Cognition最新文献

Young children acquire an amazing knowledge base, rapidly learning from, and even going beyond the observable evidence. They arrive at forming abstract concepts and generalizations and recruit logical operations. The question whether young infants can already rely on abstract logical operations, such as disjunction or negation, or whether these operations emerge gradually over development has recently become a central topic of interest. Here we target this question by focusing on infants' early understanding of negation. According to one view, negation comprehension is initially restricted to a narrow range of meanings (such as rejection or non-existence) and only much later infants develop a broader understanding that maps onto a fully-fledged negation concept. Alternatively, however, infants may rely on a fully-fledged negation concept from early on, but some forms of negation may pose more mapping and processing difficulties than others.

Here we tested infants' understanding of two syntactically and semantically different forms of negation, existential negation and propositional denial in a language (Hungarian) that has a separate negative particle for each, and thus the two negation forms can be directly compared. We engaged 15- and 18-month-old infants in a search task where they had to find a toy in one out of two locations based on verbal utterances referring to the object at one of the locations involving existential negation (Nincsen - not.be.3SG) or propositional denial (Nem itt van - not here be.3SG). In Experiments 1–3 we found a parallel development for these two kinds of negation. 18-month-olds successfully comprehended both, while 15-month-olds were at chance for both. In Experiment 4 we excluded the possibility that 15-month-olds' chance performance is explained by task-related difficulties, as they succeeded in a similar, but nonverbal task. Thus, 15-month-olds likely still have not solved the mapping for the two negation forms. The parallel performance of the two age groups with the two negation types (failing or succeeding on both) is consistent with the hypothesis that different forms of negation rely on similar conceptual underpinnings already in early development.

Different organizational structures have been argued to underlie semantic knowledge about concepts; taxonomic organization, based on shared features, and thematic organization based on co-occurrence in common scenes and scenarios. The goal of the current study is to examine which of the two organizational systems are more engaged in the semantic context of a picture naming task. To address this question, we examined the representational structure underlying the semantic space in different picture naming tasks by applying representational similarity analysis (RSA) to electroencephalography (EEG) datasets. In a series of experiments, EEG signals were collected while participants named pictures under different semantic contexts. Study 1 reanalyzes existing data from semantic contexts directing attention to taxonomic organization and semantic contexts that are not biased towards either taxonomic or thematic organization. In Study 2 we keep the stimuli the same and vary semantic contexts to draw attention to either taxonomic or thematic organization. The RSA approach allows us to examine the pairwise similarity in scalp-recorded amplitude patterns at each time point following the onset of the picture and relate it to theoretical taxonomic and thematic measures derived from computational models of semantics. Across all tasks, the similarity structure of scalp-recorded neural activity correlated better with taxonomic than thematic measures, in time windows associated with semantic processing. Most strikingly, we found that the scalp-recorded patterns of neural activity between taxonomically related items were more similar to each other than the scalp-recorded patterns of neural activity for thematically related or unrelated items, even in tasks that makes thematic information more salient. These results suggest that the principle semantic organization of these concepts during picture naming is taxonomic, at least in the context of picture naming.

The speech-to-song transformation is an illusion in which certain spoken phrases are perceived as more song-like after being repeated several times. The present study addresses whether this perceptual transformation leads to a corresponding change in how accurately participants imitate pitch/time patterns in speech. We used illusion-inducing (illusion stimuli) and non-inducing (control stimuli) spoken phrases as stimuli. In each trial, one stimulus was presented eight times in succession. Participants were asked to reproduce the phrase and rate how music-like the phrase sounded after the first and final (eighth) repetitions. The ratings of illusion stimuli reflected more song-like perception after the final repetition than the first repetition, but the ratings of control stimuli did not change over repetitions. The results from imitative production mirrored the perceptual effects: pitch matching of illusion stimuli improved from the first to the final repetition, but pitch matching of control stimuli did not improve. These findings suggest a consistent pattern of speech-to-song transformation in both perception and production, suggesting that distinctions between music and language may be more malleable than originally thought both in perception and production.

Understanding information processing biases is critical for improving scientific literacy. Research suggests that people rate scientific explanations with reductive jargon (e.g., irrelevant chemistry jargon in the explanation of a biological phenomenon) as better than those without – a phenomenon known as the reductive allure (RA) effect. Here, however, in three preregistered online experiments, we were unable to replicate this reductive allure effect using similar (and in some cases identical) materials and procedures to the original demonstration of the phenomena. Our results suggest that text-based RA effects may not be as strong as previously thought and are possibly changing over time.

In human culture, an object's value is influenced by tangible properties (e.g. visual desirability and constituent materials) and intangible ownership history (e.g. authentic objects owned by celebrities are often worth more than similar inauthentic objects). Children are sensitive to both of these factors as independent determinants of value, but research has yet to elucidate how they interact. Here, we investigate whether children aged 5–11 years consider object properties or authentic ownership history to be the greater determinant of value and examine how their object valuations are influenced by owners' characteristics. In Study 1, visually desirable and undesirable items belonging to ‘famously good’ owners received higher valuations than similar items belonging to non-famous owners, whereas desirable items belonging to ‘famously bad’ owners received significantly lower values. In Study 2, children considered items made from cheap materials belonging to famously good owners, but not famously bad owners, to be as valuable as similar items made from expensive materials belonging to non-famous owners. In Study 3, physical contact with a famously bad owner had a detrimental impact on value, but worn and unworn objects belonging to famously good owners did not significantly differ in value. Across studies, we documented evidence that children's sensitivity to authentic ownership history and physical contact as determinants of value increases with age. Together, these findings demonstrate that children's valuation of ownership history relative to object properties depends on the owner's ‘essence’, and their sensitivity to owner contact as a mediator of value indicates awareness of ‘magical contagion’.

Do people have accurate metacognition of non-uniformities in perceptual resolution across (i.e., eccentricity) and around (i.e., polar angle) the visual field? Despite its theoretical and practical importance, this question has not yet been empirically tested. This study investigated metacognition of perceptual resolution by guessing patterns during a degradation (i.e., loss of high spatial frequencies) localization task. Participants localized the degraded face among the nine faces that simultaneously appeared throughout the visual field: fovea (fixation at the center of the screen), parafovea (left, right, above, and below fixation at 4° eccentricity), and periphery (left, right, above, and below fixation at 10° eccentricity). We presumed that if participants had accurate metacognition, in the absence of a degraded face, they would exhibit compensatory guessing patterns based on counterfactual reasoning (“The degraded face must have been presented at locations with lower perceptual resolution, because if it were presented at locations with higher perceptual resolution, I would have easily detected it.”), meaning that we would expect more guess responses for locations with lower perceptual resolution. In two experiments, we observed guessing patterns that suggest that people can monitor non-uniformities in perceptual resolution across, but not around, the visual field during tasks, indicating partial in-the-moment metacognition. Additionally, we found that global explicit knowledge of perceptual resolution is not sufficient to guide in-the-moment metacognition during tasks, which suggests a dissociation between local and global metacognition.

A simple button press towards a prime stimulus enhances subsequent visual search for objects that match the prime. The present study investigated whether this action effect is a general phenomenon across different task domains, and the underlying neural mechanisms. The action effect was measured in an unspeeded size-matching task, with the presentation of the central target and the surrounding inducers of the Ebbinghaus illusion together to one eye or separately to each eye, and when repetitive TMS was applied over right primary motor cortex (M1). The results showed that a prior key-press significantly reduced the illusion effect compared to passive viewing. Notably, the action effect persisted with dichoptic presentation of the Ebbinghaus configuration, but disappeared with the right M1 disruption. These results suggest that action guides visual perception to influence human behavior, which mainly affects the late visual processing stage and probably relies on feedback projections from the motor cortex.

Autonoetic consciousness is the awareness that an event we remember is one that we ourselves experienced. It is a defining feature of our subjective experience of remembering and imagining future events. Given its subjective nature, there is ongoing debate about how to measure it. Our goal was to develop a framework to identify cognitive markers of autonoetic consciousness. Across two studies (N = 342) we asked young, healthy participants to provide written descriptions of two autobiographical memories, two plausible future events, and an experimentally encoded video. Participants then rated their subjective experience during remembering and imagining. Exploratory Factor Analysis of this data uncovered the latent variables underlying autonoetic consciousness across these different events. In contrast to work that emphasizes the distinction between Remember and Know as being key to autonoetic consciousness, Re-experiencing, and Pre-experiencing for future events, were consistently identified as core markers of autonoetic consciousness. This was alongside Mental Time Travel in all types of memory events, but not for imagining the future. In addition, our factor analysis allows us to demonstrate directly - for the first time - the features of mental imagery associated with the sense of autonoetic consciousness in autobiographical memory; vivid, visual imagery from a first-person perspective. Finally, with regression analysis, the emergent factor structure of autonoetic consciousness was able to predict the richness of autobiographical memory texts, but not of episodic recall of the encoded video. This work provides a novel way to assess autonoetic consciousness, illustrates how autonoetic consciousness manifests differently in memory and imagination and defines the mental representations intrinsic to this process.

Lineups are considered a superior method of identification to showups, but why is contested. There are two main theories: diagnostic feature detection theory, which holds that surrounding the suspect with fillers causes the eyewitness to focus on the features that are most diagnostic, and differential filler siphoning theory that claims that the fillers draw incorrect choices away from the suspect. Colloff and Wixted (2020) created a novel identification task, called a simultaneous showup, designed to prevent filler siphoning, while still allowing comparison to occur between members of the array. However, even in the simultaneous showup, it is possible that covert filler siphoning occurs. In Experiment 1, we replicated the simultaneous showup condition and also asked participants if the other photos affected their decision making; we found evidence that participants self-reported both diagnostic feature detection and covert filler siphoning. In Experiment 2, we replicated Colloff and Wixted (2020, Experiment 3) main findings. Additionally, we found that participants self-reported both diagnostic feature detection and covert filler siphoning. This led us to conclude that the simultaneous showup procedure could not fully exclude covert filler siphoning from occurring.