Netherlands

Sensation-seeking (SS) is characterised by a proclivity for intense experiences with a disregard for potential aversive consequences. While SS is implicated as a vulnerability factor in various mental disorders, the underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Recent approaches propose an alternative perspective, suggesting that SS may be linked to highly explorative, and therefore risky, behaviours driven by a preference for informative environments. To probe this hypothesis, we reanalysed a dataset where participants chose to self-administer or avoid mild electric stimulation (MES) in an economic decision-making task. Contrary to previous interpretations associating higher sensation-seeking with the positive economic value of experiencing MES, Bayesian models of learning reveal an alternative account: sensation-seekers are more attuned to information about stimuli-shock contingencies. Specifically, high sensation-seeking individuals are less avoidant of information about the possibility of a shock, supporting the idea that sensation-seeking is linked to a preference for informative environments.

**Authors:**

Ern Wong: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca; Tobias Hauser: University of Tübingen; Pietro Pietrini: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca; Charley M Wu: University of Tubingen

CogSci 2024

Shock to Thrill: Linking Sensation and Information Seeking

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The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Scatterplots are commonly used data visualizations to depict relationships between variables. There are inconsistent findings in the literature regarding how outliers in scatterplots affect trendline estimates. Correll & Heer (2017) found no difference for trendline estimations between the no-outlier and the outlier conditions consisting of a separate group of items creating an outlier cluster. However, Ciccione et al. (2022) showed that single outlier points might be included in trendline estimations. To investigate whether an outlier cluster was perceived as a salient and separate unit and thus excluded from the remaining data points, we directly compared the effects of single and multiple outliers on trendline estimations, controlling for correlation strength, outlier position and trend direction. Participants drew trendlines. We found that participants included single outliers more than they’ve included outlier clusters into the trendlines; this pattern was similar across all other control variables; suggesting grouping might play a role in this process.

**Authors:**

Özgür Saydır: Koç University; Aysecan Boduroglu: Koc University

Comparing the effect of single outliers and outlier clusters on trend estimation in scatterplots

Problem-solving and sequential decision-making research have a long-standing tradition of utilizing various tasks in experiments to gain insights into different aspects of human behavior. Choosing the right task for investigating these aspects is crucial since human solution approaches depend on features and dynamics of tasks. For a complete theory of sequential decision-making, we must consider this relationship between behavior and task features. We developed a taxonomy and identified nine structural task features that allow us to describe the relationship between tasks and the behavior in the tasks. We categorize sequential decision-making tasks and show how their features link to the demands on solution approaches that leverage their structure. We argue that this taxonomic view on tasks can guide research processes as it can help choose the right task for a research question at hand and can be used to relate the results of behavioral studies to each other.

**Authors:**

Inga Ibs: Technical University Darmstadt, Germany; Claire Ott: TU Darmstadt; Constantin Rothkopf: Technical University of Darmstadt; Frank Jäkel: TU Darmstadt

Task Diversity and Human Decision-Making: A Taxonomic View

The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem originally of interest to mathematicians, but more recently used also in the context of cognitive and comparative psychology. Humans perform extremely well on spatial versions of this task, despite its mathematical complexity, making it an appealing tool for the study of spatial and mathematical cognition. We presented participants with three versions of a TSP in navigational space; one that could be solved visually, one with visual distractors, and one that also required the use of memory. The task was preceded by instructions that promoted either a ‘growth mindset’ or ‘fixed mindset’ approach. Results indicated that performance on this navigational version of the TSP is generally good, though not quite as efficient as solutions reported in the traditional pencil-and-paper version of the task. The effects of visual distractors and of memory requirements were greater in problems with a larger number of targets. Instructions had no significant effect on performance.

**Authors:**

Rachel Blaser: University of San Diego; Alexandra Lockwood: University of San Diego; Cosette Fox: Holy Cross College

Performance on the Traveling Salesperson Problem: The role of perceptual cues and theories of intelligence

The mechanisms underpinning probability matching remain a disputed topic. Common explanations of the effect contrast a suboptimal resource-allocation view with a misapplied optimal pattern searching approach. We suggest an alternative framing of probability matching as the result of a Bayesian sampling process involving people simulating a mental sequence of possible outcomes. We designed a behavioural experiment where people are presented with information about a six-sided die with four sides of one colour and two of another, framing three distinct within-subject subtasks. The first two involved predicting the next outcome, with and without feedback. The third explicitly asked participants to mentally sample outcomes by randomly generating sequences of rolls from the die. Consistent with a Bayesian sampling process, the statistics of the sequence, such as the higher chance of selecting the maximising response on the first trial, were similar across the subtasks. We then quantitatively fit the model to these tasks.

**Authors:**

Christian Tsvetkov: University of Warwick; Haijiang Yan: University of Warwick; Adam Sanborn: University of Warwick

Modelling probability matching as an approximate Bayesian sampling process

Human memory has various deficits such as forgetting. Such deficits are generally regarded as human irrationality. However, superficial deficits in human cognition can be understood differently as rational aspects in terms of the interaction between human cognition and the environmental feature. Based on this idea, the present study analyzed the nature of memory-based judgment errors. We hypothesized that systematic errors are produced when ecologically rational inferences based on statistical regularity in the environment are performed in uncertain situations. To verify this hypothesis, we proposed a benchmark for a rational inference model of memory-based judgments under uncertainty, and tested it by analyzing real-world data, computer simulations, and a behavioral experiment. We found that the error patterns participants showed in the memory-based judgment were consistent with those predicted by the rational inference benchmark. These findings provide new insights into the errors produced by memory-based judgments from the rational side of cognition.

**Authors:**

Hidehito Honda: Otemon Gakuin University; Masaru Shirasuna: Otemon Gakuin University; Jun Kawaguchi: Nagoya University; Toshihiko Matsuka: Chiba University; Kazuhiro Ueda: The University of Tokyo

On the ecologically rational inference and memory-based judgment errors

What sorts of graphical formats best convey effect size and degree of certainty of a finding? Confidence intervals are commonly used to show uncertainty, yet lay people and experts fail to correctly interpret their meaning. There has been a recent push to present individual data points rather than only presenting aggregated summary statistics (e.g., means, confidence intervals, lines of best fit). But it is unclear how well people can aggregate raw data presented in a graphical format. Across two studies, we presented participants with hypothetical study outcomes of two independent groups in three graph styles: dot plots, mean with 95% confidence interval (CI) plots, combined plots, and bee plots. We asked participants to make judgments about the effect size using the Common Language Effect Size or Bayes Factors. Participants were more likely to underestimate effect sizes and Bayes Factors for dot plots and bee plots compared to mean + 95% CI plots and combined plots. These findings suggest that people have trouble making statistical inferences when presented with raw data points in graphs.

**Authors:**

Sara Jaramillo: University of Pittsburgh; Benjamin Rottman: University of Pittsburgh

Can People Accurately Draw Statistical Inferences from Dot Plots?

Citizens in a democracy must navigate an increasingly dense information landscape. Regulation can aid this navigation by mandating disclosures of the source and nature of political campaign material. In many countries, legislators are increasing transparency requirements for online advertising in particular. The current paper looks at how and if citizens use these proposed disclosures as signals for specific dimensions of trustworthiness and intent of advertisers. This paper specifically investigates whether such requirements uniquely disadvantage unknown political campaigners, increasing the barriers they face when communicating with citizens. The findings of this survey experiment support that political campaigners are not disadvantaged by such requirements, even when disclaimers disclose micro-targeting information. Furthermore, there is some support that ‘paid for by’ disclaimers, if they are processed, can benefit advertisers by reducing perceptions of manipulation and increasing perceived trustworthiness.

**Authors:**

Hazel Clare Gordon: University of Sheffield; Tom Stafford: University of Sheffield; Katharine Dommett: University of Sheffield

A Cue to Trust? Investigating the Impact of Political Advertising Transparency Disclaimers on Citizen Trust Evaluations

Emotions regulate social interactions from early in ontogeny, but are difficult to assess in pre-verbal or just-verbal children. Previous studies have used body posture as a measure of emotion expressions, employing depth-sensor imaging cameras (e.g., Kinect) in laboratory environments. Advances in artificial intelligence now allow researchers to track posture keypoints from existing video recordings taken with any camera. The studies reported here explore the use of OpenPose to capture children’s emotional expressions. In Study 1, we analysed posture data from previous studies and found that children’s expressed valence was positively related to changes in their upper-body expansion whereas expressed arousal was related to overall levels of movement. In Study 2, we asked children (n = 64, aged 5 to 10 years) to recall emotional episodes of ‘happiness’, ‘sadness’, ‘pride’ and ‘shame’. There were no effects of specific emotion categories on changes in children’s posture, but exploratory analyses revealed that recalling positive emotions yielded greater changes in upper-body expansion compared to negative emotions. Together, the findings suggest that the valence and arousal of expressed emotions can be captured using OpenPose. Findings are discussed with respect to the question of how children conceptualize emotions.

**Authors:**

Marlene Försterling: University of Oxford; Stella Gerdemann: Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Brian Parkinson: University of Oxford; Robert Hepach: University of Oxford

Exploring the expression of emotions in children’s body posture using OpenPose

Space helps us understand abstract math concepts (Winter et al., 2015). Mental rotation is often studied for its predictive role in math development (Casey et al., 2015; Geer et al., 2019). The association between spatial location knowledge and math development remains overlooked despite the significance of left-right body space encoding in numbers (SNARC effect, Dehaene et al., 1993). This ongoing study investigates the link between preschoolers' mental rotation skills, spatial location knowledge, and various mathematical abilities (symbolic, non-symbolic, counting). Preliminary analyses (N= 20; Mage= 4;6) using R showed a significant relationship between spatial location knowledge and symbolic math (r= .43; p= .05) and counting skills (r= .51; p= .02), while no such association is found between mental rotation skills and mathematical abilities (all ps> .05). These findings demonstrate a strong link between spatial location knowledge, but not mental rotation, and development of preschoolers’ mathematical skills.

**Authors:**

Hüseyin Yalçıner: Middle East Technical University; Dilay Z. Karadoller: Koç University

Relationship Between Spatial and Number Development: Spatial Location Knowledge but not Mental Rotation relates to Numerical Skills of Preschoolers

There are two foundational assumptions that underlie research in interactivity. First, that external scaffolds should support problem-solving and other cognitive activities and second, that human agents naturally engage in this form of offloading. We aimed to test whether participants would naturally engage with external resources without prompting in four types of simple verbal problems and whether this was affected by levels of expertise or the experience of impasse. We found that very few people naturally engaged external scaffolds apart from with mathematical problems where it had a benefit. There was no difference in expertise in problem solving between those who did and those who did not use external props and nor was there a significant difference in the proportion of people using external scaffolds as a function of experiencing impasse. These results suggest that researchers in interactivity need to focus on how and when interactivity is both engaged and provides a benefit.

**Authors:**

Wendy Ross: London Metropolitan; Selene Arfini: University of Pavia

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