Open Mind最新文献

Young infants can segment continuous speech with acoustic as well as statistical cues. Understanding how these cues interact can be informative about how infants solve the segmentation problem. This study investigates the use of acoustic and statistical cues by both adult French speakers and 6-to-7-month-old French-learning infants. Both groups were familiarized with a naturally recorded string, alternating either in duration (long-short) or in intensity (soft-loud). In addition, statistical cues were present in both strings, signaling different word boundaries than the acoustic cues. The adults were tested in a recognition task and the infants with the Head-turn Preference Procedure. Results show that the French-speaking adults segmented the strings by responding to the acoustic cues in both familiarization conditions, following the predictions of the Iambic-Trochaic Law. In contrast, the French-learning infants displayed segmentation based on TPs in the Intensity condition only. These findings collectively contribute to our understanding of how the use of acoustic and statistical cues to decode linguistic input changes between infancy and adulthood and differs across languages.

A remarkable feature of human intelligence is the ability to optimize our decisions based on the potential actions of others. This ability, i.e., strategic sophistication, is crucial in strategic interactions, where we need to predict others' actions (first-order beliefs), anticipate others' beliefs about our own possible actions (second-order beliefs), and optimize decisions based on such beliefs. While behavioral research has highlighted systematic departures from theoretically optimal behavior in strategic interactions, little is known about the possibility of enhancing strategic sophistication. In particular, no studies investigated whether and how the interaction between exogenous factors (i.e., the learning environment) and endogenous factors (i.e., individual cognitive abilities) shapes learning in strategic settings. In a novel mouse-tracking study, we manipulate the learning environment and test its interaction with individual cognitive abilities in determining context-specific and transfer of learning in interactive games. Choice and process data reveal that the interplay between individual cognitive abilities and the learning environment does modulate participants' learning. The learning environment determines what is learned and whether acquired knowledge is applied in similar contexts and transferred to novel settings. Moreover, learning success in different strategic environments depends on individual cognitive abilities. In particular, higher levels of cognitive reflection are necessary to learn sophisticated strategic behavior (i.e., forming second-order beliefs) and transfer acquired knowledge to more complex strategic environments after receiving relevant feedback. However, higher cognitive reflection levels are insufficient to prevent the misapplication of procedures learned in a specific environment to other strategic contexts with substantial structural differences. Our results provide novel insights into the factors that promote or hamper learning in interactive decision-making.

Is everyone equally justified in blaming another's moral transgression? Across five studies (four pre-registered; total N = 1,316 American participants), we investigated the perception of moral standing to blame-the appropriateness and legitimacy for someone to blame a moral wrongdoing. We propose and provide evidence for a moral commitment hypothesis-a blamer is perceived to have low moral standing to blame a moral transgressor if the blamer demonstrates weak commitment to that moral rule. As hypothesized, we found that when blamers did not have the chance or relevant experience to demonstrate good commitment to a moral rule, participants generally believed that they had high moral standing to blame. However, when a blamer demonstrated bad commitment to a moral rule in their past behaviors, participants consistently granted the blamer low moral standing to blame. Low moral standing to blame was generally associated with perceiving the blame to be less effective and less likely to be accepted. Moreover, indirectly demonstrating moral commitment, such as acknowledging one's past wrongdoing and feeling/expressing guilt, modestly restored moral standing to blame. Our studies demonstrate moral commitment as a key mechanism for determining moral standing to blame and emphasize the importance of considering a blamer's moral standing as a crucial factor in fully understanding the psychology of blame.

When objects are grouped in space, humans can estimate numerosity more precisely than when they are randomly scattered. This phenomenon, called groupitizing, is thought to arise from the interplay of two components: the subitizing system which identifies both the number of subgroups and of items within each group, and the possibility to perform basic arithmetic operations on the subitized groups. Here we directly investigate the relative role of these two components in groupitizing via an interference (dual task) paradigm. Participants were required to estimate numerosities of grouped and ungrouped arrays while their attentional resources were fully available (single task) or while performing concurrent tasks loading auditory or visuo-spatial attention (both known to interfere with the subitizing process) as well as while performing arithmetic calculation. The attentional cost of performing any concurrent task was overall higher for grouped than ungrouped stimuli, supporting the idea that groupitizing relies on the recruitment of more than one attention-dependent mechanism. However, depriving visuo-spatial attention and preventing participants from performing calculations caused the strongest decrement in sensory precision for grouped numerosities indicating that these attentional components play a major role in groupitizing. These results are in line with the existence of an estimation mechanism that might operate across all numerical ranges, supplemented by attentional mechanisms (subitizing). This study shows that this attentional-demanding mechanism can be activated also when processing numerosities outside of the subitizing regime (n > 4), provided that grouping cues are available and, in concert with calculation abilities, gives rise to the groupitizing phenomenon.

The cooperative principle states that communicators expect each other to be cooperative and adhere to rational conversational principles. Do listeners keep track of the reasoning sophistication of the speaker and incorporate it into the inferences they derive? In two experiments, we asked participants to interpret ambiguous messages in the reference game paradigm, which they were told were sent either by another adult or by a 4-year-old child. We found an effect of speaker identity: if sent by an adult, an ambiguous message was much more likely to be interpreted as an implicature, while if sent by a child, it was a lot more likely to be interpreted literally. We also observed substantial individual variability, which points to different beliefs and strategies among our participants. We discuss how these speaker effects can be modeled in the Rational Speech Act framework.

The lexicon is an evolving symbolic system that expresses an unbounded set of emerging meanings with a limited vocabulary. As a result, words often extend to new meanings. Decades of research have suggested that word meaning extension is non-arbitrary, and recent work formalizes this process as cognitive models of semantic chaining whereby emerging meanings link to existing ones that are semantically close. Existing approaches have typically focused on a dichotomous formulation of chaining, couched in the exemplar or prototype theories of categorization. However, these accounts yield either memory-intensive or simplistic representations of meaning, while evidence for them is mixed. We propose a unified probabilistic framework, infinite mixture chaining, that derives different forms of chaining through the lens of cognitive efficiency. This framework subsumes the existing chaining models as a trade-off between representational accuracy and memory complexity, and it contributes a flexible class of models that supports the dynamic construction of word meaning by automatically forming semantic clusters informed by existing and novel usages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework in reconstructing the historical development of the lexicon across multiple word classes and in different languages, and we also show that it correlates with human judgment of semantic change. Our study offers an efficiency-based view on the cognitive mechanisms of word meaning extension in the evolution of the lexicon.

Children can manipulate non-symbolic representations of both small quantities of objects (about four or fewer, represented by the parallel individuation system) and large quantities of objects (represented by the analog magnitude system, or AMS). Previous work has shown that children can perform a variety of non-symbolic operations over AMS representations (like summing and solving for an unknown addend), but are not able to perform further operations on the derived solutions of such non-symbolic operations. However, while the computational capacity of AMS has been studied extensively in early childhood, less is known about the computational capacity of the parallel individuation system. In two experiments, we examined children's ability to perform two types of arithmetic-like operations over representations of small, exact quantities, and whether they could subsequently perform novel operations on derived quantity representations. Four-6-year-old US children (n = 99) solved two types of non-symbolic arithmetic-like problems with small quantities: summation and unknown addend problems. We then tested whether children could use the solutions to these problems as inputs to new operations. Results showed that children more readily solved non-symbolic small, exact addition problems compared to unknown addend problems. However, when children did successfully solve either kind of problem, they were able to use those derived solutions to solve a novel non-symbolic small, exact problem. These results suggest that the parallel individuation system is computationally flexible, contrasting with previous work showing that the AMS is more computationally limited, and shed light on the computational capacities and limitations of representing and operating over representations of small quantities of individual objects.

Recent work demonstrates that U.S. preschoolers can represent the abstract relational concepts same and different when these abstract relational concepts are predicated upon perceptual dimensions (e.g., size, shape, color). The current research investigates whether preschoolers (n = 192; predominantly White, upper middle class, U.S. convenience sample) can also represent the abstract relational concepts same and different when these abstract relational concepts are predicated upon abstract dimensions (e.g., kind membership). Experiment 1 shows that, at baseline, 4-year-olds fail at a relational match-to-sample (rMTS) task with familiar kinds. However, Experiment 2 shows that 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, succeed at a rMTS task with familiar kinds when provided with training involving noun labels. Experiment 3 shows that 4- and 5-year-olds also succeed at a rMTS task with novel kinds when provided with training involving noun labels but not adjective labels, suggesting that noun labels but not adjective labels cue children's attention towards kind membership. Moreover, participants frequently provided explanations appealing to sameness and difference when justifying their responses. Taken together, these results suggest that, with training, preschoolers are capable of representing abstract relations predicated on abstract, as well as perceptual, dimensions.

Speaking requires frequent decisions about how to refer, for example whether to use a pronoun (she) or a name (Ana). It is well known that this choice is guided by the discourse context, but little is known about the representations that are activated. We use priming to test whether this choice can be facilitated through recent exposure, and if so, what representations are activated. In a storytelling task, participants take turns with experimenters telling a story that is illustrated in 2-panel cartoons. The first sentence is given, and participants describe the second panel in their own words. We manipulate whether the experimenter used a pronoun or name in the prior story. Experiment 1 provides the first evidence in the literature that reference form choice can be primed, and that it is not dependent on the syntactic position of the antecedent. However, the effect is not finely tuned to the preceding prime. Instead, exposure at the start of the experiment persists throughout, even when the prime changes. Experiments 2 and 3 further show that exposure to pronoun primes result in greater pronoun use than at baseline, but that there is no sensitivity to the prime on the most recent trial. Results argue against a role for production facilitation in pronoun use, which suggests that reference production is not impacted by production efficiency.

Task adaptation, characterized by a progressive increase in speed throughout experimental trials, has been extensively observed across various paradigms. Yet, the underlying mechanisms driving this phenomenon remain unclear. According to the learning-based explanation, participants are implicitly learning, becoming more proficient over time. Conversely, a motivation-based view suggests that participants' drive wanes gradually, prompting quicker pace and reduced task engagement. These explanations offer distinct predictions. The learning-based view anticipates not only accelerated speed but also improved response accuracy. In contrast, the motivation-based view assumes that participants lose their focus, their pace increases, but their response accuracy tends to decline. The present study tests these implications in a series of six self-paced reading experiments investigating the interplay between reaction times, immediate recall, and trial order. Robust learning effects are documented. Participants not only read progressively faster during the experiments, but they also get better in responding. Moreover, an analysis of recall accuracy reveals systematic differences between different types of information, with nouns yielding substantially higher recall accuracy than adjectives. These findings are explained through attentional mechanisms: prolonged processing of specific words correlates with improved recall. Furthermore, the differential recall patterns are modulated by the task's question structure, with adjectives recalled more effectively in experiments with a higher proportion of adjective-targeting questions. This underscores participants' strategic allocation of attention to sentence components deemed crucial for task performance, highlighting the dynamic interplay between learning, motivation, and attentional mechanisms in task adaptation.