Cognitive Science最新文献

There has been considerable research on confusion and frustration that has treated them as two unitary constructs, distinct from each other. In this article, we argue that there is instead a constellation of different types of confusion and frustration, with different antecedents, manifestations, and impacts, and that the commonalities between many types of confusion and frustration justify thinking of them as part of the same constellation of affect, distinct from other prominent affective categories. We discuss how these types of affect have been considered historically and in key models. We then discuss unusual manifestations of each form of affect that have been documented in the literature, and what light they shed on the broader constructs. We conclude with a discussion of a new theoretical framing that treats confusion and frustration as a confrustion constellation, and the opportunities and open questions that this perspective presents.

It has become widely accepted that standard connectionist models are unable to show identity-based relational reasoning that requires universal generalization. The purpose of this brief report is to show how one of the simplest forms of such models, feed-forward auto-associative networks, satisfies two of the most well-known challenges: universal generalization of the identity function and the reduplication rule. Given the simplicity of the modeling account provided, along with the clarity of the evidence, these demonstrations invite a shift in this high-profile debate over the nature of cognitive architecture and point to a way to bridge some of the presumed gulf between characteristically symbolic forms of reasoning and connectionist mechanisms.

Proper names-expressions such as "Barack Obama" or "New York"-play a crucial role in the philosophical debate on reference, that is, the relation that allows words to stand for entities of the world. In an elicited production test, Devitt and Porot prompt participants to use proper names to compare the Descriptivist Theory and the Causal-Historical Theory on proper names' reference. According to the Descriptivist Theory, names refer to the entity that fulfills the description that speakers associate with them. In contrast, the Causal-Historical Theory holds that names refer to the entity at the origin of the causal-historical chain of uses, regardless of any description. Devitt and Porot consider a criticism of their work, which they call "New-Meaning objection": upon reading the vignette, the participant gains access to some facts unknown to the people within the fictional scenario. As a consequence, the descriptivist participant may undertake the elicited production test by relying upon a new meaning that is in force within a linguistic community "in the know." In that case, the Descriptivist Theory predicts the same name usage as the Causal-Historical Theory. While Devitt and Porot address the objection also with a follow-up experiment, they consider the criticism theoretically flawed, arguing that names do not change meaning any time speakers acquire new information about the world. In this article, I argue that, contrary to Devitt and Porot's claim, their vignette inclines the descriptivist participant to assume that the name has acquired a new meaning.

People tend to show greater liking for expressions of sadness when these expressions are described as art. Why does this effect arise? One obvious hypothesis would be that describing something as art makes people more likely to regard it as fictional, and people prefer expressions of sadness that are not real. We contrast this obvious hypothesis with a hypothesis derived from the philosophical literature. In this alternative hypothesis, describing something as art makes people more inclined to appropriate it, that is, to see it as an expression of their own sadness. Study 1 found that describing the exact same sad text as art (e.g., a monologue) as opposed to not-art (e.g., a diary entry) led to increased liking for the work. Study 2 showed that this effect is not mediated by fictionality. Study 3 showed that the effect is mediated by appropriation. Study 4 looked at the impact of a manipulation of fictionality. Describing a work as fictional did lead to increased liking, but this effect was completely mediated by appropriation. These results provide at least some initial support for the appropriation hypothesis.

In our paper, "The reference of proper names" (2018), we raised and rebutted the "New-Meaning" objection to our methodology. Our rebuttal rested on theoretical considerations and experimental results. In "Do the Gödel vignettes involve a new descriptivist meaning?", Nicolò D'Agruma provides an interesting argument against our theoretical considerations (but does not address the experimental evidence). Our present paper argues against D'Agruma. So, our original rebuttal of the objection still stands. We offer further evidence against the objection.

In this paper, we explore the effect of musical expertise on whistled word perception by naive listeners. In whistled words of nontonal languages, vowels are transposed to relatively stable pitches, while consonants are translated into pitch movements or interruptions. Previous behavioral studies have demonstrated that naive listeners can categorize isolated consonants, vowels, and words well over chance. Here, we take an interest in the effect of musical experience on words while focusing on specific phonemes within the context of the word. We consider the role of phoneme position and type and compare the way in which these whistled consonants and vowels contribute to word recognition. Musical experience shows a significant and increasing advantage according to the musical level achieved, which, when further specified according to vowels and consonants, shows stronger advantages for vowels over consonants for all participants with musical experience, and advantages for high-level musicians over nonmusicians for both consonants and vowels. By specifying high-level musician skill according to one's musical instrument expertise (piano, violin, flute, or singing), and comparing these instrument groups to expert users of whistled speech, we observe instrument-specific profiles in the answer patterns. The differentiation of such profiles underlines a resounding advantage for expert whistlers, as well as the role of instrument specificity when considering skills transferred from music to speech. These profiles also highlight differences in phoneme correspondence rates due to the context of the word, especially impacting “acute” consonants (/s/ and /t/), and highlighting the robustness of /i/ and /o/.

Prayer, a repeated practice of paying attention to one's inner mental world, is a core behavior across many faiths and traditions, understudied by cognitive scientists. Previous research suggests that humans pray because prayer changes the way they feel or how they think. This paper makes a novel argument: that prayer changes what they feel that they perceive. Those who pray, we find, are more likely to report sensory and perceptual experiences which they take to be evidence of a god or spirit. Across three studies encompassing data from thousands of participants across five different cultures, we find that the amount of time spent daily in prayer is associated with the frequency of such events—and that prayer is associated with some of these experiences more strongly than others. Time in prayer has the strongest relationship with the frequency of everyday events (like dreams or strong emotion) that are experienced as not generated by the self but by a god or spirit. Prayer is also associated with more anomalous experiences like voices and a sense of presence, but prayer has no association with more dramatic events such as possession, out-of-body experiences, and sleep paralysis. Our results not only suggest interesting relationships between practice and experience in a religious domain, but hint at the power of practice to shape experience more broadly.

This study investigates whether listeners’ cue weighting predicts their real-time use of asynchronous acoustic information in spoken word recognition at both group and individual levels. By focusing on the time course of cue integration, we seek to distinguish between two theoretical views: the associated view (cue weighting is linked to cue integration strategy) and the independent view (no such relationship). The current study examines Seoul Korean listeners’ (n = 62) weighting of voice onset time (VOT, available earlier in time) and onset fundamental frequency of the following vowel (F0, available later in time) when perceiving Korean stop contrasts (Experiment 1: cue-weighting perception task) and the timing of VOT integration when recognizing Korean words that begin with a stop (Experiment 2: visual-world eye-tracking task). The group-level results reveal that the timing of the early cue (VOT) integration is delayed when the later cue (F0) serves as the primary cue to process the stop contrast, supporting a relationship between cue weighting and the timing of cue integration (the associated view). At the individual level, listeners with greater reliance on F0 than VOT exhibited a further delayed integration of VOT. These findings suggest that the real-time processing of asynchronously occurring acoustic cues for lexical activation is modulated by the weight that listeners assign to those cues, providing evidence for the associated view of cue integration. This study offers insights into the mechanisms of cue integration and spoken word recognition, and they shed light on variability in cue integration strategies among listeners.

Isern-Mas, C., Bystranowski, P., Rueda, J. & Hannikainen, I.R. (2024). Does Momentary Outcome-Based Reflection Shape Bioethical Views? A Pre-Post Intervention Design. Cognitive Science, 48(11): e70009. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70009

The name of the third co-author was spelled incorrectly. It should have read: “Jon Rueda”.

We apologize for this error.

We investigate the articulation between domain-general reasoning and interpretive processes in failures of deductive reasoning. We focus on illusory inferences from disjunction-like elements, a broad class of deductive fallacies studied in some detail over the past 15 years. These fallacies have received accounts grounded in reasoning processes, holding that human reasoning diverges from normative standards. A subset of these fallacies, however, can be analyzed differently: human reasoning is not to blame, instead the premises were interpreted in a nonobvious, yet perfectly predictable and reasonable way. Once we consider these interpretations, the apparent fallacious conclusion is no mistake at all. We give a two-factor account of these fallacies that incorporates both reasoning-based elements and interpretive elements, showing that they are not in real competition. We present novel experimental evidence in favor of our theory. Cognitive load such as induced by a dual-task design is known to hinder the interpretive mechanisms at the core of interpretation-based accounts of the fallacies of interest. In the first experiment of its kind using this paradigm with an inferential task instead of a simpler truth-value-judgment task, we found that the manipulation affected more strongly those illusions where our theory predicts that interpretive processes are at play. We conclude that the best way forward for the field to investigate the elusive line between reasoning and interpretation requires combining theories and methodologies from linguistic semantics and the psychology of reasoning.