Open Mind最新文献

Researchers generally assume that speakers use the linguistic information available to them. For instance, if one grammatical category robustly predicts another grammatical category, we expect speakers to reproduce this conditional relationship during language production. Here, we investigate this assumption for grammatical gender in German. Gender is the single cue which most strongly predicts the plural class of existing German nouns, but behavioral studies with novel nouns have found mixed results regarding the role of gender in plural generalization. Across three experiments, we examine how individual German speakers use grammatical gender when producing plural forms of novel nouns. We find that most speakers effectively ignore gender during plural class production, even under experimental manipulations that encourage them to attend to this cue. These results point toward an underexplored direction in cognitive science: accounting for the linguistic information that speakers do not use.

Syntactic dependency formation in comprehension is subject to retrieval interference that occurs when comprehenders need to activate stored information in memory to form and interpret a linguistic dependency. For example, retrieving a subject phrase to attach it to the verb might result in agreement attraction errors. It remains unclear whether this interference arises as part of routine dependency formation or as part of a repair mechanism that is activated when predictive dependency formation fails (e.g., Wagers et al., 2009). For example, it has been argued that reflexive anaphors resist attraction in comprehension because number/gender features of unpredictable elements are not associated with a strong 'prediction error' signal that might trigger retrieval-based and error-prone repair processes (Parker & Phillips, 2017). We test a version of the "Error-driven Retrieval" hypothesis by examining the interaction between reflexive attraction and the predictability of the anaphor. In two reading time experiments and one offline interpretation experiment, we find that the predictability of a reflexive dependency does not modulate its susceptibility to interference effects in comprehension. We propose that attraction is better captured as part of routine retrieval processes and that the (in)sensitivity of reflexives to structurally irrelevant distractors should be explained through other mechanisms.

People often imagine everyday objects are something else. A turned over bottle becomes a car, a teapot becomes a swan. Such pretense is common in play, pedagogy, and narratives. The relationship between a real and pretend object is flexible, but not arbitrary. In this work, we used a behavioral and computational approach that compares people and performant multi-modal vision models to study the features that guide the construction of visual pretense. In four studies (N = 716 in total), we show that people have systematic preferences in visual pretense, and that these preferences are better accounted for by spatial and physical alignment (specifically shape similarity), over surface feature similarity (such as color). We also found that people systematically align the subpart structure of real and pretend objects. We further show that people's visual pretense preferences are not accounted for by current common approaches to multi-modal vision models, likely due to their reliance on surface features rather than spatial and physical ones.

Humans learn the meanings of words from the contexts in which they are used. Patterns of language use change over time, suggesting that the contexts in which some words are experienced change across an individual's lifespan. Here, we investigated whether language users' semantic space changes in lockstep with changes in the language or whether it retains traces of historical language use/meanings. In two studies, we used distributional semantic word embeddings trained on corpora from different decades (HistWords) to capture meaning change at the level of the (English) language. We first compared these diachronic semantic spaces to the semantic spaces of individuals in different age cohorts (ranging from people in their 20s to people over 70) using an open dataset of associations norms (Small World of Words). Then, using HistWords, we sampled English words that have changed in meaning and words that have maintained the same meaning/usage patterns between the 1950s and the 1990s and collected relatedness judgments for those words with their nearest neighbors from each decade (1950s and 1990s) from both younger (18-33 years) and older (63-92 years) adults. Across the two studies, the semantic spaces of both older and younger adults were most strongly correlated with the semantic spaces derived from more recent corpora. We found little evidence of historical semantic spaces being differentially predictive of the semantic spaces of older adults relative to those of young adults. Our findings suggest that individuals continuously and rapidly update their lexico-semantic representations regardless of age, such that word meanings learned earlier in life are largely replaced with new meanings derived from later language experience.

Remembering the unfolding of past experiences usually takes less time than their actual duration. In this study, we examined the extent to which this temporal compression in memory depends on the number and duration of events that need to be maintained in a sequence. Participants were asked to watch and then mentally replay short videos depicting one, two, or three continuous events (i.e., people performing continuous actions in an uninterrupted way), each lasting 3, 6, 9, or 12 s. Across two experiments, we computed indices of remembering duration and temporal compression for each event. Results showed that event remembering duration was close to the actual event duration for short events, but smaller for longer ones (i.e., temporal compression was not systematic but occurred selectively depending on event duration). Furthermore, events were mentally replayed more quickly when they were part of a sequence of several events than when they were presented alone, and this decrease in the duration of event recall with the number of events was more pronounced for longer events. Exploratory analyses revealed that individual differences in memory compression were predicted by visual imagery capacity. These results suggest that working memory capacity in representing naturalistic events is limited by both the number and duration of events to be retained, which may in part explain why the unfolding of events is temporally compressed in episodic memory.

An important issue in the semantic memory literature concerns the relative importance of experience-based sensorimotor versus language corpus-based distributional information in conceptual representations. To explore how each contributes to behavioral and neural responses on a conceptual task, EEG and RTs were recorded as healthy young adults viewed terms for concepts (e.g., "APPLE") followed by properties (e.g., "red") and pressed a button to indicate whether the property is true or false for the concept. Next, we constructed a series of mixed effects models of response times (RTs) and single-trial electroencephalogram (EEG) responses to the property words. Distributional models predicted data using semantic distance measures (e.g., between "APPLE" and "red") derived from language corpus-based measures developed by computational linguists. Sensorimotor models predicted data using sensorimotor distance, a measure based on comparisons of each word's experiential strength on the perceptual and action-effector dimensions from the crowd-sourced Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms. Statistical model comparison was used to determine whether the data was best fit by Distributional, Sensorimotor, or both sorts of information. In keeping with hybrid accounts of semantic memory, we find that both measures of semantic distance explained unique variance for behavioral and neural measures. Modelling EEG across seven successive 100-ms intervals revealed that the predictors' temporal dynamics varies between true (APPLE - red) and false (APPLE - black) trials, but showed early sensorimotor activation for both. Results show how linguistic context and task demands modulate the recruitment of different information sources, supporting dynamic hybrid accounts of semantic memory.

The relation between the fundamental frequency of the voice (f0) and vertical space has been shown in previous studies; however, the underlying mechanisms are less clear. This study investigates the relationship between head angle and f0 in iconic prosody, along with the influence of object size on lip opening and formant frequencies. In the experiment, participants pointed to objects of two different sizes and in various vertical positions while saying the words "piff" or "paff," which induced vertical head position change. Head angle emerged as a reliable predictor of f0, with a larger angle increasing the f0. This effect was consistent despite individual variations in head movement. While the vertical position of the object also showed a reliable effect on f0, head angle substantially outperformed it as a predictor, suggesting that head angle represents the primary physiological mechanism predicting f0 changes. Conversely, object size did not predict either lip opening or formant dispersion. Lip opening and formant dispersion were purely indexical, tracking vowel-specific articulatory configurations rather than external object properties. These findings underscore the role of head position in modulating f0 through direct physiological coupling, potentially underpinning iconic prosody, while revealing the limits of size-related iconicity in parameters constrained by phonemic requirements.

Within minutes of birth a newborn gnu or giraffe works to stand and walk, asserting postural balance and organised animate behaviour in an apparently goal-directed manner. In contrast, robots learning to stand and walk from scratch begin with random flailing, the behaviour cohering over time as the robot internalises some reward/value signal. How does the newborn gnu 'innately know' what goal to aim for, and decide to work towards it? How could similar goal-directed balance learning be implemented in robots? Currently, animate balance inherits its axiomatic definition from the Newtonian formulation for inanimate balance; static mechanical equilibrium. This is arguably inappropriate for animate balance, because animals need to move and are never in static mechanical equilibrium, giving rise to the 'posture-movement paradox'. The present Perspective proposes a more fluid, dynamical axiomatic task definition and goal which (a) isolates resisting gravity, (b) admits and enables movement, and (c) subsumes static mechanical equilibrium as a special case. This novel definition is founded upon inevitable biophysical requirements and observable developmental process. The article explains how animals apprehend and embed this goal through prenatal development suspended in equidense amniotic fluid, and then are challenged to self-maintain it by the perinatal transition. The account entails a paradigmatic shift in putative physiological organisation and associated conceptual framework for balance; from a subsidiary sensorimotor control task to a vital mechano-regulation task, organisationally akin to thermo-regulation. This vital mechano-regulation model of balance has practical implications and implies a range of predictions.

Consensus-based social learning strategies often outcompete other strategies in evolutionary models. But while formal proofs suggest that consensus' reliability is compromised when individual judgments are not independent, this makes for a notoriously implausible assumption in the biological world: the people we learn from are constantly learning from each other as well. How do we avoid being misled by consensus? We present three experiments and a computational model examining commonsense reasoning about how people's public and private judgments are influenced by the consensus and social status of those around them. Results suggest that while people realize that these two factors can cause others' public and private judgments to diverge, their own trust in public consensus depends on how accurately they believe it reflects their informants' true beliefs.

A Ganzfeld is a homogeneous visual field, devoid of any focal points. Such a stimulus has been used by researchers to study perceptual phenomena in the absence of changes in sensory structure. Others have used it to study altered states of consciousness (ASCs). Until now, these different facets have been studied separately with little attention for the emotional subjective experience. This study aimed to elucidate the perceptual, phenomenal, and emotional experience of the multifaceted Ganzfeld using a multi-method approach combining behavioral (eye-tracking) and neural (electroencephalography; EEG) measures, with qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (questionnaires) assessments. We show that Ganzfeld spaces induce ASCs and offer immersive, full-body experiences, including bodily effects. Our results pertaining to bodily sensations further prompted us to identify a perceptually grounded cognitive processing type with either an inward-directed or externally-directed focus. We also identified the presence of an abstract cognitive processing type characterized by an introspective focus and meditative experiences. At the behavioral level, decays were characterized by decreased eye movements. The lag in reporting decays and the subjective experience of decays point to the notion of mind blanking. At the neural level, we found increased theta activity preceding decays, further hinting at a potential interrelation between perceptual decays and mind blanking. Finally, decays were characterized by more alpha activity, a pattern often associated with attenuated sensory processing and states of reduced external engagement (Jensen & Mazaheri, 2010), such as relaxation. Our findings contribute to a more in-depth understanding of all the components contributing to the rich Ganzfeld experiences.