Cognitive Science最新文献

Previous studies show that people believe that a name belongs to a person if the person's face shape (FS) matches the lip shape formed when pronouncing the name. This represents a cross-modal mapping effect between name pronunciation (NP) and FS. Considering that approximately 84.55% of Chinese people have a two-character name, the present study specifically investigates which character of double-character Chinese names plays a more critical role in the mapping relationship with the FS. We conducted four experiments that used disyllabic names with pronunciations involving contrasting lip shapes. The interval between the pronunciation of the name's first and final characters was set at either 0 or 1000 ms. Two presentation orders were used: presenting the name before the face image and the face image before the name. We found that the NP–FS mapping persists when the lip shapes of the initial and final syllables of a name differ, while the final syllable determinetavs the mapping. This underscores the significant role of the final syllable in driving NP–FS mapping, which supports the hypothesis that names must be completely encoded for recognition before being integrated with facial perception.

Verbal fluency tasks reveal clustering and switching patterns traditionally explained by strategic search or stochastic processes like Lévy or random walks. However, previous comparisons ignored how search processes interact with semantic structure, leaving unclear whether model performance reflects strategic mechanisms or fortuitous alignment with semantic organization. This study developed and validated a novel Area Restricted Search (ARS) agent-based model of semantic memory retrieval, then systematically compared it against Lévy Walk (LW) and Random Walk (RW) models to investigate when different search mechanisms succeed under varying structural conditions. The model implements incremental decision-making based on local information, without predetermined switching points or complete semantic space access. Semantic structure parameters were treated as free variables during optimization, allowing examination of process–structure interactions across diverse configurations. Performance was evaluated against 50 participants across three semantic categories using clustering, switching, and temporal variables. Two simulations examined model fit and adaptability to varying semantic structures. Different mechanisms require distinct semantic configurations: ARS performed well in moderate clustering, LW in sparse arrangements, and RW under dense clustering, but RW generated response distributions different from participants. However, when semantic density was constrained while varying cluster dispersion, ARS maintained human-like performance across multiple configurations, while LW showed limited flexibility, and RW consistently failed to get close to participants' response distributions. These findings show that human-like semantic memory retrieval across diverse contexts requires strategic mechanisms capable of dynamic adaptation to varying semantic organizations, rather than universal superiority of any single approach or of models based on context-independent stochastic processes.

When we investigate busy visual scenes, how do we estimate the number of objects that we see? Most work on number perception answers this question by focusing on properties of the to-be-estimated set of objects—their number, their size, their relative position, and so on. Here, in contrast, we show that perceived number is influenced by extraneous visual information. In six experiments, participants were shown “crowds” of dots that filled “seats” in a visual grid, asking whether the perceived number is influenced not only by the number of occupied seats, but also the number of unoccupied seats. When only about 15%–30% of the “seats” were filled, people perceived fewer dots (compared to displays without any grid). We further demonstrated that this illusion depends on the proportion of occupied seats. When most “seats” were filled, the illusion reversed: People perceived the grid displays as having more dots. This effect is continuous, switching directions at around the 50% occupancy mark. Moreover, this “crowd size illusion” is phenomenologically robust: It is evident in simple visual displays, even when the observer is aware they are being tricked. We discuss these findings in light of the recent hypothesis that the number system represents number in a part–whole format.

Because many children worldwide fail to realize their potential for learning school mathematics, diverse initiatives have embraced using digital technologies that provide feedback to individual children. Such training, however, draws children's attention away from the teacher and peers, reducing opportunities for peer-to-peer teaching, learning, and collaboration. In this paper, we present a novel approach to learning through a digitally controlled training program providing partial feedback to groups of children who play together with concrete materials to foster discussion, collaboration, and consensus-based responses to mathematical problems. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, children from each participating classroom were randomly assigned to play the same math games either individually on digital tablets with feedback to each individual child or in small groups using physical cards guided by a digital device that provided feedback only at group level: a “Magic Box.” To encourage children in both conditions to reflect on their performance and correct their errors, partial rather than complete feedback was given in both conditions. Results showed that play in groups produced greater improvement in children's math skills than individual play. Thus, math play in groups with partial digital feedback may serve as an effective complement to traditional school math curricula.

The question of which words are most important or fundamental to a language has been explored in many ways. However, many of these approaches place little emphasis on how humans learn, represent, and process language from a psychological perspective. In this study, we define and compare three distinct psycholinguistic measures of core vocabulary—word frequency, age-of-acquisition, and centrality in semantic networks—and test how well these core words capture human performance in a word-guessing game. In two experiments, 1000 participants were given different core words as both hint and target words, with the aim of identifying the target as quickly as possible. We found that while core words in general did not make very effective hints, they were effectively guessed as targets when using hints beyond the sets core words, and furthermore, were better guessed when the core word targets were defined based on centrality in semantic networks rather than linguistic factors like frequency. This finding was consistent across a range of experimental conditions and analyses. We discuss the implications of these findings for representation and processing in semantic memory, and what factors should constitute a human core vocabulary.

Human languages balance communicative informativity with complexity, conveying as much as needed through the simplest means required to do so. Yet, these concepts—informativity and complexity—have been operationalized in various ways, and it remains unclear which definitions best capture empirical linguistic patterns. A particularly successful operationalization is that offered by the Information Bottleneck framework, which suggests a balance between complexity and informativity across domains like color, kinship, and number. However, we show that the notion of complexity employed by this framework has some counterintuitive consequences. Focusing on color terms, we then study to what extent this and other notions of complexity play a role in explaining cross-linguistic regularity. We propose a method to assess their explanatory contributions; and to probe whether they enter in a joint optimization or in a trade-off competition. This offers a more general framework to study language change and the forces that shape it, where instead of showing that a given model is compatible with existing data, the data is used to adjudicate between candidate measures.

In music performance contexts, vocalists tend to gesture with hand and upper body movements as they sing. But how does this gesturing relate to the sung phrases, and how do singers’ gesturing styles differ from each other? In this study, we present a quantitative analysis and visualization pipeline that characterizes the multidimensional co-structuring of body movements and vocalizations in vocal performers. We apply this to a dataset of performances within the Karnatak music tradition of South India, including audio and motion tracking data of 44 performances by three expert Karnatak vocalists, openly published with this report. Our results show that time-varying features of head and hand gestures tend to be more similar when the concurrent vocal time-varying features are also more similar. While for each performer we find clear co-structuring of sound and movement, they each show their own characteristic salient dimensions (e.g., hand position, head acceleration) through which movement co-structures with singing. Our time-series analyses thereby provide a computational approach to characterizing individual vocalists’ unique multimodal vocal-gesture co-structuring profiles. We also show that co-structuring clearly reduces degrees of freedom of the multimodal performance such that motifs that sound alike tend to co-structure with gestures that move alike. The current method can be applied to any multimodally ensembled signals in both human and nonhuman communication, to determine co-structuring profiles and explore any reduction in degrees of freedom. In the context of Karnatak singing performance, the current analysis is an important starting point for further experimental study of gesture-vocal synergies.

The theory of embodied simulation posits that semantic processing related to actions involves the simulation of sensorimotor experiences, similar to action recognition, which also activates the action observation network. Visual and action experiences obtained through vision and proprioception can facilitate the processing of action verbs via this simulation process. However, the differential effects of these two types of action representations on the processing of action verbs remain to be explored. This study uses an action–language priming paradigm and three behavioral experiments to explore how visual and action experiences from different perspectives affect sensorimotor simulation in action verb processing. Experiment 1 studied how action image perspectives (first-person vs. third-person) and image-word congruency affect action verb priming. Experiment 2 examined the role of the action agent in perspective priming. Experiment 3 investigated that motor experience congruency, jointly activated by visual perspective and personal pronouns, influences action verb processing. Experiment 1 showed faster action verb processing with the first-person perspective (1PP) during prime–target incongruency and non-mirrored conditions, indicating better action control and prediction, enhancing sensorimotor simulation. Experiment 2 found faster responses with the 1PP during incongruency, with no effect from the action agent on sensorimotor simulation. Experiment 3 showed faster reaction times for prime–target congruency than incongruency, with no effect of perspective congruency. These results show that action verb processing involves simulating sensorimotor experiences from specific perspectives, emphasizing the key role of action experience and offering new evidence for action verb representation theories.

As part of the multimodal language system, gestures play a vital role for listeners, by capturing attention and providing information. Similarly, disfluencies serve as a cue for the listeners about one's knowledge on a topic. In two studies, the first study with natural and the second study with controlled stimuli, we asked whether the combination of gestures and speech disfluencies would affect how listeners made feeling-of-another's-knowing (FOAK) judgments regarding speakers’ knowledge states. In Study 1, we showed participants videos of speakers providing navigational instruction. We manipulated the speakers’ use of gestures and speech disfluencies, whereas facial expressions, words, and additional visual cues (e.g., background, clothes, objects) naturally occurred. We found that fluent speech elicited higher FOAK ratings than disfluent speech, but no significant effect was found for gestures. In the follow-up Study 2, we examined the same disfluency-gesture interaction in a more controlled setting using video stimuli with an actress controlling for background, intonation, and word choice, as well as iconic and beat gesture types as gesture subcategories. Participants also filled out the Gesture Awareness Scale. Results were identical with the first study, in which only the disfluent speech received significantly lower FOAK ratings, revealing no effects of gesture use or type. These findings suggest that individuals may use certain communicative cues more than others, particularly in the context of assessing others’ knowledge.

Certain recurrent features of language characterize the way a whole language system is structured. By contrast, others target specific categories of items within those wider systems. For example, languages tend to exhibit consistent order of heads and dependents across different phrases—a system-wide regularity known as harmony. While this tendency is generally robust, some specific syntactic categories appear to deviate from the trend. We examine one such case, the order of adjectives and genitives, which do not exhibit a typological tendency for consistent order with respect to the noun. Instead, adjectives tend to follow and genitives precede the noun. Across two silent gesture experiments, we test the hypothesis that these category-specific ordering tendencies reflect cognitive biases that favor (i) conveying objects before properties that modify them, but (ii) conveying expressions of possession before possessors. While our hypothesis is thus that these biases are semantic in nature—they impact preferences for how concepts are ordered—the claim is that they may have downstream effects on conventionalized syntax by contributing to an over-representation of postnominal adjectives and prenominal genitives. We find that these biases affect gesture order in contexts where no conventionalized system is in place. When a system is in place, participants learn that system, and category-specific biases do not impact their learning. Our results suggest that different contexts reveal distinct types of cognitive biases; some are active during learning and others are active during language creation.