Open Mind

Open Mind

@openmindjournal.bsky.social

Cognitive science journal published by MIT Press. https://direct.mit.edu/opmi

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Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social

Broadening the Agent Preference Hypothesis Through Experiencers: Eye-Tracking and EEG Evidence of Proto-Agents and Proto-Patients

direct.mit.eduBroadening the Agent Preference Hypothesis Through Experiencers: Eye-Tracking and EEG Evidence of Proto-Agents and Proto-PatientsAbstract. Despite the large number of proposed event roles, psycholinguistic evidence supports only two core knowledge categories with distinct processing correlates: agent and patient roles. This…
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social

Is Generalization General? Differences Between Predictive and Category Learning Reflect Knowledge of “Cognitive Kinds”

direct.mit.eduIs Generalization General? Differences Between Predictive and Category Learning Reflect Knowledge of “Cognitive Kinds”Abstract. Shepard (1987) observed that generalization gradients were invariant between species and stimulus dimensions, and proposed that these universal properties reflect knowledge of “natural…
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social

Tracking Visual Statistical Learning with Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials: Effects of Exemplar and Category Information

direct.mit.eduTracking Visual Statistical Learning with Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials: Effects of Exemplar and Category InformationAbstract. This study examined visual statistical learning using EEG-based steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP). Fifty-one adults were exposed to image sequences organized into triplets…
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social

Unsupervised Classification of English Words Based on Phonological Information: Discovery of Germanic and Latinate Clusters

direct.mit.eduUnsupervised Classification of English Words Based on Phonological Information: Discovery of Germanic and Latinate ClustersAbstract. Cross-linguistically, native words and loanwords follow different phonological rules. In English, for example, words of Germanic and Latinate origin exhibit different stress patterns, and a…
Open Mind
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Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Speakers Use More Redundant Color Adjectives When Speaking to Children Than Adults

direct.mit.eduBrown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Speakers Use More Redundant Color Adjectives When Speaking to Children Than AdultsAbstract. Cross-culturally, the evolution and production of color words has been linked to communicative efficiency. In visual search tasks for instance, speakers will direct a listener to a target…
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
dlvr.itPlural CausesAbstractCausal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a lightning strike, for example, people tend to say that the lightning bolt was the cause of the fire, not mentioning the presence of oxygen in the air, although they are well aware that the latter was no less indispensable for the fire to occur. The extant literature on causal selection has so far operated on the implicit premise that the only relevant variables for causal selection are individual variables, corresponding to distinct nodes in the relevant network of causes. Ours is the first systematic study of plural causes in the context of causal selection. First, we establish by means of two behavioral experiments the psychological reality and non-triviality of plural causes, ruling out potential deflationary explanations. Second, we show that state-of-the-art models of causal selection based on counterfactual dependence can be extended to make non-trivial predictions about plural causes consistent with our experimental findings. Third, we show that surprising logical properties of plurals in natural language interpretation might be found in causal reasoning with plural causes.
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
dlvr.itDoes It Matter What Is Said and Who Said It? The Interpretation of Trump’s and Harris’ Statements Among Republican and Democrat VotersAbstractThe Gricean model of communication assumes that cooperation is a precondition for successful communication but humans often use language non-cooperatively. How do language users calibrate cooperation when deciphering communicated content? The current work probes how belief alignment shapes the interpretation of underinformative statements attributed to politicians (Donald Trump or Kamala Harris) presented to self-identified Republican and Democratic participants. The results show that communicated content is more likely to be derived when beliefs align between voter group and speaker. This suggests that we may arrive at different conclusions from the same statement, depending on who the speaker is and how much trust we grant them.
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
dlvr.itThe Role of Reinforcement Learning in Pragmatic Reasoning Tasks: Modeling and Validating the Sources of Individual DifferencesAbstractIn Gricean pragmatics, inference during communication is regarded as a form of rational, domain-general reasoning about the intentions of other agents. Studies using the pictorial communication “reference game” task are sometimes used in support of this hypothesis. Yet, measures of pragmatic reasoning in this task sometimes reveal poor performance, with participants requiring many rounds of play before they exhibit patterns which match Gricean inferences, and demonstrating substantial individual differences in behavior. Do these results challenge the idea of widespread inferencing via fundamental social competence? We advance an alternative proposal here, which posits that these patterns emerge as a factor of the way participants perform pragmatic reasoning in a task: namely, they prefer to use simpler interpretation strategies until experience motivates the use of additional resources. Building off of work modeling task adaptation as reinforcement learning, we use the cognitive architecture ACT-R to simulate the expected behavior of individuals with this kind of resource-rational performance algorithm, subject to individualized parameters for reinforcement learning. These simulations provide a proof-of-concept for our adaptation proposal, recreating known patterns and generating new concrete predictions for the particular domain-general sources of individual variance in reference game tasks. We then go on to validate some of these new predictions in a pre-registered experiment, and find that pragmatic response behavior is indeed related to a participant’s general persistence in self-directed exploration of strategies for task completion. Our results offer a path to reconcile variable empirical data with models of core pragmatic competence. From a broader perspective, we see this as an important step towards more robust theories of performance factors in pragmatic reasoning, and ultimately, a case study in the value of process-level computational modeling.
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
dlvr.itCore Intuitions of Psychological Non-Contradiction: Infants Assume That Individual Agents Act and Communicate CoherentlyAbstractHumans generally posit that contrary mental states are unlikely to co-exist within a single mind. We tested the early ontogeny of this assumption in two domains: action and communication. Studies 1A and 1B tested whether 9-month-old infants assume that agents act coherently. Infants watched interactions between two hands whose owner(s) were invisible. In the contrary goals condition, the hand performed contrary actions—one hand reached for an object while the other impeded it. Later, during test trials, infants learned that the hands belonged to one or two people. Looking-time patterns across the contrary goals and a baseline conditions indicated that clear goal conflict led infants to infer two agents, suggesting they viewed it as unlikely for a single person to thwart their own goal. Study 2 tested whether infants assume communicative coherence, testing whether they assume that a single informant is unlikely to entertain and communicate conflicting information while two informants might do so. Informants pointed to indicate a toy’s location to 15-month-olds. When two different informants each pointed to a different place, infants did not follow one pointing gesture more than the other. However, when a single informant pointed successively to two locations, infants followed the second gesture, implying they viewed it as an updated, not contradictory, message. Thus, infants assumed that a single informant is unlikely to contradict themselves (i.e., by asserting that a toy is simultaneously in two locations). These findings reveal an early-emerging assumption of psychological coherence in infants’ representation of other minds, across both action and communication contexts.
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
dlvr.itResponse Requirements Shape the Spatial Coding of Location-Specific Adjustments to Conflict FrequencyAbstractHumans adjust to the frequency of conflicting stimuli so that the detrimental behavioral effects of frequent conflicts become smaller than those of rare conflicts. These adjustments become contingent on the locations where frequent and infrequent conflicts have been encountered. Experimentally such phenomena are studied by means of conflict tasks, a prominent one being the Simon task of the present experiments. Our Simon task involved four stimulus locations (upper-left, upper-right, lower-left, lower-right). Conflict frequency was manipulated for two diagonally opposite locations. For example, conflict frequency was low at the upper-left location and high at the lower-right location. At the remaining (non-manipulated) locations conflict frequency was intermediate. In Experiment 1 participants responded to stimulus colors by pressing a left or right key, in Experiment 2 by pressing a lower or upper key. We observed larger conflict effects for the low-conflict location than for the high-conflict location. Crucially, these adjustments to conflict frequency transferred to non-manipulated locations depending on the response configuration: transfer regions were the left or right hemifield with left-right responses, but the lower or upper hemifield with lower-upper responses. Assuming that transfer regions around manipulated stimulus locations are defined by identical (or similar) spatial codes, the pattern of transfer suggests a process of weighted two-dimensional location coding. According to this notion, the spatial dimension that is relevant for response discrimination has stronger weight in the coding of stimulus locations than a response-irrelevant dimension, and can therefore produce anisotropic transfer of conflict-frequency effects around manipulated locations.
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
dlvr.itMore Time and Effort, Same Curiosity: Expected Effort Does Not Impact CuriosityAbstractWhy do people feel curious about some questions but not others? Recent accounts of curiosity argue that curiosity should be highest when learning is likely to occur and likely to be rapid. However, it is less clear whether practical barriers to learning—for example, the effort required to gain information—matter for how curious we feel. In three preregistered experiments with a total of 419 participants, we test whether the expected degree of effort to obtain information impacts curiosity. In Experiments 1 and 2, we prompted adult participants to rate their curiosity about the answers to trivia questions. For each question, they were informed that they would receive the answer with minimal time and effort or with substantial time and effort. In Experiment 3, we additionally varied the probability that exerting effort would lead to information. Across studies, we found that effort affected decisions to seek information, but not self-reported curiosity. This suggests that subjective feelings of curiosity are unhindered by the practical costs of information search, though our decisions to actually pursue information are highly sensitive to these costs.
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
dlvr.itPlural CausesAbstractCausal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a lightning strike, for example, people tend to say that the lightning bolt was the cause of the fire, not mentioning the presence of oxygen in the air, although they are well aware that the latter was no less indispensable for the fire to occur. The extant literature on causal selection has so far operated on the implicit premise that the only relevant variables for causal selection are individual variables, corresponding to distinct nodes in the relevant network of causes. Ours is the first systematic study of plural causes in the context of causal selection. First, we establish by means of two behavioral experiments the psychological reality and non-triviality of plural causes, ruling out potential deflationary explanations. Second, we show that state-of-the-art models of causal selection based on counterfactual dependence can be extended to make non-trivial predictions about plural causes consistent with our experimental findings. Third, we show that surprising logical properties of plurals in natural language interpretation might be found in causal reasoning with plural causes.
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
dlvr.itDoes It Matter What Is Said and Who Said It? The Interpretation of Trump’s and Harris’ Statements Among Republican and Democrat VotersAbstractThe Gricean model of communication assumes that cooperation is a precondition for successful communication but humans often use language non-cooperatively. How do language users calibrate cooperation when deciphering communicated content? The current work probes how belief alignment shapes the interpretation of underinformative statements attributed to politicians (Donald Trump or Kamala Harris) presented to self-identified Republican and Democratic participants. The results show that communicated content is more likely to be derived when beliefs align between voter group and speaker. This suggests that we may arrive at different conclusions from the same statement, depending on who the speaker is and how much trust we grant them.
Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social
dlvr.itThe Role of Reinforcement Learning in Pragmatic Reasoning Tasks: Modeling and Validating the Sources of Individual DifferencesAbstractIn Gricean pragmatics, inference during communication is regarded as a form of rational, domain-general reasoning about the intentions of other agents. Studies using the pictorial communication “reference game” task are sometimes used in support of this hypothesis. Yet, measures of pragmatic reasoning in this task sometimes reveal poor performance, with participants requiring many rounds of play before they exhibit patterns which match Gricean inferences, and demonstrating substantial individual differences in behavior. Do these results challenge the idea of widespread inferencing via fundamental social competence? We advance an alternative proposal here, which posits that these patterns emerge as a factor of the way participants perform pragmatic reasoning in a task: namely, they prefer to use simpler interpretation strategies until experience motivates the use of additional resources. Building off of work modeling task adaptation as reinforcement learning, we use the cognitive architecture ACT-R to simulate the expected behavior of individuals with this kind of resource-rational performance algorithm, subject to individualized parameters for reinforcement learning. These simulations provide a proof-of-concept for our adaptation proposal, recreating known patterns and generating new concrete predictions for the particular domain-general sources of individual variance in reference game tasks. We then go on to validate some of these new predictions in a pre-registered experiment, and find that pragmatic response behavior is indeed related to a participant’s general persistence in self-directed exploration of strategies for task completion. Our results offer a path to reconcile variable empirical data with models of core pragmatic competence. From a broader perspective, we see this as an important step towards more robust theories of performance factors in pragmatic reasoning, and ultimately, a case study in the value of process-level computational modeling.