Cognitive Science最新文献

Visual statistical learning (visual SL) is the ability to implicitly extract statistical patterns from visual stimuli. Visual SL could be assessed using online measures, evaluating reaction times (RTs) to stimuli during task performance, and offline measures, which assess recognition of the presented patterns. We examined 96 children aged 3−9 years using a visual SL task that included online and offline measures. In the online phase, children viewed sequences of cartoon aliens presented one at a time, organized into triplets. The task was to press a button to two target stimuli: one predictable (the last alien in the triplet), and one unpredictable (the first in the triplet). In the offline phase, children performed a two-alternative-forced choice task, where they viewed two triplets and selected the one matching the sequence from the online phase. In online measures, we observed a gradual increase in RT for unpredictable stimulus and a slight decrease in RT for predictable stimulus over the experiment, with fewer errors for predictable stimulus, indicating an SL effect. In offline measures, the SL effect was also observed, though less robust: recognition rates for correct triplets exceeded chance level only for triplets containing predictable stimuli. Notably, while online measures remained stable across age, offline recognition rates increased with age, suggesting a link to the development of cognitive functions needed for explicit task performance. We propose that SL is not purely an implicit process but rather an active learning process shaped by experimental task requirements and goal setting.

What is that “inner” voice that keeps you up at night or that tells you to stop as you reach for another chocolate? Advances in embodied cognitive science raise doubts about explaining the “self” as the result of internalizing our shared world. On that emerging view, there is nothing to transport from outside to inside the skull. But, if not an inner state of mind, then how should we understand the experience of a self? This paper develops a relational approach to individualization by aligning ecological thinking with practice theory through Meadian considerations. On this account, we continuously experience a meaningful world, filled with possibilities for action, tied to things in places and practices. Practices are intergenerational processes in which materials get organized by what we do, while in turn organizing us. Becoming a “self” requires learning to attend to such communal organizations as one's relation to the world expands across development. As we learn to engage various such organizations skillfully, we can experience them responding to us. Situated across practices, the “self” develops as a reciprocal relation between multiple timescales: notably between communal practices and a person's skilled activities. When we close our eyes and our thoughts come to the fore, we experience this reciprocal relation directly. To get this relational self into view, psychology needs to get out of our heads and study the worldly conditions that make us.

Understanding our ideological opponents is crucial for the effective exchange of arguments and the avoidance of escalation, and the reduction of conflict. We operationalize the idea of an “Ideological Turing Test” to measure the accuracy with which people represent the arguments of their ideological opponents. Crucially, this offers a behavioral measure of open-mindedness which goes beyond mere self-report. We recruited 200 participants from opposite sides of three topics with potential for polarization in the UK of the early 2020s (1200 participants total). Participants were asked to provide reasons both for and against their position. Their reasons were then rated by participants from the opposite side. Our criteria for “passing” the test was if an argument was agreed with by opponents to the same extent or higher than arguments made by proponents. We found evidence for high levels of mutual understanding across all three topics. We also found that those who passed were more open-minded toward their opponents, in that they were less likely to rate them as ignorant, immoral, or irrational. Our method provides a behavioral measure of open-mindedness and ability to mimic counterpartisan perspectives that goes beyond self-report measures. Our results offer encouragement that, even in highly polarized debates, high levels of mutual understanding persist.

Speaking begins with the generation of a preverbal message. While a common assumption is that the scope of message-level planning (i.e., the size of message-level increments) can be more extensive than the scope of sentence-level planning, it is unclear how much information is typically encoded at the message level in advance of sentence-level planning during spontaneous production. This study assessed the scope and granularity of early message-level planning in English by tracking production of sentences with light versus heavy sentence-final NPs. Speakers produced SVO sentences to describe pictures showing an agent acting on a patient. Half of the pictures showed one-patient events, eliciting sentences with unmodified patient names (e.g., “The tailor is cutting the dress”), and half showed two-patient events with a target patient and a non-target patient. The presence of a non-target patient required production of a prenominal or postnominal modifier to uniquely identify the target patient (e.g., “The tailor is cutting the long dress” / “the dress with sleeves”). Analyses of speech onsets and eye movements before speech onset showed strong effects of the complexity of the sentence-final character, suggesting that early message-level planning does not proceed strictly word by word (or “from left to right”) but instead includes basic information about the identity of both the sentence-initial and sentence-final characters. This is consistent with theories that assume extensive message-level planning before the start of sentence-level encoding and provides new evidence about the level of conceptual detail incorporated into early message plans.

This preregistered study examined whether visual experience influences conceptual representations by examining both gestural expression and feature listing. Gestures—mostly driven by analog mappings of visuospatial and motoric experiences onto the body—offer a unique window into conceptual representations and provide complementary information not offered by language-based features, which have been the focus of previous work. Thirty congenitally or early blind and 30 sighted Turkish speakers produced silent gestures and features for concepts from semantic categories that differentially rely on experience in visual (non-manipulable objects and animals) and motor (manipulable objects) information. Blind individuals were less likely than sighted individuals to produce gestures for non-manipulable objects and animals, but not for manipulable objects. Overall, the tendency to use a particular gesture strategy for specific semantic categories was similar across groups. However, blind participants relied less on drawing and personification strategies depicting visuospatial aspects of concepts than sighted participants. Feature-listing revealed that blind participants share considerable conceptual knowledge with sighted participants, but their understanding differs in fine-grained details, particularly for animals. Thus, while concepts appear broadly similar in blind and sighted individuals, this study reveals nuanced differences, too, highlighting the intricate role of visual experience in conceptual representations.

Engaging in fluent conversation is a surprisingly complex task that requires interlocutors to promptly respond to each other in a way that is appropriate to the social context. In this study, we disentangled different dimensions of turn-taking by investigating how the dynamics of child–adult interactions changed according to the activity (task-oriented vs. freer conversation) and the familiarity of the interlocutor (familiar vs. unfamiliar). Twenty-eight autistic children (16 male; $�M_{�a�g�e�}$ = 10.8 years) and 20 age-matched typically developing children (8 male; $�M_{�a�g�e�}$ = 9.6 years) participated in seven task-orientated face-to-face conversations with their caregivers (336 total conversations) and seven more telephone conversations alternately with their caregivers (144 total conversations, 60 with the typical development group) and an experimenter (191 total conversations, 112 with the autism group). By modeling inter-turn response latencies in multi-level Bayesian location-scale models, we found that inter-turn response latencies were consistent across repeated measures within social contexts, but exhibited substantial differences across social contexts. Autistic children exhibited more overlaps, produced faster response latencies and shorter pauses than typically developing children—and these group differences were stronger when conversing with the unfamiliar experimenter. Unfamiliarity also made the relation between individual differences and latencies evident: only in conversations with the experimenter were higher sociocognitive skills and lower social awareness associated with faster responses. Information flow and shared tempo were also influenced by familiarity: children adapted their response latencies to the predictability and tempo of their interlocutor's turn, but only when interacting with their caregivers and not the experimenter. These results highlight the need to construe turn-taking as a multicomponential construct that is shaped by individual differences, interpersonal dynamics, and the affordances of the context.

Social interactions often require the ability to “stand in others’ shoes” and perceive the world “through others’ eyes,” but it remains unclear the extent to which we can actually see others’ visual worlds. Prior research has primarily focused on mental-body transformation in visual-spatial perspective taking (VSPT), yet the subsequent visual processing under the adopted perspective has been less explored. Addressing this gap, our study investigated mental representation of the visual scene as a direct outcome of perceiving from another's viewpoint. Using modified VSPT tasks, we paired avatar-perspective trials with self-perspective trials to create opportunities for observing priming effects resulting from potential mental representations formed under the avatar's perspective. We hypothesized that if individuals form embodied representations of visual scenes while explicitly processing stimuli from the avatar's viewpoint, these representations should be stored in memory, and elicit priming effects when later encountering similar scenes from their own perspective. Across four experiments, we provide the first evidence that (1) explicitly engaging in embodied VSPT produces robust mental representations of the visual scene from the adopted perspective, (2) these representations are visual-spatial rather than semantic in nature, and (3) these representations arise from embodied processing rather than from self-perspective strategies. Additionally, our findings reveal that individuals implicitly process visual stimuli from their own perspective during other-perspective tasks, forming distinct but weaker self-perspective representations. Overall, our findings demonstrate the existence of embodied representations in VSPT and offer significant insights into the processing mechanisms involved when we “stand in others’ shoes.”

This study examines the impact of grammatical gender on memory recall among simultaneous bilinguals with two three-gendered languages (Ukrainian and Russian). Ukrainian−Russian bilinguals and English monolingual controls were tested on their ability to remember names assigned to objects with either matching or mismatching grammatical genders across their two languages. Results showed that bilinguals recalled names more accurately when the biological sex of the names was congruent with the grammatical gender of objects in both languages (e.g., recalling a male name assigned to a noun with masculine grammatical gender in both L1s, rather than a female name). English monolinguals, in contrast, showed no difference in recall. However, when grammatical gender mismatched across Ukrainian and Russian, the expected influence of the more proficient language on recall accuracy was not observed. These findings suggest that converging grammatical information from two L1s creates stronger memory associations, enhancing recall accuracy of simultaneous bilinguals. Conversely, mismatching grammatical genders appear to negate this effect. Taken together, these findings highlight the interconnected nature of bilingual conceptual representation.

How do people intuitively recognize communicative intention in pantomimes, even though such actions kinematically resemble instrumental behaviors directed at changing the world? We focus on two alternative hypotheses: one posits that instrumental intention competes with communicative intention, such that the weaker the former, the stronger the latter; the other suggests that instrumental intention is nested within communicative intention, such that the presence of the former facilitates the latter. To test these hypotheses, we compiled a video dataset of action-object pairs with varying frequencies in the English corpus. Using the concept of affordance, we qualitatively varied the degree to which a scene visually supports the execution of an action. Across two empirical experiments, we found a nonmonotonic relationship between affordance and communicative ratings: partial affordance, where the scene provides some support for an action's instrumental purpose, elicited the strongest perception of communicative intention. In contrast, full affordance or no affordance resulted in weaker interpretations of communicative intention. We also found that recognizing the instrumental components of pantomime-like actions predicted a higher communicativeness rating. Our study, on top of confirming humans' ability to interpret novel pantomimes, reveals a novel mechanism of communicative intention: recognizing an instrumental goal and perceiving suboptimal conditions for achieving it together enhance the communicative signal. This work contributes toward an integrated theory of pantomimes, demonstrating how the rationality principle not only aids in distinguishing communicative intention but also supports the identification of instrumental content embedded within it.

During real-world interactions, people rely on gaze, gestures, and verbal references to coordinate attention and establish shared understanding. Yet, it remains unclear if and how these modalities couple within and between interacting individuals in face-to-face settings. The current study addressed this issue by analyzing dyadic face-to-face interactions, where participants (n = 52) collaboratively ranked paintings while their gaze, pointing gestures, and verbal references were recorded. Using cross-recurrence quantification analysis, we found that participants readily used pointing gestures to complement gaze and verbal reference cues and that gaze directed toward the partner followed canonical conversational patterns, that is, more looks to the other's face when listening than speaking. Further, gaze, pointing, and verbal references showed significant coupling both within and between individuals, with pointing gestures and verbal references guiding the partner's gaze to shared targets and speaker gaze leading listener gaze. Moreover, simultaneous pointing and verbal referencing led to more sustained attention coupling compared to pointing alone. These findings highlight the multimodal nature of joint attention coordination, extending theories of embodied, interactive cognition by demonstrating how gaze, gestures, and language dynamically integrate into a shared cognitive system.