Cognitive Science最新文献

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.

Goal-directed tasks unfold in hierarchies of larger and smaller sub-tasks, and pursuing them jointly implies that participants must agree on whether they are continuing an ongoing sub-task (horizontal transition) or switching to the next sub-task (vertical transition). Previous research indicates that humans employ short and efficient coordination markers as procedural conventions to distinguish horizontal (e.g., in English, with yeah and uh-huh) and vertical transitions (with okay, all right). However, it remains unclear (1) whether such words serve as potentially universal coordination devices and (2) which properties make some markers more suitable for horizontal versus vertical transition contexts. We hypothesized that horizontal transitions in ongoing sub-tasks are associated with higher dual-tasking interference between verbal coordination and the nonlinguistic task, therefore, constraining the lexicality of coordination markers. In our experimental study, we assessed how speakers of three typologically diverse languages (Swiss French, Vietnamese, and Shipibo-Konibo; N = 232) used coordination markers to navigate a joint LEGO-building task. We found that in each language, coordination markers comprise a system of transition-specific conventions and that participants strategically deployed markers with minimal lexical and acoustic forms (uh-huh, mm) and repetitions in horizontal transitions, while more lexicalized markers (e.g., okay) in vertical transitions. Our findings suggest that (1) coordination markers are potentially universal linguistic devices for navigating joint activities and (2) the forms of coordination markers might be shaped by the constraints of their primary interaction context (here, horizontal and vertical transitions). Our study provides new evidence of how interactional settings might selectively shape language use through the forces of convergent language evolution.

According to the noisy channel framework of sentence processing, communication can succeed even when the input is corrupted because comprehenders rationally infer the speaker's intended meaning based on the prior probability of the literal interpretation and the probability that the input has been corrupted by noise. To test whether and under what conditions comprehenders consider word exchanges as a possible source of corruption, we ran five experiments on processing three types of simple German sentences: subject-before-object sentences (SO), object-before-subject sentences (OS), and passive sentences. Critical sentences had implausible meanings, but could be “repaired” by exchanging function words or by exchanging nouns. Experiments 1 through 4 presented sentences along with yes-no questions to probe interpretation. Implausible SO and passive sentences consistently elicited few nonliteral interpretations, whereas many nonliteral interpretations were given to implausible OS sentences. This was true regardless of whether word exchanges had to cross a main verb or an auxiliary, and it was more pronounced if the overall proportion of implausible sentences was low. We conclude that when answering yes-no questions, word exchanges are considered with function words of the same syntactic category, but not with nouns, and only when they result in a more likely syntactic structure. Experiment 5 showed that when explicitly asked to correct implausible sentences, comprehenders use noun exchanges frequently. We propose that the results for both yes-no questions and explicit corrections follow if the prior probability assigned to implausible sentences differs between tasks.

Perceptions of source credibility may play a role in major societal challenges like political polarization and the spread of misinformation as citizens disagree over which sources of political information are credible and sometimes trust untrustworthy sources. Cognitive scientists have developed Bayesian Network models of how people integrate perceptions of source credibility when learning from information provided by sources, but these models do not involve the crucial source characteristic in politics: bias. Biased sources make claims that align with a particular political agenda, whether or not they are true. We present a novel Bayesian Network model which integrates perceptions of a source's bias as well as their expertise. We demonstrate the model's validity for predicting how people will update beliefs and perceptions of bias and expertise in response to testimony across two studies, the second being a preregistered conceptual replication and extension of the first.