Cognitive Science最新文献

Formal explanations are statements that explain properties of an object by referring to its category. This study investigates the role of pragmatics in the evaluation of formal explanations. Across six experiments, we examined how a questioner's knowledge of category identity and an explanation's capability to specify a category affect satisfaction with such explanations. Experiments 1a and 1b demonstrate that participants find formal explanations less satisfactory when the questioner is already aware of the category identity. Experiments 2a and 2b show that participants assumed a questioner was unaware of an object's category if they were satisfied with the formal explanation. In Experiment 3, open-ended responses revealed that satisfied questioners were perceived as seeking to learn a category identity, while dissatisfied ones were assumed to have other motives. Finally, Experiment 4 compares tautological formal explanations (where a label points to all categories possessing a particular feature at once) and nontautological ones (where a label points to one of several competing categories), and examines the role of cognitive reflection in their evaluation. It demonstrates that people with high cognitive reflection are more sensitive to pragmatic context and value a formal explanation more if it can identify a specific category. This study shows that formal explanations are satisfactory when they fulfill a specific pragmatic function, namely, helping to define a category when the questioner knows only its feature. It also shows that people prone to automatic intuitive responses are less likely to consider this function and tend to evaluate formal explanations independently of this part of the pragmatic context.

In many real-world settings, people often have to make judgments with incomplete information. Estimating unknown quantities without using precise quantitative modeling and data is called guesstimation, which is often needed in forecasting settings. Furthermore, research in education found that solving guesstimation problems builds general problem-solving skills. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation on how people solve guesstimation problems. We study their problem-solving behavior with think-aloud methods, and we identify solution strategies that are frequently used. In a two-response paradigm, we first ask for gut-feeling answers to guesstimation questions and then allow deliberation before a second answer is given. Comparing the quality of these two answers reveals that deliberation improves the answer quality significantly. In a second experiment, we additionally elicit participants' confidence about their deliberated answers by asking for an entire distribution instead of just a point estimate. We find that participants are generally overconfident in their answers. We discuss guesstimation tasks as suitable test-beds for studying human deliberative judgments in general and in the more specific context of improving forecasting through appropriate artificial intelligence tools.

This commentary critically complements a recent proposal that cognitive science can leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to counter declining literacy. While recognizing the educational potential of LLMs, we highlight a significant trade-off: their inherent design reduces users’ direct engagement with written text, undermining deeper literacy skills, especially in young learners. Acknowledging this tension is essential for developing pedagogically sound interventions. Cognitive scientists and educators must jointly anticipate which cognitive capacities may weaken, identify critical skills needed in emerging multimodal contexts, and collaboratively devise instructional strategies to preserve the cognitive benefits humans derive specifically from sustained interaction with written language.

How language interacts with metacognitive processes is an understudied area. Earlier research shows that people produce disfluencies (i.e., “uh” s or “um” s) in their speech when they are not sure of their answers, indicating metacognitive monitoring. Gestures have monitoring and predictive roles in language, also implicating metacognitive processes. Further, the rate of speech disfluencies and gestures change as a function of the communicational setting. People produce fewer disfluencies and more gestures when they can see the listener than when the listener is not visible. In the current study, 50 participants (32 women, Mage = 21.16, SD = 1.46) were asked 40 general knowledge questions, either with a visible (n = 25) or nonvisible (n = 25) listener. They provided feelings-of-knowing (FOK) judgment immediately after seeing the question and were asked to think aloud while pondering their answers. Then, they provided retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs). Results showed that gestures and speech disfluencies were not related either to the accuracy or the FOK judgments. However, both gestures and speech disfluencies predicted RCJs uniquely and interactively. Speech disfluencies negatively predicted RCJs. In contrast, hand gestures were positively related to RCJs. Importantly, the use of gestures was more strongly related to RCJs when disfluencies were also higher. No effect of communicational setting on the rate of gestures or speech disfluencies was found. These results highlight the importance of multimodal language cues in the elaboration of metacognitive judgments.

Learning the meaning of a verb is challenging because learners need to resolve two types of ambiguity: (1) word-referent mapping—finding the correct referent event of a verb, and (2) word-meaning mapping—inferring the correct meaning of the verb from the referent event (e.g., whether the meaning of an action word is TURNING or TWISTING). The present work examines how adult learners solve this challenge by utilizing both in-the-moment linguistic information within individual learning situations and cross-situational statistical information across multiple learning situations. We investigate how different cues provided in the moment affect information selection and how cross-situational learning as a general computational mechanism allows for information integration over time. Two experiments were designed based on a Human Simulation Paradigm, in which adult learners were presented with a sequence of short videos from parent−toddler toy play and asked to guess a mystery verb the parent produced in each video. In Experiment 1, we compared individual learning situations containing linguistic information to the exact same learning scenes without linguistic information and found that linguistic information helped learners narrow down the meaning of a verb embedded in individual situations, which was consistent with prior research. In Experiment 2, the videos sharing the same target verb were presented in a blocked design to incorporate cross-situational statistics for the same verb. We measured the variability, convergence, and accuracy of participants’ guesses. Within-trial linguistic information allowed learners to quickly narrow down their search space and focus on a few relevant aspects in a scene, while cross-situational learning allowed them to fine-tune their learning further across trials. Our findings support a unified account wherein within-trial linguistic information and cross-situational statistical information are integrated for more efficient verb learning.

With the rise of wearable technologies, mobile devices and artificial intelligence comes a growing pressure to understand downstream effects of cognitive offloading on children's future thinking and behavior. Here, we explored whether compelling children to use an indiscriminate cognitive offloading strategy affects their subsequent strategy selection. Six- to 9-year-olds (N = 128) completed a task where manual rotation of stimuli sometimes offloaded mental rotation demand and other times did not. In phase 1, some children were compelled to use manual rotation indiscriminately, whereas others could only use mental rotation. In phase 2, where children could freely choose their strategy, older children who were compelled to use manual rotation in phase 1 were significantly more selective in their strategy use, rotating the stimuli relatively more frequently when this behavior would offload cognitive demand than when it would not. These results provide preliminary evidence that pre-exposure to indiscriminate cognitive offloading can promote selectivity in children's subsequent strategy use, though this selectivity may reflect a desire to avoid cognitive effort rather than improve task performance.

Conceptual representations can be shaped by multiple factors, including expertise. In this study, we tested whether the concept of water is represented differently across laypeople and chemists, focusing on psychological essentialism. Essentialized categories are thought to be determined by internal factors (e.g., chemical composition). Previous research suggests laypeople do not essentialize “water.” Here, we sought to verify whether extensive experience with chemicals might lead to more essentialist conceptions. In the first two experiments, participants provided H₂O estimates, typicality, centrality, and frequency ratings for water examples, which showed that chemists partially incorporate H₂O in their conceptual representation of “water.” Experiment 3 underlined qualitative differences in the semantic organization of “water” across the two groups using similarity ratings. Experiment 4 consolidated these results with a sentence acceptability task, underlying the importance of chemical composition in determining what counts as “water” for chemists. Finally, Experiment 5 showed that laypeople consider both “H₂O” and “water” as more abstract compared to chemists. Our results provide evidence on the variability of both psychological essentialism and conceptual representation overall, which can vary as a function of expertise.

Iconicity ratings studies have established that there are many English words which native speakers judge as “iconic,” that is, as sounding like what they mean. Here, we explore whether these iconic English words are more likely to be accompanied by iconic gestures. We report a large-scale quantitative study comparing the gesture rate of words rated as high in iconicity (e.g., swoosh, puffy, crispy) to those rated as low in iconicity (e.g., ordain, rejoin, grateful), balancing for perceptual strength, part-of-speech, and syllable length. Five thousand seven hundred and twenty-five tokens from the TV News Archive were coded for whether speakers produced a gesture with the word, and whether the gesture was iconic. The results show that high iconicity words have a higher overall gesture rate (69%) than low iconicity words (56%): specifically, high iconicity words have a higher iconic gesture rate (24% vs. 11%). This effect is more pronounced among verbs than adjectives, which we hypothesize may be due to the dynamic nature of verbs. We also find that this result persists when controlling for perceptual and action strength ratings, suggesting that word-level iconicity is a more important predictor than sensorimotor strength of whether a speaker will use an iconic gesture. We find that some high iconicity words are more likely to occur with iconic gestures when they come with markers of syntactic isolation, suggesting that morphosyntactic behavior is also relevant to iconic gesture production. Our findings demonstrate that iconicity in spoken communication is inherently multimodal, manifesting in both speech and gesture simultaneously, and that iconicity is often psychologically active when speakers use conventionalized iconic words.

How do people determine who owns what? While existing research has identified a number of psychological and behavioral sources of ownership judgments, the role of mental state attribution has received less attention. We conducted three online experiments (N = 1246) examining if ownership judgments rely on mind-reading: the capacity to infer others’ intentions, beliefs, and knowledge states. Using vignettes, we tested if ownership judgments are sensitive to variations in contextual cues (Study 1), beliefs about the permissibility of taking items (Study 2), and knowledge about social norms (Study 3). We also tested if the moral aspects of a scenario affect judgments of rightful ownership transfer. Our findings indicate that ownership judgments indeed vary in response to these factors, and that they do not vary on par with moral judgments. These findings are best explained in terms of mind-reading and support the argument that ownership is fundamentally a social phenomenon: not a relationship between people and resources but rather between people about resources.

Statistical learning allows us to implicitly create memory traces of recurring sequential patterns appearing in our environment. Here, we study the dynamics of how these sequential memory traces develop in a species of nonhuman primates (i.e., Guinea baboons, Papio papio) that, unlike humans, cannot use language and verbal recoding strategies to strengthen these memory traces. We test a group of Guinea baboons in a Hebb visuo-motor pointing task in which a target sequence is repeated with random sequences inserted between repetitions. In this study, we systematically manipulate the interval between two repetitions of the target sequence by varying the number of interposed random sequences. We found that baboons can learn repeated visuo-motor sequences, even when the repetitions are separated by six random sequences. Our results also suggest that the learning curve of the target sequence best fits a logarithmic function. The present study, therefore, provides a quantitative assessment of the development of a sequential memory trace as a function of repetition spacing and without the use of verbal recoding strategies.