Cognitive Psychology最新文献

Both everyday experience and laboratory research demonstrate that readers often fail to notice errors such as an omitted or repeated function word. This phenomenon challenges central tenets of reading and sentence processing models, according to which each word is lexically processed and incrementally integrated into a syntactic representation. One solution would propose that apparent failure to notice such errors reflects post-perceptual inference; the reader does initially perceive the error, but then unconsciously ’corrects’ the perceived string. Such a post-perceptual account predicts that when readers fail to explicitly notice an error, the error will nevertheless disrupt reading, at least fleetingly. We present a large-scale eyetracking experiment investigating whether disruption is detectable in the eye movement record when readers fail to notice an omitted or repeated two-letter function word in naturalistic sentences. Readers failed to notice both omission and repetition errors over 36% of the time. In an analysis that included all trials, both omission and repetition resulted in pronounced eye movement disruption, compared to reading of grammatical control sentences. But in an analysis including only trials on which readers failed to notice the errors, neither type of error disrupted eye movements on any measure. Indeed, there was evidence in some measures that reading was relatively fast on the trials on which errors were missed. It does not appear that when an error is not consciously noticed, it is initially perceived, and then later corrected; rather, linguistic knowledge influences what the reader perceives.

The direct-lexical-control hypothesis stipulates that some aspect of a word’s processing determines the duration of the fixation on that word and/or the next. Although the direct lexical control is incorporated into most current models of eye-movement control in reading, the precise implementation varies and the assumptions of the hypothesis may not be feasible given that lexical processing must occur rapidly enough to influence fixation durations. Conclusive empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis is therefore lacking. In this article, we report the results of an eye-tracking experiment using the boundary paradigm in which native speakers of Chinese read sentences in which target words were either high- or low-frequency and preceded by a valid or invalid preview. Eye movements were co-registered with electroencephalography, allowing standard analyses of eye-movement measures, divergence point analyses of fixation-duration distributions, and fixated-related potentials on the target words. These analyses collectively provide strong behavioral and neural evidence of early lexical processing and thus strong support for the direct-lexical-control hypothesis. We discuss the implications of the findings for our understanding of how the hypothesis might be implemented, the neural systems that support skilled reading, and the nature of eye-movement control in the reading of Chinese versus alphabetic scripts.

Understanding the systematic ways that human decision making departs from normative principles has been important in the development of cognitive theory across multiple decision domains. We focus here on whether such seemingly “irrational” decisions occur in ethical decisions that impose difficult tradeoffs between the welfare and interests of different individuals or groups. Across three sets of experiments and in multiple decision scenarios, we provide clear evidence that contextual choice reversals arise in multiples types of ethical choice settings, in just the way that they do in other domains ranging from economic gambles to perceptual judgments (Trueblood et al., 2013; Wedell, 1991). Specifically, we find within-participant evidence for attraction effects in which choices between two options systematically vary as a function of features of a third dominated and unchosen option—a prima facie violation of rational choice axioms that demand consistency. Unlike economic gambles and most domains in which such effects have been studied, many of our ethical scenarios involve features that are not presented numerically, and features for which there is no clear majority-endorsed ranking. We provide empirical evidence and a novel modeling analysis based on individual differences of feature rankings within attributes to show that such individual variations partly explains observed variation in the attraction effects. We conclude by discussing how recent computational analyses of attraction effects may provide a basis for understanding how the observed patterns of choices reflect boundedly rational decision processes.

The words that children learn change over time in predictable ways. The first words that infants acquire are generally ones that are both frequent and highly imageable. Older infants also learn words that are more abstract and some that are less common. It is unclear whether this pattern is attributable to maturational factors (i.e., younger children lack sufficiently developed cognitive faculties needed to learn abstract words) or linguistic factors (i.e., younger children lack sufficient knowledge of their language to use grammatical or contextual cues needed to figure out the meaning of more abstract words). The present study explores this question by comparing vocabulary acquisition in 53 preschool-aged children (M = 51 months, range = 30–76 months) who were adopted from China and Eastern Europe after two and half years of age and 53 vocabulary-matched infant controls born and raised in English speaking families in North America (M = 24 months, range = 16–33 months). Vocabulary was assessed using the MB-CDI Words and Sentences form, word frequency was estimated from the CHILDES database, and imageability was measured using adult ratings of how easily words could be pictured mentally. Both groups were more likely to know words that were both highly frequent and imageable (resulting in an over-additive interaction). Knowledge of a word was also independently affected by the syntactic category that it belongs to. Adopted preschoolers’ vocabulary was slightly less affected by imageability. These findings were replicated in a comparison with a larger sample of vocabulary-matched controls drawn from the MB-CDI norming study (M = 22 months, range = 16–30 months; 33 girls). These results suggest that the patterns of acquisition in children’s early vocabulary are primarily driven by the accrual of linguistic knowledge, but that vocabulary may also be affected by differences in early life experiences or conceptual knowledge.

Research has shown that infants represent legitimate leadership and predict continued obedience to authority, but which cues they use to do so remains unknown. Across eight pre-registered experiments varying the cue provided, we tested if Norwegian 21-month-olds (N=128) expected three protagonists to obey a character even in her absence. We assessed whether bowing for the character, receiving a tribute from or conferring a benefit to the protagonists, imposing a cost on them (forcefully taking a resource or hitting them), or relative physical size were used as cues to generate the expectation of continued obedience that marks legitimate leadership. Whereas bowing sufficed in generating such an expectation, we found positive Bayesian evidence that all the other cues did not. Norwegian infants unlikely have witnessed bowing in their everyday life. Hence, bowing/prostration as cue for continued obedience may form part of an early-developing capacity to represent leadership built by evolution.

Language understanding and mathematics understanding are two fundamental forms of human thinking. Prior research has largely focused on the question of how language shapes mathematical thinking. The current study considers the converse question. Specifically, it investigates whether the magnitude representations that are thought to anchor understanding of number are also recruited to understand the meanings of graded words. These are words that come in scales (e.g., Anger) whose members can be ordered by the degree to which they possess the defining property (e.g., calm, annoyed, angry, furious). Experiment 1 uses the comparison paradigm to find evidence that the distance, ratio, and boundary effects that are taken as evidence of the recruitment of magnitude representations extend from numbers to words. Experiment 2 uses a similarity rating paradigm and multi-dimensional scaling to find converging evidence for these effects in graded word understanding. Experiment 3 evaluates an alternative hypothesis – that these effects for graded words simply reflect the statistical structure of the linguistic environment – by using machine learning models of distributional word semantics: LSA, word2vec, GloVe, counterfitted word vectors, BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT-2. These models fail to show the full pattern of effects observed of humans in Experiment 2, suggesting that more is needed than mere statistics. This research paves the way for further investigations of the role of magnitude representations in sentence and text comprehension, and of the question of whether language understanding and number understanding draw on shared or independent magnitude representations. It also informs the role of machine learning models in cognitive psychology research.

Research from several areas suggests that mental representations adapt to the specific tasks we carry out in our environment. In this study, we propose a mechanism of adaptive representational change, task imprinting. Thereby, we introduce a computational model, which portrays task imprinting as an adaptation to specific task goals via selective storage of helpful representations in long-term memory. We test the main qualitative prediction of the model in four behavioral experiments using healthy young adults as participants. In each experiment, we assess participants’ baseline representations in the beginning of the experiment, then expose participants to one of two tasks intended to shape representations differently according to our model, and finally assess any potential change in representations. Crucially, the tasks used to measure representations differ in the amount that strategic, judgmental processes play a role. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 allow us to exclude the option that representations used in more perceptual tasks become biased categorically. The results of Experiment 4 make it likely that people strategically decide given the specific task context whether they use categorical information or not. One signature of representational change was however observed: category learning practice increased the perceptual sensitivity over and above mere exposure to the same stimuli.