, statistical, structured, juliet, improved, maximally, indicating] [people, reasoning, cognitive, experience, rated, consistent, basis, relationship, illustration] [object, referred, forced, perceptual, shift, main, context, meaning] [control, three, comparison, feedback, course, differ, identical, difference, provided] [ambiguous, similarity, table, order, small, final, approach, structure] [choose, sample, model, option, based, best, data, fit, modeling, logistic] [figure, original, feature, distributed, interaction]
What do we learn from rating metaphors?
Paul Thibodeau, Les Sikos, Frank Durgin


What makes some metaphors easier to understand than others? Theoretical accounts of metaphor processing appeal to dimensions like conventionality and aptness to explain variability in metaphor comprehensibility. In a typical experiment, one group of naive participants rates a set of metaphoric sentences along these dimensions, while another is timed reading the same sentences. Then, the ratings are used to predict response times in order to identify the most relevant linguistic dimension for metaphor comprehension. However, surprisingly high correlations between ratings of theoretically orthogonal constructs and the results of an experiment in which a context manipulation affected ratings of metaphor conventionality and aptness suggest that these measures should be treated as dependent, rather than explanatory, variables. We discuss the implications of this perspective for theories of language processing.
[processing, target, dimension, stimulus, journal, presented, response, naive, processed, identify, base, familiarity] [metaphor, aptness, conventionality, people, extension, rated, crime, vehicle, thibodeau, experiment, sense, relevant, consistent, explained, apt, psychological, indicated, durgin, initial, manipulation, comprehensibility, rating, explain, personality, bowdle, extent] [context, metaphoric, matched, literal, principal, figurativeness, mixed, metaphoricity, figurative, linguistic, language, experimental, orthogonal, description, memory, easier, item, priming, variability] [conventional, asked, understand, college] [fluency, table, word, variance, measure, analysis, read, semantic, small, order, comprehension, loaded, theoretical, lexical] [rate, data, well, predict, vary, higher, behavior] [component, figure, goal]
Listener sensitivity to foreign-accented speech with grammatical errors
Yuki Asano, Andrea Weber


The present accent rating study investigates the interaction between accent strength and grammatical correctness on perceived accentedness. German native (L1) listeners rated German sentences produced by L1 and non-native (L2) speakers. Sentences either contained a grammatical error or were grammatically correct. Results showed that grammatical correctness affected the accent rating of sentences produced by L1 speakers, but not of those by L2 speakers. The inverse influence of grammatical errors on sentences spoken with stronger accents suggests that phonological information plays a more important role for global perception of speech accentedness than grammatical correctness does, revealing a hierarchical importance of factors that form an L2 accent. This finding is in line with recent findings from an online processing ERP study (Hanulíková, van Alphen, van Goch, & Weber, 2012) in which L1 listeners were tolerant towards grammatical errors made by L2 speakers, i.e. showed no P600 effect for grammatically incorrect sentences.
[attention, journal, spoken, learning, processing, second, suggests, type, age, erp, statistical, suggesting, standard] [rating, perceived, cognitive, case, experiment, influence, strength, person, agreement, kind] [grammatical, speech, accent, error, speaker, german, foreign, produced, language, phonological, grammatically, van, previous, contained, normalized, background, perceptual, degree, dutch, decisive, accented, accentedness, affect, memory, main, variation, adjust, marked, visible, der, male, american, university, society, tolerant] [correct, study, correctness, incorrect, group, online, three] [sentence, preposition, form, order, english, global, verb, syntactic, short, acquisition] [higher, varying, data, chosen] [perception, interaction, figure]
A Comparative Evaluation of Approximate Probabilistic Simulation and Deep Neural Networks as Accounts of Human Physical Scene Understanding
Renqiao Zhang, Jiajun Wu, Chengkai Zhang, William T. Freeman, Joshua B. Tenenbaum


Humans demonstrate remarkable abilities to predict physical events in complex scenes. Two classes of models for physical scene understanding have recently been proposed: ``Intuitive Physics Engines'', or IPEs, which posit that people make predictions by running approximate probabilistic simulations in causal mental models similar to physics engines, and memory-based models like convolutional networks, which make judgments based on analogies to stored experiences of previously encountered scenes and outcomes. Here we report four experiments that rigorously compare simulation-based and CNN-based models, where both approaches are concretely instantiated in algorithms that can run on raw image inputs and produce as outputs physical judgments. Both approaches can achieve super-human accuracy levels and can quantitatively predict human judgments to a similar degree, but only the simulation-based models generalize to novel situations in ways that people do, and are qualitatively consistent with systematic perceptual illusions and judgment asymmetries that people show.
[training, block, test, accuracy, generalize, learning, half] [physical, people, experiment, intuitive, stable, understanding, cognitive, fall, stability, reasoning, causal, mental, judgment] [perceptual, object, experimental] [performance, number, three, approximate, study, knowledge, ability, force] [pile, table, computational, large, small, variance] [model, simulation, set, predict, probabilistic, bayesian, setup, capture, well, state] [neural, ipe, human, alexnet, trained, visual, lenet, figure, scene, cnns, unstable, engine, vision, convolutional, instability, center, pretrained, battaglia, network, recognition, cnn, camera, horizontal, gaussian, top, arxiv, computer]
Learning Behavior-Grounded Event Segmentations
Christian Gumbsch, Jan Kneissler, Martin Butz


The event segmentation theory (EST) postulates that humans systematically segment the continuous sensorimotor information flow into events and event boundaries. The basis for the observed segmentation tendencies, however, remains largely unknown. We introduce a computational model that grounds EST in the interaction abilities of a system. The model learns events and event boundaries based on actively gathered sensorimotor signals. It segments the signals based on principles of probabilistic predictive coding and surprise. The implemented model essentially simulates, anticipates, and learns event progressions and event transitions online while interacting with the environment by means of dynamic, predictive Bayesian models. Besides the model’s event segmentation capabilities, we show that the learned encodings can be used for higher-order planning. Moreover, the encodings systematically conceptualize environmental interactions and they help to identify the factors that are critical for ensuring interaction success.
[time, boundary, learning, position, segmentation, dimension, identify, testing, developing, learned, type, training, continuous] [event, cognitive, heavy, relevant, ten, detection, scenario] [object, error, environmental, color] [active, change, step, attached] [small, variance, anticipatory, computational, form, structure, considered, distance] [model, prediction, predictive, predict, set, based, behavior, planning, reinforcement, generated, probability] [forward, system, sensory, hand, motor, food, figure, transition, currently, desired, sensorimotor, gaussian, characterized, environment, movement, interaction, architecture, current, learns, input, human, consists, action, suitable, light, reach, velocity, foe, segment, workspace, interacting, essentially, searching, est, critical]
Disfluency production in speech and gesture
Niloofar Akhavan, Tilbe Goksun, Nazbanou Nozari


The cognitive architecture and function of co-speech gesture has been the subject of a large body of research. We investigate two main questions in this field, namely, whether language and gesture are the same or two inter-related systems, and whether gestures help resolve speech problems, by examining the relationship between gesture and disfluency in neurotypical speakers. Our results support the view of separate, but inter-related systems by showing that speech problems do not necessarily cause gesture problems, and on many occasions, gestures signal an upcoming speech problem even before it surfaces in overt speech. We also show that while gestures are more common on fluent trials, speakers use both iconic and beat gestures on disfluent trials to facilitate communication, although the two gesture types support communication in different ways.
[evidence, journal, time, simultaneously, examining, verbal, facilitate, repeated, compared, starting] [relationship, cognitive, examined, temporal, absence, appropriateness, preceded] [speech, gesture, language, disfluency, iconic, beat, production, disfluent, interruption, university, fluent, coded, produced, spatial, memory, retrieval, main, accompanied, resolve, produce, neurotypical, repair, spontaneous, expect, error, overt, support, gestural, separate, mcneill, healthy, interrupted, resumed, interrelated, kita, listener, utterance, speaker, gesturing, resolving, supporting, cambridge, society, girl] [help, problem, filled, primary, science, annual, question, department, study, better] [lexical, word, running, proposed, semantic] [point] [role, hand, system, repetition, represent, brain]
Predictions with Uncertain Categorization: A Rational Model
Elizaveta Konovalova, Gael Le Mens


A key function of categories is to help predictions about unobserved features of objects. At the same time, humans often find themselves in situations where the categories of the objects they perceive are uncertain. How do people make predictions about unobserved features in such situations? We propose a rational model that solves this problem. Our model complements existing models in that it is applicable in settings where the conditional independence assumption does not hold (features are correlated within categories) and where the features are continuous as opposed to discrete. The qualitative predictions of our model are borne out in two experiments.
[category, second, target, categorization, scatter, evidence, suggests, journal, continuous, paradigm, compared] [experiment, people, conditional, basis, mental, independence, candidate, fact, consistent, told, positive, account, cognitive, version] [object, rely, experimental, memory, item] [asked, linear, knowledge, number, control] [existing, table, rat, order] [model, rational, correlation, posterior, blood, uncertain, fit, best, prediction, consider, unobserved, probability, individual, implied, prior, assume, estimated, sample, proportion, observed, setting, making, predict, data, propose, protropin, assumption, distribution, parameter, denotes, propensity, independent, bic, true, compute, maker, optimal] [feature, figure, single, level, weight, multiple, representation, design, pattern]
Numeric Competencies and Anchoring Biases
Sangsuk Yoon, Nathan Fong


Two experiments were conducted to examine the role of three facets of numeracy (objective (ONS), subjective (SNS), and symbolic number mapping (SMap)) in three anchoring tasks (experimenter-given, self-generate, and valuation). We found that the three numeric competencies were associated with different anchoring tasks. SMap was associated with none of the three anchor tasks, while ONS consistently predicted stronger susceptibility to self-generated anchoring. The role of ONS and SNS in experimenter-given and valuation tasks were inconsistent. In Experiment 1, where the direction of adjustment from an anchor is specified, ONS and SNS were positively associated with anchor susceptibility in a valuation task, while they were not in an experimenter-given anchor task. On the other hand, in Experiment 2 where the direction of adjustment from an anchor is uncertain, ONS and SNS were positively associated with anchor susceptibility in an experimenter-given anchor task, while they were not in a valuation task.
[task, journal, test, presented] [experiment, cognitive, psychological, positively, result, low, mapping, relationship, explicitly, personality, examined, scale, social, future, inconsistent, judgment, consistent, positive] [adjustment, previous, item] [three, numeric, high, number, question, study, lower, comparison, approximate, symbolic, literature, score, ability, asked, example, answer, math, estimation, investigated] [length, distance, table, bias, weaker] [higher, decision, individual, stronger, predicted, uncertain, subjective, price, find, objective, point, regression, economic, risk] [anchor, anchoring, numeracy, valuation, ons, associated, susceptibility, direction, role, smap, market, bjalkebring, column, indicates, behavioral, factual, freezing, mississippi, selfgenerated]
A perspective on all cognition? A study of everyday environments from the perspective of distributed cognition
Nils Dahlbäck, Mattias Kristiansson


Distributed cognition is a perspective that primarily has been applied to complex socio-technical systems such as flight decks of commercial airliners, or operating rooms where professionals perform cognitive tasks in environments specifically designed for this. For some scholars distributed cognition is exactly this kind of specialized cognitive system. On the other hand it has been claimed by some workers in the field that distributed cognition is not a kind of cognition but a perspective on all cognition. We have therefore studied an environment very different from the systems previously studied, namely single people’s homes. We find that there are many similarities between the home and the specialized socio-technical environments. To us this suggests that the specially designed complex environments can be seen as specialized cases of the general principles of distributed cognition which are not reflections of “particular work practices” but of general features of human cognition.
[time, complex, journal, suggests] [cognitive, cognition, pocket, professional, work, bag, leaving, specialized, designed, shoulder, kind, physical, social, located, despite, historical, fact, calendar, bench, deliberate, specially, serve, described] [studied, memory, instance, previous, cultural, functional, situated, cambridge, combination, remembering, specific, interesting, university] [perspective, number, study, video, knowledge, course, external, computation] [large, small, analysis, list, mentioned] [search, everyday, note, based, paper] [distributed, moa, environment, system, kitchen, side, felicia, view, human, field, top, apartment, feature, space]
Causal Learning With Continuous Variables Over Time
Kevin Soo, Benjamin Rottman


When estimating the strength of the relation between a cause (X) and effect (Y), there are two main statistical approaches that can be used. The first is using a simple correlation. The second approach, appropriate for situations in which the variables are observed unfolding over time, is to take a correlation of the change scores – whether the variables reliably change in the same or opposite direction. The main question of this manuscript is whether lay people use change scores for assessing causal strength in time series contexts. We found that subjects’ causal strength judgments were better predicted by change scores than the simple correlation, and that use of change scores was facilitated by naturalistic stimuli. Further, people use a heuristic of simplifying the magnitudes of change scores into a binary code (increase vs. decrease). These findings help explain how people uncover true causal relations in complex time series contexts.
[time, continuous, learning, presented, journal, tested, suggests, size, condition, attend, half] [causal, strength, people, experiment, positive, negative, rstates, temporal, series, drug, viewed, microorganism, relationship, uncover, result, judging, discretize, cognitive, scale, influence, covariation, vice, common] [experimental, main] [change, question, better, numerical, study, absolute, created, procedure, format, three, code, difference, high] [random, order, increase, longitudinal, table, relation, analysis] [data, correlation, binary, estimating, inferring, model, true, computing, increasing, method, observed, set, infer, naturally, compute, theory] [figure, visual, naturalistic, sensory, transition, human, involved]
Sub-Categorical Properties of Stimuli Determine the Category-Order Effect
Jordan Schoenherr, Robert Thomson


The category-order effect (COE) is observed when the categorical properties of items within the first half of a given list affect recall performance in a mixed-list serial-recall task. The present study examines whether the advantage is due to other sub-categorical properties (e.g., orthographic similarity and word frequency) rather than an artifact of stimuli used in previous studies (e.g., numbers vs. nouns). Participants were presented with numeric stimuli and nouns from a variety of semantic categories while their orthography and word frequency were systematically manipulated. The results suggest that a large portion of the COE can be attributed to the sub-categorical properties of the items.
[category, presented, coe, categorical, journal, backward, subcategorical, evidence, interference, accuracy, consisted, categoryorder, size, precede, schoenherr, lasek, examining, response, thomson, exhibited, eliminated, finding, improved, replicate] [experiment, greene, case, cognitive, indicated, discussion, psychology, explanation, fact] [recall, memory, recalled, item, previous, main, experimental, affect, university] [number, performance, mse, numeric, format, study, procedure, greater, created] [word, order, frequency, semantic, orthographic, similarity, list, relative, length, fan] [set, higher, observed, proportion, prior, based] [forward, letter, figure, serial, activation, interaction, input, associated, represented]
Moral Judgments: Studying People with Helping Professions
Maurice Grinberg, Evgeniya Hristova, Veselina Kadreva


While a considerable amount of research is done in the field of moral psychology, to our best knowledge, no systematic study of moral judgments made by professional groups who make moral decisions as part of their occupational duties exists (e.g. firefighters, medical doctors, midwives, police officers). By their training and practice, such professionals are expected to exhibit differences in moral judgment compared to the general population. Here we report data about moral judgments of firefighters and midwives using moral dilemmas in which one person must be sacrificed in order to save more people. The study reveals that midwives and firefighters are considerably less utilitarian compared to a control group of students. Midwives almost never find the utilitarian action to be permissible. This striking result demonstrates that further understanding of the specific mechanisms involved in special professional groups’ moral judgment is needed.
[presented, revealed, training, time, artificial, compared] [moral, harm, death, utilitarian, inevitability, permissible, professional, physical, occupation, judged, instrumentality, directness, person, percentage, avoidable, life, inevitable, experience, killing, judgment, dilemma, impersonal, harming, trolley, going, worker, anova, people, heavy, factor, occupational, situation, fall, die, responsibility, personal, endangered, termination, ethical, save, cognitive, incidental, emotional, instrumental, inflicted, care, thing] [main, female, male, mixed, specific, gender] [number, analyzed, control, three, study, saving, involving, difference, special, container] [order, analysis] [data, based, set, exploration] [figure, interaction, moving, fewer, action]
Children consider others' expected costs and rewards when deciding what to teach
Sophie Bridgers, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Hyowon Gweon


Humans have an intuitive sense of how to help and inform others even in the absence of a specific request. How do we achieve this? Here we propose that even young children can reason about others’ expected costs and rewards to flexibly decide what is best for others. We asked children to choose one of two toys to teach to another agent while systematically varying the relative costs and rewards of discovering each toy’s functions. Children’s choices were consistent with the predictions of a computational model that maximizes others’ utilities by minimizing their expected costs and maximizing their expected rewards. These results suggest that even early in life, children draw rational inferences about others’ costs and benefits, and choose to communicate information that maximizes their utilities.
[learner, condition, learning, differed, suggests] [reason, cognitive, reasoning, consideration, social, failed, equally, understanding] [harder, experimental] [toy, teaching, teach, help, easy, hard, experimenter, taught, activate, cooler, dull, cool, discover, knowledgeable, communicate, activating, asked, prioritize, reduce, difficulty, teacher, providing, knowledge] [relative, reflect, small, order, turn, table] [model, expected, cost, reward, utility, full, discovery, higher, consider, selected, button, best, alternative, data, choose, provide, choice, deciding, based, preferred, set, empirical, rewarding, binomial, simpler, range, decide, predict, inform, probability, incur, proportion, predicted, likelihood] [figure, play, activation, plan, focus]
Differentiating between Encoding and Processing during Sequential Diagnostic Reasoning: An Eye tracking study.
Anja Klichowicz, Agnes Scholz, Sascha Strehlau, Josef F. Krems


When finding a best explanation for observed symptoms a multitude of information has to be integrated and matched against explanations stored in memory. Although assumptions about ongoing memory processes can be derived from the process models, little process data exists that would allow to sufficiently test these assumptions. In order to explore memory processes in diagnostic reasoning, 29 participants were asked to solve a visual reasoning task (the Black Box paradigm) where critical information had to be retrieved from memory. This study focused on differentiating between processes that take place during the encoding and the evaluation of symptom information by comparing eye movement measures (the number of fixation and fixation duration per dwell). Results will be discussed in light of existing theories on sequential diagnostic reasoning. Further, it will be discussed to which extent eye movements can be informative about memory processes underlying sequential diagnostic reasoning.
[processing, task, time, sequential, trial, test, second, increased, journal, complex, compared, training] [diagnostic, black, reasoning, cognitive, evaluation, participant, influence, car, symptom, deliberate, concerning, explanation, people, explained, clear] [memory, aoi, experimental, differentiated, expect] [number, study, place, department, high, johnson, needed] [analysis, order, absorption, measure] [decision, making, assume, tracing, upper, data, find, set, method] [fixation, process, encoding, eye, ray, dwells, dwell, box, atom, duration, glaholt, light, current, encoded, horstmann, field, tracking, left, gaze, tar, figure, hygene, aois, technische, corner, area, movement, analyzing]
Effects of experience in a developmental model of reading
Ya-Ning Chang, Padraic Monaghan, Stephen Welbourne


There is considerable evidence showing that age of acquisition (AoA) is an important factor influencing lexical processing. Early-learned words tend to be processed more quickly compared to later-learned words. The effect could be due to the gradual reduction in plasticity as more words are learned. Alternatively, it could originate from differences within semantic representations. We implemented the triangle model of reading including orthographic, phonological and semantic processing layers, and trained it according to experience of a language learner to explore the AoA effects in both naming and lexical decision. Regression analyses on the model’s performance showed that AoA was a reliable predictor of naming and lexical decision performance, and the effect size was larger for lexical decision than for naming. The modelling results demonstrate that AoA operates differentially on concrete and abstract words, indicating that both the mapping and the representation accounts of AoA were contributing to the model’s performance.
[training, age, learned, time, task, journal, hearing, target, presented, processing, size, learning, early, accuracy, predictor, evidence, picture, explore, learn] [mapping, consistency, including, experience, consistent, key] [phonological, context, speaking, error, language, memory, experimental] [step, score, larger, performance, three, conducted, greater, number] [aoa, semantic, lexical, word, naming, reading, frequency, cumulative, attractor, monaghan, locus, orthographic, semantics, acquisition, concreteness, computational, derived, phonology, simulate, table, small, richness, slot] [model, decision, regression, theory, set, based, data, measured, observed] [representation, trained, layer, hidden, interaction, behavioural, activation, input, role, unit, connected, developed, pattern]
Language does not explain the wine-specific memory advantage of wine experts
Ilja Croijmans, Asifa Majid


Although people are poor at naming odors, naming a smell helps to remember that odor. Previous studies show wine experts have better memory for smells, and they also name smells differently than novices. Is wine experts’ odor memory is verbally mediated? And is the odor memory advantage that experts have over novices restricted to odors in their domain of expertise, or does it generalize? Twenty-four wine experts and 24 novices smelled wines, wine-related odors and common odors, and remembered these. Half the participants also named the smells. Wine experts had better memory for wines, but not for the other odors, indicating their memory advantage is restricted to wine. Wine experts named odors better than novices, but there was no relationship between experts’ ability to name odors and their memory for odors. This suggests experts’ odor memory advantage is not linguistically mediated, but may be the result of differential perceptual learning.
[verbal, journal, label, accuracy, advantage, interference, task, test, type, half, training, condition, presented, learning, baseline, finding] [common, consistent, cognitive, consistency, relationship, people, chemical, real, appear, white, professional] [wine, memory, odor, remembering, language, expertise, named, remember, perceptual, expert, olfactory, consistently, domain, smell, verbally, smelled, household, superior, melcher, previous, specific, corrected, restricted, bonferroni, flavor, describing, brown, nez, recall, croijmans, hughson] [better, chess, asked, study, ability, correctly, accurate, difference, correct, group, knowledge, help] [naming, table, small, dependent] [correlation, pairwise, red] [recognition, encoding, interaction, visual, role, food, current]
Young children and adults integrate past expectations and current outcomes to reason about others’ emotions
Desmond Ong, Mika Asaba, Hyowon Gweon


Reasoning about others’ emotions is a crucial component in social cognition. Here, we tested the ability of preschool children to reason about an agent’s emotions following an unexpected outcome. Importantly, we controlled for the actual payoff of the outcome, while varying the prior expectation of the agents. Five year olds, but not four year olds, were able to correctly judge an agent’s emotions following an unexpected outcome (Experiment 1). However, when explicitly provided with the agent’s expectations, four year old children were then able to correctly judge the agent’s feelings (Experiment 2). Thus, our results suggest that the ability to reason about emotions given outcomes and prior expectations develops by 4 years of age, while the ability to spontaneously infer such prior expectations develops soon after. We discuss our results in light of the developmental literature on emotion understanding and counter- factual reasoning.
[child, test, developmental, adult, reported, age, tested, incongruent, trajectory, journal] [expectation, character, low, ball, understanding, bowling, affective, happy, reason, strike, knocked, gutter, rating, physical, emotion, experiment, counterfactual, feel, scale, initial, sad, feeling, happier, unexpected, mental, mage, straight, felt, reasoning, social, going, explicitly, hit, examined, judge, equally, emotional, indicated] [] [high, experimenter, provided, ability, asked, preschool, correctly, practice, three, better, number, sally, understand, additional, young, difference, video, change] [final, order] [prior, outcome, alternative, choose, observed, higher, chose, theory, actual, choice, predict, agent] [left, figure]
On the Tragedy of Personnel Evaluation
Momme von Sydow, Niels Braus


In social-dilemma situations (public-good games) people may pursue their local, egoistic interests and thereby lower the global, overall payoff of their group and, paradoxically, even their own resulting payoff. One may also speak of intra-individual dilemmas, where people pursue local goals at the expense of their overall utility. Our experiments transfer this idea to personnel evaluation. Participants were put in the position of a Human Resources manager, who should for instance select workers who optimize the overall payoff of the company, rather than those who optimize only their specific payoffs. The results, however, suggest that most, albeit not all, participants tended to focus on directly comparing individuals without considering the overall contribution to a group. Thus employees with the best overall effects for a company may be evaluated the most negatively. This possible ‘tragedy of personnel evaluation’ may have a substantial negative impact on the effectiveness of companies or organizations.
[task, general, day, phase, condition] [experiment, people, evaluation, worker, social, company, work, cognitive, positive, evaluated, assigned, team, causal, negative, detection, presence, stable, understanding, discussion] [clearly, context, evolutionary, university, evolution, society] [group, working, contribution, majority, versus, management, lower, science, high] [local, table, global, small, increase] [altruist, earnings, personnel, individual, normal, utility, von, based, highest, lowest, best, tragedy, average, egoistic, optimize, round, randomly, well, manager, altruism, considering, fehr, operating, ignore, total, pursue, data, good, profit] [selection, figure, human, role, focus, critical]
Learning How To Throw Darts: The Effect Of Modeling Type And Reflection On Dart-Throwing Skills
Janneke van der Loo, Eefje Frissen, Emiel Krahmer


In this study we investigate the effect of modeling type and reflection on the acquisition of dart-throwing skills, self-efficacy beliefs and self-reaction scores by replicating a study by Kitsantas, Zimmerman, and Cleary (2000). Participants observing a coping model were expected to surpass participants observing a mastery model who in turn were expected to outperform participants who learned without a model. Reflection was hypothesized to have a positive effect. Ninety undergraduate students were tested three times on dart-throwing skills, self-efficacy beliefs, and self-reaction scores. Contrary to what was expected, we found no main effects of modeling type and reflection. No interaction effects were found either. There was an effect of trial, indicating that participants improved dart-throwing skills, self-efficacy beliefs, and self-reaction scores over time. Furthermore, self-efficacy beliefs and dart-throwing skill were highly correlated. Our results suggest that learners do not benefit from observing a model and reflecting, but practice makes perfect.
[learning, test, type, trial, second, journal, tested, improved, repeated, condition, learn, performing, indicating] [social, influence, throw, experience] [main, van, novice, basic] [reflection, observing, observational, mastery, coping, study, dart, practice, difference, asked, three, throwing, dartthrowing, feedback, better, skill, watched, video, kitsantas, score, question, started, educational, group, reflecting, third, numerically, selfreaction, performance, selfefficacy, scored] [acquisition, order, form, den, turn, writing, reflect, read] [model, modeling, correlation, played, higher, observed, lead, data, average, expected, measured, best, follow] [motor, process, interaction, performed, current]
Dissociable effects of cue validity on bias formation and reversal
Angelo Pirrone, Qi Zhang, Sheng Li


In two experiments we manipulated the prior probability of occurrence for two alternatives. After a first learning session, in a second session the cue to bias the decision was reversed. Our investigation shows that subjects are able to learn the reverse bias only when the bias of the first session is in line with their expected outcome. When, during the first session, the actual outcome of the bias is not in line with the expected outcome, there is an inhibition for the reversal bias learning in the second session. We investigate this phenomenon with computational models of choice showing that the inhibition of reversal is due to an increase in the rate at which subjects accumulate evidence for repeated, unexpected stimuli. We discuss a possible theoretical explanation that links this phenomenon to similar results found in the literature on reversal learning and to the effect of novelty on learning.
[session, reversal, drift, accuracy, learning, presented, starting, second, training, invalid, congruent, valid, incongruent, evidence, arrow, wrong, cue, learn, journal, rule, time, rdk, faster, peking, task, mulder, ddm, block, trial, stimulus, learned, reported, wrt, differed, showing, compared] [neutral, experiment, crt] [experimental, perceptual, discrimination, manipulated] [group, correct, change, modify, accurate, performance, three, department] [bias, occurrence, random, table] [decision, rate, point, validity, expected, model, diffusion, outcome, prior, opposite, accumulation, making, data, probability, based, biased, accumulated] [direction, performed, figure, interaction, pointing, rts, level, switched, human, behavioural, inhibition, associated]
Are we ON the same page? Monolingual and bilingual acquisition of familiar and novel relational language
Nathan George, Junko Kanero, Dorothee Chwilla, Daniel Weiss


Verbs and prepositions pose significant challenges in second language learning, as languages differ in how they map these relational terms onto events. Second language learners must put aside their language-specific lens to uncover how a new language operates, perhaps having to rediscover semantic distinctions typically ignored in the first language. The current study examines how the acquisition of these novel mappings are affected by characteristics of the learner and of the language to be learned. English monolinguals and Dutch-English bilinguals learned novel terms that corresponded to containment and support relations of either English, Dutch, or Japanese. Results show that English distinctions are learned best across groups, potentially reflecting predispositions in human cognition. No differences were found between monolinguals and bilinguals in any language condition. The characteristics of the language to be learned appear to play a prominent role in the acquisition of novel semantic categories.
[learning, second, novel, japanese, category, learned, presented, relational, learn, test, training, advantage, evidence, condition, suggests, attend, consisted, block, learner] [cognitive, mapping, cognition, future, excluded, appear, experiment] [language, lexicalization, dutch, bilingual, support, native, containment, university, main, oku, phonetic, expect, aan, nonce, acquiring, monolingual, background, van, degree, easier, outperform, hameru, ireru, spatial] [study, three, additional, worse, better, conducted, reflecting, performance] [english, semantic, acquisition, word, examine, relation, relative, ease, proficiency, verb] [well] [figure, current, pattern, level, process, performed, motion]
A Perception-Based Threshold for Bidirectional Texture Functions
Banafsheh Azari, Sven Bertel, Charles Wuethrich


For creating photorealistic images, Computer Graphics researchers introduced Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTFs), which use view- and illumination-dependent textures for rendering. BTFs require massive storage, and several proposals were made on how to compress them, but very few take into account human perception. We present and discuss an experimental study on how decreasing the texture resolution influences perceived quality of the rendered images. In a visual comparison task, observer quality judgments and gaze data were collected and analysed to determine the optimal downsampling of BTF data without significant loss of their perceived visual quality.
[second, pair, test, exposure, time, presentation, visually, block, viewer] [perceived, bidirectional, real, experiment, work, compression] [object, experimental] [three, study, group, reflection, material, incorrect, comparison, lower, correct, performance, equal, number] [quality, table, surface, order, analysis, subject, applied, existing] [data, higher, well, model, threshold, average, based, individual, collected] [image, btf, fixation, texture, visual, gaze, resolution, perception, btfs, computer, illumination, perceivable, figure, vdp, reflectance, afds, sofa, viewing, ffs, eye, light, filip, location, rendered, rendering, synthetic, downsampling, view, human]
Temporal Causal Strength Learning with Multiple Causes
Cory Derringer, Benjamin Rottman


When learning the relation between a cause and effect, how do people control for all the other factors that influence the same effect? Two experiments tested a hypothesis that people focus on events in which the target cause changes and all other factors remain stable. In both four-cause (Experiment 1) and eight-cause (Experiment 2) scenarios, participants learned causal relations more accurately when they viewed datasets in which only one cause changed at a time. However, participants in the comparison condition, in which multiple causes changed simultaneously, performed fairly well; in addition to focusing on events when a single cause changed, they also used events in which multiple causes changed for updating their beliefs about causal strength. These findings help explain how people are able to learn causal relations in situations when there are many alternative factors.
[condition, accuracy, learning, learn, time, trial, target, learner, tested, finding, cue, test, type] [causal, experiment, strength, focal, changed, positive, negative, people, neutral, stable, participant, cognitive, strong, viewed, influence, remain, relationship] [informative, updated, sleep, intercept] [change, three, number, better, controlling, control, created, subset, accurate, fairly, included, difference, help, course, effectiveness] [random, table, final, order, calculate, relative] [regression, data, set, alternative, update, datasets, bivariate, theory, updating, potential, based, logistic, probability, predicting, selected, predict, well] [multiple, figure, current, patient, transition, interaction]
A Unified Framework for Bounded and Unbounded Numerical Estimation
Dan Kim, John Opfer


Representations of numerical value have been assessed using bounded (e.g., 0-1000) and unbounded (e.g., 0-?) number-line tasks, with considerable debate regarding whether one or both tasks elicit unique cognitive strategies (e.g., addition or subtraction) and require unique cognitive models. To test this, we examined 86 5- to 9-year-olds' addition, subtraction, and estimation skill (bounded and unbounded). Against the measurement-skills hypothesis, estimates were even more logarithmic on unbounded than bounded number lines and were better described by conventional log-linear models than by alternative cognitive models. Moreover, logarithmic index values reliably predicted arithmetic scores, whereas model parameters of alternative models failed to do so. Results suggest that the logarithmic-to-linear shift theory provides a unified framework for numerical estimation with high descriptive adequacy and yields uniquely accurate predictions for children’s early math proficiency.
[task, condition, second, developmental, tested, evidence, test, development, suggests, response] [power, cognitive, account, examined] [shift, mixed, produced] [number, unbounded, bounded, numerical, estimation, logarithmic, mllm, subtraction, logarithmicity, addition, arithmetic, cohen, better, three, greater, magnitude, linear, sarnecka, cyclic, numeric, performance, scallop, opfer, unified, accurate, mspm, psychophysical, mcpms, require, study, conventional] [bias, order, unique] [model, parameter, predicted, fit, individual, data, best, based, actual, correlation, estimate, median, observed, expected, predict, provide] [framework, multiple, representation, figure]
The Relationship Between Inhibitory Control and Free Will Beliefs in 4-to 6-Year-Old-Children
Adrienne Wente, Titus Ting, Rosie Aboody, Tamar Kushnir, Alison Gopnik


This study explores the relationship between beliefs about self-control and the ability to exercise self-control in 4- to 6- year-old children. Sixty-eight children were asked a series of questions to gauge whether they believed that they could freely choose to act against their desires or inhibit themselves from performing desired actions. Children were also asked to provide qualitative explanations for why they could or could not exercise free will, and to complete two inhibitory control tasks: forbidden toy and day/night. Choice responses were negatively correlated with performance on the forbidden toy task, when children performed that task first. There was also a negative correlation between a belief in an internal locus of control, and success on the forbidden toy measure. Refraining from touching a forbidden toy appears to be correlated to less belief in free will. Though this may appear counter-intuitive, it is consistent with cross-cultural research.
[task, inhibitory, child, completed, executive, age, half, developmental, revealed, explore, suggests, day, development, presented, type, tested, counterbalanced] [relationship, desire, impossible, belief, indicated, explanation, possibility, social, anova, people, negative, explain, consistent, experience, series] [previous] [free, control, external, toy, forbidden, provided, score, experimenter, asked, question, answered, night, believed, difference, study, received, ice, passed, mind, ability, kushnir, department, practicing, functioning, exercise, drew, usa, better, practice, differ] [eat, order, table, locus, correlated] [choose, choice, theory, independent, correlation, wait, hall, provide, data] [internal, action, inhibition, fewer, food, desired, indicates]
Document Cohesion Flow: Striving towards Coherence
Scott Crossley, Mihai Dascalu, Stefan Trausan-Matu, Laura Allen, Danielle McNamara


Text cohesion is an important element of discourse processing. This paper presents a new approach to modeling, quantifying, and visualizing text cohesion using automated cohesion flow indices that capture semantic links among paragraphs. Cohesion flow is calculated by applying Cohesion Network Analysis, a combination of semantic distances, Latent Semantic Analysis, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, as well as Social Network Analysis. Experiments performed on 315 timed essays indicated that cohesion flow indices are significantly correlated with human ratings of text coherence and essay quality. Visualizations of the global cohesion indices are also included to support a more facile understanding of how cohesion flow impacts coherence in terms of semantic dependencies between paragraphs.
[reported, accuracy, size] [understanding, initial, automated, strong, evaluation] [previous, university, sort, latent, coherent, language, linguistic, calculated] [three, absolute, study, number, score, scored, conducted, difference, high, linear] [cohesion, text, flow, essay, coherence, global, quality, semantic, writing, local, paragraph, crossley, document, similarity, graph, adjacency, topological, raters, analysis, order, distance, lexical, discourse, organization, demonstrated, computational, examine, ordered, sequencing, correlated, table, topic, readerbench, measure, final, sat] [based, regression, average, provide, correlation, model, well, follow, predict] [human, network, overlap, feature, current, figure, element, developed]
Are children flexible speakers? Effects of typicality and listener needs in children’s event descriptions
Myrto Grigoroglou, Anna Papafragou


Do children take into account their addressees’ needs in spontaneous production? Developmental evidence for speaker adjustments is mixed. Some studies show that children are often under-informative when communicating with ignorant addressees but other studies demonstrate successes in children’s ability to integrate another person’s perspective. We asked whether children adapt their event descriptions depending on (a) the typicality of event components, and (b) the listener’s visual access to the events. We found that children’s ability to use information about the listener’s visual perspective to make specific adjustments to event descriptions emerged only in highly interactive contexts, in which participants collaborated towards mutual goals.
[age, test, child, older, journal, younger, evidence, compared, explore, revealed, task, showing, early, presentation, dell] [experiment, event, account, generic, sensitivity, discussion, man, participant, version] [access, atypical, addressee, typical, instrument, specific, typicality, referential, main, confederate, communicative, egocentric, informational, production, listener, contrastive, ignorant, communication, university, adjust, frequently, previous, delaware, watering, adapt, lockridge, experimental, mentioning, describing, brown, emerged, highly] [group, ability, difference, perspective, purpose, conducted, knowledge, circle, procedure, experimenter] [mention, mentioned, analysis] [agent, proportion] [visual, goal, interaction, computer, screen, figure]
Explanatory Biases in Social Categorization
Samuel Johnson, Haylie Kim, Frank Keil


Stereotypes are important simplifying assumptions we use for navigating the social world, associating traits with social categories. These beliefs can be used to infer an individual’s likely social category from observed traits (a diagnostic inference) or to make inferences about an individual’s unknown traits based on their putative social category (a predictive inference). We argue that these inferences rely on the same explanatory logic as other sorts of diagnostic and predictive reasoning tasks, such as causal explanation. Supporting this conclusion, we demonstrate that stereotype use involves four of the same biases known to be used in causal explanation: A bias against categories making unverified predictions (Exp. 1), a bias toward simple categories (Exp. 2), an asymmetry between confirmed and disconfirmed predictions of potential categories (Exp. 3), and a tendency to treat uncertain categorizations as certainly true or false (Exp. 4).
[evidence, category, complex, categorization, heard, deterministic, journal, chance, completed] [people, social, causal, personality, positive, negative, occupation, explanatory, experiment, explanation, cognitive, physical, simplicity, diagnostic, religion, work, belong, jamie, told, ethnicity, drink, taylor, reasoning, chener, trait, folian, scope, excluded, consistent, discussion, explain, recruited, case, psychological, account, occasionally, leading, martini, mechanical] [latent] [reputation, stereotype, science, traditional, help, versus, additional, difference] [bias, relative] [probability, simple, unknown, individual, making, based, predictive, conference, uncertain, piece, prior, infer, prediction, method, set, potential, inferred, amazon] [feature, associated, multiple]
Relation between bimanual coordination and whole-body balancing on a slackline
Kentaro Kodama, Yusuke Kikuchi, Hideo Yamagiwa


To reveal the fundamental skills involved in slacklining, this study examined a hypothesis regarding single-leg standing on a slackline. In the field of practice, instructors teach learners how to maintain balance on a swinging flat belt (slackline), such as by moving their hands in parallel. We hypothesized that bimanual coordination in the horizontal direction might contribute to dynamic balancing on a slackline. In our pilot study, two participants at different skill levels were asked to maintain their balance on a slackline as long as possible. The dynamic stability of bimanual coordination was assessed by a nonlinear time series analysis (cross recurrence quantification analysis), then compared among the participants. Bimanual coordination stability was higher in the experienced player than in the novice player. The results suggest that the single-leg standing skill might be correlated with bimanual coordination stability. Further investigations are expected to clarify this notion in the future.
[time, task, training, position, phase, standard, compared] [series, stability, fundamental, regarded, cognitive, stable, participant, sensitivity, long, case, experiment] [novice, shared, van] [balance, skill, study, maintain, investigate, three, hypothesized, control, greater, number, strategy, difficult, required, international, contributes] [analysis, relation, structure] [player, data, higher, noise, sample, model, based, method, hypothesis] [bimanual, coordination, slackline, dynamic, experienced, balancing, standing, figure, system, postural, slacklining, movement, recurrence, level, nonlinear, human, quantification, persistence, body, motor, dynamical, static, pattern, horizontal, move, maxl, longer, microscopic, motion, current, reveal, quiet, crqa, center, dofs, macroscopic, compensating, environment]
From embodied metaphors to metaphoric gestures
Margot Lhommet, Stacy Marsella


Humans turn abstract referents and discourse structures into gesture using metaphors. The semantic relation between abstract communicative intentions and their physical realization in gesture is a question that has not been fully addressed. Our hypothesis is that a limited set of primary metaphors and image schemas underlies a wide range of gestures. Our analysis of a video corpus supports this view: over 90% of the gestures in the corpus are structured by image schemas via a limited set of primary metaphors. This analysis informs the extension of a computational model that grounds various communicative intentions to a physical, embodied context, using those primary metaphors and image schemas. This model is used to generate gesture performances for virtual characters.
[shape, status, size, suggests, structured, verbal, rule] [virtual, physical, mental, social, metaphor, work, script, autonomous, reasoning, mapping, wide, depicting, scale] [gesture, communicative, object, metaphoric, generation, speech, university, speaker, depict, previous, meaning, language, multiagent, convey, eing, conversational, vertical, springer] [primary, grounded, international, intelligent, communicate, limited, video, impact] [abstract, corpus, concrete, analysis, discourse, computational, semantic, conceptual, list, text, relation, multimodal, structure] [model, set, generate, range, conference, behavior, based, distribution] [image, space, embodied, action, figure, nonverbal, location, represents, represent, framework, annotated, human]
Selecting Explanations from Causal Chains: Transitivity Intuitions Require Exportable Mechanisms
Jonas Nagel, Simon Stephan


When A causes B and B causes C, under what conditions is A a good explanation for the occurrence of C? We propose that distal causes are only perceived to be explanatory if the causal mechanism is insensitive to inessential variations of boundary conditions. In two experiments, subjects first observed deterministic A->B->C relationships in a single exemplar of an unknown kind. They judged A to be crucial for C by default. However, when they subsequently learned that the causal mechanism fails to generate the A->C dependency in other exemplars of the same kind, subjects devalued A as a crucial explanation for C even within the first exemplar. We relate these findings to the idea that good explanations pick out portable dependency relations, and that sensitive causes fail to meet this requirement.
[dependency, condition, exemplar, second, learned, pre, learning, half, indicating, position, complex, generalize, analogous, boundary, finding, sound, selective, displayed] [causal, sensitive, fish, relationship, experiment, explanation, distal, crucial, appropriateness, sensitivity, insensitive, influence, rating, explanatory, contingency, swarm, device, kind, physical, antenna, nagel, relevance, equally, mediated, stephan, variable, despite, dependence, presence, physiological, narrow, future, exportable] [proximal, gender, highly, context, domain] [asked, additional, high, three] [mechanism, occurrence, post, mediator, class, interpreted, perfect] [observed, alternative, good, outcome, estimate, hypothesis, simple, expected] [figure, brain, activity, single, chain, movement, system, human]
Causality, Normality, and Sampling Propensity
Thomas Icard, Joshua Knobe


We offer an account of the role of normality---both statistical and prescriptive---in judgments of actual causation. Using only standard tools from the literature on causal cognition, we argue that the phenomenon can be explained simply on the assumption that people stochastically sample (counterfactual) scenarios in a way that reflects perceived normality. We show that a formalization of this idea can account for some of the most puzzling qualitative patterns uncovered in recent experimental work on the topic.
[statistical, fixed] [causal, prescriptive, strength, counterfactual, case, coin, normality, people, sufficiency, dice, necessity, account, causation, caused, abnormal, disjunctive, roll, inclined, alex, regard, fact, suppose, administrative, faculty, accord, relevant, arises, explained, event, receptionist, detector, purely, factor, extent, supersession, moral, philosophy, police, billy, violates, cognitive, flip, stochastically, work, claim, precisely, professor, described, suzy, person] [degree, experimental, university] [impact, allowed, problem, greater, three] [measure, existing, exactly, reflect] [sampling, actual, consider, outcome, probabilistic, norm, probability, agent, determine, sample, paper, bayes, normal, model, drawn, depends, simple, underlying] [conjunctive, motion, role, supposed]
Using Subgoal Learning and Self-Explanation to Improve Programming Education
Lauren Margulieux, Richard Catrambone


The present study explored passive, active, and constructive methods of learning problem solving procedures. Using subgoal learning, which has promoted retention and transfer in procedural domains, the study compared the efficacy of different methods for learning a programming procedure. The results suggest that constructive methods produced better problem solving performance than passive or active methods. The amount of instructional support that learners received in the three different constructive interventions also affected performance. Learners performed best when they either received hints about the subgoals of the procedure or received feedback on the subgoal labels that they constructed, but not when they received both. These findings suggest that constructing subgoal labels is better than passively or actively engaging with subgoal labels. Furthermore, there is an optimal level of instructional support for students engaging in constructive learning and that providing too much support can be equally as detrimental as providing too little support.
[learning, label, condition, novel, task, receiving, completed, journal] [explain, constructing, participant, cognitive] [support, meaning, main] [subgoal, feedback, constructive, worked, subgoals, received, problem, solving, example, created, instructional, better, guided, procedure, passive, active, app, receive, programming, providing, create, study, asked, provided, transfer, performance, help, correct, click, guidance, unguided, knowledge, statistically, drum, catrambone, included, drag, improve, procedural, solve, promote, incorrect, effective, number, inventor] [include, analysis, applied, quality, structural, considered] [method, based, best, prior] [performed, figure, image, framework, classified, play]
The Effects of Gender Stereotypes for Structure Mapping in Mathematics
Kreshnik Begolli, Brooke Herd, Hannah Sayonno, Susanne Jaeggi, Lindsey Richland


Fear of a negative stereotype about one’s performance can lead to temporary underperformance on tests; e.g. women may underperform on a math test when prompted to think about gender. The current study extends this literature to examine whether stereotype threat not only leads to underperformance on tests, but also may impact reasoning and learning more broadly. We focus in particular on the effects of stereotype threat on analogical learning, a complex reasoning process that imposes a high working memory load. In this study, we examined the effects of gender stereotypes when females were asked to learn by comparing the mathematical concepts of combinations and permutations. Overall, participants given a threat before learning gained less from the instruction, as reflected by assessments administered immediately after the lesson and after a 1-week delay. This could lead to systematic differences in the quality of abstract representational knowledge for individuals from negatively stereotyped groups.
[learning, test, condition, analogical, journal, time, type, analogy, relational, learn, suggesting, exposed, examining] [story, unrelated, common, cognitive, schema, examined, social, work, negative] [gender, context, memory, combination, experimental, previous, delayed] [threat, stereotype, lesson, video, mathematics, instructional, study, working, performance, misleading, facilitory, posttest, richland, impact, mathematical, problem, solution, high, math, knowledge, lower, teaching, worse, strategy, mcdonough, reduce, correct, instruction, solve, question, greater, pretest, concept, number, permutation, comparing] [similarity, structure, core, order, surface] [based, state, higher, potential, lead] [role, current, represent]
Improving with Practice: A Neural Model of Mathematical Development
Sean Aubin, Aaron Voelker, Chris Eliasmith


The ability to improve in speed and accuracy as a result of repeating some task is an important hallmark of intelligent biological systems. We model the progression from a counting-based strategy for addition to a recall-based strategy. The model consists of two networks working in parallel: a slower basal ganglia loop, and a faster cortical network. The slow network methodically computes the count from one digit given another, corresponding to the addition of two digits, while the fast network gradually "memorizes" the output from the slow network. The faster network eventually learns how to add the same digits that initially drove the behaviour of the slower network. Performance of this model is demonstrated by simulating a fully spiking neural network that includes basal ganglia, thalamus and various cortical areas.
[learning, learn, response, presented, development, task, rule, learned, accuracy, reaction, developmental, complex, speed, faster] [cognitive, result] [memory, error, recall, apply] [counting, addition, grade, strategy, working, number, digit, numerical, progression, answer, dyscalculia, performance, thalamus, mathematical, incremented, example, magnitude, correct, predefined, international] [semantic, vector, table, plausible, count, similarity] [model, population, well, rate, simple, conference] [neural, heteroassociative, figure, spiking, representation, input, output, prefrontal, brain, network, basal, represent, pointer, level, single, cortical, cortex, current, learns, encoders, eliasmith, consists, desired, motor, architecture, activity, neuron, focus, numeracy, nef, behaviour, action]
Examining Referential Uncertainty in Naturalistic Contexts from the Child’s View: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Study with Infants
Yayun Zhang, Chen Yu


Young Infants are prolific word learners even though they are facing the challenge of referential uncertainty (Quine, 1960). Many laboratory studies have shown that infants are skilled at inferring correct referents of words from ambiguous contexts (Swingley, 2009). However, little is known regarding how they visually attend to and select the target object among many other objects in view when parents name it during everyday interactions. By investigating the looking pattern of 12-month-old infants using naturalistic first-person images with varying degrees of referential ambiguity, we found that infants’ attention is selective and they only select a small subset of objects to attend to at each learning instance despite the complexity of the data in the real world. This work allows us to better understand how perceptual properties of objects in infants’ view influence their visual attention, which is also related to how they select candidate objects to build word-object mappings.
[learning, target, attention, attend, label, time, statistical, size, learn, condition, suggesting, evidence, compare, silence, infant, labeling, looked, selective, visually, continuous, novel, complex, smith] [experiment, influence, person, cognitive, candidate, real] [object, select, referential, referent, perceptual, previous, degree, language, experimental] [correct, number, study, subset, free, young, knowledge, toy] [word, naming, entropy, ambiguous, natural, examine, small, direct, build] [data, uncertainty, proportion, selected, potential, based, uncertain, pay] [attended, view, visual, figure, gaze, location, eye, moment, system, environment, process, play, naturalistic, viewing, analyzing, centered, pattern, human]
The Naïve Utility Calculus unifies spatial and statistical routes to preference
Julian Jara-Ettinger, Felix Sun, Laura Schulz, Josh Tenenbaum


Humans can seamlessly infer what other people like, based on what they do. Broadly, two types of accounts have been proposed to explain different aspects of this ability. A first account focuses on inferences from spatial information: agents choose and move towards things they like. A second account focuses on inferences from statistical information: uncommon choices reveal preferences more clearly compared to common choices. Here we argue that these two kinds of inferences can be explained by the assumption that agents maximize utilities. We test this idea in a task where adult participants infer an agent’s preferences using a combination of spatial and statistical information. We show that our model predicts human answers with higher accuracy than a set of plausible alternative models.
[statistical, test, second, category, suggests, standard, compared, type, adult] [participant, inference, sensitive, work, common, people, intuitive, experiment, understanding, psychological, reason] [spatial, object, combination, rely] [three, better, difference] [table, computational] [model, agent, utility, nuc, confidence, cost, calculus, infer, preference, red, higher, green, correlation, miner, alternative, collecting, reward, assumes, assumption, full, collected, theory, navigate, distribution, predicted, mineral, based, set, considers, bayesian, closest, simpler, deviation, traveling, proportion, efficiently, choose, integrates, cookie] [lesion, human, figure, action, reveal, single, goal]
Task-set Selection in Probabilistic Environments: a Model of Task-set Inference
Ian W. Eisenberg, Russell A. Poldrack


To act effectively in a complicated, uncertain world, people often rely on task-sets (TSs) that define action policies over a range of stimuli. Effectively selecting amongst TSs requires assessing their individual utility given the current world state. However, the world state is, in general, latent, stochastic, and time-varying, making TS selection a difficult inference for the agent. An open question is how observable environmental factors influence an actor's assessment of the world state and thus the selection of TSs. We designed a novel task in which probabilistic cues predict one of two TSs on a trial-by-trial basis. With this task, we investigate how people integrate multiple sources of probabilistic information in the service of TS selection. We show that when action feedback is unavailable, TS selection can be modeled as “biased Bayesian inference”, such that individuals participants differentially weight immediate cues over TS priors when inferring the latent world state.
[task, stimulus, training, learning, trial, position, evidence, test, response, deterministic, rule, learn, explicit, phase, testing] [participant, people, inference, psychological, work, relationship, key, cognitive] [latent, vertical, context, select, relates] [feedback, idea, performance] [structure, recursion, analysis, computational, vector, distance] [model, tss, probabilistic, individual, choice, decision, based, prior, making, optimal, bayesian, parameter, probability, confidence, sts, true, fit, likelihood, estimate, behavior, infer, posterior, red, state, underlying, reinforcement, selected, collins, observer, population, knew, integrate, favor, hypothesis] [transition, action, current, selection, multiple, figure, matrix, encoded, defined, encoding, respond]
N400 amplitudes reflect change in a probabilistic representation of meaning: Evidence from a connectionist model
Milena Rabovsky, Steven S. Hansen, James L. McClelland


The N400 ERP component is widely used, but the cognitive functions underlying N400 amplitudes are still unclear. Recent simulations with a model of word meaning suggest that N400 amplitudes reflect implicit semantic prediction error. Here, we extend these simulations to sentence comprehension, using a model of sentence processing to simulate a number of N400 effects obtained in empirical research. In the model, sequentially incoming words update a representation capturing probabilities of elements of sentence meaning, not only reflecting the constituents presented so far, but also the model’s best guess at all features of the sentence meaning based on the statistical regularities in its environment. Across a series of simulations, the update of the predictive representation of sentence meaning consistently patterned with N400 amplitudes, in line with the idea that N400 amplitudes reflect semantic surprise as the change in the probability distribution over semantic features in an integrated representation of meaning.
[processing, presented, compared, congruent, erp, training, category, incongruent, reversal, presentation, correspondence, probed, learning] [described, connection, unrelated, unexpected, concerning, cognitive, influence, event, induced] [meaning, shared, language, specific, error, functional, filler, produced, context, van] [smaller, change, difference, larger, better] [semantic, sentence, word, reflect, lexical, approach, incoming, measure, computational, simulate, kutas, cloze] [model, probability, update, based, simulation, prediction, empirical, observed, set, underlying, distribution, probabilistic] [layer, activation, brain, surprise, network, feature, representation, repetition, output, component, categorically, current, trained, unit, neural, role, environment, canary, input]
Asking and evaluating natural language questions
Anselm Rothe, Brenden Lake, Todd Gureckis


The ability to ask questions during learning is a key aspect of human cognition. While recent research has suggested common principles underlying human and machine “active learning,” the existing literature has focused on relatively simple types of queries. In this paper, we study how humans construct rich and sophisticated natural language queries to search for information in a large yet computationally tractable hypothesis space. In Experiment 1, participants were allowed to ask any question they liked in natural language. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to evaluate questions that they did not generate themselves. While people rarely asked the most informative questions in Experiment 1, they strongly preferred more informative questions in Experiment 2, as predicted by an ideal Bayesian analysis. Our results show that rigorous information-based accounts of human question asking are more widely applicable than previously studied, explaining preferences across a diverse set of natural language questions.
[learning, task, revealed, size, trial, phase, type] [people, experiment, cognitive, work, participant, evaluate] [language, rich, blue, context, color, purple, reference, configuration, informative] [question, active, number, asked, score, science, answer, annual, demonstration, study, example, better, correctly, high, allowed] [natural, quality, analysis, large, frequency, table] [ship, expected, generated, model, game, tile, bayesian, rank, hypothesis, red, eig, painting, choice, machine, best, query, set, sampling, conference, bonus, data, gain, occupied, simple, battleship, distribution, row, selected, prior, good, ideal, higher, remaining, function] [human, figure, location, space, column, single, left]
Sequential images are not universal, or Caveats for using visual narratives in experimental tasks
Neil Cohn


Sequential images have frequently been used as experimental stimuli in the cognitive and psychological sciences to explore topics like theory of mind, temporal cognition, discourse, social intelligence, and event sequencing, among others. The assumption has been that sequential images provide a fairly universal and transparent stimuli that require little to no learning to decode, and thus are ideal for non-verbal tasks in developmental, clinical, and non-literate populations. However, decades of cross-cultural and developmental research have actually suggested something different: that sequential image comprehension is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. I here review this literature and advocate for more sensitivity to the “fluency” needed to understand sequential images.
[sequential, picture, age, journal, exposure, developmental, child, sequence, japanese, arrangement, cohn, complex, africa, comic, manga, learning, broadcasting, test, second, construe, conveying] [narrative, understanding, continuity, cognitive, work, temporal, character, cognition, appear, event, interpreting, experience, social, psychological, united, including] [experimental, language, basic, south, perceptual, meaning, degree, memory, production, university] [ability, study, understand, educational, practice, recognize, require, question] [comprehension, structure, modulated, proficiency, british, fluency, reflect] [prior, requires, provide, inform] [visual, image, figure, activity, pictorial, graphic, system, constraint, brain]
Deciding to Remember: Memory Maintenance as a Markov Decision Process
Jordan W. Suchow, Tom Griffiths


Working memory is a limited-capacity form of human memory that actively holds information in mind. Which memories ought to be maintained? We approach this question by showing an equivalence between active maintenance in working memory and a Markov decision process in which, at each moment, a cognitive control mechanism selects a memory as the target of maintenance. The challenge of remembering is to find a suitable maintenance policy. We compute the optimal policy under various conditions and define plausible cognitive mechanisms that can approximate them. Framing the problem of maintenance in this way makes it possible to capture in a single model many of the essential behavioral phenomena of memory maintenance, including directed forgetting and self-directed remembering. Finally, we consider the case of imperfect metamemory — where the current state of memory is only partially observable — and show that the fidelity of metamemory determines the effectiveness of maintenance.
[directed, learning, time, family, cued, task, journal, forgetting, target] [cognitive, assigned, strength, case, temporal, strong, determines] [memory, maintenance, remembering, metamemory, object, remembered, studied, remember, graded, recall, reproducing, priority, context] [working, control, number, problem, performance, allocation, selects, mind, resource, strategy, benefit, difference, maintain] [random, direct, mechanism, plausible] [reward, state, policy, decision, optimal, luce, probability, agent, function, partially, quantum, model, observable, set, behavior, consider, chosen, williams, depend, mdp, imperfect, best, distribution, memorizer, suchow, choice, worst, bjork, proportion] [process, markov, action, current, human, defined, behavioral, visual, transition, system, figure, framework, space, sensor]
Process Modeling of Qualitative Decision Under Uncertainty
David Broniatowski, Valerie Reyna


Fuzzy-trace theory assumes that decision-makers process qualitative “gist” representations and quantitative “verbatim” representations in parallel. Here, we develop a formal model of fuzzy-trace theory that explains both processes. The model also integrates effects of individual differences in numeracy, metacognitive monitoring and editing, and sensation seeking. Parameters of the model varied in theoretically meaningful ways with differences in numeracy, monitoring, and sensation seeking, accounting for risk preferences at multiple levels. Relations to current theories and potential extensions are discussed.
[chance, categorical, journal, compare, compared, stimulus, presented] [framing, frame, mental, cognitive, possibility, extended, consistent, psychological, prefer, account, mapping, personality] [manipulated, experimental, criterion] [problem, ordinal, number, high, mathematical, seeking] [subject, interpretation, order, interpreted, weighted, table] [decision, model, option, money, risky, individual, preferred, choose, gist, choice, theory, data, sensation, winning, risk, sample, stanovich, gamble, nfc, gain, interval, probability, point, loss, leboeuf, total, average, based, proportion, chosen, higher, mle, additive, pnfc, hierarchy, estimate, set, estimated, logistic] [representation, numeracy, associated, process, space, represent, reverse, level, design, multiple, analytic]
Learning Non-Adjacent Dependencies in Continuous Presentation of an Artificial Language
Hao Wang, Jason Zevin, Toben Mintz


Many grammatical dependencies in natural language involve elements that are not adjacent, such as between the subject and verb in the child always runs. To date, most experiments showing evidence of learning non-adjacent dependencies have used artificial languages in which the to-be-learned dependencies are presented in isolation by presenting the minimal sequences that contain the dependent elements. However, dependencies in natural language are not typically isolated in this way. In this study we exposed learners to non-adjacent dependencies in long sequences of words. We accelerated the speed of presentation and learners showed evidence for learning of non-adjacent dependencies. The previous pause-based positional mechanisms for learning of non-adjacent dependency are challenged.
[learning, dependency, artificial, presentation, nonadjacent, position, half, test, trial, testing, presented, training, counterbalancing, statistical, novel, consisted, heard, auditory, sequence, learn, randomized, radio, adjacent, newport, indicate, participated, child, ungrammatical, condition, occur, continuous] [experiment, rating, cognitive, scale, long, low, kind, clear, detection] [language, previous, variability, speech, grammatical, item, contained, memory, university] [question, three, presenting, number, answer, hard, correct, linear, asked] [word, sentence, natural, distributional, syntactic, dependent, subject, embedded, concatenated, positional, edge, order, random] [rate, success, intermediate, making] [start, pattern, current, play, design, suggested]
Coordinate to cooperate or compete: Abstract goals and joint intentions in social interaction
Max Kleiman-Weiner, Mark Ho, Joseph Austerweil, Michael Littman, Josh Tenenbaum


Successfully navigating the social world requires reasoning about both high-level strategic goals, such as whether to cooperate or compete, as well as the low-level actions needed to achieve those goals. We develop a hierarchical model of social agency that infers the intentions of other agents, strategically decides whether to cooperate or compete with them, and then executes either a cooperative or competitive planning program. Learning occurs across both high-level strategic decisions and low-level actions leading to the emergence of social norms. We test predictions of this model in multi-agent behavioral experiments using rich video-game like environments. By grounding strategic behavior in a formal model of planning, we develop abstract notions of both cooperation and competition and shed light on the computational nature of joint intentionality.
[learning, competition, trial, generalize, pair, time] [social, work, reasoning, develop, cognitive, dilemma, future] [previous, intention, acting] [square, group, number, require] [abstract, cluster, include, mode, mechanism] [planning, cooperation, model, agent, cooperative, behavior, strategic, player, game, cooperate, data, competitive, stochastic, utility, compete, jointly, theory, based, consider, realize, individual, lesioned, round, cote, choose, infer, well, reinforcement, distribution, rate, max, policy, good] [joint, action, coordination, goal, figure, reached, space, human, behavioral, move, plan, hierarchical, interaction, single, allows]
A Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory Perspective on Dual-Processing Accounts of Decision-Making under Uncertainty
Marieke M. J. W. van Rooij, Luis H. Favela


Dual-processing accounts of reasoning have gained renewed attention in the past decade, particularly in the fields of social judgment, learning, and decision-making under uncertainty. Although the various accounts differ, the common thread is the distinction between two qualitatively different types of reasoning: explicit/implicit, rational/affective, fast/slow, etc. Consequently, much research has focused on characterizing the two different processes. Less extensive are the attempts to find mediators that influence which process is used. In this paper, we argue that the missing perspective on these dual-processing theories is rooted in dynamical systems theory. By shifting the perspective to the dynamic interaction and transitions between different types of reasoning, we provide a theoretical framework for dual-processing with an emphasis on phase transitions. As a special case, we focus on dual-processing in decision-making and judgment under uncertainty for which we will propose suggestions for future experimental evaluation.
[phase, complex, journal, processing, type, development] [cognitive, reasoning, social, psychological, dual, understanding, judgment, strong, cognition, evans, common, case, thinking, relationship, mit, clear] [van, experimental, conscious, university] [control, change, science, perspective, mind, ice, water, activate, difficulty, number, ability] [order, theoretical, conceptual, approach, temperature, dependent, liquid] [theory, behavior, lack, uncertainty, model, qualitative, utilize, risky, note, observed] [system, nonlinear, dynamical, human, dynamic, transition, catastrophe, qualitatively, behavioral, focus, process, interaction, framework, critique, dualprocessing, current, brain, perception, dualprocess]
From uh-oh to tomorrow: Predicting age of acquisition for early words across languages
Mika Braginsky, Daniel Yurovsky, Virginia Marchman, Mike Frank


Why do children learn some words earlier than others? Regularities and differences in the age of acquisition for words across languages yield insights regarding the mechanisms guiding word learning. In a large-scale corpus analysis, we estimate the ages at which 9,200 children learn 300-400 words in seven languages, predicting them on the basis of independently-derived linguistic, environmental, and conceptual factors. Predictors were surprisingly consistent across languages, but varied across development and as a function of lexical category (e.g., concreteness predicted nouns while linguistic structure predicted function words). By leveraging data at a significantly larger scale than previous work, our analyses highlight the power that emerges from unifying previously disparate theories, but also reveal the amount of reliable variation that still remains unexplained.
[age, predictor, development, vocabulary, category, learning, early, learned, child, indicate, developmental, learn, journal] [work, arousal, valence, relationship, scale, understanding, sensitive, consistency, consistent, swedish] [language, previous, spanish, utterance, linguistic, russian, turkish, highly] [number, linear, change, question, limited, appears] [word, frequency, acquisition, lexical, mlu, cdi, concreteness, english, aoa, length, conceptual, min, wordbank, relative, babiness, childes, corpus, approach, examine, analysis, coefficient, table, amount, theoretical, earlier, complexity] [data, function, estimate, max, collected, model, predicting, fit, estimated, predict, higher, based, individual] [figure]
Effects of Gesture on Analogical Problem Solving: When the Hands Lead you Astray
Autumn Hostetter, Mareike Wieth, Katlyn Foster, Keith Moreno, Jeffery Washington


We investigated the role of speech-accompanying gestures in analogical problem solving. Participants attempted to solve Duncker’s (1945) Radiation Problem after reading and retelling a story that described an analogous solution in a different domain. Participants were instructed to gesture, instructed not to gesture, or given no instructions regarding gesture as they retold the story. Participants who were instructed to gesture as they retold the analogous story were more likely to mention perceptual details in their description and less likely to apply the analogous solution to the problem than participants who were instructed not to gesture. These results suggest that gestures can be detrimental to analogous problem solving when the perceptual elements of a story are irrelevant to its schematic similarity with a problem.
[analogical, target, condition, general, analogous] [story, source, told, schema, military, connection, medical, radiation, cognitive, notice, psychological, explanation, mental, formation] [gesture, instructed, perceptual, gestured, convergence, gesturing, spatial, produced, studied, retold, noticing, memory, beilock, multiplicity, retelling, specific, hostetter, strengthen, thomas, experimental, lleras, retell] [problem, solution, solving, solve, spontaneously, difficult, army, included, encourage, smaller, experimenter, three, schematic, concept, difference, appears, study, help] [producing, similarity, applied, form, large, small, mention] [fortress, likelihood, generate, success] [multiple, focus, involved, hand, representation, moving, role, eye, tumor, represent, motor, system]
Stable Causal Relationships are Better Causal Relationships
Nadya Vasilyeva, Thomas Blanchard, Tania Lombrozo


We report two experiments investigating whether people’s judgments about causal relationships are sensitive to the robustness or stability of such relationships across a wide range of background circumstances. We demonstrate that people prefer stable causal relationships even when overall causal strength is held constant, and show that this effect is unlikely to be driven by a causal generalization’s actual scope of application. This documents a previously unacknowledged factor that shapes people’s causal reasoning.
[type, evidence, presented, target, condition, suggesting, revealed] [causal, relationship, stability, experiment, strength, moderator, moderated, sore, explanatory, yonas, judgment, circumstance, held, explanation, zelmos, stable, variable, salty, sexual, split, cognitive, people, covariation, scope, sex, enabling, relevant, strong, extent, sensitive, respect, herpes, fresh, scientist, agree, influence, thrombosis, drinking, claim, sense, gerstenberg, sexually, causally, nonmoderated] [background, main, varied, mixed] [water, vein, additional, difference, science, guidance, asked] [eating, structure, frequency, token, table] [actual, population, average, sample, rate, outcome, higher, range, consider, agent] [figure, unstable, deep, role, activity]
Emotional influences on time perception
Anna K. Trapp, Manfred Thüring


In studies on prospective time perception, a prolonging effect of arousal on time estimates is commonly reported for durations under 2s while the effect vanishes for longer intervals. In this study, we investigated how arousal and pleasure induced by aural stimuli varying in volume and valence influenced reproductions in the range from 1.1s to 5s. As expected, higher arousal was associated with higher estimates for 1.1s durations. However, this effect was also found for 3.8s durations. An additional analysis with linear mixed models revealed an interaction between volume manipulation and subjective ratings regarding arousal and pleasure. Based on these results we propose that subjective experience of the emotional quality of stimuli might be interesting for further research on prospective time perception. Moreover, the results showed that not only within subject variation should be statistically controlled when analyzing such data. Instead, statistical models should also include parameters controlling for stimulus material.
[time, compared, speed, reported, statistical, revealed, presented, fixed, timing, induction, continuous, sound] [arousal, emotional, valence, neutral, clock, pleasure, ptrs, negative, anova, low, noulhiane, prolonging, cognitive, lmm, loud, prospective, ptr, gil, rating, factor, including, respect, described, aural, led, affective, indicated, psychology, emotion, reproduction, version] [mixed, variation, support, main] [volume, linear, difference, high, conducted, smaller, study, help, group, magnitude, ranging, impact, report] [random, analysis, increase, variance, include] [well, data, higher, model, subjective, hypothesis, increasing] [duration, perception, longer, interaction, medium, visual, level, averaged]
The Relational SNARC: Spatial Representation of Nonsymbolic Ratios?
Percival Matthews, Rui Meng, Elizabeth Toomarian, Edward Hubbard


Recent research has highlighted the operation of a ratio processing system that represents the analog magnitudes of nonsymbolic ratios. This study investigated whether such representations would demonstrate spatial associations parallel to the SNARC (spatial numeric association of response codes) effect previously demonstrated with whole number magnitudes. Participants judged whether nonsymbolic ratio test stimuli were larger or smaller than reference stimuli using response keys located alternately either on the left or on the right side of space. Larger ratio magnitudes were associated with the right side of space and smaller magnitudes with the left. These results demonstrate that nonsymbolic ratio magnitudes – defined relationally by pairs of components – are characterized by a left-to-right spatial mapping. The current focus on ratio magnitudes expands our understanding of the basic human perceptual apparatus and how it might provide tools that grant intuitive access to more advanced numerical concepts beyond whole numbers.
[stimulus, processing, test, presented, journal, standard, response, reaction, faster, type] [understanding, cognitive, mental, white, street, black, psychological, told, negative] [spatial, experimental, reference, basic, varied, access, perceptual] [ratio, nonsymbolic, number, magnitude, circle, dot, fraction, symbolic, numerical, smaller, larger, composed, ability, three, comparison, study, drt, analog, usa, educational, johnson, denominator, asked, department, numerator, school, numerosity] [snarc, association, demonstrated, panel, small] [individual, sample] [human, current, figure, space, perception, hand, left, representation, represents, process]
Dynamical systems modeling of the child--mother dyad: Causality between child-directed language complexity and language development
Jeremy Irvin, Daniel Spokoyny, Fermin Moscoso del Prado Martin


We model the causal links between child language (CL) and child-directed language (CDL). We take pairs of sequences of linguistic measurements from a longitudinal study. Each child-mother pair of sequences is considered as an instance of the trajectory of a high-dimensional dynamical system. We then use Multispatial Convergent Cross Mapping to ascertain the directions of causality between the pairs of sequences, that is, whether the complexity of CL drives that of CDL, the complexity of CDL drives that of CL, both, or neither. We find that children are responsive to the amount of speech and the diversity of words produced by their mothers, but not vice-versa. However, the syntactic diversities of the children's utterances drive the syntactic diversity of the mothers' utterances. This is evidence for fine-grained fine-tuning of CDL in response only to the syntax of CL.
[child, development, time, evidence, journal, vocabulary, response, cross, adult, developmental, size] [causal, cognitive, causality, series, presence, variable, version, strong, talking, reconstructed] [language, produced, university, van, evolution, speech, contained, linguistic, cambridge] [number, three, science] [complexity, shadow, syntactic, direct, cdl, diversity, manifold, del, prado, acquisition, lexical, short, order, length, moscoso, longitudinal, richness, detailed, technique, measure, increase, recovered, sugihara, corpus, mlus, embedding, analysis] [model, provide, sample, measured, find, point, considering] [system, dynamical, multiple, coupled, ccm, interaction, input, convergent, single, role, level, human, original]
Definitely maybe and possibly even probably: efficient communication of higher-order uncertainty
Michele Herbstritt, Michael Franke


Possibility and probability expressions, like possibly or probably, are frequently assumed to communicate that the probability of a proposition is above a certain threshold. Most previous empirical research on these expressions has focused on cases of known objective chance: if the true objective probability is given, would a speaker use possibly, probably or one of their kin? Here, we investigate the use of probability expressions when speakers have subjective uncertainty about objective chance, i.e., higher-order uncertainty. Experimental data suggest that speakers’ choices of a probability expression is a complex function of their state of higher-order uncertainty. We formulate a computational probabilistic model of pragmatic speaker behavior that explains the experimental data.
[complex, chance, suggests, verbal, standard, wearing, evidence, picture] [possibility, work, belief, factor, ball, imagine, experiment, result, version, appropriate, proposition] [experimental, message, access, content, speaker, previous, affect, drawing] [number, free, better, investigate] [semantics, computational, table, expressed] [model, probability, uncertainty, red, objective, urn, data, observed, choice, agent, simple, posterior, pragmatic, likelihood, state, drawn, modeling, bayesian, based, draw, prior, bayes, nested, randomly, probabilistic, uncertain, behavior, rationality, aic, rsa, definitely, proportion, favor, observe, credible, predict, rational, observation, regression, goodman, consider, sender, call, setup] [figure, expression, level, interaction]
First things first? Top-down influences on event apprehension
Johannes Gerwien, Monique Flecken


Not much is known about event apprehension, the earliest stage of information processing in elicited language production studies, using pictorial stimuli. A reason for our lack of knowledge on this process is that apprehension happens very rapidly (<350 ms after stimulus onset, Griffin & Bock 2000), making it difficult to measure the process directly. To broaden our understanding of apprehension, we analyzed landing positions and onset latencies of first fixations on visual stimuli (pictures of real-world events) given short stimulus presentation times, presupposing that the first fixation directly results from information processing during apprehension.
[presentation, condition, time, stimulus, task, processing, compared, exposure, type, verbal] [event, experiment, respect, manipulation, cognitive, indicated, white, described, basis] [language, apprehension, spanish, specific, ger, german, message, linguistic, object, specificity, directly, reference, production, coded, bock, native, produced, aoi, error, main, term, generation] [three, study, comparing] [flexibility, verb, sentence, short, table] [agent, data, estimate, model] [fixation, action, duration, visual, spa, location, scene, process, eye, fewer, level, longer, figure, region, representation, encoding, area, system, viewing]
The Description-Experience Gap in Risky Choice Framing
Gaëlle Vallée-Tourangeau, Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, Madhuri Ramasubramanian


We examined whether the classical framing effect observed with the Asian Disease problem could be reversed when people make decisions from experience. Ninety-five university students were randomly allocated to one of three conditions: Description, Sampling (where the participants were allowed to sample through the outcomes presented as a pack of cards) and Interactive (where the participants were invited to spread out all possible outcomes in a sample) and made three gain-framed choices and three loss-framed choices, with two filler tasks after the first three choices. The results revealed a significant interaction effect between framing and choice condition. In the Description choice condition, participants were more risk-seeking with loss-framed problems. This pattern was reversed in the Sampling choice condition where participants were more risk-seeking with gain frames. Finally, the Interactive choice condition resulted in a classic pattern of framing effect, whereby people were more risk averse in the domain of gains.
[condition, presented, task, reversal, processing, evidence] [framing, people, frame, descriptive, disease, valence, experience, negative, front, scale, social, cognition, gap, cognitive, mental, positive, reasoning] [description, experimental, university, program, spread, support] [interactive, three, asked, interactivity, score, problem, reversed, kingston, allowed, impact, understand, ecology] [examine, illustrates] [sampling, choice, loss, gain, risky, option, risk, individual, decision, asian, outcome, explicated, sample, observed, expected, preference, making, risktaking, hertwig, uncertain, distribution, classic, choose, probability, recreational, behavior, alternative] [figure, representation, pattern, human, experienced]
Transfer of Cognitive Skills in Developmental Tasks
Sarah Rupp, Niels Taatgen


The main question we try to answer in this paper is whether stage-like progression in cognitive development can be explained by transfer of cognitive skill among tasks. We focus on the following question: To what extent does training on one task improve the performance on another task? The tasks are Piaget’s (1959) Balance Scale Task and Number Conservation Task, and a task that we will call the Une-Sentence Task, which is taken from Karmiloff-Smith's (1979) experiment on the acquisition of determiners in French. We re-implemented already existing models within the framework of the PRIMs cognitive architecture (Taatgen, 2013). Each task was subdivided in certain stages related to the complexity of the problem-solving strategies. We show that mastery of a certain stage of a problem becomes easier if a higher stage of another task is mastered first.
[task, training, dimension, developmental, second, learn, general, subordinate, development, learning, child, time, tested, phase, testing, learned] [cognitive, case, scale, account, explain, explained, work] [shared, combination, support, french, van, interesting, main, university, specific] [stage, balance, transfer, progress, number, prims, three, performance, mastery, idea, identical, third, knowledge, better, lower, skill, question, conservation, study, mastered, step, problem, difference, answer, correct, modeled, helpful, taatgen] [sentence, examine, word, distance, approach, structure, boy, amount] [model, decision, theory, based, paper, consider, call, higher, decide, average] [figure, dominant, multiple, weight, single, process, indicates, trained, transition]
Cognitive biases and social coordination in the emergence of temporal language
Tessa Verhoef, Esther Walker, Tyler Marghetis


Humans spatialize time. This occurs within individual minds and also in larger, shared cultural systems like language. Understanding the origins of space-time mappings requires analyses at multiple levels, from initial individual biases to cultural evolution. Here we present a laboratory experiment that simulates the cultural emergence of space-time mappings. Dyads had to communicate about temporal concepts using only a novel, spatial signaling device. Over the course of their interactions, participants rapidly established semiotic systems that mapped systematically between time and space. These semiotic systems exhibited a number of similarities, but also striking idiosyncrasies. By foregrounding the interaction of mechanisms that operate on disparate timescales, laboratory experiments can shed light on the commonalities and variety found in space-time mappings in languages around the world.
[time, target, novel, increased, fixed, sequence, touch, deictic, complex, sequential, accuracy] [temporal, cognitive, social, systematic, future, initial, consistent, strong, experience, extent] [language, vertical, spatial, cultural, semiotic, evolution, emergence, meaning, communication, shared, domain, communicative, calculated, linguistic, university, variability] [communicate, incorrect, difference, three, correct, number, course, study, bar] [structure, distance, semantic, random, order, associate, relative, english, abstract, earlier, natural, entirely, relation, combined, similarity] [model, round, individual, pairwise, game] [space, duration, signal, interaction, system, dyad, location, figure, associated, coordination, human, defined]
A performance model for early word learning
Michael Frank, Molly Lewis, Kyle MacDonald


The emergence of language around a child’s first birthday is one of the greatest transformations in human development. Does this transition require a fundamental shift in the child’s knowledge or beliefs, or could it instead be attributable to more gradual changes in processing abilities? We present a simple model of cognitive performance that supports the second conclusion. The premise is that any cognitive operation requires multiple steps, each of which require some time to complete and have some probability of failure. We use meta-analysis to estimate these parameters for two components of simple ostensive word learning: social cue use and word recognition. When combined in our model, these estimates suggest that learning should be very difficult for children younger than around a year, especially with gaze alone. This model takes a first step towards quantifying performance limitations for cognitive development and may be broadly applicable to other developmental changes.
[learning, developmental, reaction, accuracy, cue, time, speed, early, processing, age, fernald, reported, development, learn, evidence, indicate, target, complex, older, stanford, ostensive, adult, yurovsky] [social, cognitive, temporal, psychology, mental, psychological, failure, strong, work, mapping] [language, basic, frank, null, referential] [performance, change, number, literature, sum, department, product] [word, analysis, link, kail, large] [model, probability, data, success, estimated, estimate, function, distribution, simple, successful, fit, set, theory, rate, individual, dashed, consider, parameter] [gaze, figure, pointing, operation, chain, recognition, internal, parametric, single, current]
Referential choice in identification and route directions
Adriana Alexandra Baltaretu, Emiel Krahmer, Alfons Maes


Though communicative goals are an important element in language production, few studies investigate the extent to which these goals might affect the form and content of referring expressions. In this study, we directly contrast two tasks with different goals: identification and instruction giving. Speakers had to refer to a target building nearby or further away, so that their addressee would distinguish it between other buildings (identification) or give route directions and use the same building as a landmark (instructions). Our results showed that irrespective of goals, the referring expressions consisted of the same types of attributes, yet the attribute frequency and formulation differed. In the identification task, references were longer, contained more locative and more post-nominal modifiers. In addition, referential choices were influenced by the visual distance between the speaker and the target: when the speaker observed the target from far, references were longer and contained more often locative modifiers.
[target, task, type, size, consisted, compared, journal, complex] [influence, extent, account, white, factor, close] [building, referring, route, communicative, identification, object, speaker, reference, addressee, van, language, experimental, produced, generation, production, spatial, affect, main, color, refer, description, contained, converging, marked, der, locative] [difference, number, asked, international, study, correct] [distance, random, length, order, noun, lexical, computational, structure, corpus, frequency, turn, natural, association, table, discourse] [model, distribution] [visual, location, figure, goal, interaction, focus, longer, pointing, expression, direction]
Statistical learning creates novel object associations via transitive relations
Yu Luo, Jiaying Zhao


A remarkable ability of the cognitive system is the creation of new knowledge based on prior experiences. What cognitive mechanisms support such knowledge creation? We propose that statistical learning not only extracts existing relationships between objects, but also generates new associations between objects that have never been directly associated. Participants viewed a continuous color sequence consisting of base pairs (e.g., A-B, B-C), and learned these pairs. Importantly, they also successfully learned a novel pair (A-C) that could only be associated through transitive relations between the base pairs (Exp1). This learning, however, was not successful with three base pairs (e.g., learning A-D from A-B, B-C, C-D), revealing a limit in this transitive process (Exp2). Beyond temporal associations, novel transitive associations can also be formed across categorical hierarchies (Exp3), but with limits (Exp4&5). The current findings suggest that statistical learning provides an efficient scaffold through which new object associations are transitively created.
[base, pair, novel, learning, statistical, park, learned, familiar, categorical, country, test, chance, foil, subordinate, superordinate, formed, reliably, automatically, presented, reported, task, second, served, explicit, appeared, exposure, learn, suggesting, sequence, awareness, suggests, tested, participated, journal, ubc] [experiment, temporal, people, cognitive, inference, discussion, participant, work, implicit, psychological] [color, directly, memory, previous, specific, noticing, object] [knowledge, three, procedure, number, study, course, performance, circle, correctly, percent, third] [transitive, form, reflect, order, association, limit, examine, dotted] [city, chosen, based, prior] [level, visual, associated, current, figure, corresponding]
The Relationship Between the Numerical Distance Effect and Approximate Number System Acuity is Non-Linear
Dana Chesney


People can estimate numerical quantities, like the number of grapes in a bunch, using the Approximate Number System (ANS). Individual differences in this ability (ANS acuity) are emerging as an important predictor in research areas ranging from math skills to judgment and decision making. One commonly used ANS acuity metric is the size of the Numerical Distance Effect (NDE): the amount of savings in RT or errors when distinguishing stimuli values as the numerical distance between them increases. However, the validity of this metric has recently been questioned. Here, we model the relationship between the NDE-size and ANS acuity. We demonstrate that the relationship between NDE-size and ANS acuity should not be linear, but rather should resemble an inverted J-shaped distribution, with the largest NDE-sizes typically being found for near average ANS acuities.
[journal, size, half, standard, pair, task, faster, stimulus, accuracy, evidence] [relationship, people, perceived, close, judgment] [error, distinguish, experimental, referred, calculated] [numerical, magnitude, acuity, number, smaller, larger, comparison, symbolic, modeled, ratio, greater, approximate, difference, nde, erfc, moyer, absolute, acta, math, sekuler, ranging, erfcs, ability, linear, counting, better] [distance, small, large, amount, theoretical, typically, dependent] [individual, model, yield, range, ideal, based, predict, metric, decision, distribution, proportion, find, well, rate, validity] [overlap, figure, central, system, rts, pattern]
Fractal Scaling and Implicit Bias: A Conceptual Replication of Correll (2008)
Mary Jean Amon, John G. Holden


A racial priming article claimed that, relative to a control condition, an exotic variety of variability, called 1/ƒ noise, is altered when stereotypes impact participants’ judgments in an implicit prejudice task (Correll, 2008). However, Madurski and LeBel (2014) recently described two powerful, faithfully cloned, and apparently decisive studies that each failed to return a successful literal replication of Correll’s report. Madurski and LeBel outlined and subsequently eliminated several potential extraneous reasons for their replication failures, such as different participant demographics, participant non-compliance, poor psychometrics, and hardware discrepancies. By contrast, this article reports a successful conceptual replication of the pattern reported by Correll. Notably, this conceptual replication required adjustments to Correll’s original method and statistical analyses. All the changes were dictated by a systems theory of 1/ƒ noise that was largely in place prior to Correll’s report. Implications for the replication debate are discussed, with emphasis on contextualizing implicit cues.
[replication, scaling, optimized, avoid, task, response, statistical, spectral, time, baseline, fractal, correll, journal, sda, trial, madurski, lebel, weapon, presented, spectrum, reliable, identify, condition, standard, pink, orden, compelling, holden] [racial, white, methodological, implicit, black, participant, power, race, manipulation, sensitive, social, established, described, cognitive, psychological, series, psychology] [van, literal, error, variability, experimental, priming, identification, university, contrast] [control, difference, impact, practice] [bias, conceptual, analysis, relative, theoretical, derived] [uncertainty, data, noise, observed, rate, potential, sampling, successful, quantum, predicted] [original, coordination, reveal, pattern, human, figure, tool]
Controlled vs. Automatic Processing: A Graph-Theoretic Approach to the Analysis of Serial vs. Parallel Processing in Neural Network Architectures
Sebastian Musslick, Biswadip Dey, Kayhan Ozcimder, Mostofa Patwary, Theodore L. Willke, Jonathan D. Cohen


The limited ability to simultaneously perform multiple tasks is one of the most salient features of human performance and a defining characteristic of controlled processing. Based on the assumption that multitasking constraints arise from shared representations between individual tasks, we describe a graph-theoretic approach to analyze these constraints. Our results are consistent with previous numerical work (Feng et al., 2014), showing that even modest amounts of shared representation induce dramatic constraints on the parallel processing capability of a network architecture. We further illustrate how this analysis method can be applied to specific neural networks to efficiently characterize the full profile of their parallel processing capabilities. We present simulation results that validate theoretical predictions, and discuss how these methods can be applied to empirical studies of controlled vs. and automatic processing and multitasking performance in humans.
[task, interference, processing, stimulus, response, size, dimension, directed, indicate, learned] [cognitive, psychological, capacity, work, extent, profile] [associative, describe, concurrent, shared] [performance, number, control, limited] [graph, analysis, reflect, approach, similarity, applied, theoretical, adjacency] [set, independent, empirical, determine, maximum, theory, consider, uniform, based, individual] [network, multitasking, output, input, pathway, parallel, layer, figure, overlap, bipartite, capability, activity, neural, matrix, automatic, human, trained, performed, representation, concurrently, extracted, associated, controlled, serial, represents, pattern, corresponding, unit, constraint, focus, component, represented, validate, current, pure, switching, achieved]
How Does Generic Language Elicit Essentialist Beliefs?
Emily Foster-Hanson, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Marjorie Rhodes


Generic language (e.g., “tigers have stripes,” “girls hate math”) is a powerful vehicle for communicating essentialist beliefs. One way generic language likely communicates these beliefs is by leading children to generate kind-based explanations about particular properties; e.g., if a child hears “girls hate math,” he may infer that there must be an inherent causal basis for the generalization, which in turn supports essentialist beliefs. However, it is also possible that simply hearing a category described with generics elicits the belief that the category is an appropriate kind to generalize about. On this account, even if the generic is negated (“girls don’t hate math”), the generic language might nonetheless lead children to essentialize the category. The current study supports the latter possibility, suggesting that even hearing negated generics (“girls don’t hate math”) may still foster social essentialism.
[category, novel, hearing, condition, child, increased, heard, development, negation, generalize, powerful, developmental] [generic, essentialist, social, essentialism, zarpies, property, striped, zarpie, rhodes, causal, statement, develop, appropriate, psychological, kind, elicit, hate, explanation, simply, generally, replacement, negated, cognition, reasoning, told, hold, gelman, negating, race, cimpian, scope, baby, inheritance, communicating, predicated, spotted, basis, sufficient] [language, specific, coded, cultural, gender, shared, memory, university, expect] [puppet, study, ability, three, asked, mother, preschool, experimenter] [animal, conceptual, expressed, form] [lead, alternative, individual] [current, input, view, box, signaling, role, associated]
Extended Metaphors are Very Persuasive
Paul Thibodeau, Peace Iyiewuare, Matias Berretta


Metaphors pervade discussions of critical issues and influence how people reason about these domains. For instance, when crime is a beast, people suggest enforcement-oriented approaches to crime-reduction (e.g., by augmenting the police force); when crime is a virus, on the other hand, people suggest systemic reforms for the affected community. In the current study, we find that extending metaphoric language into the descriptions of policy interventions bolsters the persuasive influence of metaphoric frames for an array of important is- sues. When crime is a beast, people are even more likely to endorse “attacking” the problem with harsh enforcement tac- tics; when crime is a virus people are even more likely to to endorse “treating” the problem through social reform.
[response, congruent, condition, revealed, facilitate, target, journal, compared, chance, incongruent, presented] [metaphor, extended, consistent, frame, people, inconsistent, crime, initial, issue, described, framing, candidate, influence, beast, relationship, persuasive, framed, economy, designed, reform, experiment, social, distinct, work, thibodeau, street, extending, participant, police, manipulation, clear, percentage] [metaphoric, language, description, matching, describe, item, degree, expect, specificity, context, experimental] [virus, difference, study, problem, three, score, educational, asked, question] [conceptual, ambiguous, similarity, word, lexical, conceptually, lsa, table, analysis, semantic, natural, order, identified] [choose, option, policy, chose, data, increasing, city] [congruence, system]
Who should I tell? Young children correct and maintain others’ beliefs about the self
Mika Asaba, Hyowon Gweon


We care tremendously about what other people think of us. Motivated by two lines of prior work -- children's inferential and communicative capacities and strategic reputation management -- we examine how children infer what others think of them given others' observations of their performance, and how they influence these beliefs through disclosing their performance. In Experiment 1, 3-5 year-olds played a luck-based game; one confederates watched the child win and another confederate watched the child lose. We asked the child to disclose an additional, unobserved win to one of the two confederates. We find that younger children overwhelmingly choose the person who previously saw them win. However, as age increased, children were more likely to choose to disclose to someone who previously saw them lose. In Experiment 2, adults played a similar third person version and selectively chose the person who saw the main character previously lose.
[child, older, evidence, developmental, younger, trial, tested, age, selective] [positive, experiment, belief, negative, front, person, work, understanding, cognitive, people, told, communicating, reasoning, social, moral, desire, prefer, discussion, reason, care, false, version] [confederate, tom, blue] [win, bill, disclose, asked, experimenter, young, change, won, lose, understand, maintain, card, reputation, skill, three, lost, anne, communicate, additional, correct, management, differentially, watched, difference, third, performance, ability] [final, order, random, amount, meant] [game, friend, observed, outcome, observer, chose, choose, prior, played, winning, choice, preference, agent, infer, star, provide, based] [figure, selectively]
Can Monaural Auditory Displays Convey Directional Information to Users?
Takanori Komatsu, Seiji Yamada


The purpose of this study is to build a monaural auditory display to convey four pieces of directional information (upward, downward, rightward, and leftward) to users effectively and intuitively without the need for wearing headphones or preparing more than one speaker. We prepared five types of monaural auditory displays consisting of triangle wave sounds and conducted an experiment to investigate which kinds of displays succeeded in conveying the four pieces of information to participants. As a result, we could confirm that one of the prepared monaural auditory displays, designed as a “progress bar” on the basis of the mental-number line and spatial-number association of the response code effect, succeeded in conveying the four pieces of information more effectively compared with the other candidate sets (its average correct rates were 0.88). This result thus strongly shows that this monaural auditory display was quite useful for conveying primitive spatial information to users.
[auditory, sound, directional, monaural, display, conveying, triangle, rightward, leftward, downward, upward, succeeded, training, navigation, indicating, response, indicate, fixed, pitch, artificial, emitted, journal, presented, phase, stepwise] [candidate, designed, basis, experiment, fundamental, result, intuitive, understanding, variable] [speech, convey, spatial, manner, experimental, main] [correct, code, concept, international, study, effective, japan, performance, investigate] [association, snarc, table] [set, wave, higher, played, best, increasing, decreasing, independent, find, effectively, average, simple] [indicates, prepared, duration, figure, left, human, user, associated, level, consisting, visual, subtle, pattern]
Spatial Attention to Social Cues is not a Monolithic Process
Samuel Harding, Ty Boyer, Bennett Bertenthal


Social stimuli are a highly salient source of information, and seem to possess unique qualities that set them apart from other well-known categories. One characteristic is their ability to elicit spatial orienting, whereby directional stimuli like eye-gaze and pointing gestures act as exogenous cues that trigger automatic shifts of attention that are difficult to inhibit. This effect has been extended to non-social stimuli, like arrows, leading to some uncertainty regarding whether spatial orienting is specialized for social cues. Using a standard spatial cueing paradigm, we found evidence that both a pointing hand and arrow are effective cues, but that the hand is encoded more quickly, leading to overall faster responses. We then extended the paradigm to include multiple cues in order to evaluate congruent vs. incongruent cues. Our results indicate that faster encoding of the social cue leads to downstream effects on the allocation of attention resulting in faster orienting.
[stimulus, attention, faster, cue, response, arrow, target, incongruent, congruent, reaction, valid, presented, showing, type, paradigm, time, processing, suggesting, cued, attend, standard, interfere, directional, speed, journal, exogenous, evidence, invalid] [social, experiment, consistent, influence, discussion, strength, salience, cognitive, low, excluded, psychological] [spatial, main, experimental, previous, visible] [difference, three, greater, provided, additional, ability, addition] [include] [validity, total, prediction, observed, opposite, normal] [central, hand, encoding, pointing, gaze, cueing, visual, figure, orienting, flanking, location, interaction, reflexive, multiple, screen, direction, perception, soa, design, eye, pointed, automatic, process, brain, critical, algorithm]
When High WMC Promotes Mental Set: A Model of the Water Jar Task
Erin Sovansky, Stellan Ohlsson


Differences in working memory capacity (WMC) relate to performance on a variety of problem solving tasks. High WMC is beneficial for solving analytical problems, but can hinder performance on insight problems (DeCaro & Beilock, 2010). One suggested reason for WMC-related differences in problem solving performance is differences in strategy selection, in which high WMC individuals tend toward complex algorithmic strategies (Engle, 2002). High WMC might increase the likelihood of non-optimal performance on Luchins’ (1942) water jar task because high WMC solvers tend toward longer solutions, not noticing when shorter solutions become available. We present empirical data showing this effect, and a computational model that replicates the findings by choosing among problem solving strategies with different WM demands. The high WMC model used a memory-intensive strategy, which led to long solutions when shorter ones were available. The low WMC model was unable to use that strategy, and switched to shorter solutions.
[task, complex, accuracy, journal, type, presented, span, finding, executive, processing, time] [low, long, capacity, cognitive, experience, analytical, people, mental, psychology, psychological, ten, subtracting, failed, capable] [memory, previous, experimental, van] [problem, wmc, high, solving, solution, solver, jar, strategy, water, working, solved, insight, difference, shorter, performance, formula, reduction, solve, number, step, three, lower, score, saved, study, better, practice, extrapolating, guided, limited, luchins] [short, order, path, random, table, tend, computational, abstract, list] [model, prior, higher, proportion, based, set, successful, function, tendency, load, empirical, utility] [human, current, goal, longer, figure, desired, environment]
Thermodynamics and Cognition: Towards a Lawful Explanation of the Mind
Larry Moralez, Luis Favela


An argument is developed to show that the theoretical methods of description for biological and physical systems can be corroborated by appealing to the second law of thermodynamics. The separation dates back to Modern western philosophy, but we show that the second law’s influence on the evolutionary history of life at the scale of the global Earth system—a system that has demonstrated an exponential increase of entropy production over time— justifies rescinding this separation. From this perspective it appears that the necessity of ever increasing entropy in nature may constrain the organization and behavior of living organisms and cognitive processes. We suggest a new framework for understanding cognition by explaining memory at the scale of the brain-body-environment system with respect to its role in increasing entropy in nature. This framework, if developed further, may lead to a fruitful understanding of cognition by appealing to the necessity of physical laws.
[suggests, hebbian, increased, second] [cognitive, physical, biological, nature, understanding, cognition, respect, dichotomy, organism, life, mit, scale, account, history, philosophy, philosophical, explanation, contemporary, closed, necessity, thermodynamics, scientific, formation, modern, case] [memory, production, context, situated, university, domain, western] [free, water, mind, perspective, additional, study] [entropy, energy, slt, living, increase, earth, global, consumption, understood, approach, principle, biophysical, flow, amount, order, local, open, unique, path, matter, theoretical, river, consume, supply, promising, constrained] [empirical, increasing, enables, potential, data, likelihood, inquiry] [system, action, law, brain, process, neural, field, net, human, selection, dynamic, move, framework, florida]
Benefits for Grounded Feedback over Correctness in a Fraction Addition Tutor
Eliane Wiese, Rony Patel, Kenneth Koedinger


Do students activate conceptual and procedural knowledge simultaneously when learning fraction addition? In grounded feedback, student actions on a target, to-be-learned representation are reflected in a more familiar feedback representation to promote conceptual learning within procedural practice. An experiment with 163 4th and 5th graders shows improved learning with a grounded feedback tutor over a symbols-only control with step-level right/wrong feedback. Learning with grounding also transferred to symbols-only assessment items, providing some support for the simultaneous activation view.
[learning, condition, test, time, simultaneous, second, type, improved] [evaluation, experiment, work, cognitive] [error, main, previous, directly] [fraction, grounded, feedback, addition, student, correct, correctness, number, knowledge, tutor, included, pretest, magnitude, symbolic, bar, incorrect, strategy, posttest, sum, control, procedural, problem, study, performance, equation, correctly, adding, question, arithmetic, science, instruction, transfer, converted, score, school, solved, converting, help, equivalent] [conceptual, class, table, interpret, proposed, correlated, final] [prior, average, marginal, independent, model, favor] [representation, figure, grounding, activation, view, accessible]
Our morals really depends on our language: The foreign language effect within participants
Kuninori Nakamura


Recent research has suggested that using a foreign language to present hypothetical moral dilemmas increases the rate of utilitarian judgments about those dilemmas (e.g., Greene et al, 2001) and decreases incoherency between judgments in framing effect tasks (e.g., Costa, Foucart, Hayakawa, Aparici, Apesteguia, Heafner, & Keysar, 2014; Keysar, Hayakawa, & An, 2012). However, existing research has mainly investigated this effect using between-participants designs (i.e., different participants in the foreign and native language conditions). Such designs are unable to exclude non-equivalent conditions as a confounding variable. In contrast, this study examined the foreign language effect using a within-subjects design (i.e., all participants responded to moral dilemmas (Greene et al, 2001) and framing effect tasks in both their native and foreign languages. The “foreign language effect” was replicated, excluding semantic non-equivalence between language conditions as a potential confound. This result supports the hypothesis that the foreign language effect is independent of meaning.
[switch, japanese, response, indicate, chance, task, presented, indicating, condition] [moral, framing, factor, save, costa, people, disease, footbridge, trolley, kill, thinking, reasoning, baby, man, permissibility, result, boat, cognition, utilitarian, judgment, dilemma, die, morally] [foreign, language, native, medicine, affect, crisis, sculpture, nakamura, hospital, donor, meaning, remains, exclude] [study, difference, problem, equivalence, three, equivalent] [table, coherence, analysis, semantic, reflect, english, read, existing] [individual, model, loss, choose, financial, gain, asian, decision, fit, depend, replicated, data, bic, chose] [design, action, figure, responded, performed]
A scaleable spiking neural model of action planning
Peter Blouw, Chris Eliasmith, Bryan Tripp


Past research on action planning has shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying the selection of simple motor actions, along with the cognitive mechanisms underlying the planning of action sequences in constrained problem solving domains. We extend this research by describing a neural model that rapidly plans action sequences in relatively unconstrained domains by manipulating structured representations of objects and the actions they typically afford. We provide an analysis that indicates our model is able to reliably accomplish goals that require correctly performing a sequence of up to 5 actions in a simulated environment. We also provide an analysis of the scaling properties of our model with respect to the number of objects and affordances that constitute its knowledge of the environment. Using simplified simulations we find that our model is likely to function effectively while picking from 10,000 actions related to 25,000 objects.
[sequence, structured, time, scaling, indicate, complex] [cognitive, ultimate, representational, work] [memory, object, associative, context] [number, precision, control, working, needed, require, knowledge, partial, correct, problem] [large, random, analysis, vector, semantic, panel, tuning] [model, planning, set, state, simulated, function, randomly, average, successful, provide, simple, behavior] [action, goal, neural, environment, spiking, motor, spa, figure, selection, planned, subsystem, system, representation, stack, location, ket, signal, inner, labeled, performed, process, correspond, accomplish, architecture, plan, hrr, planner, neuron, represent, current, implement, sps, routed, basal, representing, vsas, perform]
Monitoring the Level of Attention by Posture Measurement and EEG
Ryohei Furutani, Yuki Seino, Taro Tezuka, Tetsuji Satoh


Attention is a factor that affects the performance of various intelligent activities in humans. Up until now, the methods for measuring the level of attention have been mostly based on subjective reports or employing large and costly devices. In this paper, a new method of estimating the level of attention is proposed, based on posture and EEG measurements. These data can be recorded using easily available and less burdensome devices. From the obtained data, the time evolution of attention was explored. Experiments showed that there is negative correlation between posture variance and attention, and also between EEG and attention.
[attention, time, task, monitoring, learning, recorded, pressure, match, indicate] [participant, work, low, cognitive, power, experiment, indicated, physiological, focused, negative, device] [evolution, recording, society, summarizes, description, university, object] [board, balance, change, three, high, easily, calculation, science, measurement, conducted, questionnaire, problem, cab, intelligent, japan, group, performance] [table, frequency, variance, proposed, large, word] [subjective, correlation, based, method, measured, estimating, model, total, propose, data, log, interval, making] [level, eeg, posture, figure, center, gravity, band, system, represent, weight, indicator, reversi, attentive, chair, body, indicates, height, movement, burdensome, divided, move, sensor]
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth in a Misunderstood Field: The IOED in Mental Disorders
Andrew Zeveney, Jessecae Marsh


Humans fail to understand the world around them and also fail to recognize this lack of understanding. The illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) exemplifies these failures: people believe they understand the world more deeply than they actually do and only realize that this belief is an illusion when they attempt to explain elements of the world. An unexplored factor of the IOED is how people may become overconfident by confusing their own understanding with others’ understanding. In two experiments, we examine the IOED in mental disorders, a domain where society has a limited understanding. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that people display an IOED for mental disorders as well as devices, but that it is smaller for mental disorders. In Experiment 2, we show that exposing the IOED is specifically linked to generating an explanation, rather than more generally thinking about a phenomenon.
[presented, condition, finding, evidence, explore, tested, size, suggests] [understanding, mental, people, illusion, ioed, personal, explanation, gap, health, experiment, explain, rated, explanatory, disorder, examined, phenomenon, depth, thinking, societal, work, keil, lay, attempting, rozenblit, scale, laypeople, future, simply, endorse, concentrated, overestimate, belief, great, expose, discussion, anticipated] [domain, society, description, expert, interesting, drop] [understand, smaller, asked, limited, recognize, knowledge, difference, greater, larger, question, ability, study, group] [correlated, understood, demonstrated, topic, order] [higher, generating, rate, well, demonstrate, generate, set, average, lack] [level, figure, interaction]
Social Affordance Tracking over Time - A Sensorimotor Account of False-Belief Tasks
Judith Bütepage, Hedvig Kjellström, Danica Kragic


False-belief task have mainly been associated with the explanatory notion of the theory of mind. However, it has often been pointed out that this kind of high-level reasoning is computational and time expensive. Viewed from an embodied intelligence perspective, the failing in a false-belief test can be the result of the impairment to recognize and track others' sensorimotor contingencies and affordances. Thus, social cognition is explained in terms of low-level signals instead of high-level reasoning. In this work, we present a generative model for optimal action selection which simultaneously can be employed to make predictions of others' actions. We demonstrate how the tracking of others' sensorimotor signals can give rise to correct false-belief inferences, while a lack thereof leads to failing. With this work, we want to emphasize the importance of sensorimotor contingencies in social cognition, which might be a key to artificial, socially intelligent systems.
[time, test, presented, learning, training] [social, account, mental, belief, inference, cognitive, reasoning, story, understanding, implicit, mapping, autistic, cognition, temporal, false] [tom, memory] [sally, marble, help, mind, idea, knowledge, ability, active, anne, perspective] [approach, vector, computational, rise, distance] [state, model, agent, based, optimal, distribution, theory, observation, predict, lack, behavior, prior, successful, infer, goodman, prediction, propose, probability] [hidden, action, box, sensorimotor, tracking, generative, goal, interaction, smc, selection, smcs, affordances, defined, representation, represent, current, joint, location, theorist, embodied, visual, figure, affordance, space, system]
Hidden Markov Modeling of eye movements with image information leads to better discovery of regions of interest
Stephan Brueggemann, Antoni B. Chan, Janet Hsiao


Hidden Markov models (HMM) can describe the spatial and temporal characteristics of eye-tracking recordings in cognitive tasks. Here, we introduce a new HMM approach. We developed HMMs based on fixation locations and we also used image information as an input feature. We demonstrate the benefits of the newly proposed model in a face recognition study wherein an HMM was developed for every subject. Discovery of regions of interest on facial stimuli is improved compared to earlier approaches. Moreover, clustering of the newly developed HMMs lead to very distinct groups. The newly developed approach also allows reconstructing image information at fixation.
[second, identify, statistical] [temporal, cognitive, mouth, distinct, located] [spatial, map] [partial, better, difference, study, number, understand, group] [proposed, clustering, cluster, analysis, approach] [state, model, individual, prior, estimated, based, probability, patch, full, data] [hidden, image, fixation, face, hmm, hmms, eye, developed, figure, newly, input, markov, transition, heat, vhem, interest, recognition, chuk, facial, nose, hong, location, movement, allows, visual, correspond, gaussian, area, algorithm, foveated, component, kong, variational, gmm, original, reconstruction, feature, representation, hsiao, perry, geisler]
Influences of Speaker-Listener Similarity on Shadowing and Comprehension
Lynn Perry, Emily Mech, Maryellen MacDonald, Mark Seidenberg


We routinely encounter speakers with different accents and speaking styles. The speech perception literature offers examples of disruption of comprehension for unfamiliar speech and also of listeners’ rapid accommodation to unfamiliar accents. Much of this research uses a single measure and/or focuses on isolated word perception. We investigated listeners’ abilities to comprehend and shadow connected speech spoken in a familiar or unfamiliar accent. We found increases in shadowing latencies and comprehension errors in the Dissimilar Speech relative to Similar Speech conditions—especially for relatively informal rather than more academic style speech. Additionally, there was less accommodation over time to Dissimilar than Similar Speech. These results suggest that there are costs both in the immediate timescale of processing speech (necessary for shadowing) and in the longer time scale of listening comprehension when accent and other speech quality is very different from one’s own speech.
[condition, task, block, type, revealed, familiarity, second, standard, accuracy, processing, heard, familiar, compared, journal, predictor, test, time, simultaneous] [examined, rated, white, social, relationship, perceived] [speech, shadowing, listening, passage, dissimilar, informal, academic, latency, error, native, speaker, american, speaking, main, language, regional, comprehend, accent, depict, dialect, african, delivery, manipulated, adaptation, experimental, voice, degree, highly, varied] [comparison, study, larger, ability, included, marginally, course, accurate, constructive, difference] [comprehension, style, english, shadow, random, similarity, accommodation, word, syntactic] [model, proportion, regression] [interaction, unfamiliar, figure, perception, longer, driven, current]
Conceptual Expansion During Divergent Thinking
Richard Hass


Recent research on creative thinking has implicated conceptual expansion as potential cognitive underpinnings. These theories were examined within the context of a laboratory study using two divergent thinking prompts. Participants generated alternative/creative uses for a brick and for a glass bottle (separately) for two minutes and responses were time-stamped using a Matlab GUI. Semantic distances between responses and conceptual representations of the DT prompts were computed using latent semantic analysis. Results showed that semantic distance increased as responding progressed, with significant differences between the two tasks, and intraparticipant variation. Results have implications for theories of creative thinking and represent methodological and analytic advances in the study of divergent thinking.
[response, task, time, statistical, attention, appeared, processing, monitor, executive, verbal, journal, evidence, presented] [thinking, cognitive, people, examined, psychological, initial] [memory, latent, associative, growth, generation, context, variation, content, degree] [study, linear, concept, performance, matlab, control, originality, fluid, idea, science] [semantic, creative, conceptual, distance, order, expansion, analysis, prompt, divergent, lsa, irt, brick, glass, creativity, bottle, cosine, fluency, table, similarity, flexibility, neuroscientific, structure, examine, correlated, global] [model, data, individual, validity, alternative, subjective, prior, potential, method] [serial, current, represent, represents, defined, representation, representing, brain]
Information Search with Depleting and Non-Depleting Resources
Amber Bloomfield, J. Isaiah Harbison, Susan Campbell, Petra Bradley, Lelyn Saner


Predictions about information search behavior have been informed by extensive research in food foraging behavior. However, information foraging environments may differ in key ways from food foraging environments, and these differences may impact search behavior. We investigated the effect of patch distribution (depleting or non-depleting) and ability to return to previously searched patches on participants’ decision to switch from one patch to another while searching. Whether or not a participant could return after leaving a patch led to fewer samples and fewer relevant items found. Whether or not the patches depleted and whether it was possible to return to a patch influenced stopping rules, indicating that these factors may alter the size of the increment applied through the Incremental Rule.
[irrelevant, condition, rule, size, task, switch, time, target, standard, journal, suggests, decreased] [relevant, relationship, participant, experiment, negative, consistent, positive, case, source, ten, mechanical] [incremental, previous, influenced, matching, item, memory, varied] [number, three, comparing, ability, impact, resource, investigated, study, larger] [richness, table, visited, applying] [return, patch, search, increment, rate, depleting, total, depletion, foraging, stopping, forager, predicted, behavior, average, explored, depending, threshold, highest, distribution, optimal, leave, expected, searched, cost, data, exploited, model, decision, deviation, marginal, sample, richer, find] [figure, fewer, food, pattern, current, switching, compatibility]
Do Simple Probability Judgments Rely on Integer Approximation?
Shaun O'Grady, Tom Griffiths, Fei Xu


A great deal of research has been conducted on how humans reason about probability, yet it remains unknown what mental computations support this ability. Research on the development of the Approximate Number Sense (ANS) has shown that performance in a magnitude (i.e., estimations of integers) discrimination task is well fit by a psychophysical model (Halberda & Feigenson, 2008). Whether or not estimations of integers plays a role in probability judgments has yet to be investigated. In the present study we use data from two adult experiments as well as results from comparisons of two computational models to argue that simple probability judgments based on proportion may involve a division operation, a finding that could explain why previous research has yielded little evidence supporting the role of the ANS in probability judgments.
[trial, target, type, presented, chance, general, big, task, evidence, adult, revealed, response, development, increased] [experiment, sense, reasoning, told, designed, reason, white, bag] [color, bird, influenced, discrimination] [number, ratio, performance, favorable, equal, acuity, approximate, correct, example, unfavorable, young, comparison, panamath, accurate, strategy, statistically, study, marble, group, investigate, asked, literature, lower] [order, large, computational, correlated, measure] [probability, based, proportion, model, distribution, total, making, probabilistic, data, well, game, red, correlation, weber, average, played, predict] [figure, area, gaussian, role, design, interaction, system]
Evaluating Causal Hypotheses: The Curious Case of Correlated Cues
Bob Rehder, Zachary Davis


Although the causal graphical model framework has achieved considerable success accounting for causal learning data, appli-cation of that formalism to multi-cause situations assumes that people are insensitive to the statistical properties of the causes themselves. The present experiment tests this assumption by first instructing subjects on a causal model consisting of two independent and generative causes and then requesting them to make data likelihood judgments, that is, to estimate the proba-bility of some data given the model. The correlation between the causes in the data was either positive, zero, or negative. The data was judged as most likely in the positive condition and least likely in the negative condition, a finding that obtained even though all other statistical properties of the data (e.g., causal strengths, outcome density) were controlled. These re-sults pose a problem for current models of causal learning.
[learning, statistical, presented, presentation, base, condition, journal, generalize] [causal, common, positively, reasoning, independence, retirement, positive, described, cognitive, people, conditional, account, strength, fact, absence, rehder, case, consistent, negative, treated, experiment, expectation, judge, psychological] [domain, expect, experimental] [three, high, asked, computation] [structure, correlated, table, graph, order, computed, large, vector] [data, probability, likelihood, generated, estimate, sample, correlation, trade, distribution, marginal, observed, hypothesis, model, prior, bayesian, conditioned, highest, unconditional, parameter, assumption, note, expected, binomial, assumed] [interest, current, network, role, pattern]
Reflexive Spatial Attention to Goal Directed Reaching
Alexis Barton, Bennett Bertenthal, Samuel Harding


Social interaction involves cues such as gaze direction, head orientation, and pointing gestures that serve to automatically orient attention to a specific referent or spatial location. In this paper we demonstrate that an observed reaching action similarly results in a reflexive shift in attention as evidenced by faster responses that are congruent with the direction of the reach, than responses that are incongruent. When the task involves a saccadic response (Experiment 1) this prediction is inhibited and results in a reverse-congruence, faster responses to incongruent than congruent cues, when the cue occurs after the reach is completed. This reverse-congruence is not present when the task involves a key press (Experiment 2) or a mouse movement (Experiment 3). We propose that the inhibition of the predictive saccade is overcome when the eye movements toward the goal are activated to guide the mouse movement.
[response, attention, congruent, cue, incongruent, mouse, faster, stimulus, revealed, time, automatically, task, completed, evidence, presented, target, trial, presentation, slower] [experiment, social, discussion, consistent, changed, long, facilitated, result, key] [spatial, shift, main, instructed, object, experimental, error, color] [three, video, course, guide] [analysis, completion, relative, onset] [observation, predictive, observed, well, hypothesis, prediction, red] [reach, action, eye, direction, reaching, movement, saccadic, soa, inhibition, congruence, soas, activation, gaze, reflexive, figure, goal, left, automatic, location, grasping, orienting, grasp, dynamic, interaction, hand, saccade, associated, pointing, contralateral, visual, move, reversecongruence]
Structural Alignment in Incidental Word Learning
Ruxue Shao, Dedre Gentner


Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words with only limited, indirect exposure (Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We propose that structural alignment processes lead to fluent detection of commonalities and differences that facilitate incidental word learning. To test this, we adapted the Carey and Bartlett paradigm, varying the alignability of the objects that 4-year-olds saw while hearing the novel word chromium. In Experiment 1, children in the High-Alignment condition were significantly better than those in the Low-Alignment condition at identifying chromium objects in a subsequent task. In Experiment 2, we ruled out an alternative account by equalizing the overall amount of information presented to the two groups. We also found that the advantage of high alignment persisted after two-to-four days. These results suggest that structural alignment is a mechanism by which children can learn word meanings even in incidental word learning situations.
[chromium, learning, alignment, day, exposure, condition, retention, learn, child, task, alignable, shape, advantage, olive, novel, journal, presented, pick, bartlett, analogical, alignability, evidence, vocabulary, trial, assessed, dimension, identify, dark, rule, differed] [experiment, initial, incidental, cognitive, mapping, false, fish, consistent, understanding, discussion, designed] [meaning, color, object, blue, spontaneous, language, experimental, intention, perceptual, highly, noticing] [group, difference, assessment, transfer, number, correctly, carey, comparison, performance, high, better, received, asked, study, experimenter, young, comparing, greater, easily] [word, structural, similarity, amount, subsequent, structure] [hypothesis, set, point, max] [figure, role, process, pattern, goal, facilitates]
Neural bases of semantic-memory deficits for events
Chia-Ming Lei, Haley C. Dresang, Michelle B. Holcomb, Tessa C. Warren, Michael Walsh Dickey


This study investigated the neural bases of event-related semantic-memory deficits among people with aphasia due to left-hemisphere (LH) stroke. A novel task using naturalistic photographic stimuli and patient-friendly procedures was used to test event-related semantic knowledge. In the task, participants decided whether depicted events were normal (represented in semantic memory) or were abnormal (not represented in semantic memory). Performance on this Event task was correlated with deficits in action- and object-concept processing and on standardized language measures, especially action- and verb-processing deficits. Logistic regression analyses examined lesion correlates of patient performance on the Event task. Surprisingly, increasing LH lesion size in action ROIs was associated with improved performance on the event-knowledge task. These findings suggest that action processing may play a special role in event-related semantic memory representations. Furthermore, they are consistent with recent claims that the right hemisphere may be especially important for activation of event-related knowledge.
[task, processing, response, type, stimulus, presented, evidence, test, journal, erp, tested, suggests, standardized, finding, compared] [event, temporal, examined, consistent, cognitive, abnormal, sagittal, unexpected, relationship] [object, language, memory, activated, depicted, specific, communication, template] [performance, knowledge, study, usa, control, better, department, larger, additional] [semantic, naming, verb, conceptual, correlated, measure, analysis, word, intended, bias] [data, regression] [lesion, action, roi, gyrus, brain, behavioral, image, cat, neural, represented, figure, anatomical, scan, voxel, metusalem, ppt, kdt, visual, damage, aphasia, palm, associated, activation]
Degeneracy results in canalisation of language structure: A computational model of word learning
Padraic Monaghan


There is substantial variation in language experience between learners, yet there is surprising similarity in the language structure they eventually acquire. While it is possible that this canalisation of language structure may be due to constraints imposed by modulators, such as an innate language system, it may instead derive from the broader, communicative environment in which language is acquired. In this paper, the latter perspective is tested for its adequacy in explaining the robustness of language learning to environmental variation. A computational model of word learning from cross-situational, multimodal information was constructed and tested. Key to the model’s robustness was the presence of multiple, individually unreliable information sources that could support learning when combined. This “degeneracy” in the language system had a detrimental effect on learning when compared to a noise-free environment, but was critically important for acquiring a canalised system that is resistant to environmental noise in communication.
[learning, cue, target, robustness, training, reliability, accuracy, canalisation, degeneracy, presented, condition, compared, assist, speed, processing, time, integrative, statistical, spoken, testing, integration, second, learner, learned, tested, operate, category, developmental] [cognitive, consequence, supported, biological, result, anova, presence] [language, gestural, phonological, environmental, referent, object, variation, map, communicative, support, implemented, criterion, hoc, speech, linguistic] [effective, performance, perspective, acquired, ability] [word, distributional, prosodic, semantic, computational, acquisition, structure, increase, multimodal, combined, post] [model, randomly, increasing, potential, point, modeling] [multiple, figure, input, visual, representation, environment, layer, system, single, trained, activation, interaction, current, unit]
Lexical Complexity of Child-Directed and Overheard Speech: Implications for Learning
Ruthe Foushee, Tom Griffiths, Mahesh Srinivasan


Although previous studies have found a link between the child-directed speech learners receive and their vocabulary development, no previous studies have found a parallel link between early measures of overheard speech and vocabulary. This is despite the fact that children are able to learn words from overheard speech in laboratory settings (Shneidman & Woodward, 2015). Drawing on the idea that children preferentially attend to stimuli that are at a manageable level of complexity (Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012, 2014), the present research explores the possibility that children do not initially tune into overheard speech because it is too complex for their stage of lexical development. Using transcripts from CHILDES and the SBC, and estimates of vocabulary by age from the MB-CDI, we find that child-directed speech is significantly less complex than overheard speech through at least 30 months, suggesting children may only begin learning from more complex, overheard speech later.
[overheard, vocabulary, learning, age, attention, child, learn, development, complex, early, developmental, directed, attend, familiar, suggests, overhearing, barbara, explore, berkeley, infant, dialogue, novel] [account, relationship, future, psychological, social] [speech, language, previous, typical, lexicon, linguistic, expect, university, acoustic, american] [young, greater, idea, high, effective, versus, knowledge] [complexity, lexical, measure, analysis, word, relative, childdirected, reflect, corpus, style, window, database, link, exponential, longitudinal] [sample, based, proportion, unknown, data, simple, optimal, completely, intermediate, initially, hypothesis, capture] [input, current, unfamiliar, visual, figure, selectively, period]
A neural network model of hierarchical category development
Chris Gorman, Alistair Knott


Object recognition and categorization is a fundamental aspect of cognition in humans and animals. Models have been implemented around the idea that categories are sets of frequently co-occurring features. Out of these models a question has been raised, namely what is the mechanism by which we learn a hierarchically organized set of categories, including types and subtypes? In this paper we introduce such a model, the Dominant Property Assembly Network (DPAN). DPAN uses an unsupervised neural network to model an agent which develops a hierarchy of object categories based on highly correlated object features. Initially, the network generates representations of high-level object types by identifying commonly co-occurring sets of features. Over time, the network will start to use an inhibition of return (IOR) operation to examine the features of a categorized object that make it unusual as an instance of its identified category.
[learning, training, dog, category, learn, subordinate, categorization, presented, superordinate, type, child] [property, cognitive, simply, prototype] [object, basic, shared, referential, updated] [stage, change, difference, assembly, three, recognize, idea, number, subtypes] [token, vector, identifying, computational, correlated] [set, rate, based, well, model, allowing, agent, paper, winning, return, provide, theory] [network, unit, dpan, input, represent, weight, level, ior, neural, cpca, operation, dpa, inhibition, gradient, localist, cat, representation, figure, represents, internal, subtle, layer, representing, lpa, output, visual, learns, dominant, rpc, activates, represented, allows, indicates, process, matrix, associated, image]
Communicating generalizations about events
Michael Henry Tessler, Noah Goodman


Habitual sentences (e.g. Bill smokes.) generalize an event over time, but how can you know a habitual sentence is true? We develop a computational model and use this to guide experiments into the truth conditions of habitual language. In Expts. 1 & 2, we measure participants’ prior expectations about the frequency with which an event occurs and validate the predictions of the model for when a habitual sentence is acceptable. In Expt. 3, we show that habituals are sensitive to top-down moderators of expected frequency: It is the expectation of future tendency that matters for habitual language. This work provides the mathematical glue between our intuitive theories’ of others and events and the language we use to talk about them.
[time, presented, explore, month, completed] [experiment, future, event, truth, person, work, scale, causal, generic, people, enabling, participant, recruited, elicited, viewed] [male, speaker, gender, language, female, endorsement, frequently] [bill, asked, difference, third] [frequency, sentence, dependent, analysis, computational, order] [model, habitual, log, data, prior, felicity, habituals, propensity, density, predicted, bayesian, scaled, predictive, proportion, threshold, smoked, posterior, pragmatic, theory, inferred, set, behavior, preventative, distribution, writes, expected, underlying, range, observe, full, predict, clothing, average] [action, figure, human, corresponding, compensated, food]
Measuring lay theories of parenting and child development
Emily Hembacher, Michael C Frank


Parenting practices are known to play an important role in shaping children’s outcomes. For example, children whose parents engage them in high-quality conversations and who are given opportunities for free play are at an advantage for learning and later academic outcomes. However, communicating the results of relevant scientific findings to parents remains a challenge. One possible moderator of uptake of parenting information is the implicit theories parents hold with regard to child development and parenting. As a first step in investigating this possibility, the present work establishes a new measure of parenting attitudes including three subscales corresponding to attitudes about rules and respect, affection and attachment, and early learning. We then examine whether subscale scores predict uptake of new information about children’s learning. Scores on the Early Learning subscale, but not the Rules and Respect subscale, predicted generalization from the article, providing initial evidence of the validity of this measure.
[learning, early, target, child, generalization, development, attachment, learn, evidence, subscales, test, time, status, reported, explore] [respect, lay, scale, implicit, factor, initial, work, consistent, experiment, personality, hold, talk, including, psychology, relationship, positively, psychological, mechanical, people, understanding, strong, engage] [recall, language, gender, previous, meaningful, item] [parenting, subscale, affection, uptake, control, three, young, conducted, knowledge, targ, helpful, questionnaire, correct, high, differentially, answered] [article, read, analysis, measure, reading, table, reflect, identified, random, existing] [higher, based, predicted, predict, behavior, validity, provide, theory, model, well, generated] [play, psychometric]
Improving Visual Memory with Auditory Input
Scott R. Schroeder, Viorica Marian


Can input in one sensory modality strengthen memory in a different sensory modality? To address this question, we asked participants to encode images presented in various locations (e.g., a dog in the top left corner of the screen) while they heard spatially uninformative sounds. Some of these sounds matched the image (e.g., the word “dog” or a barking sound) while others did not. In a subsequent memory test, participants were better at remembering the locations of images that were encoded with a matching sound, even though these sounds were spatially uninformative – an effect that was mediated by whether the sounds were verbal or non-verbal. Because the sounds did not provide any relevant location information, better spatial memory cannot be attributed to auditory memory; rather, it is attributed to visual memory being strengthened by the matching auditory input. These findings provide the first behavioral evidence for cross-modal interactions in memory.
[congruent, spoken, auditory, condition, sound, incongruent, hearing, presented, accuracy, task, picture, evidence, tonal, improved, dog, uninformative, spatially, beep, cue, completed, yielded, attention, ventriloquism, test, displayed, modality, finding, increased, depicts] [neutral, experiment, relevant, anova, cognitive, barking, located, attributed, variable, consistent] [memory, environmental, spatial, item, remembered, retrieval, object, linguistic, strengthen, remembering, main, episodic, remember, matched, context, matching] [control, better, number, help, performance, equal, helpful, versus, included] [word, english, list, dependent] [provide, row, independent, played] [visual, encoding, input, location, figure, image, sensory, top, left, encoded]
But vs. Although under the microscope
Fatemeh Torabi Asr, Vera Demberg


Previous experimental studies on concessive connectives have only looked at their local facilitating or predictive effect on discourse relation comprehension and have often viewed them as a class of discourse markers with similar effects. We look into the effect of two connectives, but and although, for inferring contrastive vs. concessive discourse relations to complement previous experimental work on causal inferences. An offline survey on AMTurk and an online eye-tracking-while-reading experiment are conducted to show that even between these two connectives, which mark the same set of relations, interpretations are biased. The bias is consistent with the distribution of the connective across discourse relations. This suggests that an account of discourse connective meaning based on probability distributions can better account for comprehension data than a classic categorical approach, or an approach where closely related connectives only have a core meaning and the rest of the interpretation comes from the discourse arguments.
[time, condition, processing] [expectation, experiment, consistent, causal, participant, including, story, cognitive, inference, judgment] [contrast, meaning, memory, cake, experimental, context, item, previous, affect, contrastive, marked, linguistic, coherent, frequently, mixed, filler] [difference, study, question, differ, online] [discourse, coherence, connective, sentence, violated, reading, interpretation, final, relation, comprehension, random, pizza, offline, text, savory, corpus, disambiguating, table, word, earlier, ambiguous, concessive, semantics, local, trigger, bias, continuation, semantic, eating, pdtb] [total, distribution, model, well, based, data, set, probability, observed] [critical, desired, interaction, area, region, role, design]
Emotions in lay explanations of behavior
Desmond Ong, Jamil Zaki, Noah Goodman


Humans use rich intuitive theories to explain other people’s behavior. Previous work in lay psychology of behavior have tended to treat emotion as causing primarily unintentional behavior (e.g., being sad causes one to cry), neglecting how people incorporate emotions into explanations of rational, intentional actions. Here, we provide preliminary explorations into integrating emotions into a theory of folk psychology. Specifically, we show that in the lay theory, people are willing to endorse emotions as causes of intentional actions. Moreover, people readily attribute beliefs and desires as explanations for emotional expressions. This work provides a first step in elaborating people’s rich understanding of emotions as an important component of intuitive social cognition.
[situational, modal, presented, type, speed, test, explore] [intentional, emotional, emotion, lay, people, unintentional, explanation, intuitive, profile, caused, work, counterfactual, laypeople, psychology, social, explain, influence, understanding, psychological, valenced, affective, rated, feeling, situation, physical, rating, fall, belief, sue, endorse, appeal, future, result, judged, judge, desire, behave, recruited, desdemona, causal, distinct] [rich, affect] [study, asked, impact] [ambiguous, cluster, frequency, clustering, table, form, completion] [behavior, set, model, decision, generated, chose, theory, likelihood, note, find, state, rate, making, bought, round] [action, figure, driven, achieve, top]
Structure-sensitive Noise Inference: Comprehenders Expect Exchange Errors
Till Poppels, Roger Levy


Previous research has found that comprehenders are willing to adopt non-literal interpretations of sentences whose literal reading is unlikely. Several studies found evidence that comprehenders decide whether a given utterance should be taken at face value in accordance with principles of Bayesian rationality, by weighing the prior probability of potential interpretations against the degree to which they are (in)consistent with the literal form of the utterance. While all of these results are consistent with string-edit noise models, many error processes are known to be sensitive to the underlying linguistic structure of the intended utterance. Here, we explore the case of exchange errors and provide experimental evidence that comprehenders' noise model is structure-sensitive. Our results add further support to the noisy-channel theory of language comprehension, extend the set of known noise operations to include positional exchanges, and show that comprehenders' noise models are well-adapted to structure-sensitive sources of signal corruption.
[evidence, presented, accuracy, compared, accidental] [gibson, described, possibility, case, cognitive, consistent, rated, sensitivity] [literal, language, utterance, previous, normalized, expect, repair, support, item, filler, highly, communicative, experimental, production, linguistic] [] [implausible, comprehenders, exchange, plausibility, plausible, comprehension, canonicality, structure, word, canonical, intended, interpretation, sentence, order, table, analysis, package, sib, corpus, reading, semantic, syntactic, positional, interpreted, kicked, literally, floor, tra, relative, fil, errorbars, exchanging, adopt] [noise, model, rational, probability, prior, underlying, noisy, consider, string, hypothesis, alternative, dashed] [represent, figure, input, process, representation]
Tangible models and haptic representations aid learning of molecular biology concepts
Kristen Johannes, Jacklyn Powers, Lisa Couper, Matt Silberglitt, Jodi Davenport


Can novel 3D models help students develop a deeper understanding of core concepts in molecular biology? We adapted 3D molecular models, developed by scientists, for use in high school science classrooms. The models accurately represent the structural and functional properties of complex DNA and Virus molecules, and provide visual and haptic feedback about biomolecular properties that are often implicit in traditional models. We investigated: 1) Can we measure improvement on core concepts? 2) Do lessons with 3D models improve student outcomes on these measures? and 3) What factors mediate learning? Model use yielded measurable gains in conceptual knowledge and the greatest gains were related to how actively models were used during a lesson and the facilitative role adopted by the teachers.
[test, learning, time, replication, complex, reliable, explore] [understanding, key, designed, reasoning, life, loading, physical] [item] [dna, molecular, virus, biology, student, viral, active, posttest, classroom, science, tangible, teacher, school, high, spent, three, haptic, passive, poliovirus, biomolecular, correct, interactive, lakeside, identical, assembly, concept, facilitating, feedback, strand, difficulty, answering, actively, greater] [structure, conceptual, amount, proficiency, small, structural, frequency, accurately, table] [model, allow, observed, fit, predicted] [role, figure, process, represent, activity, current, developed, cycle, critical]
‘Unlikely' Outcomes Might Never Occur, But What About ‘Unlikely (20% Chance)’ Outcomes?
Sarah Jenkins, Adam Harris, Murray Lark


A commonly suggested solution to reduce misinterpretations of verbal probability expressions in risk communications is to use a verbal-numerical (mixed format) approach, but it is not known whether this increases understanding over and above a purely numerical format. Using the ‘which outcome’ methodology (Teigen & Filkuková, 2013), we examined the effect of using verbal, numerical and mixed communication formats, as well as investigating whether marking outcomes as salient would alter the outcomes people perceived as ‘unlikely’ or having a 20% chance of occurring. We observed no effect of saliency, but replicated previous findings, with general preference for values at the high end of a distribution (including maximum/above maximum values) present in both verbal and mixed communication formats. This demonstrates the relevance of these findings for real-world consequential risk communication. Whilst the estimates differed between the mixed and numerical formats, we found that the mixed format yielded the more accurate estimates.
[verbal, saliency, condition, journal, response, chance, general, occur, accuracy, indicating] [understanding, event, scenario, people, scientific, influence, communicating, future, described, perceived] [mixed, communication, salient, experimental, describe, term, marking, shift] [format, numerical, correct, high, study, lower, number, asked, three, difference, accurate, solution, change] [approach, british, translation, distance, directionality, occurrence] [risk, probability, outcome, teigen, decision, vpes, geological, maximum, distribution, methodology, lava, consequential, climate, probabilistic, uncertainty, harris, earthquake, proportion, trust, budescu, bin, observed, higher, well, potential, ipcc, replicated, extra] [figure, site, numeracy, human, expression, interest, multiple, behavioral, focus, level]
No stereotype threat effect in international chess
Tom Stafford


We examine data from over 6.6 million games of tournament chess between players rated by the international chess authority, FIDE. Previous research has focussed on the low representation of women in chess. We replicate and extend previous analysis (Chabris and Glickman, 2006) on an international level. We find no support for differential variability, differential drop-out between male and female players, or social context (in the form of proportion of female players at a national level) as drivers of drivers of male-female differences. Further, we examine games between mixed and same gender pairs for evidence of a `stereotype threat' effect. Contrary to previous reports, we find no evidence of stereotype threat. Though this analysis contradicts one specific mechanism whereby gender stereotype may influence players, the persistent differences between male and female players suggests that systematic factors do exist and remain to be uncovered.
[learning, advantage, journal, evidence, compared, younger, standard, country] [rating, rated, white, social, cognitive, psychological, influence, strong, phenomenon, man, black, work] [female, male, gender, previous, curve, context, highly, intellectual, support] [chess, difference, stereotype, performance, threat, playing, young, international, chabris, group, skill, study, glickman, fide, lower, elo, participation, change, number, tournament, mathematics, active, win, zip, absolute, minority, observational] [analysis, relative, large, mechanism, differential, relation] [player, higher, average, proportion, data, men, outcome, played, game, confidence, sample, winning, woman, probability, population, find, opposite, deviation, quintile, covered] [figure, allows, role, move]
Outcome or Strategy? A Bayesian Model of Intelligence Attribution
Marta Kryven, Tomer Ullman, William Cowan, Josh Tenenbaum


People have a common-sense notion of intelligence and use it to evaluate decisions and decision-makers. We propose a model of intelligence attribution based on inverse planning in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). The model explains the agent's decisions by a combination of probabilistic planning, a softmax decision noise, prior knowledge about the world and forgetting, estimating the agent's intelligence as efficiency in optimising costs and rewards. Behavioural evidence shows that some people attribute intelligence to the strategy and others attribute intelligence to the outcome of the observed actions. People in the strategy cluster attribute more intelligence to decisions that minimise the agent's overall cost, even if the outcome is unlucky. People in the outcome cluster attribute intelligence to the outcome, preferring low-cost outcomes even if the outcome is accidental and make neutral judgements before they observe the result. Our model explains human judgements better than perceptual cues.
[condition, mouse, sem, age, time, half, forgetting] [people, rating, participant, experiment, attribution, rated, social, anova, judged, cognitive, belief, attributed] [attribute, perceptual, cell, main, describe, university] [knowledge, intelligent, strategy, difference, number, control, solving, better, department] [cluster, table, random] [intelligence, agent, decision, prior, model, outcome, optimal, revisits, noise, suboptimal, optimality, lucky, pomdp, planning, based, bayesian, set, rank, movie, evaluating, reward, inverse, regression, chosen, rational, theory, pearson, median, observer, observed, observable, attributing, higher] [goal, action, computer, human, behaviour, markov, space, multiple, location]
The Emergence of Linguistic Consciousness and the "hard problem"
Christina Behme


Jackendoff (2007) claims that most work on consciousness deals “almost exclusively with visual experience” and suggests to focus more on linguistic awareness. Jackendoff proposes that phonological ability – to divide utterances into words and syllables – is at the core of linguistic consciousness. This account can be supplemented by empirical research on language acquisition. Focusing on the step-by-step emergence of linguistic consciousness in infancy can offer new and potentially fruitful angles for investigating states of consciousness. In addition computational models of word segmentation and possible implications for linguistic consciousness are discussed.
[child, early, journal, complex, infant, suggests, learn, segmentation, auditory, familiar, task, time, awareness] [experience, account, aware, philosophical, relevant, cognitive, understanding, work, conversation, fact] [linguistic, language, consciousness, phonological, conscious, jackendoff, speech, phonotactic, chalmers, native, discriminate, voice, rhythmic, combination, acoustic, succeed, distinguish, werker, basic, prose, emergence, meaning, blue, access, argues, earliest, puddle, addressing, prelinguistic] [hard, problem, easy, young, initiated, ability, aspect, stage] [structure, acquisition, computational, word, increasingly, semantics] [model, provide, based, individual, modeling, range, good] [perception, input, valuation, focus, visual, role, human, babbling, behaviour, process]
Where Should Researchers Look for Strategy Discoveries during the Acquisition of Complex Task Performance? The Case of Space Fortress
Marc Destefano, Wayne Gray


In complex task domains, such as games, students may exceed their teachers. Such tasks afford diverse means to tradeoff one type of performance for another, combining task elements in novel ways to yield method variations and strategy discoveries that, if mastered, might produce large or small leaps in performance. For the researcher interested in the development of extreme expertise in the wild, the problem posed by such tasks is “where to look” to capture the explorations, trials, errors, and successes that eventually lead to the invention of superior performance. In this paper, we present several successful discoveries of methods for superior performance. For these discoveries we used Symbolic Aggregate Approximation as our method of identifying changepoints within score progressions in the venerable game of Space Fortress. By decomposing performance at these changepoints, we find previously unknown strategies that even the designers of the task had not anticipated.
[task, time, second, complex, rule, lab] [gray, appear, cognitive, result, killing] [drop, destroy, expert, curve, blue, superior, experimental] [strategy, performance, skill, number, score, three, study, symbolic, appears, science] [small, increase, acquisition, subject, large, approach] [fortress, player, mine, hour, game, destroyed, data, destroying, sax, average, total, shoot, shooting, vulnerability, individual, point, wayne, requires, method, capture, bonus, ship, extreme, destefano, marc, behavior, aggregate, well, plateau, psf, leap, discovering, dip, approximation, vlner, scoring, discovery, simple] [figure, space, play, algorithm, focus, allows, plot, pattern, screen]
The Interaction of Memory and Attention in Novel Word Generalization: A Computational Investigation
Erin Grant, Aida Nematzadeh, Suzanne Stevenson


People exhibit a tendency to generalize a novel noun to the basic-level in a hierarchical taxonomy -- a cognitively salient category such as "dog" -- with the degree of generalization depending on the number and type of exemplars. A change in the presentation timing of exemplars has also been shown to have an effect, reversing the prior observed pattern of basic-level generalization. We explore the precise mechanisms that could lead to such behavior by extending a computational model of word learning and generalization to integrate cognitive processes of memory and attention. Our results show that the interaction of forgetting and attention to novelty, as well as sensitivity to both type and token frequencies of exemplars, enables the model to replicate the empirical results from different presentation timings. Our results reinforce the need to incorporate general cognitive processes within word learning models to better understand observed behaviors in vocabulary acquisition.
[novel, generalization, attention, learning, presentation, subordinate, training, time, test, sequential, category, match, simultaneous, suspicious, general, coincidence, alignment, condition, novelty, dog, nematzadeh, type, reversal, superordinate, child, generalize, fep, presented, forgetting, pgen, attend, noveltyt, compared, assoct] [people, taxonomy, cognitive, strength, account, extended] [memory, meaning, instance, basic, object, taxonomic, specific, incremental] [three, group, number, greater, lower] [word, computational, animal, mechanism, association, frequency, approach] [model, probability, data, decay, set, observed, higher, tendency, integrate, formulation, rate] [feature, level, input, interaction, figure, single, labeled]
Environmental Orientation Affects Emotional Expression Identification
Stephen Flusberg, Derek Shapiro, Kevin Collister, Paul Thibodeau


Spatial metaphors for affective valence are common in English, where up in space=happy/positive and down in space=sad/negative. Past research suggests that these metaphors have some measure of psychological reality: people are faster to respond to valenced stimuli when they are presented in metaphor-congruent regions of space. Here we explore whether the orientation of a stimulus –rather than its position– is sufficient to elicit such spatial-valence congruency effects, and, if so, which spatial reference frame(s) people use to represent this orientation. In Experiment 1, participants viewed images of happy and sad profile faces in different orientations and had to identify the depicted emotion. In Experiment 2, participants completed this task while lying down on their sides, thereby disassociating environmental and egocentric reference frames. Experiment 1 revealed a metaphor-congruent interaction between emotion and orientation, while Experiment 2 revealed that this spatial-valence congruency effect was only reliable in the environmental frame of reference.
[condition, appeared, stimulus, revealed, faster, presented, processing, time, position, completed, upward, reaction, downward, compared, slower, response, identify, suggests] [happy, experiment, sad, people, frame, emotional, congruency, upright, gazing, emotion, masked, upwards, valence, profile, oriented, respect, facing, unmasked, valenced, account, work, psychology, discussion, disassociating, appear, positive, negative, mapping, davidenko, lying, common, lynott, connotes, sufficient, elicit, participant] [reference, spatial, environmental, egocentric, error, main] [performance, study] [analysis] [data, based] [orientation, face, respond, space, figure, represent, computer, interaction, screen, polarity, expression, top, environment, perception, spatialvalence]
An experimental study on the observation of facts in explanation reconstruction
Hitoshi Terai, Kazuhisa Miwa, Naohiro Toyama


In this study, we conducted experiments to examine the factors that facilitate shifts in explanations using short story in which participants were required an explanation reconstruction. In the experiment, we controlled the time of presentation of a key fact that contradicts an initial explanation and has a central role in its reconstruction (bottom-up condition), reflective thinking (top-down condition), and the two together (bidirectional condition). The results are summarized as follows. First, when the prior explanation was rejected, attention to the key fact was inhibited although a new explanation was required. Second, the successful group increased their attention on the key fact just before the explanatory shift. Third, protection of the preceding explanation with unobserved facts was inhibited by guiding the participants’ attention toward the key fact. Finally, although the initial explanation was not completely shifted, a quasiexplanatory shift was achieved by activating reflective thinking with attention to the key fact.
[attention, time, condition, facilitate, baseline, phase, task, increased, presented, finding] [fact, explanation, key, explanatory, initial, reflective, experiment, reconstructed, barber, thinking, shifted, bidirectional, hair, story, unsuccessful, indicated, oxygen, shop, understanding, caloric, summarized, crucial, gathering, scientific, burning, facilitated, introduction, phenomenon, staff, constructing, basis, reconsider, reinterpret, guiding] [shift, experimental, previous, main, university, meaning] [control, group, place, mind, number, ratio, lower, required, difference, problem, science, procedure] [increase, construct, constructed, preceding, structure] [successful, based, theory, observation, average, opportunity, consider, completely, observed, accepted] [fixation, reconstruction, figure, system, transition, eye, process, area]
A Learned Label Modulates Object Representations in 10-Month-Old Infants
Katherine Twomey, Gert Westermann


Despite substantial evidence for a bidirectional relationship between language and representation, the roots of this relationship in infancy are not known. The current study explores the possibility that labels may affect object representations at the earliest stages of language acquisition. We asked parents to play with their 10-month-old infants with two novel toys for three minutes, every day for a week, teaching infants a novel word for one toy but not the other. After a week infants participated in a familiarization task in which they saw each object for 8 trials in silence, followed by a test trial consisting of both objects accompanied by the trained word. Infants exhibited a faster decline in looking times to the previously unlabeled object. These data speak to the current debate over the status of labels in human cognition, supporting accounts in which labels are an integral part of representation.
[label, time, novel, child, infant, trial, stimulus, familiarization, journal, test, learned, evidence, training, learning, early, category, attention, presented, phase, session, target, task, caregiver, recorded, lab, eyetracker, half, development, consisted, shape, westermann, categorization, developmental, age, twomey, preferential, auditory] [experience, relationship, cognitive, work, account, interact, explained, mapping] [object, language, affect, perceptual, experimental, color, accompanied, blue] [study, experimenter, asked, week, toy, received, identical, teaching, difference] [word, relative, onset, amount] [demonstrate, red, prior, data, individual, model] [play, representation, labeled, current, trained, figure, visual, screen, offset, single]
Spatial Interference and Individual Differences in Looking at Nothing for Verbal Memory
Alper Kumcu, Robin L. Thompson


People tend to look at uninformative, blank locations in space when retrieving information. This gaze behaviour, known as looking at nothing, is assumed to be driven by the use of spatial indices associated with external information. We investigated whether people form spatial indices and look at nothing when retrieving words from memory. Participants were simultaneously presented four words. During retrieval participants looked at the relevant, blank location, where the probe word had appeared previously, longer than the other blank locations. Additionally, word presentation was sometimes followed by a visual cue either co-located or not with the probe word. Valid cues functioned as visual reinforcement while invalid cues caused interference. Finally, participants with better visuospatial memory looked less at the relevant, blank location, suggesting a dynamic relationship between so-called “external” and “internal” memory. Overall findings suggest an automatic, instantaneous spatial indexing mechanism for words and a dynamic looking at nothing behaviour.
[cue, visuospatial, blank, invalid, time, presented, verbal, indexing, interference, irrelevant, condition, looked, evidence, valid, task, revealed, appeared, journal, simultaneously, interfering, general, formed, aimed] [cognitive, mental, relevant, percentage, people, psychological, experiment, manipulation, understanding, history, version] [spatial, memory, quadrant, retrieval, language, experimental, university, updated, main] [external, study, better, number, spent, difference, equal, three, asked, questionnaire, science, working] [word, probe, mechanism, analysis] [individual, correlation, data] [visual, eye, dwell, internal, interest, behaviour, location, integrated, corresponding, dynamic, space, encoding, longer, associated, centre, retrieving, divided, area, analysed, role, simon, environment]
Deconstructing "tomorrow": How children learn the semantics of time
Katharine Tillman, Tyler Marghetis, David Barner, Mahesh Srinivasan


Deictic time words (e.g., “tomorrow") refer to time periods relative to the present. While children produce these words by age 2-3, they use them incorrectly for several more years. Here, as a case study in abstract word learning, we explored what children know about these words during this delay. Specifically, we probed children’s knowledge of three aspects of meaning: deictic (past/future) status, sequential ordering (e.g., “tomorrow” is after “yesterday”), and remoteness from now. We asked 3- to 8-year-olds to place these words on a timeline extending from the past (left) to the future (right). Even 4-year-olds could meaningfully represent the words’ deictic status and order, and by 6, the majority displayed adult-like performance. Adult-like knowledge of remoteness, however, emerged independently, after age 7. Thus, even while children use these terms incorrectly, they are gradually constructing a structured semantic domain, including information about the deictic, sequential, and metric relations among terms.
[deictic, time, remoteness, status, age, early, child, learning, accuracy, sequential, adult, busby, facet, tested, learn, year, indicate, improved, developmental, journal, chance, independently, half, bootstrapping, type] [temporal, timeline, understanding, future, common, case, long, indicated, going, event, possibility, yesterday, cognitive] [meaning, language, item, produce, calculated, spatial, production, linguistic, error, characterize, refer] [knowledge, partial, acquire, three, study, majority, week, place, young, department] [order, word, relative, semantic, distance, acquisition, abstract, syntactic, breakfast, tense] [ordering, prior, probability, provide, predicted, confidence, method] [figure, placement, grant, left, duration, represent, transition]
Generalization of within-category feature correlations
Nolan Conaway, Kenneth Kurtz


Theoretical and empirical work in the field of classification learning is centered on a ‘reference point’ view, where learners are thought to represent categories in terms of stored points in psychological space (e.g., prototypes, exemplars, clusters). Reference point representations fully specify how regions of psychological space are associated with class labels, but they do not contain information about how features relate to one another (within- class or otherwise). We present a novel experiment suggesting human learners acquire knowledge of within-class feature correlations and use this knowledge during generalization. Our methods conform strictly to the traditional artificial classification learning paradigm, and our results cannot be explained by any prominent reference point model (i.e., GCM, ALCOVE). An alternative to the reference point framework (DIVA) provides a strong account of the observed performance. We additionally describe preliminary work on a novel discriminative clustering model that also explains our results.
[category, diva, classification, learning, generalization, training, novel, journal, discriminative, boundary, stimulus, response, evidence, indicate, generalized, exemplar, reported, presented, selective] [psychological, explained, account, people, work, experiment, systematic, cognitive] [reference, experimental, perceptual, memory, depicted, context, contrast, encode] [knowledge, performance, acquire, traditional, report, difference, study, score] [class, clustering, similarity, divergent] [model, point, gcm, observed, fit, parameter, probability, best, prediction, predict, theory, search] [feature, diagonal, figure, critical, human, behavioral, side, represent, internal, stored, central, representation, hidden, fully, space, achieved, associated, explains, design, represented]
Neurophysiological Effects of Negotiation Framing
Peter Khooshabeh, Rebecca Lin, Celso de Melo, Jonathan Gratch, Brett Ouimette, Jim Blascovich


In this study, we manipulated gain/loss framing context during a simulated negotiation between a human user and a virtual agent. Task instructions placed users either in a loss or gain framed context, such that those in the loss frame had to minimize expenses whereas those in the gain frame had to maximize profits. The virtual agent displayed facial emotions so that we could also test how interpersonal emotions interact with framing. Results suggest that individuals are more motivated to minimize their losses than maximizing their gains. The loss frame caused individuals to demand more during the negotiation, hence to minimize expenses. Neurophysiological results suggest that cardiovascular patterns of challenge (i.e., positive motivations) were present in the loss frame condition, most strongly when the virtual human smiled. We discuss these results in regards to Prospect Theory. This work also has implications for designing and rigorously evaluating human-like virtual agents.
[task, condition, compared, journal, suggests, displayed, induction, decreased, half, indicate, increased] [frame, virtual, framing, positive, emotion, social, emotional, indicated, motivated, physiological, psychological, cognitive, told, work, khooshabeh, account, situation, participant, neutral] [affect, context, manipulated] [greater, performance, threat, study, difference, mood, motivation] [relative, multivariate] [negotiation, loss, gain, demand, challenge, agent, cardiovascular, offer, decision, neurophysiological, risk, outcome, state, based, minimize, prospect, tpr, demanded, motivational, reactivity, profit, model, making, carnevale, maximize, behavior, round, predicted, loom, bps] [facial, behavioral, level, interpersonal, interaction, goal, experienced, expression, human, design]
Probability Prediction in Children with ASD
Zi L. Sim, Fei Xu


Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often struggle with making inductive generalizations. Yet for typically developing children, the capacity to make such generalizations is a hallmark of human learning. This ability requires some understanding of “intuitive statistics” (i.e., the understanding that there is a relationship between samples and populations), which have been previously demonstrated to emerge early on in infancy. We hypothesized that the challenges with inductive generalization among the ASD population may have its roots in weaknesses in probabilistic reasoning. In the current study, we gave children with ASD a probability prediction task adapted from the method used with infants in Teglas et al. (2007), and our results over two experiments with two groups (one from the U.S. and one from Singapore) suggest that compared with typically developing children, children with autism may have difficulties in engaging in probabilistic reasoning.
[autism, asd, familiarization, developing, presented, inductive, task, test, displaying, trial, child, developmental, picture, learning, spectrum, early, journal, statistical, phase, bouncing, shape, presentation, second, learn, generalization] [experiment, cognitive, reasoning, psychological, yellow, understanding, social, future, autistic, disorder, causal, work, mental] [experimental, object, blue, color, adapted, fluent] [control, three, ability, procedure, identical, container, card, young, experimenter, difference, exact, group, asked, better] [typically, large, order, weak] [probabilistic, sample, probability, theory, prediction, making, binomial, method, based, median] [current, exited, visual, level, respond, screen, perform]
Know Your Enemy: Applying Cognitive Modeling in Security Domain
Vladislav Daniel Veksler, Norbou Buchler


Game Theory -based decision aids have been successfully employed in real-world policing, anti-terrorism, and wildlife conservation efforts (Tambe, Jiang, An, & Jain, 2013). Cognitive modeling, in concert with model tracing and dynamic parameter fitting techniques, may be used to improve the performance of such decision aids by predicting individual attacker behavior in repeated security games. We present three simulations, showing that (1) cognitive modeling can aid in greatly improving decision-aid performance in the security domain; and (2) despite the fact that individual attackers will differ in initial preferences and in how they learn, model parameters can be adjusted dynamically to make useful predictions for each attacker.
[learning, repeated, robust, suggests, general] [cognitive, initial, normative, account, fact, future, despite, cognition] [domain, mixed] [performance, strategy, software, better, playing, number, improve, international] [table, employed, animal, approach, computational, oxford] [attacker, security, game, defender, model, simulation, theory, decision, rate, individual, modeling, agent, predict, preference, tracing, parameter, choose, based, behavior, success, reinforcement, uncertainty, predicting, method, provide, dynamically, employ, utility, winning, prevented, rational, attack, optimal, data, paper, conference, tambe, successful, perfectly, fitting] [human, figure, action, behavioral, play, focus, dynamic, represents, multiple, current]
Leveling the Field: Talking Levels in Cognitive Science
Luke Kersten, Robert West, Andrew Brook


Talk of levels is everywhere in cognitive science. Whether it is in terms of adjudicating longstanding debates or motivating foundational concepts, one cannot go far without hearing about the need to talk at different ‘levels’. Yet in spite of its widespread application and use, the concept of levels has received little sustained attention within cognitive science. This paper provides an analysis of the various ways the notion of levels has been deployed within cognitive science. The paper begins by introducing and motivating discussion via four representative accounts of levels. It then turns to outlining and relating the four accounts using two dimensions of comparison. The result is the creation of a conceptual framework that maps the logical space of levels talk, which offers an important step toward making sense of levels talk within cognitive science
[second, attention, general, position] [cognitive, talk, ontic, epistemic, explanatory, account, bechtel, discussion, newell, physical, applies, biological, realization, metaphysical, pylyshyn, algorithmic, mechanistic, cognition, sense, marr, application, understanding, virtue, identifies, described, real, implementational, concerned, informationprocessing, constitutive, philosophy, realist, mental, investigation, conductivity, perspectival, simply, respect, substantive] [contrast, produce] [three, science, versus, larger, mind, change] [analysis, computational, organization, conceptual, relation, theoretical, relate, logical, mechanism] [theory, consider, provide, individual, underlying, representative] [level, system, framework, view, figure, brain, space, current, neurological, realized]
Bayesian Pronoun Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese
Meilin Zhan, Roger P. Levy, Roger P. Levy, Andrew Kehler


Kehler and Rohde (2013) proposed a Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation where the influence of world knowledge emerges as effects on the prior and the influence of information structure as effects on the likelihood: P(referent|pronoun) ∝ P(pronoun|referent)P(referent). Here we present two experiments on Mandarin Chinese that allow us to test the generality of the theory for a language with different syntactic-semantic associations than English. Manipulations involving two different classes of implicit-causality verbs and passive vs. active voice confirmed key predictions of the Bayesian theory: effects of these manipulations on the prior and likelihood in production were consistently reflected in pronoun interpretation preferences. Quantitative analysis shows that the Bayesian model is the best fit for Mandarin compared to two competing analyses. These results lend both qualitative and quantitative support to a cross linguistically general Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation.
[type, test, journal, second, statistical, increased, condition] [experiment, strong, influence, san] [voice, production, referent, main, grammatical, object, overt, affect, coded, refer, referring, null, passage, varied, term] [passive, active, free, knowledge] [pronoun, interpretation, prompt, verb, subject, logical, meihui, syntactic, mandarin, rohde, kehler, weak, sentence, passivization, bias, form, pronominalized, chinese, bei, mirror, structure, pronominalization, mentioned, clause, competing, intended, entity, structural, emerges, jieyi, generality] [bayesian, model, rate, prior, likelihood, theory, predicts, probability, predicted, hypothesis, data, proportion, choice, based, observed] [figure, quantitative, role]
A speed-accuracy trade-off in children's processing of scalar implicatures
Rose Schneider, Michael Frank


Scalar implicatures - inferences from a weak description ("I ate some of the cookies") that a stronger alternative is true ("I didn't eat all") - are paradigm cases of pragmatic inference. Children's trouble with scalar implicatures is thus an important puzzle for theories of pragmatic development, given their communicative competence in other domains. Previous research has suggested that access to alternatives might be key. Here, we explore children's reaction times in a new paradigm for measuring scalar implicature processing. Alongside failures on scalar implicatures with "some," we replicate previous reports of failures with "none," and find evidence of a speed-accuracy trade-off for both quantifiers. Motivated by these findings, we explore the relationship between accuracy and reaction time with a Drift Diffusion Model. We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that preschoolers lack access to alternatives for scalar implicature computation, although this set of alternatives may be broader than previously assumed.
[trial, age, accuracy, reaction, type, quantifier, drift, horowitz, time, response, implicature, evidence, implicatures, target, task, developmental, ddm, processing, explore, separation, paradigm, ipad, indicating, suggests, slower, older, increased] [consistent, split, low, inferential, cover, cognitive, relevant, excluded, motivated, relationship, failed] [frank, previous, mixed, description, language, access] [correct, performance, incorrect, high, three, knowledge, lower, study, computation, experimenter, additional] [book, bias, subject, lexical] [scalar, data, alternative, diffusion, model, making, parameter, pragmatic, fit, hypothesis, find, compute, theory, rate, exploratory, based, observed, decision, confidence] [figure, interaction, rts, longer, process]
Left-right mental timeline is robust to visuospatial and verbal interference
Rose Hendricks, Esther Walker, Benjamin Bergen, Lera Boroditsky, Rafael Nunez


We test the robustness of American college students’ mental timeline to dual tasks that have interfered with spatial and verbal reasoning in prior work. We focus on the left-right axis for representing sequences of events. We test American college students, who read from left to right. We test for automatic space-time mappings using two established space-time association tasks. We find that their tendency to associate earlier events with the left side of space and later events with the right remains under conditions of visuospatial and verbal interference. We find this both when participants made time judgments about linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. We discuss the relationship between these results and those obtained for mental timelines that result from learning new metaphors in language (Hendricks & Boroditsky, 2015), and the effects of the same interference tasks on number tasks (mental number-line and counting; van Dijck et al., 2009; Frank et al., 2012).
[interference, time, visuospatial, task, verbal, incongruent, congruent, reaction, completed, second, presented, type, revealed, accuracy, baseline, dijck, condition, span, sequence, robust, evidence, calibration, block, nonlinguistic, suggesting, standard] [judgment, mental, experiment, dual, congruency, work, timeline, participant, cognitive, people, metaphor, temporal, implicit, assigned, white, future] [spatial, memory, main, linguistic, van, american, frank] [number, working, control, three, group, accurate, difference, performance, conducted, college, practice] [earlier, association, order, associate] [load, observed, making, individual] [left, representation, space, figure, screen, performed, side, interaction]
Helping people make better decisions using optimal gamification
Falk Lieder, Tom Griffiths


Game elements like points and levels are a popular tool to nudge and engage students and customers. Yet, no theory can tell us which incentive structures work and how to design them. Here we connect the practice of gamification to the theory of reward shaping in reinforcement learning. We leverage this connection to develop a method for designing effective incentive structures and delineating when gamification will succeed from when it will fail. We evaluate our method in two behavioral experiments. The results of the first experiment demonstrate that incentive structures designed by our method help people make better, less short-sighted decisions and avoid the pitfalls of less principled approaches. The results of the second experiment illustrate that such incentive structures can be effectively implemented using game elements like points and badges. These results suggest that our method provides a principled way to leverage gamification to help people make better decisions.
[condition, learning, avoid, time, response, task, presented, second, improved, increased] [people, experiment, positive, negative, work, designed, cognitive, principled] [experimental, modified] [performance, approximate, better, help, adding, sum, equation, control, number, three, correct, problem, beneficial, international, group] [structure, embedded, frequency] [optimal, reward, gamification, method, policy, function, decision, shaping, incentive, game, state, planning, theorem, jonesville, median, clarksville, pseudorewards, choice, theory, smithsville, max, potential, mdp, designing, williamsville, reinforcement, bakersville, arg, leverage, based, fail, bonus, discounted] [figure, environment, action, integrated, move, level, current, original, achieve, separately]
When to Block versus Interleave Practice? Evidence Against Teaching Fraction Addition before Fraction Multiplication
Rony Patel, Ran Liu, Kenneth Koedinger


In practice, mathematics education is blocked (i.e., teaching one topic at a time; CCSS, 2010), but research generally promotes interleaving (i.e., teaching multiple topics together; Rohrer & Taylor, 2007). For example, fraction arithmetic is blocked with students being taught fraction addition before fraction multiplication. Since students often confuse fraction operations to produce arithmetic errors, interleaved fraction arithmetic instruction might be more productive than blocked instruction to teach students to discriminate between the operations. Additionally, a cognitive task analysis suggests that fraction multiplication may be a prerequisite to fraction addition and thus reversing the blocking order may enhance learning. Two experiments with fraction addition and fraction multiplication were run. Experiments 1 and 2 show that interleaved instruction is generally better than the current blocked instruction. Experiment 2 provides evidence that blocking that reverses the standard order -- providing practice on fraction multiplication before fraction addition -- produces better learning.
[condition, learning, interference, accuracy, evidence, training, task, presented, suggests, finding, block, type, second, slower] [experiment, common, cognitive, consistent, generally] [support, delayed] [fraction, multiplication, addition, blocked, interleaved, practice, problem, posttest, blocking, better, interleaving, strategy, correct, instruction, pretest, number, step, arithmetic, denominator, skill, midtest, incorrect, mathematics, division, taught, feedback, provided, multiplying, adding, teaching, correctness, performance, knowledge, outperformed, transfer, school, convert, answer, require, national, three, tutor, procedure, prerequisite, equivalent, included, progression] [order, analysis, core] [choice, observed, proportion, predict, based, state, independent] [figure, process, moving]
Context, but not proficiency, moderates the effects of metaphor framing: A case study in India
Paul Thibodeau, Daye Lee, Stephen Flusberg


Metaphors suffuse language and affect how people think. A meta-analysis of metaphor framing studies conducted between 1983 and 2000 concluded that metaphors are about 6% more persuasive than literal language (Sopory & Dillard, 2002). However, each of these studies was conducted in English with samples drawn from populations of native English speakers. Here, we test whether and how language proficiency moderates the influence of metaphor frames. Sampling from a population of non-native, but generally proficient, English speakers from India, we found that metaphor frames systematically affected people who reported using English primarily in informal contexts (i.e., among friends and family and through the media) but not for people who reported using English primarily in formal contexts (i.e., for school or work). We discuss implications of this finding for countries like the US, where English is increasingly a non-native language for its residents, and for theories of language processing.
[response, reported, congruent, type, second, journal, family, revealed, age, suggesting, incongruent, learning] [metaphor, people, crime, influence, consistent, beast, street, social, work, india, framing, participant, issue, frame, systematic, thibodeau, percentage, mechanical, cognitive, commonly, psychological, history, designed, including, persuasive, contrasted, political, reasoning] [language, informal, context, item, native, influenced, main, frequently, previous, proficient, degree] [formal, asked, virus, school, educational, education, study, create, conducted, science] [english, usage, table, reading, proficiency, tend, fluency] [population, option, model, choose, find, setting, consider, prior] [interaction, congruence]
Recursion in Nicaraguan Sign Language
Annemarie Kocab, Ann Senghas, Jesse Snedeker


Syntactic recursion is argued to be a key property of natural languages, allowing us to create an infinite number of utterances from a finite number of words and rules. Some have argued that recursion is uniquely human. There are at least two possibilities for the origins of recursion: 1) Recursion is a property of the language faculty. 2) Recursion is an historical accomplishment and is culturally constructed over millennia. Here we ask whether an emerging sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), exhibits syntactic recursion by comparing the language of the first three age cohorts of signers. Signers (n=27) watched and described vignettes designed to elicit relative clauses. Results suggest that signers from all three cohorts have strategies to fulfill the discourse function of relative clauses, picking out an individual from a set. The grammatical form of the utterances differs across cohorts, with signers from later cohorts clearly producing embedded structures.
[second, early, age, evidence, individuating, revealed, target, performing, repeated, compared] [property, historical, capacity, cognitive, work, version, faculty, character, established] [language, sign, community, university, fourth, coded, cultural, deaf, description, expect, constituent, linguistic, describing] [three, difference, third, number, reduction, asked, observing, study, department] [relative, clause, cohort, boy, recursion, conjoined, syntactic, typing, nicaraguan, nsl, verb, mention, producing, length, emerging, discourse, fulfill, recursive, argued, entered, unique, form, embedded, constructed, structure, noun, picking, identifying, prosodic] [individual, set, model, function, proportion, opportunity] [action, human, figure, scene, coding, single, current]
A Twist On Event Processing: Reorganizing Attention To Cope With Novelty In Dynamic Activity Sequences
Jessica Kosie, Dare Baldwin


Fluent event processing appears to critically involve selectively attending to information-rich junctures within continuously unfolding sensory streams (e.g., Newtson, 1973). What counts as information-rich would seem to depend on a variety of factors, however, including the novelty/familiarity of such events, as well as opportunity for repeated viewings. Using Hard, Recchia, & Tversky’s “Dwell-time Paradigm,” we investigated the extent to which viewers’ attention to unfolding activity streams is affected by novelty/familiarity and a second viewing. Viewers’ dwell times were recorded as they advanced twice each through three slideshows varying in familiarity but equated on other dimensions. Dwell time patterns revealed reorganization on a number of fronts: a) familiarity elicited decreased dwelling overall, b) dwell-time patterns changed systematically on second viewing, and c) familiarity modulated the specific nature of change associated with repeated viewing. These findings illuminate reorganization in attention as action information is first encountered and quickly incorporated to guide processing.
[tying, second, boundary, familiarity, processing, twist, familiar, attention, predictability, slide, advantage, shoe, sem, unfolding, distinctive, slideshows, stream, shoelace, exposure, displayed, statistical, sequence, segmentation, revealed, segmental, attentional, dwelling, slideshow, loop, identify, portion, type, enhanced, repeated] [event, depicting, causally, low, examined, causal, fact] [discrimination, specific, degree, highly, main] [three, versus, provided, differ, linear, greater] [structure, tend, analysis, relative, increase] [method, prior, predicted, preferred, opportunity] [dwell, activity, viewing, action, longer, motion, reorganization, sensory, classified, process, interaction, selectively, dynamic, level, naturalistic, unfamiliar, segment, current]
Strategic search in semantic memory
Evgenii Nikitin, Thomas Hills


We search for various things every day - food, information on the Internet or someone's name in memory. Despite the different nature of these tasks, they all have a common feature - a final goal with an unknown location in a complex environment. This property of the search raises a problem of trade-off between exploration of new opportunities and exploitation of the known information. We used the data from the semantic fluency task experiment to investigate how humans switch between exploration and exploitation strategies when they search in memory. On comparing different search models, the one that assumes that humans switch strategies according to the semantic quality of the current neighbourhood best fits the data. Moreover, participants who set higher thresholds for the words with better quality of the neighbourhood tend to retrieve more words. We also used regression analysis to find out which factors affect efficiency of both strategies.
[time, switch, suggests, type] [psychological, participant, people, described, cognitive, variable] [memory, retrieval, retrieved, retrieve, calculated, description, support, produced] [number, strategy, idea, performance, study, improve, three] [semantic, local, global, word, quality, proximity, analysis, similarity, neighbourhood, frequency, measure, subject, vector, random, calculate, amount, table, semantically, coefficient, animal] [search, model, threshold, maximum, average, patch, foraging, fit, find, exploitation, mvt, set, remaining, exploration, marginal, optimal, likelihood, best, aic, regression, higher, elapsed, function, pij, choice, rate, attempt, modelling, assumes, leave, intake, strategically, estimate] [current, space, process, switching, figure, nearest, dynamic, glm, representation]
Translating testimonial claims into evidence for category-based induction
Tamar Kushnir, Susan Gelman


Inductive generalizations about the properties of kinds are based on evidence. But evidence can come either from our observations, or from the testimony of knowledgeable informants. The current study explores how we combine information from these two sources to make inductive inferences. Participants learned about a novel object category, and observed the property occur with some frequency in a sample of category members. Different groups of participants also heard an informant making either Generic, Quantified, or Specific claims about the prevalence of the property. Participants who heard generic claims were more resistant to a straightforward use of statistical evidence in their generalizations. Moreover, participants who rated the informant as more knowledgeable (across conditions) gave higher prevalence estimates. The results suggest two pathways through which testimony translates into evidence for category learning, and raise questions on how to best combine evidence from these different sources into a common representational form.
[category, evidence, condition, inductive, trial, statistical, learning, novel, heard, hearing, suggests, type, wald, general] [generic, property, quantified, testimony, zorg, claim, testimonial, cognitive, influence, attribution, led, low, causal, straightforward, blickets, skepticism, account, straightforwardly, resistant, lovely, people, illustration, translate, credibility, belief] [specific, main, object, influenced] [knowledge, high, study, video, slope, knowledgeable, difference, lower, informant, translating, observing] [frequency, table] [observed, prevalence, sample, machine, average, rational, based, probability, lead, making, parameter, probabilistic, prior, higher, data, predicted, bayesian, model, highest, true] [interaction, figure, human, process, current]
Investigating Rational Analogy in the Spirit of John Stuart Mill: Bayesian Analysis of Confidence about Inferences across Aligned Simple Systems
Bradley Rogers, David Landy


What does it mean for analogy to be rational? John Stuart Mill described a probabilistic underpinning for analogical inference based on the the odds of observing systemic pairwise correspondence across otherwise independent systems by mere chance. Although proponents and critics have debated its validity, Mill’s approach has yet to be implemented computationally or studied psychologically. In this paper we examine Mill’s approach and show how it can be instantiated using Bayes theorem. Then we describe two experiments that present subjects with partially-revealed, aligned binary strings with varying degrees of intra- and inter-string regularity. Experimental results are compared to a formal rational analysis of the stimuli revealing conditions whereby participants exhibit confidence patterns consistent and inconsistent with Mill’s rational basis of analogy.
[analogy, analogical, evidence, conflict, correspondence, stimulus, relational, response, target, general, presented, match, journal, indicating] [consistent, people, participant, experiment, basis, reasoning, agree, property, cognitive, strong, relationship, described, assigned, psychological] [matched, experimental, degree] [problem] [approach, analysis, computational, bias, unique, list, large] [rational, probability, proportion, pairwise, model, theory, randomly, probabilistic, sample, prediction, confidence, observed, mill, rationally, sampling, binary, estimating, based, bayesian, lead, distribution, choice, rate, criticism, varying, simple, describes, generated, incomplete, consider, systemic, rationality] [figure, design, system, developed, responded, human]
Pragmatic relativity: Gender and context affect the use of personal pronouns in discourse differentially across languages
Zeynep Azar, Ad Backus, Asli Ozyurek


Speakers use differential referring expressions in pragmatically appropriate ways to produce coherent narratives. Languages, however, differ in a) whether REs as arguments can be dropped and b) whether personal pronouns encode gender. We examine two languages that differ from each other in these two aspects and ask whether the co-reference context and the gender encoding options affect the use of REs differentially. We elicited narratives from Dutch and Turkish speakers about two types of three-person events, one including people of the same and the other of mixed-gender. Speakers re-introduced referents into the discourse with fuller forms (NPs) and maintained them with reduced forms (overt or null pronoun). Turkish speakers used pronouns mainly to mark emphasis and only Dutch speakers used pronouns differentially across the two types of videos. We argue that linguistic possibilities available in languages tune speakers into taking different principles into account to produce pragmatically coherent narratives.
[type, repeated, compared, reduced, general, adult, stimulus] [personal, person, singular, extended] [turkish, dutch, null, overt, gender, language, context, main, maintenance, referent, reference, typologically, encode, university, studying, referring, addressee, maintaining, netherlands, specific, default, sitting, radboud, office, expect, emphasis, coherent, refer, coded, coreference] [video, third, differ, strategy, study, comparison, additional, comparing] [discourse, pronoun, subject, analysis, mentioned, clause, variance, form, noun, applied] [data, independent, woman, preferred, sample, full] [tracking, interaction, performed, maintained, figure, single, hand, accessible, current]
Which Learning Algorithms Can Generalize Identity-Based Rules to Novel Inputs?
Paul Tupper, Bobak Shahriari


We propose a novel framework for the analysis of learning algorithms that allows us to say when such algorithms can and cannot generalize certain patterns from training data to test data. In particular we focus on situations where the rule that must be learned concerns two components of a stimulus being identical. We call such a basis for discrimination an identity-based rule. Identity-based rules have proven to be difficult or impossible for certain types of learning algorithms to acquire from limited datasets. This is in contrast to human behaviour on similar tasks. Here we provide a framework for rigorously establishing which learning algorithms will fail at generalizing identity-based rules to novel stimuli. We use this framework to show that such algorithms are unable to generalize identity-based rules to novel inputs unless trained on virtually all possible inputs. We demonstrate these results computationally with a multilayer feedforward neural network.
[training, learning, novel, learn, generalize, second, ungrammatical, valid, learner, pair, artificial, task, paired, learned, fixed] [rating, case, result, suppose, experiment, evaluate] [language, grammatical, map, phonological, contrast, phonotactic, apply, university, linguistic] [score, example, number, asked, identical, performance, ability] [word, random, computational, order] [data, set, consider, theorem, increasing, good, provide, average, model, demonstrate, randomly, maximum] [algorithm, invariant, hidden, symmetry, network, neural, trained, input, distributed, localist, dataset, train, letter, define, invariance, human, sonority, figure, encoding, segment, identity, consist, framework, unable, feature, formalize, connectionist, computer]
Discriminability of sound contrasts in the face of speaker variation quantified
Christina Bergmann, Alejandrina Cristia, Emmanuel Dupoux


How does a naive language learner deal with speaker variation irrelevant to distinguishing word meanings? Experimental data is contradictory, and incompatible models have been proposed. Here, we examine basic assumptions regarding the acoustic signal the learner deals with: Is speaker variability a hurdle in discriminating sounds or can it easily be ignored? To this end, we summarize existing infant data. We then present machine-based discriminability scores of sound pairs obtained without any language knowledge. Our results show that speaker variability decreases sound contrast discriminability, and that some contrasts are affected more than others. However, chance performance is rare; most contrasts remain discriminable in the face of speaker variation. We take our results to mean that speaker variation is not a uniform hurdle to discriminating sound contrasts, and careful examination is necessary when planning and interpreting studies testing whether and to what extent infants (and adults) are sensitive to speaker differences.
[sound, infant, tested, test, processing, testing, stimulus, quantify, evidence, condition, spoken, learning, early, chance, compare, developmental, compared, novel, learner] [psychological, including, deal] [speaker, variation, speech, variability, acoustic, discrimination, contrast, discriminability, episodic, language, talker, phonetic, abstractionist, normalization, abx, pena, sucking, experimental, vowel, support, kuhl, habituation, jusczyk, mel, deviating, adverse, frequently, background, introduced] [difference, score, versus, study, performance, impact, difficult, ability, problem, change, better, international] [word, abstract, corpus, table, english] [data, compute, based, lack, rate] [face, figure, level, perception, multiple, indicates, interaction, trained]
The Combinatorial Power of Experience
Brendan Johns, Randall Jamieson, Matthew Crump, Michael Jones, Douglas Mewhort


Recent research in the artificial grammar literature has found that a simple exemplar model of memory can account for a wide variety of artificial grammar results (Jamieson & Mewhort, 2009, 2010, 2011). This classic type of model has also been extended to account for natural language sentence processing effects (Johns & Jones, 2015). The current article extends this work to account for sentence production, and demonstrates that the structure of language itself provides sufficient power to generate syntactically correct sentences, even with no higher-level information about language provided to the model.
[exemplar, artificial, test, presented, position, journal, regularity] [experience, power, account, psychological, nature, sufficient, people] [language, memory, context, retrieval, produce, experimental, grammatical, grammatically, production, retrieved, studied, linguistic, previous] [number, performance, correct, equal, department, high, greater, ability, three, improvement, exact, formal] [word, order, sentence, vector, grammar, structure, natural, syntactic, analysis, unordered, length, construct, panel, list, small, probe, record, large, retrieves, jamieson, constructed, jones, amount, complexity, holographic, computed, final, mechanism, regular, epm] [model, rank, simple, function, provide, ordering, theory, based, underlying] [figure, serial, stored, representation, represent, represented, goal, parallel, input, allows, represents, top]
Racial Essentialism is Associated With Prejudice Towards Blacks in 5- and 6-Year-Old White Children
Tara Mandalaywala, Marjorie Rhodes


Psychological essentialism is a cognitive bias that leads people to view members of a category as sharing a deep, underlying, inherent nature that causes them to be fundamentally similar to one another in non-obvious ways. Although essentialist beliefs can be beneficial, allowing people to view the social world as stable and predictable, essentialist beliefs about social categories such as race or ethnicity are also thought to underlie the development of stereotyping and prejudice. While recent studies in adults have found that racial essentialism is associated with increased prejudice, the development of this relationship has rarely been examined. The present research examines the implications of essentialism for prejudice in a population of white five- and six-year old children in the United States, finding that essentialist beliefs about race are associated with increased implicit and explicit prejudice towards members of a minority racial group.
[development, child, journal, early, explicit, increased, block, developmental, category, time, presented, status, completed] [social, essentialism, essentialist, prejudice, white, race, implicit, racial, black, relationship, cognitive, people, intergroup, psychological, participant, formation, personality, smiley, prejudiced, frowny, negative, socially, pairing, warmth, stable, justification, positive, cartoon, justify, prejudicial, yellow, biological, reasoning, distinct, stereotyping, leading, thermometer, nature, rhodes] [blue] [group, greater, score, study, minority, asked, three] [association, structure, measure, bias, order] [individual, data, compatible, lead, button, incompatible, sample, higher] [associated, view, face, indicates, screen]
Simple Search Algorithms on Semantic Networks Learned from Language Use
Aida Nematzadeh, Filip Miscevic, Suzanne Stevenson


Recent empirical and modeling research has focused on the semantic fluency task because it is informative about semantic memory. An interesting interplay arises between the richness of representations in semantic memory and the complexity of algorithms required to process it. It has remained an open question whether representations of words and their relations learned from language use can enable a simple search algorithm to mimic the observed behavior in the fluency task. Here we show that it is plausible to learn rich representations from naturalistic data for which a very simple search algorithm (a random walk) can replicate the human patterns. We suggest that explicitly structuring knowledge about words into a semantic network plays a crucial role in modeling human behavior in memory search and retrieval; moreover, this is the case across a range of semantic information sources.
[learned, learner, match, switch, replicate, task, cue] [people, explicitly, appropriate, work, simply] [memory, produce, meaning, language, produced] [number, ratio, required, knowledge, created, better] [semantic, word, random, irt, walk, beagle, animal, abbott, structure, fluency, corpus, gold, weighted, node, association, reflect, conceptual, table, edge, graph, computational, similarity, subcategory, length, stricter, contextual, approach, unweighted] [data, search, patch, model, observed, range, best, behavior, foraging, empirical, set, simple, optimal, parameter, average, threshold, find, modeling, rate, capture, higher] [network, human, representation, connected, pattern, algorithm, input, process, figure, naturalistic, perform]
The Structure of Names in Memory: Deviations from Uniform Entropy Impair Memory for Linguistic Sequences
Melody Dye, Brendan Johns, Michael Jones, Michael Ramscar


Human languages can be seen as socially evolved systems that have been structured to optimize information flow in communication. Communication appears to proceed both more efficiently and more smoothly when information is distributed evenly across the linguistic signal. In previous work (Ramscar et al., 2013), we used tools from information theory to examine how naming systems evolved to meet this requirement historically, and how, over the past several hundred years, social legislation and rapid population growth have disrupted naming practices in the West, making names ever harder to process and remember. In support of these observations, we present findings from three experiments investigating name fluency, recognition, and recall. These results provide converging empirical evidence for an optimal solution to name design, and offer a more nuanced understanding of how social engineering has impaired the structure of names in memory.
[task, revealed, response, accuracy, faster, category, journal, learn, second, ramscar, repeated] [famous, social, experiment, cognitive, psychological, work, discussion, psychology, experience] [female, male, gender, memory, linguistic, recall, produce, university, produced, recalled, evenly, highly, harder, communication] [asked, correct, correctly, study, array, difficult] [semantic, entropy, naming, frequency, subject, grammar, fluency, structure, english, producing, distributional, analysis, efficient, lexical, similarity, word, indiana, identified, length, accurately, semantics] [set, theory, men, rate, optimal, distribution, individual, uncertainty, collected, log, search, probability, relied, point, model, decision] [element, interaction, recognition, face, human, figure, space, distributed]
Analyzing distributional learning of phonemic categories in unsupervised deep neural networks
Okko Räsänen, Tasha Nagamine, Nima Mesgarani


Infants’ speech perception adapts to the phonemic categories of their native language, a process assumed to be driven by the distributional properties of speech. This study investigates whether deep neural networks (DNNs), the current state-of-the-art in distributional feature learning, are capable of learning phoneme-like representations of speech in an unsupervised manner. We trained DNNs with unlabeled and labeled speech and analyzed the activations of each layer with respect to the phones in the input segments. The analyses reveal that the emergence of phonemic invariance in DNNs is dependent on the availability of phonemic labeling of the input during the training. No increased phonemic selectivity of the hidden layers was observed in the purely unsupervised networks despite successful learning of low-dimensional representations for speech. This suggests that additional learning constraints or more sophisticated models are needed to account for the emergence of phone-like categories in distributional learning operating on natural speech.
[learning, training, classification, standard, statistical, target, learn, auditory, finding, continuous, increased] [temporal, capable] [speech, acoustic, language, phonetic, gender, native, context, error] [number, study, performance, analyzed] [distributional, order, earlier, increasingly, node, structure, random, vector, corpus] [data, set, observed, individual, higher, model] [input, phone, phonemic, layer, network, dbn, aen, unsupervised, neural, deep, hidden, selectivity, mlp, supervised, output, knn, rbm, nagamine, dnns, timit, invariance, moa, activation, reconstruction, generative, system, autoencoder, dbns, original, trained, dnn, feature, multiple, corresponding, visual, representation, stack, human, feedforward]
Boredom, Information-Seeking and Exploration
Andra Geana, Robert Wilson, Nathaniel Daw, Jonathan Cohen


Any adaptive organism faces the choice between taking actions with known benefits (exploitation), and sampling new actions to check for other, more valuable opportunities available (exploration). The latter involves information-seeking, a drive so fundamental to learning and long-term reward that it can reasonably be considered, through evolution or development, to have acquired its own value, independent of immediate reward. Similarly, behaviors that fail to yield information may have come to be associated with aversive experiences such as boredom, demotivation, and task disengagement. In accord with these suppositions, we propose that boredom reflects an adaptive signal for managing the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, in the service of optimizing information acquisition and long-term reward. We tested participants in three experiments, manipulating the information content in their immediate task environment, and showed that increased perceptions of boredom arise in environments in which there is little useful information, and that higher boredom correlates with higher exploration.
[task, learning, condition, increased, switch, tested, time, response, performing, journal] [experiment, horizon, rated, consistent, work, long, told, elicited, participant, relationship, perceived] [error, content, previous, university, curve] [three, number, change, improve, difference, course, better, greater, received, asked] [random, theoretical, amount, bias, earlier, short, correlated] [boredom, game, exploration, prediction, behavior, bandit, higher, reward, boring, played, generated, average, exploratory, decision, machine, model, total, opportunity, cost, correlation, adaptive, slider, drive, empirical, choosing, princeton, observed, pressed, well] [current, gaussian, figure, environment, signal, suggested, human, screen, perform, associated, behavioral, level]
Implicit measurement of motivated causal attribution
Laura Niemi, Joshua Hartshorne, Tobias Gerstenberg, Liane Young


Moral judgment often involves pinning causation for harm to a particular person. Since it reveals "who one sides with," expression of moral judgment can be a costly social act that people may be motivated to conceal. Here, we demonstrate that a simple, well-studied psycholinguistic task (implicit causality) can be leveraged as a novel implicit measure of morally relevant causal attributions. Participants decided whether to continue sentences like "Amy killed Bob because..." with either the pronoun "he" or "she". We found that (1) implicit causality selections predicted explicit causal judgments, (2) selecting the object (victim) for harm/force events (e.g., kill, rape) predicted endorsement of moral values previously linked to victim-blame, and (3) higher hostile sexism predicted selecting the female as the cause in male-on-female harm/force. The implicit causality task is a new measure of morally motivated causal attribution that may circumvent social desirability concerns.
[task, position, journal, explicit, increased] [implicit, causality, causal, moral, people, social, harm, sexism, hostile, motivated, work, killed, psychological, blame, low, positively, judgment, deserved, attribution, morally, cognition, personality, amy, violence, responsibility, psychology, hostility, hartshorne, extent, sufficient, caesar, person, causation, event, reasoning, understanding, focused, purity, brutus] [object, select, endorsement, gender, filler, language] [contribution, force, high, group, study] [sentence, subject, correlated, measure, pronoun] [agent, prior, predict, higher, predicted, men, selecting, likelihood, well, individual, predicts] [binding, patient, involves, focus, perception, view, indicates]
Putting the “th” in Tenths: The Role of Labeling Decimals in Revealing Place Value Structure
Abbey Loehr, Bethany Rittle-Johnson


Language is a powerful cognitive tool. For example, labeling objects or features of problems can support categorization and relational thinking. Less is known about their role in making inferences about the structure of mathematics problems. We test the impact of labeling decimals such as 0.25 using formal place value labels (“two tenths and five hundredths”) compared to informal labels (“point two five”) or no labels on children’s problem-solving performance. Third- and fourth-graders (N = 104) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (formal labels, informal labels, or no labels) and labeled decimals while playing a magnitude comparison game and number line estimation task. Formal labels facilitated performance on comparison problems that required understanding the role of zero, which highlighted place value structure. However, formal labels hindered performance when explicit understanding of place value magnitudes was required. Findings highlight how the language teachers and students use can impact problem-solving success.
[condition, compared, label, revealed, incongruent, learning, congruent, child, task, labeling, relational, type, journal, accuracy] [understanding, negative, thinking, examined, cognitive] [informal, language, shared] [decimal, formal, number, place, comparison, performance, magnitude, knowledge, correct, correctly, mathematics, included, solved, comparing, lower, transfer, greater, providing, pretest, digit, estimation, three, mathematical, fraction, percent, control, symbolic, pae, decomposed, revealing, study, score, answer, activate, encourage] [relative, table, structure, analysis, reflect, naming, korean] [game, highest, everyday, making] [role, pattern, performed, reveal, current, play]
The Effect of Emotion and Induced Arousal on Numerical Processing
Karina Hamamouche, Michelle Hurst, Sara Cordes


Prominent theories suggest that time and number are represented by a common magnitude system. However, distinct patterns of temporal and numerical processing occur in the presence of emotional stimuli, calling into question theories of a common magnitude system, while also unveiling questions regarding the mechanisms underlying these temporal and numerical biases. We tested whether numerical processing, like temporal processing, may be impacted by increased arousal levels, yet have a higher threshold level in order to impact estimates. If so, then induced arousal may reverse the typical pattern of numerical underestimation in the presence of emotions. Adults (N = 85) participated in either a stress-induction or a control version of the task. Then, participants completed a numerical bisection task in the presence and absence of emotional content. Increasing arousal had no impact on numerical processing, except in the presence of happy faces, providing further evidence for distinct processing mechanisms.
[processing, task, condition, baseline, increased, time, presentation, test, revealed, standard, evidence, attention, presented, induction, journal, stimulus, simultaneous, response, suggesting] [emotional, arousal, temporal, stress, emotion, presence, neutral, underestimation, happy, work, induced, angry, bisection, overestimation, common, distinct, absence, arousing, cognitive, social, result] [main, content, basic, degree] [numerical, impact, performance, magnitude, control, young, heightened, study, number, precision, identical, providing, precise, investigated, experimenter, dot, difference, math] [large, measure, bias, order, relative] [prior, observed, set, individual, higher, pse, underlying] [pattern, face, level, interaction, representation, perception]
Is the Self-Concept like Other Concepts? The Causal Structure of Identity
Stephanie Chen, Daniel Bartels, Oleg Urminsky


We investigate the age-old questions of what makes us who we are and what features of identity, if changed, would make us a different person. Previous approaches to identity have suggested that there is a type of feature that is most defining of identity (e.g., autobiographical memories or moral qualities). We propose a new approach to identity that suggests that, like concepts in general, more causally central features are perceived as more defining of the self-concept. In three experiments, using both measured and manipulated causal centrality, we find that changes to features of identity that are perceived as more causally central are more disruptive to both the identity of the self and others.
[defining, condition, target, task, suggests, counterbalanced, completed, journal] [causal, causally, centrality, missing, common, person, experiment, personal, version, positive, depth, perceived, rated, continuity, described, people, vignette, disruption, disruptive, shyness, moral, spearman, autobiographical, caused, childhood, personality, assigned, character, discussion, relationship, strength, disrupt, twelve, influence, consistent] [memory, map, contained] [number, change, three, concept, difference, knowledge] [approach, measure, read, order, linked, table, plausible, structure, semantic] [correlation, set, prior, average, measured, selected, individual] [identity, feature, central, figure, peripheral, level, suggested, represent]
Can the High-Level Semantics of a Scene be Preserved in the Low-Level Visual Features of that Scene? A Study of Disorder and Naturalness
Hiroki Kotabe, Omid Kardan, Marc Berman


Real-world scenes contain low-level visual features (e.g., edges, colors) and high-level semantic features (e.g., objects and places). Traditional visual perception models assume that integration of low-level visual features and segmentation of the scene must occur before high-level semantics are perceived. This view implies that low-level visual features of a scene alone do not carry semantic information related to that scene. Here we present evidence that suggests otherwise. We show that high-level semantics can be preserved in low-level visual features, and that different high-level semantics can be preserved in different types of low-level visual features. Specifically, the ‘disorder’ of a scene is preserved in edge features better than color features, whereas the converse is true for ‘naturalness.’ These findings suggest that semantic processing may start earlier than thought before, and integration of low-level visual features and segmentation of the scene may occur after semantic processing has begun, or in parallel.
[processing, suggests, evidence, segmentation, occur, presented, journal, stimulus, tested, category, suggesting, categorize, early, removing, half, integration, time, exposure, mask, presentation] [disorder, people, experiment, consistent, psychological, diagnostic, cognitive, identifiable, possibility] [color, object, spatial, highly, university] [better, study, difference, statistically, providing, procedure, conducted, number] [semantic, semantics, edge, natural, correlate, correlated, derived, dependent, global, association] [randomly, method, rate, note, predicted, correlation, prior, partially] [visual, scene, naturalness, preserved, original, figure, perception, scrambled, rapid, image, lowlevel, oliva, preservation, carry, recognition, associated, scrambling, brain]
When the Words Don’t Matter: Arbitrary labels improve categorical alignment through the anchoring of categories
Ellise Suffill, Martin Pickering, Holly Branigan


Novel labels provide feedback that may enhance categorical alignment between interlocutors. However, the nature of this feedback may not always be linguistic. Lupyan (2008) has demonstrated the effects of labels on individual categorization, and even non-word labels have seemingly produced greater consistency in sorting strategies (Lupyan & Casasanto, 2014). We extend this to alignment by demonstrating that arbitrary labels can increase sorting consistency to bring people’s categories closer together, even without dialogue. Importantly, we argue that increased alignment is not always due to labeling in a linguistic sense. Results suggest that it is not the content of the non-word labels driving the alignment effects, but the very presence of the labels acting as ‘anchors’ for category formation. This demonstrates a more general cognitive effect of arbitrary labels on categorization.
[alignment, exposure, labeling, exposed, novel, label, category, fixed, condition, removing, categorical, categorization, pair, block, lupyan, arbitrary, teb, occur, dup, sound, match, increased, half, facilitate, reported] [consistency, participant, appear, cognitive, consistent, led, nature, physical] [language, linguistic, access, item, matched, meaning, specific, produced, experimental, shared, evolution, intercept, seemingly] [group, reduce, barrier, included, feedback, greater, number, place, enhance] [sorting, table, random, order, demonstrated, applied, sorted, conceptual, analysis, residual, syntactic, increase, approach, lexical, abstract, structure] [set, model, fit, higher, data, well] [associated, anchoring, process, interaction, figure]
General Mechanisms Underlying Language and Spatial Cognitive Development
Hilary Miller, Vanessa Simmering


Previous research showed that children’s spatial language production predicts their spatial skills, but the mechanisms underlying this relation remain a source of debate. This study examined whether 4-year-olds’ spatial skills were predicted by their attention to task-relevant information—in tasks that emphasize either memory or language—above and beyond their spatial word production. Children completed three types of tasks: (1) a memory task assessing attention to task-relevant color, size, and location cues; (2) a production task assessing adaptive use of language to describe scenes, varying in color, size, and location; and (3) spatial tasks. After controlling for age, gender, and vocabulary, children’s spatial skills were significantly predicted by their memory for task-relevant cues, above and beyond their task-related language production and adaptive use of language. These findings suggest that attending to relevant information is a process supporting spatial skill acquisition and underlies the relation between language and spatial cognition.
[task, size, child, attention, vocabulary, cue, target, trial, test, tested, development, probed, general, second, irrelevant, early, picture, presented, reflected, developmental] [relevant, composite, cognitive, cognition, causal, excluded, psychological, negative, mental] [spatial, memory, language, description, color, referent, differentiated, adaptation, production, varied, miller, produce, calculated, produced, support, coded, pruden, object, describe, encode] [score, performance, three, number, array, study, correct, included, third, quantity, controlling, better] [relation, word, variance, probe, productive] [predicted, adaptive, proportion, data, predict, hypothesis] [location, figure, scene, feature]
Developmentally plausible learning of word categories from distributional statistics
Daniel Freudenthal, Julian Pine, Gary Jones, Fernand Gobet


In this paper we evaluate a mechanism for the learning of word categories from distributional information against criteria of psychological plausibility. We elaborate on the ideas developed by Redington et al. (1998) by embedding the mechanism in an existing model of language acquisition (MOSAIC) and gradually expanding the contexts it has access to in a developmentally plausible way. In line with child data, the mechanism shows early development of a noun category, and later development of a verb category. It is furthermore shown that the mechanism can maintain high performance at lower computational overhead by disregarding token frequency information, thus improving the plausibility of the mechanism as something that is used by language-learning children.
[developmental, accuracy, early, target, category, learning, reported, child, development, classify] [cognitive, basis] [context, language, emergence, grammatical, main] [number, performance, high, lower, limited, investigate] [mechanism, noun, word, redington, preceding, table, verb, order, mosaic, jaccard, approach, plausible, distributional, similarity, computed, frequent, frequency, distance, gradually, computational, developmentally, large, analysis, richness, token, measure, class, concatenated, overhead, length, expressed, corpus, acquisition, disregarding, plausibility, mintz, productive, argued, increase, tend, applied, increasingly] [rank, data, model, correlation, well, threshold, higher, collect] [pattern, input, separately, represents]
An Empirical Evaluation of Models for How People Learn Cue Search Orders
Percy Mistry, Michael Lee, Ben Newell


We propose simple parameter-free models that predict how people learn environmental cue contingencies, use this information to measure the usefulness of cues, and in turn, use these measures to construct search orders. To develop the models, we consider a total of 8 previously proposed cue measures, based on cue validity and discriminability, and develop simple Bayesian and biased-Bayesian learning mechanisms for inferring these measures from experience. We evaluate the model predictions against people’s search behavior in an experiment in which people could freely search cues for information to decide between two stimuli. Our results show that people’s behavior is best predicted by models relying on cue measures maximizing short-term accuracy, rather than long-term exploration, and using the biased learning mechanism that increases the certainty of inferences about cue properties, but does not necessarily learn true environmental contingencies.
[cue, learning, standard, learned, learn, trial, journal, evidence, attention, compared] [people, lee, mental, newell, account, evaluation, black, cognitive, psychological, participant] [discriminability, experimental, university, blue, select] [partial, lower, correct, usa, better, difference, linear] [order, measure, panel, random, large, relate] [search, biased, validity, model, success, rate, bayesian, decision, probability, simple, additive, predicted, uncertainty, individual, tau, based, distribution, choice, predict, beta, sampled, making, city, modeling, sampling, behavior, gain, consider, propose, bayes, ordering, set, best, generated, decide, prior, sample, data, red] [figure, focus, top, human, process]
The role of word-word co-occurrence in word learning
Abdellah Fourtassi, Emmanuel Dupoux


A growing body of research on early word learning suggests that learners gather word-object co-occurrence statistics across learning situations. Here we test a new mechanism whereby learners are also sensitive to word-word co-occurrence statistics. Indeed, we find that participants can infer the likely referent of a novel word based on its co-occurrence with other words, in a way that mimics a machine learning algorithm dubbed ‘zero-shot learning’. We suggest that the interaction between referential and distributional regularities can bring robustness to the process of word acquisition
[learning, category, novel, presented, label, artificial, familiar, learn, statistical, familiarization, session, exposure, test, picture, learned, training, tested, hear, cue, phase, exposed, journal, chance, block, second, learner] [real, experiment, psychological, work, situation, cognitive, absence, series] [language, referential, context, latent, referent, consolidation, experimental, linguistic, meaning, consistently, memory, interesting, university] [correct, step, difference, knowledge, composed] [semantic, word, distributional, mechanism, order, abstract, analysis, xsl, similarity, large, association, ouyang] [model, based, infer, hypothesis, set, choice, machine] [visual, figure, neural, consists, suggested, human, trained]
Solution of division by access to multiplication: Evidence from eye tracking
Shawn Tan, Kasia Muldner, Jo-Anne Lefevre


People report solving division problems by mentally recasting division problems as multiplication (e.g., 72 ÷ 8 to 8 × [?] = 72). Mediation of division by multiplication occurs mainly on larger problems. Eye tracking data was used to determine whether patterns of gaze durations on division problems provided support for mediation. Adults solved division problems in two formats: traditional (e.g., 72 ÷ 8 = [ ]) and recasted (e.g. 72 = 8 × [ ]). Processing of individual problem elements was compared across formats. Results provide support for mediation. Processing patterns for traditionally-formatted problems were more similar to those for traditional division in earlier work (72 ÷ 8) whereas problems in recasted format (72 = 8 × [ ]) were more similar to patterns found when participants solved multiplication problems (e.g., 8 × 9). These findings provide a novel source of support for differential processing of problems across presentation formats.
[time, processing, attention, size, reported, presented, journal, compared, display, position, evidence, response, appeared] [missing, mental, cognitive, influence, work, located] [sign, retrieval, experimental, memory, varied, support, spatial, university, calculated] [division, problem, format, traditional, recasted, multiplication, middle, curtis, dividend, solved, arithmetic, solving, spent, recasting, lefevre, mediation, equal, solution, larger, operand, number, strategy, solve, symbol, morris, study, third, course, ranging, analyzed, addition, report] [large, small, table, carleton] [distribution, interval, observed, total, simple] [gaze, interest, eye, area, figure, element, left, location, tracking, duration, longer, focus, divided, fixation, dwell, pattern]
Using a smartphone game to promote transfer of skills in a real world environment
Inge Doesburg, Niels Taatgen


This article presents an experiment in which participant's working memory, tasks-switching and focusing skills are trained in a game called Wollie on a smartphone. Before and after the training period they performed three task (a recall, Stroop and task-switching). The goal of this research was to see how the participants, from the test group, learn within the game and how this affects the three tasks. Only in the Stroop results a clear difference between the two groups was found. However, we found that participants who had the most trouble in playing Wollie, improved the most on Stroop and task-switching, indicating that these participants still lacked the relevant skills for all these tasks.
[task, stroop, training, presented, time, test, second, switch, picture, rule, accuracy, block, learning, condition, pre] [participant, cognitive, influence, people, low, appear, result, assigned] [recall] [improvement, transfer, smartphone, group, difflevel, tap, wollie, control, three, working, high, needed, difference, help, progress, created, performance, playing, score, improve, highscore, educational, smart, benefit, taatgen, called] [word, table, amount, applied, small, post, graph] [game, correlation, player, data, based, green, average, highest, played, decision] [figure, level, screen, train, switching, play, focus, phone, performed, goal, reached, perform]
Searching large hypothesis spaces by asking questions
Alexander Cohen, Brenden Lake


One way people deal with uncertainty is by asking questions. A showcase of this ability is the classic 20 questions game where a player asks questions in search of a secret object. Previous studies using variants of this task have found that people are effective question-askers according to normative Bayesian metrics such as expected information gain. However, so far, the studies amenable to mathematical modeling have used only small sets of possible hypotheses that were provided explicitly to participants, far from the unbounded hypothesis spaces people often grapple with. Here, we study how people evaluate the quality of questions in an unrestricted 20 Questions task. We present a Bayesian model that utilizes a large data set of object-question pairs and expected information gain to select questions. This model provides good predictions regarding people's preferences and outperforms simpler alternatives.
[response, learning, compared, presented] [people, depth, participant, mechanical, cognitive, experiment, including, turk, scale, work, future] [object, previous, specific] [question, subset, correct, asked, answer, science, number, ability, effective, providing, annual, analyzed] [large, random, semantic, complete, quality, computed, table, analysis, unique] [model, bayesian, set, full, average, expected, game, hypothesis, eig, data, rank, correlation, gain, chosen, best, selected, prior, guessing, bonus, posterior, search, choose, likelihood, point, played, multinomial, setup, fit, bigger, maximizes, probability, randomly, alternative, conference, selecting, range, simulated] [human, space, framework, behavioral]
Predicting Decision in Human-Agent Negotiation using functional MRI
Eunkyung Kim, Sarah Gimbel, Aleksandra Litvinova, Jonas Kaplan, Morteza Dehghani


The importance of human-agent negotiation, and the role of emotion in such negotiations, have been emphasized in human-agent interaction research. Thus far, studies have focused on behavioral effects, rather than examining the neural underpinnings of different behaviors shown in human-agent interactions. Here, we used a multi-round negotiation platform, instead of the more common single-shot negotiation, and were able to find distinct brain patterns in emotion-related regions of the brain during different types of offers. Using multi-voxel pattern analysis to analyze brain imaging data acquired during functional MRI scanning, we show that it is possible to predict whether the negotiator concedes, does not change, or asks for more during the negotiation. Most importantly, we demonstrate that left dorsal anterior insula, which is known to be an emotion-related brain region, shows a different pattern of activity for each of the three offer types.
[task, general, accuracy, artificial, type, standard, showing, journal, compared, chance, indicate, learning] [participant, social, emotion, cognitive, history, investigating] [functional, previous] [better, included, three, international, limited, linear, practice, number] [analysis, approach] [negotiation, offer, data, prediction, round, method, agent, based, predict, payoff, find, behavior, restaurant, decision, generated, model] [brain, feature, fmri, searchlight, selection, mvpa, anterior, activity, dorsal, insula, left, human, computer, role, roi, neural, performed, level, insular, pattern, user, imaging, labeled, voxel, cortex, voxels, glm, ultimatum]
Attention and the Development of Inductive Generalization: Evidence from Recognition Memory
Tracey Miser, Vladimir Sloutsky


Induction, the ability to generalize knowledge from known to novel instances, is essential for human learning. This study investigates how attention allocation during category learning and induction affects what information is represented and encoded to memory. In Experiment 1 5-year-olds and adults learned rule-based categories. They were then presented with an Induction-then-Recognition task. Similar to previous results with familiar categories, children exhibited better memory for items than adults. In Experiment 2, adults learned similarity-based categories and then were presented with an Induction-then-Recognition task. In this condition, adults’ memory was as good as children’s memory in Experiment 1. These results indicate that the way categories are represented affects the way induction is performed.
[category, induction, attention, presented, novel, switch, inductive, development, learning, journal, child, phase, developmental, evidence, chance, familiar, sloutsky, fisher, rule, deterministic, learned, training, label, age, target, generalization, indicating, accuracy, testing, task, performing, processing] [experiment, false, low, result, twelve, focused, inference, kind, cognitive] [memory, item, experimental, discrimination, default, perceptual] [high, better, young, feedback, knowledge, ability, provided, study, lower] [mechanism, similarity, table, analysis, argued, demonstrated] [probabilistic, based, higher, inferred, remaining] [feature, recognition, view, visual, representation, perform, single, multiple, role]
Viewing time affects overspecification: Evidence for two strategies of attribute selection during reference production
Ruud Koolen, Albert Gatt, Roger Van Gompel, Emiel Krahmer, Kees Van Deemter


Speakers often produce definite referring expressions that are overspecified: they tend to include more attributes than neces- sary to distinguish the target referent. The current paper inves- tigates how the occurrence of overspecification is affected by viewing time. We conducted an experiment in which speakers were asked to refer to target objects in visual domains. Half of the speakers had unlimited time to inspect the domains, while viewing time was limited (1000 ms) for the other half. The results reveal that limited viewing time induces the occurrence of overspecification. We conjecture that limited viewing time caused speakers to rely heavily on quick heuristics during attribute selection, which urge them to select attributes that are perceptually salient. In the case of unlimited inspection time, speakers seem to rely on a combination of heuristic and more deliberate selection strategies.
[time, target, condition, size, identify, half, pressure, presented, inspection, type] [experiment, cognitive, deliberate, inherent] [color, attribute, van, distractors, pace, overspecification, listener, reference, referential, inspect, redundant, domain, speaker, overspecified, distractor, refer, referring, production, description, language, object, discriminatory, unlimited, rely, manipulated, main, university, tilburg, quick, select, incremental, describe, deemter, contained, confederate, uniquely, referent, produce, interesting, speech, expect, produced] [limited, three, needed, included, example, difference, number] [occurrence, include, random, definite, computational, order, large, amount] [proportion, based, heuristic, model, data, paper] [viewing, visual, selection, figure, interaction, current, critical, scan]
Trump supported it?! A Bayesian source credibility model applied to appeals to specific American presidential candidates’ opinions
Jens Koed Madsen


The credibility of politicians is crucial to their persuasiveness as election candidates. The paper applies a parameter-free Baysian source credibility model (integrating trustworthiness and epistemic authority) in a real-life test predicting participants’ posterior belief in the goodness of an unnamed policy after a named candidate has publically supported or attacked it. Two studies test model predictions against policy support and attack of five presidential candidates from the USA. Model predictions were measured against observed posterior belief in the goodness of the policy. The results strongly suggest the model captures essential traits of how participants update beliefs in policies given appeals to a candidates’ support of attack. Further, individual differences suggest that people consider other factors than the ones elicited for the study. More studies into appeals to specific candidates are warranted to construct more accurate models of the influence of source credibility on political reasoning
[tested, test, suggests, sequential, general] [source, political, candidate, credibility, belief, epistemic, trustworthiness, authority, goodness, conditional, supported, persuasive, reasoning, person, influence, social, people, publically, election, public, trump, psychology, appeal, elicited, presidential, fact, despite, participant, cognitive, trustworthy, clinton, hahn, democratic, bush] [support, specific, university, expert, gender, degree, american, named] [study, linear, science] [order, argument, approach, applied, oxford, table] [model, bayesian, posterior, policy, observed, individual, good, prior, population, harris, attack, predict, potential, attacked, fit, likelihood, trust, average, woman, paper, unknown, data, regression] [current, review]
Expressive faces are remembered with less pictorial fidelity than neutral faces
Martina Lorenzino, Giorgio Gronchi, Corrado Caudek


A repeated finding in the literature of face recognition is that expressive faces are remembered better than neutral faces. However, a better facial-identity recognition may come at a cost of a reduced precision with which the pictorial facial features, irrelevant for identity recognition, are represented in memory. By means of a continuous-report task, we tested this hypothesis by measuring the memory precision of expressive and neutral faces. Commensurable face-identity and facial-expressions variations were generated with the method of Fechnerian scaling. The results confirm our hypothesis, but only under conditions of high memory load. We interpret the present findings as due to the effects of the categorical processes required for facial-identity recognition.
[compared, presented, phase, task, advantage, second, journal, test, blank, irrelevant, repeated, stimulus, trial, response] [neutral, emotional, angry, san, frame, happy, experiment, negative, cognition, health] [memory, discrimination, perceptual, expect, van, der, remember] [working, lower, precision, procedure, study, better, versus, created, statistically, asked, difference, department, high, correct] [order, employed, interpret] [fechnerian, generated, rate, set, measured, average, function, method] [face, morphing, continuum, image, expressive, facial, pictorial, fidelity, identity, visual, expression, represented, recognition, vwm, figure, psychometric, transient, representation, screen, corresponding, creation, top, morphed, unfamiliar, fixation, jackson, padiglione]
Three barriers to effective thought experiments, as revealed by a system that externalizes students’ thinking
Miki Matsumuro, Kazuhisa Miwa


This study aimed to develop a Thought Experiment Externalizer (TE-ext) and to apply it in order to observe barriers to problem solving. TE-ext enables students to visualize a problem situation. Users of TE-ext can implement changes in the situation and see the result as an animation. Experimental use of TE-ext identified three barriers to conducting an effective thought experiment (TE). First, participants tended not to change the situation from the original one; second, incorrect or inappropriate knowledge was applied to the situation; third, the participants did not apply the results of their TE to other situations. These factors prevented participants from rejecting their initial incorrect model and finding a new one through TEs.
[phase, test, second, shape, time, half] [situation, thinking, mental, initial, cognitive, reasoning, result, scientific, experiment, including, factor, existence, inappropriate, nature, animation, exist, focused, philosophy] [select, previous, shift, apply, experimental, support, combination, frequently, main, university] [yoyo, barrier, third, problem, correct, thought, step, additional, incorrect, science, break, knowledge, effective, conduct, change, three, conducted, student, educational, answer, solving, instruction, yokoyama, square, investigated, number, asked, anzai, confirm, conducting, exact, high, easily] [] [model, selected, round, expected, prevented, string, based, data, simulation] [figure, original, carry, direction, movement, operation, role, suitable, process, rotation]
Mind reading: Discovering individual preferences from eye movements using switching hidden Markov models
Tim Chuk, Antoni B. Chan, Shinsuke (shin) Shimojo, Janet H. Hsiao


Here we used a hidden Markov model (HMM) based approach to infer individual choices from eye movements in preference decision-making. We assumed that during decision making process, there is a transit from an exploration to a decision-making period, and this behavior can be better captured with a Switching HMM (SHMM). Through clustering individual eye movement patterns described in SHMMs, we automatically discovered two groups of participants with different decision making behavior. One group showed a strong bias to look more often at the to-be chosen stimulus (i.e., the gaze cascade effect; Shimojo et al., 2003) with a short decision-making period. The other group showed a weaker cascade effect with a longer decision-making period. The SHMMs also showed capable of inferring participants’ preference choice on each trial with high accuracy. Thus, our SHMM approach made it possible to reveal individual differences in decision making and discover individual preferences from eye movements.
[time, trial, switch, standard, accuracy, attention, chance, indicate, test, journal] [inference, participant, people, cognitive, paid, social] [shared] [group, high, number, spent] [final, table, analysis, length, clustering, earlier, discovered, approach, bias] [individual, exploration, chosen, state, preference, decision, infer, making, data, based, proportion, prior, decisionmaking, average, yield, behavior, higher, model] [eye, period, cascade, hidden, gaze, movement, transition, fixation, shmm, hmm, face, markov, shmms, switching, level, side, matrix, suggested, hmms, shimojo, pattern, hong, clustered, longer, image, gaussian, current, performed, summed, figure]
Semantic Contamination of Visual Similarity Judgments
Layla Unger, Anna Fisher


The roles of semantic and perceptual information in cognition are of widespread interest to many researchers. However, disentangling their contributions is complicated by their overlap in real-world categories. For instance, attempts to calibrate visual similarity based on participant judgments are undermined by the possibility that semantic knowledge contaminates these judgments. This study investigated whether inverting stimuli attenuates semantic contamination of visual similarity judgments in adults and children. Participants viewed upright and inverted triads of familiar animals, and judged which of two test items looked most like the target. One test item belonged to the same category as the target, and one belonged to a different category. Test items’ visual similarity to the target either corresponded or conflicted with category membership. Across age groups, conflicting category membership reduced accuracy and slowed reaction times to a greater extent in upright than inverted triads. Therefore, inversion attenuates semantic contamination of visual similarity judgments.
[conflict, category, inverted, test, response, inversion, target, accuracy, condition, contamination, presented, slower, revealed, task, processing, age, adult, attenuates, match, attenuated, visually, journal, repeated, presentation, mellon, contaminates, consisted, slows, familiar, belonged, carnegie, child, undermined] [upright, influence, experiment, gelman, possibility, judgment, judge, qualified, cognition] [perceptual, item, main, membership, manipulated, experimental, degree, triad, memory] [knowledge, study, kindergarten, versus, accurate, practice, group] [similarity, semantic, approach, conceptual, analysis, animal] [calibrate, collecting, bottom, calibrating, prediction, prior, choose, predicted] [visual, orientation, brain, pattern, rts, interaction]
Human Reinforcement Learning of Sequential Action
George Kachergis, Floris Berends, Roy de Kleijn, Bernhard Hommel


Learning sequential actions is an essential ability, for most daily activities are sequential. We modify the trajectory serial reaction time (SRT) task, used to teach people a consistent sequence of mouse movements by cueing them with the next target response. We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) version of the paradigm in which no cue appears. Instead, learners must explore response alternatives, receiving penalties when incorrect and rewards when correct. Learners are not told that they will learn a single deterministic sequence of responses, nor that it will repeat (nor how often), nor how long it is. Performance was bimodal: half performed poorly, and yet half performed remarkably well, acquiring the full 10-item sequence within 10 repetitions. We compare these groups’ detailed results in this RL task with a cued trajectory SRT task, finding both similarities and discrepancies. Human learners outperform three standard RL models and have different patterns of errors.
[learning, sequence, srt, position, response, task, target, sequential, cued, trajectory, time, paradigm, reaction, sarsa, learn, attention, valid, compare, accuracy, journal, scm, evidence, stimulus, eligibility, explore, training] [experiment, cognitive, negative, low, participant, temporal, psychological] [previous, error, adapted, university] [correct, group, score, incorrect, study, number, performance, difference, high, three, change, control, better] [correlated, final, structure] [reinforcement, median, simple, data, reward, behavior, well, model, success, recency, note] [rts, human, action, figure, current, serial, role, movement, pattern, environment, slow, process, brain]
The Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Inductive Reasoning: An fNIRS Study
Layla Unger, Jaeah Kim, Theodore Huppert, Julia Badger, Anna Fisher


This study examined neural activity associated with inductive inference using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). Induction is a powerful way of generating new knowledge by generalizing known information to novel items or contexts. Two key bases for identifying targets for induction are perceptual similarity, and rules that specify category-relevant features. Similarity- and rule-based induction have been argued to represent distinct mechanisms, such that only rule-based induction requires executive function processes associated with the prefrontal cortex (PFC), namely: active maintenance of representations and inhibition of salient but irrelevant features. Here, we address the lack of direct empirical evidence supporting this possibility by recording PFC activity using fNIRS while adult participants (n=24) performed an inductive inference task. We found that PFC activity during induction was greater when participants had been taught a category-inclusion rule versus when participants could only rely on overall similarity.
[induction, baseline, inductive, fnirs, rule, category, condition, evidence, presented, match, target, categorization, task, shape, general, novel, statistical, revealed, journal, processing, stimulus, mellon, rulebased, tested, adult, compare, badger, similaritybased] [inference, distinction, reasoning, distinct, possibility, basis, consistent, presence, foundation] [memory, color, functional, uniquely, maintenance, perceptual, degree, university] [study, greater, linear, taught, department, versus, smaller] [similarity, head, involve, koenig] [data, model, based, observed] [activity, pfc, neural, associated, brain, prefrontal, anatomical, behavioral, human, figure, cortex, visual, area, represent, body, imaging, feature]
Learning and making novel predictions about others’ preferences
Natalia Vélez, Yuan Chang Leong, Chelsey Pan, Jamil Zaki, Hyowon Gweon


We often make decisions on behalf of others, such as picking out gifts or making restaurant recommendations. Yet, without direct access to others’ preferences, our choices on behalf of others depend on what we think they like. Across two experiments, we examined whether and how accurately people are able to infer others’ preferences by observing their choices. Our results suggest that people are capable of making reasonably accurate predictions about what others will choose next, given what they have chosen before. These results lay the groundwork to systematically study how people make novel predictions about others’ preferences, and when different strategies might be appropriate.
[target, novel, accuracy, learning, learn, task, generalize, test, tested, suggesting, second, half, journal, evidence, compared, learned] [experiment, people, real, social, participant, work, person, consistent, described, extent, stable, reasoning] [previous, egocentric, experimental, meet] [performance, provided, asked, three, imposed, observing, study, better, free, young] [accurately] [model, choose, well, movie, making, mml, set, predict, based, data, choosing, predicting, round, chose, option, predicted, preference, reasonably, completely, friend, observe, solely, observed, choice, prior, behalf, agent, chosen, align, observer, infer, noisy, allocentric] [human, figure, feature, trained, space, current]
The Determinants of Knowability
Samuel Johnson, Kristen Kim, Frank Keil


Many propositions are not known to be true or false, and many phenomena are not understood. What determines what propositions and phenomena are perceived as knowable or unknowable? We tested whether factors related to scientific methodology (a proposition’s reducibility and falsifiability), its intrinsic metaphysics (the materiality of the phenomena and its scope of applicability), and its relation to other knowledge (its centrality to one’s other beliefs and values) influence knowability. Across a wide range of naturalistic scientific and pseudoscientific phenomena (Studies 1 and 2), as well as artificial stimuli (Study 3), we found that reducibility and falsifiability have strong direct effects on knowability, that materiality and scope have strong indirect effects (via reducibility and falsifiability), and that belief and value centrality have inconsistent and weak effects on knowability. We conclude that people evaluate the knowability of propositions consistently with principles proposed by epistemologists and practicing scientists.
[relational, reduced, evidence, test] [knowability, reducibility, centrality, consistent, falsifiability, relationship, methodological, extent, scope, knowable, materiality, belief, scientific, strong, phenomenon, people, reducible, proposition, fundamental, understanding, laypeople, influence, pseudoscience, positive, claim, zenilan, scientist, unknowable, physical, perceived, moral, factor, possibility, basis, appear, composite, discussion, wide, determines] [item, highly, experimental, university, conscious, domain] [study, material, science, knowledge, step, idea, concern] [table, topic, indirect, direct, measure, variance, read, complete, order] [empirical, predict, regression, model, true, consider, method] [intrinsic, central, associated, design, movement]
A computational investigation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The case of spatial relations
Christine Tseng, Alexandra Carstensen, Terry Regier, Yang Xu


Investigations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis often ask whether there is a difference in the non-linguistic behavior of speakers of two languages, generally without modeling the underlying process. Such an approach leaves underexplored the relative contributions of language and universal aspects of cognition, and how those contributions differ across languages. We explore the naming and non-linguistic pile-sorting of spatial scenes across speakers of five languages via a computational model grounded in an influential proposal: that language will affect cognition when non-linguistic information is uncertain. We report two findings. First, native language plays a small but significant role in predicting spatial similarity judgments across languages, consistent with earlier findings. Second, the size of the native-language role varies systematically, such that finer-grained semantic systems appear to shape similarity judgments more than coarser-grained systems do. These findings capture the tradeoff between language-specific and universal forces in cognition, and how that tradeoff varies across languages.
[accuracy, evidence, stimulus, category, size, task, tested, test] [cognitive, cognition, percentage, case] [language, spatial, native, linguistic, dutch, grain, color, ground, variation, object, kay, support] [strategy, three, science, procedure, asked] [residual, universal, naming, semantic, similarity, pile, sorting, maihiki, computational, earlier, relative, mandarin, carstensen, sorted, chichewa, english, varies, relation, reflect, small, khetarpal, open, topological] [predictive, model, data, based, predicted, individual, hypothesis, gain, predict, proportion, behavior, predicting, prediction, predicts, proposal, expected] [figure, scene, matrix, role]
Mindfulness meditation as attention control training: A dual-blind investigation
Alexa Romberg, Hank Haarmann


Mindfulness meditation is a form of secular meditation that emphasizes non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. Research into mindfulness has greatly expanded in recent years (Davidson & Kasniak, 2015) and a growing literature has documented effects of mindfulness training on cognition. However, the specific aspects of mindfulness meditation training for novice practitioners that might influence cognition remain unexplored. The present study used a rigorous, dual-blind design to investigate whether the attention-monitoring component of mindfulness meditation reduces mind-wandering and improves performance during reading comprehension and sustained attention tasks. When compared with relaxation meditation, mindfulness training improved recall of specific details from a text but did not reduce mind-wandering or affect sustained attention. The results are discussed with respect to design considerations when studying a meditation intervention.
[meditation, session, mmt, attention, training, mindfulness, task, reported, target, rmt, sustained, relaxation, general, accuracy, fixed, response, completed, revealed, mrazek, sart, consisted, auditory, relax, block, testing, improves, presented, test] [cognition, influence, told, sensitivity, thinking, cognitive, low] [passage, specific, main, memory] [group, study, control, performance, guided, practice, engaged, change, report, linear, high, asked, working, college, comparison, question] [comprehension, text, reading, frequency, form, random, table, engagement, subject, read, order, freq] [model, fit, total, objective, prior, data, find, expected] [design, component, interaction, goal, pattern]
Salience versus prior knowledge - how do children learn rules?
Samuel Rivera, Vladimir Sloutsky


Categories are essential for thinking, learning, and communicating. Research has shown that young children and adults treat categories very differently, with young children favoring whole objects while adults focus on the key information in most cases. If so, then how can young children learn categories requiring focused attention to key features? Studies have shown that drawing attention to rules had facilitative effects. We sought to identify whether the effect was driven by instruction about rules or by stimulus-driven factors. Our results suggest that even with instruction, 4-year-olds were not able to attend to key information. Simply making important information more salient, however, allowed them to learn the category and transfer to situations when the key feature was no longer salient.
[test, category, learning, accuracy, endogenous, exogenous, standard, baseline, switch, learn, training, attention, deterministic, condition, rule, learned, arrow, child, chance, completed, family, cue, resemblance, type, age, revealed, novel, development, categorization, exemplar, clue, dropped, remained, testing, selective, executive, shape, journal, facilitative, suggests] [key, salience, told, cognitive, inference, consistent] [salient, experimental, rely, memory, color, appearance, perceptual] [young, instruction, help, versus, study, feedback, knowledge, understand, correct, limited, teaching] [structure, similarity, order, table, demonstrated] [probabilistic, prior, sample, relied, point] [feature, figure, holistic, interaction, corresponds]
Memory for exemplars in category learning
Charlotte Edmunds, Andy Wills, Fraser Milton


Some argue that category learning is mediated by two competing systems of learning: one explicit, one implicit (Ashby et al., 1998). These systems are hypothesised to be responsible for learning rule-based and information-integration category structures respectively. However, little experimental work has directly investigated whether people are conscious of category knowledge learned by the implicit system. In this study, we directly compared explicit recognition memory for exemplars between these two category structures. Contrary to the predictions of the dual-systems approach, we found preliminary evidence of superior exemplar memory after information-integration category learning compared to rule-based learning. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that participants learn information-integration category structures by using complex rules.
[category, learning, condition, stimulus, unidimensional, explicit, covis, evidence, informationintegration, learn, training, rule, learned, dark, verbal, brightness, optimum, complex, journal, categorization, test, displayed, optimally, reported, compared, carpenter, edmunds, size, boundary, dimension, general, presented] [implicit, participant, described, experiment, key, work, case, split, consistent] [memory, directly, experimental, university, superior] [strategy, report, performance, greater, asked, three, study, feedback, knowledge, questionnaire, school] [structure, analysis, random, small, identified, table] [model, decision, data, based, conjunction, assumed, hypothesis, simple, determine] [recognition, system, light, classified, multiple, indicates, figure, space, diagonal, neuroimaging, human]
Effects of Auditory Input on a Spatial Serial Response Time Task
Chris Robinson, Jessica Parker


The current study examined how relevant and irrelevant auditory stimuli affect the speed of responding to structured visual sequences. Participants were presented with a dot that appeared in different locations on a touch screen monitor and they were instructed to quickly touch the dot. Response times sped up over time, suggesting that participants learned the visual sequences. Response times in Experiment 1 were slower when the dot was paired with random sounds, suggesting that irrelevant sounds slowed down visual processing/responding. Dots in Experiment 2 were paired with correlated sounds (both auditory and visual information provided location information). While the redundant intersensory information did not speed up response times, it did partially attenuate auditory interference. These findings have implications on tasks that require processing of simultaneously presented auditory and visual information and provide evidence of auditory interference and possibly dominance on a task that typically favors the visual modality.
[auditory, response, learning, block, presented, sequence, modality, stimulus, sound, statistical, task, paired, condition, silent, interference, dominance, processing, attention, irrelevant, slower, intersensory, touch, colavita, attenuated, speed, time, automatically, half, structured, appeared, showing, suited, sped, robinson, reaction, attentional, reported, redundancy, conflicting, suggesting, silence, finding, ohio, pop, transformed, multisensory] [experiment, account, nature, temporal, participant, cognitive, psychological, negative, examined, future, relevant] [instructed, experimental, spatial, affect, university, speech] [dot, better, study, require, procedure] [correlated, random] [state] [visual, current, location, responding, sensory, perception, screen, pattern, slow, figure, respond, brain]
Decision-Making and Biases in Causal-Explanatory Reasoning
Samuel Johnson, Marianna Zhang, Frank Keil


Decisions often rely on judgments about the probabilities of various explanations. Recent research has uncovered a host of biases that afflict explanatory inference: Would these biases also translate into decision-making? We find that although people show biased inferences when making explanatory judgments in decision-relevant contexts (Exp. 1A), these biases are attenuated or eliminated when the choice context is highlighted by introducing an economic framing (price information; Exp. 1B–1D). However, biased inferences can be “locked in” to subsequent decisions when the judgment and decision are separated in time (Exp. 2). Together, these results suggest that decisions can be more rational than the corresponding judgments—leading to choices that are rational in the output of the decision process, yet irrational in their incoherence with judgments.
[explicit, evidence, monitoring, task] [causal, judgment, people, reasoning, explanation, explanatory, scope, diagnostic, narrow, unbiased, transduction, cognitive, wide, hesolite, spindle, deer, normative, unverified, lawnmower, inference, work, discussion, white, sufficient, translate, excluded, buy, diagnosis, caused, experiment, separated, faulty, leading, mechanical, tended, axle, suppose] [context, latent, previous, expect] [science, asked, question, performance, difference, appears, problem, versus, equal, procedure] [bias, induce, order, dependent, table] [choice, biased, decision, making, economic, lead, check, rational, based, conference, favor, depend, choose, method, behavior, amazon, underlying] [system, current, corresponding, behavioral, process, human]
Event participants and linguistic arguments
Roxana-Maria Barbu, Ida Toivonen


Although there is a clear and intuitive mapping between linguistic arguments of verbs and event participants,the mapping is not perfect. We review the linguistic evidence that indicates that the mapping is imperfect. We also present the results of a new experimental study that provides further support for a dissociation between event participants and linguistic arguments. The study consists of two tasks. The first task elicited intuitions on conceptual event participants, and the second task elicited intuitions on linguistic arguments in instrument verbs and transaction verbs. The results suggest that while instrument phrases and currency/price phrases are considered necessary event participants, they are not linguistic arguments.
[task, child, type, presented, evidence, status, test] [event, participant, mapping, necessity, buy, clear, person, scrub, experiment, work, mit, nature, distinction] [linguistic, instrument, coded, object, language, describe, university, directly, evening, tom, instructed] [study, example, number, provided, difference, place, answer, needed, asked, three, difficult, literature, ice, required] [conceptual, verb, argument, include, syntactic, phrase, currency, mentioned, order, sentence, obligatory, conceptually, semantic, praised, lisa, theoretical, listed, linguistically, syntactically, praise, considered, rissman, table, structure, rappaport, koenig, expressed, linguistics, illustrate, noun, optional, carleton, brush, complete] [based, average] [transaction, motion, involved]
Between versus Within-Language Differences in Linguistic Categorization
Anne White, Gert Storms, Barbara C. Malt, Steven Verheyen


Cross-linguistic research has shown that boundaries for lexical categories differ from language to language. The aim of this study is to explore these differences between languages in relation to the categorization differences within a language. Monolingual Dutch- (N=400) and French-speaking (N=300) Belgian adults provided lexical category judgments for three lexical categories that are roughly equivalent in Dutch and French. Each category was represented by good, borderline, and bad examples. A mixture modeling approach enabled us to identify latent groups of categorizers within a language and to evaluate cross-linguistic variation in relation to within-language variation. We found complex patterns of lexical variation within as well as between language groups. Even within a seemingly homogeneous group of speakers sharing the same mother tongue, latent groups of categorizers display a variability that resembles patterns of lexical variation found at a cross-linguistic level of comparison.
[category, categorization, reliability, journal, displayed, presented, display, complex, task, adult] [clear, account, common, extent] [latent, dutch, language, french, pot, variability, item, doos, degree, categorizers, variation, bouteille, vagueness, fles, linguistic, memory, criterion, malt, monolingual, seemingly, belgian, household, map, expect, speaking, endorsed, object] [group, difference, number, study, equivalent, comparison, mother, lower] [table, lexical, similarity, identified, random, relation, complete, semantic, order, naming] [data, mixture, average, set, roughly, model, correlation, higher, proportion, sample, homogeneous, threshold, based, well, theory, probability, modeling, collected, bic] [figure, selection]
Do Do Do, The The The: Interactivity and Articulatory Suppression in Mental Arithmetic
Frederic Vallee-Tourangeau, Miroslav Sirota, Gaelle Vallee-Tourangeau


Doing long sums in the absence of complementary actions or artefacts is a multi-step procedure that quickly taxes working memory; congesting the phonological loop further handicaps performance. In the experiment reported here, participants completed long sums either with hands down—the low interactivity condition—or by moving numbered tokens—the high interactivity condition—while they repeated ‘the’ continuously, loading the phonological loop, or not. As expected articulatory suppression substantially affected performance, but more so in the low interactivity condition. Independent measures of basic arithmetic skill and mathematics anxiety moderated the impact of articulatory suppression on performance in the low but not in the high interactivity condition. These findings suggest that working memory resources are augmented with interactivity, underscoring the importance of characterizing the properties of the system as it is configured by the dynamic agent-environment coupling
[condition, task, presentation, attention, reported, presented, repeated, executive, completed, accuracy, journal, time] [low, mental, cognitive, experiment, physical, percentage, long, absence, series, moderated] [memory, basic, error, latency, main, experimental, university, phonological, degree] [interactivity, articulatory, suppression, high, arithmetic, performance, working, impact, calculation, math, anxiety, problem, efficiency, absolute, ratio, mathematics, correct, answer, moderation, poorer, procedure, difference, solution, counting, secondary, collapsing, interim, skill, adding, moderate, three, slowest] [table, increase, order, employed, calculating] [average, data, higher, measured, function, simple] [level, switching, complementary, dynamic, design, experienced, pattern, add]
What Causal Illusions Might Tell us About the Identification of Causes
Robert Thorstad, Phillip Wolff


According to existing accounts of causation, people rely on a single criterion to identify the cause of an event. The phenomenon of causal illusions raises problems for such views. Causal illusions arise when a particular factor is perceived to be causal despite knowledge indicating otherwise. According to what we will call the Dual-Process Hypothesis of Causal Identification, identifying a cause involves two cognitive processes. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that in response to a causal illusion shown in a naturalistic setting, people’s initial judgments of causation were higher than their ultimate judgments of causation (Experiment 1). Using an online measure of decisions, we found that people initially view animations of causal illusions as causal before concluding that they are non-causal (Experiment 2). Finally, we obtained similar results using a deadline procedure (Experiment 3). Implications for different classes of theories of causation are discussed.
[response, dial, time, occur, completed, tested, position, dependency] [causal, causation, intuitive, experiment, reflective, impression, causality, cognitive, initial, illusion, deadline, man, judged, animation, elevator, reasoning, ultimate, rated, viewed, distinction, reflectiveness, people, caused, consistent, strong, sloman, thinking, perceived, long, existence, temporal, identifies, event, wolff, respect, basis, judge, clear, social, discussion] [perceptual, confederate, transmission] [three, knowledge, conducted, study, high] [written, short, measure, order, open] [hypothesis, decision, stronger, individual, well, provide, allow, initially, generated, door] [figure, system, process, involves, move, level]
Not all overlaps are equal: Social affiliation and rare overlaps of preferences
Natalia Vélez, Sophie Bridgers, Hyowon Gweon


Shared preferences are a critical component of social attraction. Knowing that someone likes the same things as you do is indicative of broader underlying similarities that support successful social partnerships. However, not all overlaps in preferences are equally informative. Here we propose that the rarity of overlaps in preferences may be a particularly salient cue for social affiliation. We find evidence that people are sensitive to the rarity of overlaps in preferences and affiliate themselves (Experiment 1) or predict others' affiliations (Experiment 2) with potential social partners who share a relatively rare preference. Because preferences provide information about both what people know and what they like, we also tested the effect of overlaps in knowledge (without taste) and overlaps in taste (without knowledge) to understand why we are drawn to people who share our preferences.
[target, trial, chance, statistical, general, condition, test, task] [social, people, experiment, common, personality, significance, influence, excluded, consistent, intuitive] [shared, item, matched, share, influenced, cultural, census, consistently, select] [knowledge, difference, asked, group, procedure, provided, study, control] [music, relative, expressed, meeting] [friend, rare, preference, chose, popularity, gazorp, knew, prevalence, agent, game, predicted, population, rarity, potential, rarer, choice, choose, affiliation, gazorps, favorite, prior, raspberry, binomial, taste, systematically, consider, infer, stronger, find, amazon, sampling, liking, successful] [role, figure, complementary]
Are Symptom Clusters Explanatory? A Study in Mental Disorders and Non-Causal Explanation
Daniel Wilkenfeld, Jennifer Asselin, Tania Lombrozo


Three experiments investigate whether and why people accept explanations for symptoms that appeal to mental disorders, such as: “She experiences delusions because she has schizophrenia.” Such explanations are potentially puzzling, as mental disorder diagnoses are made on the basis of symptoms rather than causes. Do laypeople nonetheless conceptualize mental disorder classifications in causal terms? Or is this an instance of non-causal explanation? Experiment 1 shows that such explanations are found explanatory. Experiment 2 presents participants with novel disorders that are stipulated to involve or not involve an underlying cause across symptoms and people. Disorder classifications are found more explanatory when a causal basis is stipulated, or when participants infer that one is present (even after it’s denied in the text). Finally, Experiment 3 finds that merely having a principled, but non-causal, basis for defining symptom clusters is insufficient to reach the explanatory potential of categories with a stipulated common cause.
[condition, category, presented, attention, journal, second, revealed, statistical, decreased, pick] [mental, common, disorder, experiment, symptom, explanation, causal, explanatory, diagnostic, basis, reason, disease, people, diagnosed, medical, presence, excluded, stipulated, grouped, laypeople, appeal, told, principled, philosophy, vignette, dsm, work, agreement, discussion, borderline, historical, fact, explain, psychiatric, anova, scale, unrelated] [alien, experimental, varied, american] [three, asked, number, correctly, group, question, included, control] [random, cluster, analysis, token, comprehension, exchange] [based, inferred, prior, find, underlying, consider, draw, doctor, higher, range, treatment] [figure, single]
Does Chess Instruction Enhance Mathematical Ability in Children? A Three-Group Design to Control for Placebo Effects
Giovanni Sala, Fernand Gobet, Roberto Trinchero, Salvatore Ventura


Pupils’ poor achievement in mathematics has recently been a concern in many countries. To address this issue, it has been proposed to teach chess in schools. However, no convincing evidence of the benefits of chess instruction has ever been provided, because no study has ever controlled for placebo effects. This study implemented a three-group design to control for placebo effects. Measures of mathematical and metacognitive skills were taken. The results showed that the chess-treated group achieved better scores in mathematics than the placebo group (attending a Go course) but not than the control group (attending regular school lessons). Regarding metacognition, no differences occurred between the groups. These results suggest that some chess-related skills generalize to mathematics, because chess compensated for the hours of school lessons lost, whereas Go did not. However, this transfer is not mediated by metacognitive skills, and appears to be too limited to offer educational advantages.
[journal, test, training, learning, development, generalize, whilst, size] [cognitive, positive, influence, summarized, focused, psychological, united] [academic, experimental, university, memory, domain, gobet, perceptual] [chess, mathematical, instruction, group, placebo, control, school, study, mathematics, ability, three, metacognitive, transfer, metacognition, educational, international, primary, attending, education, practice, pretest, performance, kazemi, teaching, special, effectiveness, outperformed, problem, enhancing, achievement, interested, board, difference, enhance, trinchero, impact, course, math, knowledge, spite, curricular] [regular, order, class, table] [game, sample, policy, potential, planning, observed, state] [design, figure, attended, field, activity]
Temporal Horizons and Decision-Making: A Big Data Approach
Robert Thorstad, Phillip Wolff


Human behavior is plagued by shortsightedness. When faced with two options, smaller rewards are often chosen over larger rewards, even when such choices are potentially costly. In three experiments, we use big data techniques to examine how such choices might be driven by people’s temporal horizons. In Experiment 1, we determine the average distance into the future people talk about in their tweets in order to determine the temporal horizon of each U.S. state. States with further future horizons had lower rates of risk taking. In Experiment 2, we used an individual’s tweets to establish their temporal horizon and found that those with longer temporal horizons were more willing to wait for larger rewards. In Experiment 3, we show with tweets that those with longer future horizons were less likely to take risks. The findings help establish a powerful relationship between people’s thoughts about the future and their decisions.
[time, task, completed, evidence, big, valid] [future, horizon, temporal, experiment, delay, long, discounting, twitter, relationship, excluded, bart, sensitivity, result, balloon, demographic, people, composite, aim, evaluate, tweet, account, discussion, earned, handle, evaluated, thinking, stable, axis, including] [main, classifier, address] [number, larger, asked, failing, additional, smaller, logarithmic, control] [analysis, distance, tend, correlated, large, measure, computational, short] [risk, risky, potential, state, provide, collected, wait, data, average, individual, hypothesis, reward, behavior, well, plotted, total, impulsive] [orientation, fewer, classified, longer, figure, human, separately, discount, level, performed, horizontal]
Quantifying Joint Activities using Cross-Recurrence Block Representation
Tian Xu, Chen Yu


Humans, as social beings, are capable of employing various behavioral cues, such as gaze, speech, manual action, and body posture, in everyday communication. However, to extract fine-grained interaction patterns in social contexts has been presented with methodological challenges. Cross-Recurrence Plot Quantification Analysis (CRQA) is an analysis method invented in theoretical physics and recently applied to cognitive science to study interpersonal coordination. In this paper, we extend this approach to analyzing joint activities in child-parent interaction. We define a new representation as Cross Recurrence Block based on CRQA. With this representation, we are able to capture interpersonal dynamics from more than two behavioral streams in one Cross Recurrence Plot and derive a suite of measures to quantify detailed characteristics of coordination. Using a dataset collected from child-parent interaction, we show that these quantitative measures of joint activities reveal developmental changes in coordinative behavioral patterns between children and parents.
[time, cross, child, categorical, block, standard, target, month, formed, stream, sequence] [social, temporal, cognitive, held, series, hold, leading] [object, blue, calculated] [width, study, science, playing, toy] [analysis, constructed, frequency, form, structure, list, derived, reflect, measure, engagement] [data, point, based, method, individual, manual, green, capture, reflects, red] [holding, recurrence, joint, behavioral, crb, parent, plot, figure, action, interaction, quantification, representation, hand, interpersonal, coordination, crbs, crp, lag, height, diagonal, play, switched, multiple, start, quantitative, left, matrix, human, duration, coordinated, reveal, crqa, blockb, blocka, horizontal, activity]
tDCS to Premotor Cortex Changes Action Verb Understanding: Complementary Effects of Inhibitory and Excitatory Stimulation
Tom Gijssels, Daniel Casasanto


Do neural systems for planning motor actions play a functional role in understanding action language? Across multiple neuroimaging studies, processing action verbs correlates with somatotopic activity in premotor cortex (PMC). Yet, only one neurostimulation study supports a functional role for PMC in action verb understanding: paradoxically, inhibiting PMC made people respond faster to action verbs. Here we investigated effects of PMC excitation and inhibition on action verb understanding using tDCS. Right-handers received excitatory or inhibitory stimulation to left PMC hand areas, then made lexical decisions on unimanual action verbs and abstract verbs. tDCS polarity selectively affected how accurately participants responded to unimanual action verbs. Inhibitory stimulation to left PMC caused a relative increment in performance for right-hand responses, whereas excitatory left PMC stimulation caused a relative decrement. tDCS polarity did not differentially affect responses to abstract verbs. Premotor areas that subserve planning actions also support understanding language about these actions.
[response, inhibitory, accuracy, processing, evidence, type, task, trial, journal, stimulus] [understanding, people, caused, relationship] [language, functional, previous, experimental, support, produced, university] [study, primary, performance, correct, received, differentially, statistically] [verb, abstract, lexical, word, relative, semantic, accurately, direct] [predicted, data, decision, button, planning, find] [action, left, motor, hand, pmc, tdcs, stimulation, unimanual, polarity, excitatory, activity, neural, interaction, inhibition, excitation, premotor, complementary, current, brain, ctbs, system, willems, behavioral, neurostimulation, performed, cortex, role, embodied, rts, selectively, somatotopic, pattern, perform, human, transcranial, activation, inhibiting, dominant, view]
From low to high cognition: A multi-level model of behavioral control in the primate brain
Jerald Kralik, Dongqing Shi, Omar El-Shroa, Laura Ray


The basic cognitive architecture of the human brain remains unknown. However, there is evidence for the existence of distinct behavioral control systems shared by humans and nonhumans; and there is further evidence pointing to distinct higher-level problem solving systems shared by humans and other primates. To clarify the nature of these proposed systems and examine how they may interact in the brain, we present a four-level model of the primate brain and compare its performance to three other brain models in the face of a challenging foraging problem (i.e., with transparent, and thus, invisible barriers). In all manipulations (e.g., size of problem space, number of obstacles), our model never performed the best outright; however, it was always among the best, appearing to be a jack-of-all-trades. Thus, the virtues of our primate brain lie not only in the heights of thinking it can reach, but also in its range and versatility.
[learning, size, evidence, learn, novel, advantage, suggests] [cognitive, initial, existence] [main, item, lateral, directly] [problem, control, changing, solve, solving, number, performance, solver, barrier, ability, change, solution, appears, largest, blocking, mammalian, example, challenging] [path, computational, examine, comparative, cumulative, direct, habit, analysis, complete, creative, considered] [model, state, agent, best, find, foraging, based, well, function, reinforcement, potential] [level, system, goal, brain, nonapparent, grid, figure, transparent, behavioral, apparent, action, primate, represents, actor, prefrontal, current, detour, reach, granular, pfc, performed, obstacle, location, food, cortex, reaching, rhesus, opaque, consisting, evolved, nonhuman, hidden]
Cohesive Features of Deep Text Comprehension Processes
Laura Allen, Matthew Jacovina, Danielle McNamara


This study investigates how cohesion manifests in readers’ thought processes while reading texts when they are instructed to engage in self-explanation, a strategy associated with deeper, more successful comprehension. In Study 1, college students (n = 21) were instructed to either paraphrase or self-explain science texts. Paraphrasing was characterized by greater cohesion in terms of lexical overlap whereas self-explanation included greater lexical diversity and more connectives to specify relations between ideas. In Study 2, adolescent students (n = 84) were provided with instruction and practice in self-explanation and reading strategies across 8 sessions. Self-explanations increased in lexical diversity but became more causally and semantically cohesive over time. Together, these results suggest that cohesive features expressed in think alouds are indicative of the depth of students’ comprehension processes.
[training, processing, explicit, target, session, second] [causal, established, engage, mental, cognitive, understanding, explicitly] [specific, calculated, produced, language] [study, greater, practice, ratio, knowledge, three, strategy, lower, included, course, number, prompted, instructional, educational, tutoring, provided, science, instruction] [cohesion, text, comprehension, lexical, reading, semantic, cohesive, paraphrase, diversity, istart, skilled, examine, global, selfexplanation, indicative, analysis, aggregated, identified, givenness, selfexplanations, coherence, establish, detected] [higher, prior, generate, method] [overlap, current, deep, associated, representation, goal]
Specificity at the basic level in event taxonomies: The case of Maniq verbs of ingestion
Ewelina Wnuk


Previous research on basic-level object categories shows there is cross-cultural variation in basic-level concepts, arguing against the idea that the basic level reflects an objective reality. In this paper, I extend the investigation to the domain of events. More specifically, I present a case study of verbs of ingestion in Maniq illustrating a highly specific categorization of ingestion events at the basic level. A detailed analysis of these verbs reveals they tap into culturally salient notions. Yet, cultural salience alone cannot explain specificity of basic-level verbs, since ingestion is a domain of universal human experience. Further analysis reveals, however, that another key factor is the language itself. Maniq’s preference for encoding specific meaning in basic-level verbs is not a peculiarity of one domain, but a recurrent characteristic of its verb lexicon, pointing to the significant role of the language system in the structure of event concepts.
[general, label, categorization] [case, event, described, generic, cognitive, drinking, fact, factor] [basic, specific, language, manner, specificity, object, lexicon, domain, salient, variation, highly, default, referring, apply, lexicalization, netherlands, university, john, linguistic, cultural, characteristic, expertise] [number, hard, reflection] [ingestion, verb, maniq, eat, eating, fruit, aslian, kap, linked, table, medicinal, ingested, semantic, animal, wild, involve, ciyak, liquid, linguistics, newman, applied, fibrous, typically, reveals, categorial, inhale, elaborate, coh, culturally, jahai, structure, large] [smoke, well, range, depending, based, underlying] [level, human, food, associated, action, identity, encoding, system, covert]
What does the crowd believe? A hierarchical approach to estimating subjective beliefs from empirical data
Michael Franke, Fabian Dablander, Anthea Schoeller, Erin Bennett, Judith Degen, Michael Tessler, Justine Kao, Noah Goodman


People's beliefs about everyday events are both of theoretical interest in their own right and an important ingredient in model building---especially in Bayesian cognitive models of phenomena such as logical reasoning, future predictions, and language use. Here, we explore several recently used methods for measuring subjective beliefs about unidimensional contiguous properties, such as the likely price of a new watch. As a first step towards a way of assessing and comparing belief elicitation methods, we use hierarchical Bayesian modeling for inferring likely population-level beliefs as the central tendency of participants' individual-level beliefs. Three different dependent measures are considered: (i) slider ratings of (relative) likelihood of intervals of values, (ii) a give-a-number task, and (iii) choice of the more likely of two intervals of values. Our results suggest that using averaged normalized slider ratings for binned quantities is a practical and fairly good approximator of inferred population-level beliefs.
[task, paired, condition, indicate] [cognitive, belief, participant, work, rating, future, frame, consistent] [item, latent, context, experimental] [number, comparison, three, measuring, lower, spent, easy, comparing, high] [link, measure, table, interpretation, plausible, sentence] [slider, model, bin, subjective, data, binned, bayesian, coffee, posterior, prior, higher, tendency, histogram, watch, individual, laptop, predictive, joke, commute, choice, good, likelihood, behavior, cost, function, crowd, approximation, observed, empirical, everyday, capture, elicitation, parameter, method, provide] [central, level, practical, figure, hierarchical, focus, trained]
Active control of study leads to improved episodic memory in children
Azzurra Ruggeri, Douglas B. Markant, Todd M. Gureckis, Fei Xu


This paper reports an experiment testing whether volitional control over the presentation of stimuli leads to enhanced recognition memory in 6- to 8-year-old children. Children were presented with a simple memory game on an iPad. During the study phase, for half of the materials children could decide the order and pacing of stimuli presentation (active condition). For the other half of the materials, children observed the study choices of another child (yoked condition). We found that recognition performance was better for the objects studied in the active condition as compared to the yoked condition. Furthermore, we found that the memory advantages of active learning persisted over a one-week delay between study and test. Our results support pedagogical approaches that emphasize self-guided learning and show that even young children benefit from being able to control how they learn.
[test, learning, presented, condition, time, session, accuracy, child, compared, recognized, advantage, journal, phase, task, block, presentation, testing, improved, position, explore] [cognitive, frame, experience] [memory, object, studied, episodic, experimental, spatial, previous, studying, recall, main] [study, active, control, yoked, number, markant, retest, procedure, science, better, versus, performance, analyzed, week, voss, passive, benefit, arranged, young] [distance, order, visited] [red, selected, data, well, lead, exploration, correlation, making, paper, average, set, adaptive] [recognition, location, grid, figure, encoding, role, longer, original, level, experienced, pattern, currently, design, current]
Stop paying attention: the need for explicit stopping in inhibitory control
Ning Ma, Angela Yu


Inhibitory control, the ability to stop inappropriate actions, is an important cognitive function often investigated via the stop-signal task, in which an infrequent stop signal instructs the subject to stop a default go response. Previously, we proposed a rational decision-making model for stopping, suggesting the observer makes a repeated Go versus Wait choice at each instant, so that a Stop response is realized by repeatedly choosing to Wait. We propose an alternative model here that incorporates a third choice, Stop. Critically, unlike the Wait action, choosing the Stop action not only blocks a Go response at the current moment but also for the remainder of the trial -- the disadvantage of losing this flexibility is balanced by the benefit of not having to pay attention anymore. We show that this new model both reproduces known behavioral effects and has internal dynamics resembling presumed Go neural activations in the brain.
[time, trial, response, inhibitory, explicit, task, stimulus, processed, attentional, processing, attention] [race, belief, cognitive, low, leading, version, future] [error, encode, experimental, basic] [control, difference, three, high] [subject, earlier, ssrt, onset, proposed] [model, cost, wait, optimal, function, expected, bayesian, data, state, decision, mdp, stopping, average, ptz, observed, choosing, probability, distribution, assume, rate, chosen, median, observer, classical, chooses, making, posterior, simulated] [action, signal, process, neural, behavioral, sensory, current, fixation, movement, associated, ptd, eye, penalty, neuron, frontal, fef, figure, ssd, moment, field, brain, activity, paying, canceled]
A cross-linguistic investigation on the acquisition of complex numerals
Pierina Cheung, Meghan Dale, Mathieu Le Corre


Complex numerals (e.g., four hundred) have a multiplicative structure (four hundred = 4 x 100). This paper investigates whether children are sensitive to the meaning of the multiplicative structure. We designed a novel word learning paradigm and taught 4- to 6-year-old children the meaning of a novel numeral phrase (e.g., ‘one gobi houses’ to mean a group of three houses). We then asked whether they could generalize it to a novel context (e.g., ‘two gobi butterflies’ to mean two groups of three). Experiment 1 showed that only English-speaking children who received multiplier syntax training were able to generalize. Experiment 2 extended findings from Experiment 1 to Cantonese-speaking children and found that they could also generalize a novel multiplier to novel contexts. These results suggest that children as young as 4 can create a mapping between the structure of complex numerals and a multiplicative meaning.
[multiplier, numeral, novel, gobi, condition, complex, training, learning, generalize, generalization, phase, test, multiplicative, cantonese, general, age, presented, uninformative, generalized, tested, suggesting, evidence, task, competitor, journal, vocabulary, learn, completed] [experiment, mapping, experience, discussion, sensitivity, understanding] [meaning, classifier, language, map, linguistic] [digit, three, group, asked, counting, correct, knowledge, investigate, number, passed, discover, control, majority, mathematical, included, taught] [phrase, count, form, structure, word, syntax, noun, acquisition, chinese, english, combined, measure, pass, interpreted] [highest, compositional, total, provide, average, set, modelling, demonstrate] [figure, system, design]
Switch it up: Learning Categories via Feature Switching
Garrett Honke, Nolan Conaway, Kenneth Kurtz


This research introduces the switch task, a novel learning mode that fits with calls for a broader explanatory account of human category learning (Kurtz, 2015; Markman & Ross, 2003; Murphy, 2002). This paper presents the switch task to further explore the contingencies between learning goals, learning modes, outcomes, and category representations. Given that the ability to switch items between categories nicely encapsulates category knowledge, how does this relate to more familiar tasks like inferring features and classifying exemplars? To address this question we present an empirical investigation of this new task, side-by-side with the well-established alternative of classification learning. The results show that the category knowledge acquired through switch learning shares similarities with inference learning and provides insight into the processes at work. The implications of this research, particularly the distinctions between this learning mode and well-known alternatives, are discussed.
[category, learning, switch, classification, test, type, training, accuracy, task, classify, phase, condition, wald, journal, presented, target, tacl, novel, paradigm, iii, family, learn, exemplar, compared, resemblance, diva, learned, reliable, reliably] [inference, result, experiment, psychological, distinct, participant, consistent, commonly] [experimental, memory] [group, example, correct, accurate, knowledge, included, three, member, provided, study, feedback, versus, traditional, analyzed, partial, difference] [structure, complete, mode, class, conceptual, approach, random, core] [estimate, model, higher, incomplete, proportion, set, button, data, based] [feature, figure, human, process, representation, switching, represent, current]
Episodic memory as a prerequisite for online updates of model structure
David Gergely Nagy, Gergo Orban


Human learning in complex environments critically depends on the ability to perform model selection, that is to assess competing hypotheses about the structure of the environment. Importantly, information is accumulated continuously, which necessitates an online process for model selection. While model selection in human learning has been explored extensively, it is unclear how memory systems support learning in an online setting. We formulate a semantic learner and demonstrate that online learning on open model spaces results in a delicate choice between either tracking a possibly infinite number of competing models or retaining experiences in an intact form. Since none of these choices is feasible for a bounded-resource memory system, we propose an episodic learner that retains an optimised subset of experiences in addition to semantic memory. On a simple model system we demonstrate that this normative theory of episodic memory can effectively circumvent the challenge of online model selection.
[learning, learner, novel, statistical, complex, evidence] [normative, sufficient, power, inference, capacity] [episodic, memory, batch, main, store, argue] [online, change, problem, number, limited, knowledge, comparison, approximate, benefit, correct, require, performance, providing] [semantic, computational, form, order, structure, large, storing, amount, earlier, constrained] [model, data, posterior, distribution, predictive, mllh, bayesian, parameter, mixture, set, alternative, probability, marginal, based, proc, log, choice, provide, estimate, likelihood, uncertainty, simple, demonstrate, retaining, point, prior, mog, true, effectively, machine, propose, razor, hypothesis, expected, conf] [selection, human, tracked, current, representation, figure, surprise, system, brain, framework, space]
Feature Overlap in Action Sequence
Alexandra Stubblefield, Lisa Fournier


This study determined if features of an action plan held in working memory are activated equally (consistent with serial memory theories) or in a gradient (consistent with theories that assume serial order is imposed before response selection). Two visual events occurred sequentially. Participants planned an action (3-key sequence) to the first event (Action A) maintaining this action in working memory while executing a speeded response to the second event (Action B). Afterwards, participants executed Action A. We manipulated whether Action B overlapped with the first, second or final feature of Action A, and examined the pattern of correct, Action B RTs at the different overlap locations by finger (index, middle, ring), as well as error rates of both Action A and Action B. Results indicate that sequences were not activated equally or in a gradient. Instead, activation reflected a serial position curve or reverse serial position curve dependent on finger.
[response, sequence, second, appeared, position, journal, compared, stimulus, cross, task, trial, accuracy, evidence, presented, slower, occurred] [event, consistent, psychological, corresponded] [memory, error, activated, experimental, curve, main, instructed] [middle, third, study, partial, working, three, conducted, control, greater, differ, correct] [order, double] [rate, prior, assume, pairwise] [action, feature, activation, finger, plan, overlap, serial, ring, maintained, box, gradient, rts, pattern, fournier, executed, current, represented, overlapped, repetition, fixation, parallel, reverse, planned, interaction, left, executing, movement, figure, space, perception, execution, centimeter, visual, keyboard, execute, representing, letter, responded]
Modeling adaptation to a novel accent
Kasia Hitczenko, Naomi Feldman


Listeners quickly adapt to novel accents. There are three main hypotheses for how they do so. Some suggest that listeners expand their phonetic categories, allowing more variability in how a sound is pronounced. Others argue that listeners shift their categories instead, only accepting deviations consistent with the accent. A third hypothesis is that listeners shift and expand their categories. Most work has supported the category expansion hypotheses, with the key exception of Maye et al. (2008) who argued for a shifting strategy. Here, we apply the ideal adaptor model from Kleinschmidt & Jaeger (2015) to reexamine what conclusions can be drawn from their data. We compare adaptation models in which categories are shifted, expanded, or both shifted and expanded. We show that models involving expansion can explain the data as well as, if not better than, the shift model, in contrast to what has been previously concluded from these data.
[category, session, test, standard, sound, exposure, heard, evidence, response, spoken, suggests, compare, novel, task, exposed] [experiment, people, mapping, version, work, front, shifted, explain] [shift, expand, accent, endorsement, adaptation, vowel, previous, maye, covariance, item, speech, updated, lowered, accented, wetch, acoustic, american, weech, adapt, witch, pronounced, produced, experimental, accept, jaeger, girl, adaptor, kleinschmidt, argue, shifting, raised, pronunciation, expanding, twenty] [three, sum, better, difference, absolute, involving] [word, lexical, expansion, english, increase, weighted] [model, data, probability, confidence, based, set, decision, hypothesis, capture, ideal, sampled, parameter, accepted] [figure, corresponding, original, unfamiliar]
Comparing competing views of analogy making using eye-tracking technology
Jean-Pierre Thibaut, Bob French, Yannick Glady


We used eye-tracking to study the time course of analogical reasoning in adults. We considered proportions of looking times and saccades. The main question was whether or not adults would follow the same search strategies for different types of analogical problems (Scene Analogies vs. Classical A:B:C:D scene version of A:B::C:D). We then compared these results to the predictions of various models of analogical reasoning. Results revealed a picture of common search patterns with local adaptations to the specifics of each paradigm in both looking-time duration and the number and types of saccades. These results are discussed in terms of conceptions of analogical reasoning.
[task, analogy, target, analogical, standard, stimulus, second, time, type, pair, looked, attention, evidence, compared, picture, presented, compare, suggests, suggesting, relational] [cognitive, reasoning, unrelated, common, result, focused, black, source] [item, main, distractor, french, object] [solution, three, number, study, comparing, science, third, correct, received, course] [relation, semantic, order, local, analysis] [search, find, data, point, making] [scene, abcd, eye, thibaut, figure, role, interaction, slice, chasing, designated, semdis, pointed, tracking, focus, organized, tsemdis, fewer, visual, gordon, undis, bsemdis, csemdis]
Memory for the Random: A Simulation of Computer Program Recall
Fernand Gobet, Oliver Iain


Contrary to a widely held belief, experts recall random material better than non-experts. This phenomenon, predicted by the CHREST computational model, was first established with chess players. Recently, it has been shown through a meta-analysis that it generalises to nearly all domains where the effect has been tested. In this paper, we carry out computer simulations to test whether the mechanism postulated with chess experts – the acquisition and use of a large number of chunks – also applies to computer programming experts. The results show that a simplified version of CHREST (without the learning and use of high-level schemata known as templates) broadly captures the skill effect with scrambled programs. However, it fails to account for the differences found in humans between different types of randomisation. To account for these differences, additional mechanisms are necessary that use semantic processing.
[stimulus, test, type, completed, training, time, presented, journal, presentation, compared, phase, learning] [cognitive, account, experiment, experience, psychological, described] [recall, chrest, program, memory, expert, expertise, chunk, novice, guerin, chunking, adelson, recalled, gobet, perceptual, language, discrimination, barfield, randomised, experimental, module, epam, randomisation] [skill, programming, code, three, material, knowledge, chess, better, correct, number, study, performance, stm, course] [random, semantic, order, large, syntactic, proposed] [model, normal, data, based, point, empirical, paper, simulation] [computer, level, figure, net, architecture, scrambled, simon, chase]
Linguistic niches emerge from pressures at multiple timescales
Molly Lewis, Michael C. Frank


What accounts for the vast diversity in the world’s languages? We explore one possibility: languages adapt to their linguistic environment (Linguistic Niche Hypothesis; Lupyan & Dale, 2010). Recent studies have found support for this hypothesis through correlations between aspects of the environment and linguistic structure. We synthesize this previous work and find that languages spoken in cold, small regions tend to be more complex across a range of linguistic features. We also test a novel prediction of the Linguistic Niche Hypothesis by examining the learnability of languages for first-language, child learners.
[complex, spoken, learning, second, suggests, size, explore, adult, lupyan] [relationship, cognitive, work, variable] [language, linguistic, environmental, principal, niche, variability, polish, turkish, portuguese, yoruba, finnish, chamorro, morphosyntactic, bulgarian, georgian, tagalog, lithuanian, fijian, greek, ilocano, hawaiian, spanish, akan, bambara, kanuri, luganda, timescale, catalan, wolof, tamil, hebrew, ewe, precipitation, shona, italian, hindi, bengali, hausa, irish, learnability, communicative, german, romanian, somali, vietnamese, timescales, french, evolution, areal] [number, study, larger, control] [word, complexity, tend, english, small, hungarian, analysis, temperature, mechanism, large, aoa, acquisition] [population, hypothesis, data, find, model, range, datasets, total] [component, internal, figure]
Know Your Adversary: Insights for a Better Adversarial Behavioral Model
Yasaman Abbasi, Debarun kar, Nicole Sintov, Milind Tambe, Noam Ben-Asher, Don Morrison, Cleotilde Gonzalez


Given the global challenges of security, both in physical and cyber worlds, security agencies must optimize the use of their limited resources. To that end, many security agencies have begun to use "security game" algorithms, which optimally plan defender allocations, using models of adversary behavior that have originated in behavioral game theory. To advance our understanding of adversary behavior, this paper presents results from a study involving an opportunistic crime security game (OSG), where human participants play as opportunistic adversaries against an algorithm that optimizes defender allocations. In contrast with previous work which often assumes homogeneous adversarial behavior, our work demonstrates that participants are naturally grouped into multiple distinct categories that share similar behaviors. We capture the observed adversarial behaviors in a set of diverse models from different research traditions, behavioral game theory and Cognitive Science, illustrating the need for heterogeneity in adversarial models.
[response, learning, time, training] [cognitive, work, distinct, percentage, crime, future] [highly, instance, memory, interesting, main] [score, number, three, study, better, strategy, high] [cluster, random, opportunistic, graph, clustering] [model, behavior, adversary, utility, game, security, station, data, based, ibl, mobility, defender, parameter, decision, adversarial, suqr, probability, exploration, heterogeneity, rank, observed, quantal, homogeneous, theory, expected, distribution, osg, rationality, provide, satisficing, highest, choice, rational, set, considering, player, noise, heterogeneous, coverage, making, attack, blended, defense, played, cyber, perfectly, subjective, average, modeling, patrolling, collected] [behavioral, figure, human, algorithm]
Gibson's Reasons for Realism and Gibsonian Reasons for Anti-Realism: An Ecological Approach to Model-Based Reasoning in Science
Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira


Representational views of the mind traditionally face a skeptical challenge on perceptual knowledge: if our experience of the world is mediated by representations built upon perceptual inputs, how can we be certain that our representations are accurate and our perceptual apparatus reliable? J. J. Gibson's ecological approach provides an alternative framework, according to which direct perception of affordances does away with the need to posit internal mental representations as intermediary steps between perceptual input and behavioral output. Gibson accordingly spoke of his framework as providing “reasons for realism.” In this paper I suggest that, granting Gibson his reasons for perceptual realism, the Gibsonian framework motivates anti-realism when it comes to scientific theorizing and modeling. If scientists are Gibsonian perceivers, then it makes sense to take their use of models in indirect investigations of real-world phenomena not as representations of the phenomena, but rather as autonomous tools with their own affordances.
[target, relational, learn, stanford, processing] [scientific, ecological, gibson, gibsonian, representational, cognitive, philosophy, epistemic, kind, perceive, psychology, organism, autonomous, relationship, account, cognition, mental, mediated, case, descartes, morgan, synthese, edward, manipulation, mit, fact, relevant, simply, zalta, url, morrison, afford, representationalism] [perceptual, university, object, van, generation] [science, knowledge, mind, external, mathematical, accurate] [approach, direct, order, indirect, oxford, rat, intended, proposed] [model, modeling, theory, subjective, based, individual, well, alternative] [perception, affordances, action, view, representation, framework, realism, visual, built, skeptical, behavioral, represent, dynamical, environment, affordance, involves, process, encyclopedia, robotic, internal]
Measuring the Causal Dynamics of Facial Interaction with Convergent Cross Mapping
Eric Postma, Marie Postma-Nilsenová


The nature of the dynamics of nonverbal interactions is of considerable interest to the study of human communication and future human-computer interaction. Facial expressions constitute an important source of nonverbal social signals. Whereas most studies have focused on the facial expressions of isolated individuals, the aim of this study is to explore the coupling dynamics of facial expressions in social dyadic interactions. Using a special experimental set-up, the frontal facial dynamics of pairs of socially interacting persons were measured and analyzed simultaneously. We introduce the use of convergent cross mapping, a method originating from dynamical systems theory, to assess the causal coupling of the dyadic facial-expression dynamics. The results reveal the presence of bidirectional causal couplings of the facial dynamics. We conclude that convergent cross mapping yields encouraging results in establishing evidence for causal behavioral interactions.
[cross, time, size, dimension, complex, paired] [causal, conversation, mapping, causality, participant, presence, survey, positive, evaluation, statement, social, psychological, detecting] [gender, recording] [number, study, measuring, example] [attractor, shadow, measure, quality, table, manifold, relation, embedding, increase, applied, analysis, establish] [correlation, prediction, increasing, method, behavior, predict] [facial, ccm, action, coupling, system, convergent, behavioral, dynamical, nonverbal, figure, interaction, dyad, unit, dyadic, interacting, synchrony, lorenz, coupled, mimicry, library, partner, human, recurrence, corner, eye, lag]
Modeling language discrimination in infants using i-vector representations
M. Julia Carbajal, Radek Fér, Emmanuel Dupoux


Experimental research suggests that at birth infants can discriminate two languages if they belong to different rhythmic classes, and by 4 months of age they can discriminate two languages within the same class provided they have been previously exposed to at least one of them. In this paper, we present a novel application of speech technology tools to model language discrimination, which may help to understand how infants achieve high performance on this task. By combining a Gaussian Mixture Model of the acoustic space and low-dimensional representations of novel utterances with a model of a habituation paradigm, we show that brief exposure to French does not allow to discriminate between two previously unheard languages with similar phonological properties, but facilitates discrimination of two phonologically distant languages. The implications of these findings are discussed.
[test, switch, infant, presented, task, exposure, pair, second, novel, phase] [initial, arousal, asymmetry, belong, variable] [language, habituation, discrimination, speech, french, acoustic, bilingual, speaker, discriminate, background, ubm, variability, unheard, abx, experimental, centroid, spanish, utterance, calculated, principal, habituated, previous, native, identification, subspace, rhythmic] [difference, ability, number, larger, step, understand, young, help, additional] [english, distance, variance, large, analysis, cosine, measure] [model, set, data, distribution, observed, selected, threshold, modeling, mixture, propose, behavior] [trained, system, representation, component, figure, pattern, recognition, represent, space, dataset, single, feature, represents, overlapping, gaussian]
Children’s Use of Orthographic Cues in Language Processing
Takayo Sugimoto


This study investigated factors responsible for the developmental discontinuity of children's language processing in Japanese. We conducted an experiment using cross-modal linguistic stimuli (prosody & orthography) to see whether children’s orthographic knowledge affects their rendaku strategy or not. Our results showed that orthographic cues affected literate children’s rendaku processing. They were aware the correspondence between types of orthography and word categories in Japanese. Children define the rendaku category and redefine it, resulting in the qualitative change in children’s rendaku strategies.
[rendaku, condition, japanese, pitch, katakana, unaccented, processing, hiragana, compound, orthography, developmental, journal, voiced, development, literate, child, novel, category, presented, prosody, adult, correspondence, phonetics, counterbalance, loan, complex, task, yamato, preliterate, early, test] [aware, formation, experiment, applies, childhood] [accent, language, accented, apply, university, linguistic, native, consonant, phonological, society, foreign] [strategy, control, group, three, change, study, knowledge, japan, acquire, score, annual, middle] [word, orthographic, lexical, table, acquisition, noun, subject, assignment, oxford, handbook, prosodic, aloud, meeting, applied, literacy, read] [total, based, data] [figure, element, divided, represent]
Semantic, Lexical, and Geographic Cues in Recall Processes
Janelle Szary, Michael N. Jones


Semantic fluency tasks have increasingly been used to probe the structure of human memory, adopting methodologies from the ecological foraging literature to describe memory as a trajectory through semantic space. Clusters of semantically related items are often produced together, and the transitions between these clusters of semantically related items are consistent with theories of optimal foraging, where the search process exhibits a balance between exploration and exploitation (Hills, Jones, & Todd, 2012). Here, we use a semantic fluency memory task in which subjects recall geographic locations. For each pairwise transition, we measure temporal, geographic, semantic, lexical, and phonetic distances. In general, the dimensions are loosely but reliably correlated with each other. Segmentation of the retrieval sequence into patches supports the notion that subjects strategically leave patches as within-patch resources diminish, but also suggests that subjects may shift their attention between different sources of information, perhaps reflecting dynamically changing patch definitions.
[compared, category, sequence, suggests, task, time, occurred, switch, evidence, reported, finding] [cognitive, temporal, physical, consistent, psychological, positively, appropriate, leading] [phonetic, retrieval, retrieved, memory, phonological, recall, recalled, highly, language] [number, greater, balance, science, course, external, control, versus, idea] [semantic, distance, geographic, lexical, structure, shuffled, correlated, measure, fluency, subject, szary, semantically, similarity, relative, preceding, reflect] [search, observed, patch, optimal, data, foraging, exploration, simulated, pairwise, exploitation, city, hypothesis, metric, higher, rate, forager, successful, dynamically, exploratory, measured] [figure, space, process, internal, goal, tool]
Curiosity and Its Influence on Children's Memory
Haley Walin, Shaun O'Grady, Fei Xu


Curiosity has a tumultuous past. Originally curiosity was considered a vice of excess leading to misconduct and disaster. Recently, curiosity has transformed into a virtue of self-expression resulting in success and better performance. In classrooms, educators try to find ways of eliciting curiosity from their students: allowing them to pick their own research topics and books, including pop culture references in lecture, and many more strategies. Recent adult studies have revealed better memory for trivia facts that elicit more curiosity. The current study modifies the methods used in previous adult studies in order to make them more appropriate for children. Results from a sample of 24 7- and 8-year-olds reveal that by age eight curiosity significantly affects memory for trivia facts. This research may shed light on the cognitive advantages of curiosity and legitimatize the encouragement of curiosity in classrooms for school age children.
[child, age, learning, trial, revealed, presented, size, evidence, retention, learn, response, testing, artificial, attention, increased, journal, developmental] [gap, rating, cognitive, scale, low, induced, elicit, people, influence] [memory, remember, recall, coded] [curiosity, question, dopamine, answer, correct, knowledge, experimenter, trivia, curious, study, ratio, group, better, asked, difference, active, larger, high, filling, motivation, metacognitive, science, lower, board, provided, concept] [order, form, increase, word, small, mechanism] [reward, model, theory, exploratory, odds, based, behavior, lead, sample, well, prior, knew, expected] [level, network, desired, box, figure, process, brain]
Increasing preschoolers’ awareness of lexical ignorance to encourage word-learning
Sofia Jimenez, Kaitlin Ryan, Megan Saylor


Preschool-aged children develop awareness of the words they do and do not know. Awareness of one’s lexicon may encourage word learning if children pay more attention to the definition of unknown words. Here, we tested 3-4-year-old children (N = 91) on a word learning task embedded in an e-book. When a novel word was read, children were either asked if they knew the word, asked a question about the storyline, or asked no question. Then they were given a description without visual input and asked to identify the referent’s picture from three choices. Participants who were asked if they knew a word before being provided with the definition identified more referents than children in the other conditions. Children’s word learning was predicted by short-term memory.
[awareness, novel, test, target, familiar, learning, picture, task, tested, electronic, attention, child, condition, ignorance, teddy, development, identify, vocabulary, presented, reported, heard, creature, revealed, early, journal, span, type, trial, counterbalanced, completed] [cognitive, income, told, work, story, possibility, researcher, supported] [object, language, memory, distractor, meaning, item, distractors, support, degree, definition, lexicon] [question, three, asked, digit, study, ability, young, transfer, vanderbilt, help, preschool, practice, experimenter, scaffold, example, prompted, performance] [word, lexical, table, reading, book, acquisition, order] [well, knew, consider, predict, unknown] [representation, unfamiliar, current, visual, catch]
The Aging Lexicon: Differences in the Semantic Networks of Younger and Older Adults
Dirk U. Wulff, Thomas Hills, Margie Lachman, Rui Mata


How does the mental lexicon, the network of learned words in our semantic memory, change in old age? To address this question, we employ a new network inference method to infer networks from verbal fluency data of a group of younger and older adults. We find that older adults produce more unique words in verbal fluency tasks than younger adults. In line with recent theorizing, this suggests a larger mental lexicon for older than for younger adults. Moreover, we find that relative to the mental lexicon of younger adults, the mental lexicon of older adults is less small-world-like. Based on several findings linking network clustering to processing speed, this finding suggests that not only the size, but also the structure of the mental lexicon may contribute to apparent cognitive decline in old age.
[older, younger, verbal, size, journal, statistical, vocabulary, age, suggests, adult, aging, standard, finding, decline, preferential, bootstrap, learning] [mental, cognitive, psychological, inference, investigation, consistent, result, aim] [lexicon, memory, produced, language, lexica, previous, highly, society, experimental] [number, larger, group, step, performance, study, young, science] [semantic, fluency, small, clustering, structure, path, shortest, word, unique, coefficient, window, random, length, relative, graph, analysis, natural, measure, minimum, rand, producing, animal, frequency, entered] [average, data, method, based, search, parameter, inferred, total, optimal, theory, median] [network, figure, process, apparent]
A Recurrent Network Approach to Modeling Linguistic Interaction
Rick Dale, Riccardo Fusaroli, Kristian Tylén, Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi, Morten Christiansen


What capacities enable linguistic interactions? While several proposals have been advanced, little progress has been made in comparing and articulating them within an integrative framework. In this paper, we take initial steps towards a connectionist framework designed to compare different cognitive models of social interactions. The framework we propose couples two simple-recurrent network systems (Chang, 2002) to explore the computational underpinnings of interaction, and apply this modeling framework to predict the semantic structure derived from transcripts of an experimental joint decision task (Bahrami et al., 2010; Fusaroli et al., 2012). In an exploratory application of this framework, we find (i) that the coupled network approach is capable of learning from noisy naturalistic input but (ii) that integration of production and comprehension does not increase the network performance. We end by discussing the value of looking to traditional parallel distributed processing as flexible models for exploring computational mechanisms of conversation.
[integration, learning, training, task, test, sequential, processing, compare, baseline] [cognitive, social, conversation, common, participant, capable] [production, language, context, linguistic, interlocutor, university, conversational] [performance, number, interactive, control, better, modeled, difference] [comprehension, lsa, lexical, local, word, structure, computational, chang, subnetwork, semantic, subnetworks, approach, order, cosine, panel, theoretical, relative, syntactic, corpus, analysis, fusaroli] [model, agent, predict, full, function, expected, prediction, based, modeling, allow] [input, network, layer, output, hidden, coupled, framework, representation, space, interaction, recurrent, dyad, trained, neural, coupling, joint, interacting, activation, net, figure, fully, integrated, internal, original, matrix]
Are Financial Advisors Money Doctors or Charlatans? Evidence on Trust, Advice, and Risk Taking in Delegated Asset Management
Qizhang Sun, Michael Gibbert, Thomas Hills, Eric Nowak


We test the effects of advice and trust on risk-taking in three online experiments designed to elucidate under what conditions financial advice may increase risk-taking, irrespective of advisor performance. In our study, investors made 100 decisions, selecting between one of two alternatives: risky or conservative. We manipulate the suggestion of an advisor (risky vs. non-risky investments), the fee of the advice, as well as the trustworthiness of the advisor (by increasing the transparency of the advice presented) to test the effect of the advice on risk-taking. The results show that individuals asymmetrically follow the advice they received, with a bias towards following more risky than conservative advice. Moreover, trusted advice was more persuasive irrespective of what the advisor suggested and even the fee is higher.
[test, condition, standard, second, trial, chance, suggests] [people, experiment, experience, result, low, personal, survey, recruited, mturk, long] [select, experimental, manipulated] [larger, high, asked, control, online, group, better, number, enable, lose, manipulate, seeking, performance, difference] [quality] [advice, advisor, risky, conservative, trust, follow, alternative, financial, money, model, investment, justified, risk, asymmetric, consult, price, selecting, selected, phrasing, choose, probability, trusted, decision, distribution, method, irrespective, outcome, enables, higher, actual, bearish, fee, recommend, gennaioli, provide, investor, assumption, find, deviation, charge, choice, based, prove, accumulated, randomly, normal, bought, charged] [environment, figure, design, represents, suggested, market]
The impact of biased hypothesis generation on self-directed learning
Doug Markant


Self-directed learning confers a number of advantages relative to passive observation, including the ability to test hypotheses rather than learn from data generated by the environment. However, it remains unclear to what extent self-directed learning is constrained by basic cognitive processes and how those limits are related to the structure of the to-be-learned material. The present study examined how hypothesis generation affects the success of self-directed learning of categorical rules. Two experiments manipulated the hypothesis generation process and assessed its impact on the ability to learn 1D and 2D rules. Performance was strongly influenced by whether the stimulus representation facilitated the generation of hypotheses consistent with the target rule. Broadly speaking, the findings suggest that the opportunity to actively gather information is not enough to guarantee successful learning, and that the efficacy of self-directed learning closely depends on how hypothesis generation is shaped by the structure of the learning environment.
[rule, learning, stimulus, test, target, accuracy, classification, type, condition, category, sdl, learn, dimension, trial, shape, displayed, size, task, journal, second, training, label] [experiment, cognitive, participant, assigned, people, including, led] [generation, perceptual, highly, combination, salient, experimental, previous] [performance, involving, study, correct, number, passive, markant, gureckis, ability] [form, structure, order, relative, analysis] [hypothesis, proportion, decision, generated, search, generate, predicted, successful, higher, randomly, biased, based, set, depends, success] [feature, figure, representation, interaction, corresponding, goal, defined, selection, single]
Representing Sequence: The Influence of Timeline Axis and Direction on Causal Reasoning in Litigation Law
Amy Fox, Martin van den Berg, Erica de Vries


Can the representation of event sequence influence how jurors remember and reason in a legal case? We addressed this question by examining the interaction between an individual’s preferred spatial construal of time (SCT) for an external (visual- spatial) representation and the SCT of a courtroom graphic. One hundred fifty three undergraduates played the role of jurors in a fictitious civil trial. The details of a case were re- counted in a multimedia presentation featuring timelines animated in one of four orientations: left-right, right-left, top- bottom, and bottom-top. Participants were assessed on measures of comprehension and causal reasoning. Results indicated effects of timeline orientation and SCT choice behavior on comprehension and reasoning. We discuss these results in terms of the role of attention in temporal-causal reasoning, and implications for the design of multimedia materials for the courtroom.
[sequence, time, task, stimulus, attention, presentation, evidence, learning, presented, sequential, explore, revealed, suggests] [scts, reasoning, timeline, sct, multimedia, cognitive, mental, courtroom, temporal, influence, causal, axis, stability, rwd, construal, result, oriented, inconsistent, consistent, lawyer, event, litigation, import, case, animated, representational, traffic, indicated, testimony, sagittal] [spatial, experimental, university, memory, coherent] [working, asked, external, group, interactive, impact, department] [comprehension, measure, order, flexibility, structure, sequencing, abstract] [data, choice, model, chose, preferred] [orientation, visual, figure, direction, role, body, representation, space, interaction, design, developed]
Answering Causal Queries about Singular Cases
Simon Stephan, Michael R. Waldmann


Queries about singular causation face two problems: It needs to be decided whether the two observed events are instantiations of a generic cause-effect relation. Second, causation needs to be distinguished from co-incidence. We propose a computational model that addresses both questions. It accesses generic causal knowledge either on the individual or the group level. Moreover, the model addresses the possibility of a coincidence by adopting Cheng and Novick’s (2005) power PC measure of causal responsibility. This measure delivers the conditional probability that a cause is causally responsible for an effect given that both events have occurred. To take uncertainty about both the causal structure and the parameters into account we embedded the causal responsibility measure within the structure induction (SI) model developed by Meder et al. (2014). We report the results of three experiments that show that the SI model better captures the data than the power PC model.
[second, test, presented, induction, occurred, tested, target, time, condition, type] [causal, singular, generic, power, causation, contingency, responsibility, experiment, event, chemical, fish, antenna, causally, low, cheng, psychological, account, absence, imagine, indicated, caused, discussion, series, possibility, relationship, responsible, waldmann] [depicted, main, instructed] [question, knowledge, asked, high, three, difference, problem, study, group] [structure, table, measure, oxford, read, relation, mechanism] [model, data, probability, sample, predicts, parameter, likelihood, observed, uncertainty, bayesian, theory, predicted, noise, based, predictive, higher, gene, confidence, denotes, posterior, consider, prior, set] [single, figure, developed, interaction, joint]
Making it Right: Can the Right-Hemisphere Compensate for Language Function in Patients with Left-Frontal Brain Tumors?
Ethan Jost, Nicole Brennan, Kyung Peck, Andrei Holodny, Morten Christiansen


Both the degree to which the left-hemisphere is specialized for language and the relative ability of the right-hemisphere to subserve language function are underspecified. The present study sought to identify whether the right-frontal fMRI activation seen in a number of case studies in patients with left-sided brain lesions exists as a group-level trend in patients with left-frontal tumors. It also sought to examine the possible compensatory nature of this activation. Thus, a retrospective analysis of 197 brain tumor patients who had undergone pre-surgical fMRI language mapping was conducted. Patients with left-frontal tumors were found to be more likely to show right- or co-dominant fMRI activation during language mapping tasks compared to patients who had tumors elsewhere in the brain. Further, patients with left-frontal tumors who were identified as right- or co-dominant for language were found to possess more intact language function as measured by the Boston Naming Test.
[development, indicate, early, age, reported, task, suggests, adult, journal] [result, work, case, cognitive, clinical, future, cancer, understanding, positive] [language, healthy, functional, error, degree, shift] [study, report, difference, number, traditional, usa, group, better, required] [large, table, plasticity, order, demonstrates, trend] [function, compensatory, data, based, set] [brain, tumor, patient, reorganization, activation, damage, frontal, laterality, fmri, hemisphere, contralateral, role, figure, hemispheric, leftdominant, lobe, suffering, stroke, righthemisphere, left, dominant, network, brennan, memorial, kettering, sloan, basal, holodny, ipsilateral, bnt, infiltration]
Spatial Meaning is Retained in Emotion Metaphors: Some Evidence from Spanish
Cesar Riano, Florencia Reali


Previous work has shown that the abstract use of the prepositions in and on retains spatial meaning, such as containment and support that includes the control relationship between a located object (the figure) and a reference object (the ground). We extend these ideas to the case of metaphorical descriptions of emotion in Spanish – some of them featuring the emotion as a located entity in the person´s body, and some of them featuring emotion as the ground in which the person´s body stands. Two rating experiments show that people judge emotions as more “controllable” when they are described as located entities (the figure) than when they are described as grounds.
[condition, evidence, counterbalanced, second] [gran, emotion, encontraba, estado, una, described, metaphorical, located, framing, positive, negative, metaphor, person, valence, twelve, cognition, cognitive, los, participant, social, universidad, political, people, elena, experiencing, sus, andes, retained, rated, relationship, reali, version, por, case, great, work, ximena, controllable, falta, serenidad, luz, featuring] [spatial, ground, experimental, meaning, perceptual, language, spanish, object, linguistic, item, degree, describing, functional, describe] [study, control, questionnaire, included] [abstract, entity, sentence, concrete, del, semantic, order, conceptual] [data, state, proposal, higher, rate] [figure, body, naturalness, corresponds]
Explanatory Value, Probability, and Abductive Inference
Matteo Colombo, Marie Nilsenova, Jan Sprenger


Abductive reasoning assigns special status to the explanatory power of a hypothesis. But what determines explanatory power remains unclear. Our study clarifies this issue by asking: How does the explanatory power of a hypothesis cohere with other cognitive factors? How does probabilistic information affect explanatory judgments? To answer these questions, we conducted an experiment, where participants made judgments about a potentially explanatory hypothesis and its cognitive virtues. In the responses, we isolated three constructs: Explanatory Value, Rational Acceptability, and Entailment. While explanatory judgments strongly cohered with judgments of causal relevance and with a sense of understanding, Explanatory Value was sensitive to manipulations of statistical relevance relations between hypothesis and evidence, but not to explicit information about the prior probability of the hypothesis. These results indicate that probabilistic information about statistical relevance is a strong determinant of Explanatory Value, and that abductive and probabilistic reasoning are two distinct modes of inference.
[statistical, response, base, chance, presented, second, revealed] [explanatory, relevance, explanation, understanding, power, abductive, causal, philosophy, cognitive, inference, vignette, reasoning, white, factor, ball, confirmation, sense, lombrozo, simplicity, acceptability, scientific, strong, truth, ruud, east, abduction, account, psychology, determines, louise, experiment, implication, taxi, assigned, manipulation, distinct, proposition] [university, experimental, tilburg, principal, main, netherlands, degree] [three, question, literature, study, help, number, knowledge, difference] [logical, table, analysis, weak, oxford, dependent, relation] [hypothesis, probabilistic, prior, probability, rational, urn, posterior, good, conservative, chooses, bayesian, entailment, consider, broader, rate, estimated, selected] [component, interaction, human]
Visual Statistical Learning Deficits in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: an Event Related Potential Study
Sonia Singh, Anne Walk, Christopher Conway


Extensive research suggests that individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD) perform below typical readers on non-linguistic cognitive tasks involving the learning and encoding of statistical-sequential patterns. However, research investigating the neural mechanisms underlying such a deficit is inadequate. The aim of the present study was to investigate the ERP correlates of sequence processing in a sample of children diagnosed with DD using a probabilistic visual serial learning paradigm. Behavioral results revealed that whereas age-matched typically developing (TD) children (n=12) showed learning in the task as reflected by their reaction times, the children with dyslexia (n=8) showed no effects of learning. Additionally, ERPs of the TD children showed a P300-like response indicative of this paradigm (Jost et al., 2015); whereas, children diagnosed with a reading disorder showed no such ERP effects. These findings are consistent with the idea that differences in statistical-sequential learning ability might underlie the reading deficits observed in DD.
[learning, statistical, predictor, dyslexia, developmental, target, response, deficit, stimulus, sequence, erp, erps, task, time, sequential, compared, revealed, condition, presented, jost, processing, magnocellular, age, suggests, wechsler, trial, annals, presentation] [cognitive, implicit, diagnosed, low, appear, indicated] [color, language, phonological, perceptual, typical] [group, ability, high, study, difficulty, three, larger] [reading, word, decoding, table, amplitude, typically, dependent] [observed, data, theory, probability, sample, individual, potential, average, lack] [visual, motor, figure, associated, level, brain, behavioral, input, eeg, current, component, performed, neural, left, net, box]
The St. Petersburg Paradox: A Subjective Probability Solution
Hongbin Wang, Yanlong Sun, Jack Smith


The St. Petersburg Paradox (SPP), where people are willing to pay only a modest amount for a lottery with infinite expected gain, has been a famous showcase of human (ir)rationality. Since inception multiple solutions have been proposed, including the influential expected utility theory. Criticisms remain due to the lack of a priori justification for the utility function. Here we report a new solution to the long-standing paradox, which focuses on the probability weighting component (rather than the value/utility component) in calculating the expected value of the game. We show that a new Additional Transition Time (AT) based measure, motivated by both physics and psychology, can naturally lead to a converging expected value and therefore solve the paradox.
[time, occur, standard, arbitrary, second] [event, expectation, people, pleasure, long, great, cognitive, consistent, psychological, impossible, paid, judgment] [] [solution, additional, concept, logarithmic, mind, equal, difficulty, number, mathematical, fair, problem, difference, science, sum, smaller, published] [small, length, head, form, large, statistic, proposed, measure, complete, existing] [probability, utility, streak, expected, bernoulli, function, based, game, waiting, theory, petersburg, spp, decision, treatment, tttt, toss, lack, gamble, return, pay, infinite, weighting, paper, prospect, describes, player, money, payout, rare, probabilistic, paradox, tail, risk, wait, valued, making] [human, figure, transition, pattern, longer, represents, play, original, component, represented]
A test of two models of probability judgment: quantum versus noisy probability
Fintan Costello, Paul Watts


We test contrasting predictions of two recent models of probability judgment: the quantum probability model (Busemeyer et al., 2011) and the probability theory plus noise model (Costello & Watts, 2014). Both models assume that people estimate probability using formal processes that follow or subsume standard probability theory. The quantum probability model predicts people's estimates should agree with one set of probability theory identities, while the probability theory plus noise model predicts a specific pattern of violation of those identities. Experimental results show just the form of violation predicted by the probability theory plus noise model. These results suggest that people's probability judgments do not follow quantum probability: instead, they follow the rules of standard probability theory, with the systematic biases seen in those judgments due to the effects of random noise.
[interference, standard, pair, reliably, evidence, test, chance, second, presented] [event, positive, systematic, people, experiment, psychological, case, reasoning, causal] [term, error, degree, university, item, expect, instance] [difference, number, measurement, group, equal, idea, formal] [table, order, random, form, occurrence] [probability, quantum, theory, model, measured, observables, predicts, incompatible, noise, ordering, observable, predicted, opposite, average, estimate, incompatibility, busemeyer, conjunction, expected, weather, assume, follow, counted, compatible, hpe, sample, state, individual, randomly, set, ireland, incorrectly, probabilistic, assumes, windy, depend, cloudy, prior] [identity, conjunctive]
Influence of 3D images and 3D-printed objects on spatial reasoning
Akihiro Maehigashi, Kazuhisa Miwa, Masahiro Oda, Yoshihiko Nakamura, Kensaku Mori, Tsuyoshi Igami


In this study, we experimentally investigated the influence of a three-dimensional (3D) graphic image and a 3D-printed object on a spatial reasoning task in which participants were required to infer cross sections of a liver in a situation where liver resection surgery was presupposed. The results of the study indicated that using a 3D-printed object produced more accurate task performance and faster mental model construction of a liver structure than a 3D image. During the task, using a 3D-printed object was assumed to reduce cognitive load and information accessing cost more than using a 3D image.
[task, condition, test, learning, time, cross, target, indicating, indicate] [situation, cognitive, mental, reasoning, people, factor, influence, experiment, understanding, cognition] [spatial, object, memory, reference, main, store, experimental] [external, liver, vein, ability, branching, three, score, difference, required, answer, conducted, accurate, ivc, shorter, desk, number, accessing, secondary, primary, created, high, investigated, sheet, mentally, experimentally, school, manipulate, nagoya, resection, science, japan, printed] [structure, accurately, analysis, concrete, considered, construct] [model, cost, higher, load, drawn, confidence, observed, correlation, assumed, inferring] [image, location, tumor, representation, figure, computer, interaction, inner, anatomical, internal, box]
Modeling the Contribution of Central Versus Peripheral Vision in Scene, Object, and Face Recognition
Panqu Wang, Garrison Cottrell


It is commonly believed that the central visual field is important for recognizing objects and faces, and the peripheral region is useful for scene recognition. However, the relative importance of central versus peripheral information for object, scene, and face recognition is unclear. In a behavioral study, Larson and Loschky (2009) investigated this question by measuring the scene recognition accuracy as a function of visual angle, and demonstrated that peripheral vision was indeed more useful in recognizing scenes than central vision. In this work, we modeled and replicated the result of Larson and Loschky (2009), using deep convolutional neural networks. Having fit the data for scenes, we used the model to predict future data for large-scale scene recognition as well as for objects and faces. Our results suggest that the relative order of importance of using central visual field information is face recognition>object recognition>scene recognition, and vice-versa for peripheral information.
[accuracy, condition, processing, tested, training, journal, learning, learned, classification, radius, test] [experiment, result, consistent, work, missing] [object, van] [versus, performance, equal, number, three, study, contribution, modeled] [window, relative, small, order, efficient] [model, modeling, function, higher, predict, set, best] [recognition, vision, central, scene, peripheral, visual, face, figure, deep, larson, loschky, neural, foveated, convolutional, scotoma, human, field, original, recognizing, image, viewable, resolution, trained, viewing, region, preprocessed, behavioral, achieve, network, perception, angle, connected, computer, layer, area, validation, googlenet, cnns, fully, performs, arxiv, preprint, input]
College Students’ Understanding of Linear Functions: Slope is Slippery
Marta Mielicki, Jennifer Wiley


A common obstacle for students in the transition from arithmetic to algebra is developing a conceptual understanding of equations representing functions. Two experiments manipulated isomorphic problems in terms of their solution requirements (computation vs. interpretation) and format to test for understanding of linear functions. Experiment 1 provided problems in a story context, and found that performance on slope comparison problems was low, especially when problems were presented with equations. Experiment 2 tested whether performance on slope comparison problems improves when problem prompts include explicit mathematical terminology rather than just natural language consistent with the problem story. Results suggest that many undergraduate students fail to access the mathematical concept of slope when problem prompts are presented with natural language. Overall, the results suggest that even undergraduate students lack understanding of the slope concept and equations of linear functions, both which are foundational for advanced algebraic thinking.
[presented, presentation, type, advantage, reported, accuracy, learning, journal, pair, revealed, counterbalanced, half, compare, completed, explicit] [experiment, understanding, company, cognitive, participant] [main, language, linguistic, chicago, bob, university, error] [problem, slope, comparison, mathematical, format, linear, performance, equation, solving, solution, three, graphical, computation, concept, comparing, correct, sponsor, solve, undergraduate, algebra, terminology, answer, better, mathematics, versus, algebraic, subtypes, entailed, incorrect, school, pledge, cab, requiring, stern, mielicki, math, wiley, conducted, procedural, knowledge, subtype, donate, procedure, rephrasing, illinois] [interpretation, natural, graph, order, conceptual, form, comprehension] [point, method, expected, proportion, money, higher] [figure]
Processing Consequences of Onomatopoeic Iconicity in Spoken Language Comprehension
David Peeters


Iconicity is a fundamental feature of human language. However its processing consequences at the behavioral and neural level in spoken word comprehension are not well understood. The current paper presents the behavioral and electrophysiological outcome of an auditory lexical decision task in which native speakers of Dutch listened to onomatopoeic words and matched control words while their electroencephalogram was recorded. Behaviorally, onomatopoeic words were processed as quickly and accurately as words with an arbitrary mapping between form and meaning. Event-related potentials time-locked to word onset revealed a significant decrease in negative amplitude in the N2 and N400 components and a late positivity for onomatopoeic words in comparison to the control words. These findings advance our understanding of the temporal dynamics of iconic form-meaning mapping in spoken word comprehension and suggest interplay between the neural representations of real-world sounds and spoken words.
[iconicity, processing, spoken, compared, presented, sound, auditory, early, arbitrary, journal, suggests, evidence, verbal, electrophysiological, erp, erps, processed, recorded, advantage, condition, ideophones, response, positivity] [mapping, late, experiment, negative, temporal, experience, positive, indicated, case] [iconic, language, dutch, sign, meaning, main, error, native, item, linguistic] [control, study, difference] [onomatopoeic, word, lexical, amplitude, form, frequency, existing, comprehension, analysis, semantic, onset, electrode, accurately] [decision, rate, everyday] [behavioral, brain, current, component, left, eeg, activation, level, rts, region, decrease, eye, visual, performed, sensory]
Language Evolution in the Lab: The Case of Child Learners
Limor Raviv, Inbal Arnon


Recent work suggests that cultural transmission leads to the emergence of linguistic structure as speakers’ weak individual biases become amplified through iterated learning. However, to date, no published study has demonstrated a similar emergence of linguistic structure in children. This gap is problematic given that languages are mainly learned by children and that adults may bring existing linguistic biases to the task. Here, we conduct a large-scale study of iterated language learning in both children and adults, using a novel, child-friendly paradigm. Results show that while children make more mistakes overall, their languages become more learnable and show learnability biases similar to those of adults. Child languages did not show a significant increase in linguistic structure over time, but consistent mappings between meanings and signals did emerge on many occasions, as found with adults. This provides the first demonstration that cultural transmission affects the languages children and adults produce similarly.
[learning, child, age, structured, adult, time, artificial, type, ditaz, ilm, learned, learn, didi, second] [initial, consistent, experiment, cognitive, distinct, strong, work, participant, including, despite, result, case] [language, transmission, generation, linguistic, cultural, error, kirby, learnability, alien, iterated, emergence, learnable, produced, evolution, emerged, previous, easier, sign, memory, balgu, inferior] [number, study, group, performance, score, difference, created, creating, three, comparison, smaller, change] [structure, increase, random, examine, semantic, natural, plural, small, final] [model, regression, making, diffusion] [figure, single, decrease, trained, visual, multiple, input]