Canada

Human social interactions require understanding and predict- ing other people’s behavior. A growing body of work has found that these inferences are structured around an assumption that agents act rationally and efficiently in space. While powerful, this view treats action understanding in a vacuum, ignoring that much social inference happens in the context of familiar, hierarchically structured events (e.g.: buying groceries, ordering in a restaurant). We propose that social and world knowledge is critical for efficiently interpreting behavior and test this idea through a simple block-building paradigm, where participants infer an agent’s sub-task (study 1a), next action (study 1b), and higher-level goal (study 1c), from very sparse observations. We compare these inferences against a Bayesian model of goal inference that exploits task structure to interpret agents’ actions. This model fit participant judgments with high quantitative accuracy, highlighting how world knowledge may help support social inferences in a rich and powerful way.
Keywords: Computational modeling; Social cognition

CogSci 2022

Hierarchical task knowledge constrains and simplifies action understanding

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This study investigates how L2 learners achieve the ‘good-enough’ comprehension in Korean. We focus on a suffixal passive construction, given the scarcity of this construction in the L2 textbook input. Results from acceptability judgement and self-paced reading tasks suggest two aspects of L2 comprehension. First, L1 and L2 comprehension do not qualitatively differ regarding ‘good-enough’ processing: the L2 processor utilises both heuristic and algorithmic parsing to reduce the burden of work at hand. Second, the divergence of L1 and L2 processing behaviours during comprehension may originate from various factors around L2 learners (e.g., L2 input, L1–L2 interface, task types), which are assumed to anchor the noisier representations of L2 knowledge.

How ‘Good-Enough’ is L2 Sentence Comprehension? Evidence from Suffixal Passive Construction in Korean

Chinese phonology features a contrast between alveolar and retroflex places of articulation, particularly in the standard Beijing variety of Mandarin. However, studies have shown that ‘outer-circle’ varieties (such as in Taiwan and Singapore) have a less clear contrast, termed “deretroflexion”, which results in poor contrastive perception for Taiwan Mandarin speakers. However, our previous study did not find this deficit in Singapore Mandarin speakers. In this preregistered follow-up study, we investigate how Singapore Mandarin speakers perceive the alveolar-retroflex contrast and examine if differences in perception are linked to Mandarin understanding proficiency. Our results (N = 62) reveal that while Singapore Mandarin speakers perceive an alveolar-retroflex phoneme contrast, there is a wide range of differences in ambiguity resolution across the alveolar-retroflex acoustic spectrum. We did not find a link between perceptual differences and Mandarin understanding proficiency, indicating that highly ‘tuned’ perceptual sensitivity is not needed for high Mandarin understanding proficiency.

Perception of a phoneme contrast in Singaporean English-Mandarin bilingual adults: A preregistered study of individual differences

A considerable number of studies have investigated whether speaking two languages improves executive function. Results, while controversial, have highlighted the influence of second language proficiency on the emergence of these cognitive advantages. To date, few studies have investigated whether other related linguistic experiences, such as dialect use, confer similar advantages. The diverse range of dialects found across the People’s Republic of China provide ideal conditions under which to explore this question. Using a heterogeneous sample of Mandarin-English bilingual, bidialectal young adults (n = 73), the present study investigated whether differences in self-reported dialect proficiency impacted on Simon Task performance. While results showed reduced Simon effects associated with higher reported dialect proficiency, it was a consequence of slower performance on congruent trials, not improved performance on incongruent trials. The observed reduction in facilitation from congruent trials associated with higher reported dialect proficiency suggests a cognitive disadvantage, but merits further investigation.

Chinese Dialect Proficiency and Executive Function: Evidence from the Simon Task

A widely researched question in bilingualism asks whether bilinguals’ vocabulary growth is equal to or lower than that of monolinguals. Some studies have found smaller vocabularies in bilingual toddlers than monolingual toddlers when comparing in one language, but others have found no significant group differences. We compared 12 to 32-month-old bilingual toddlers growing up in the UK with English and one additional language (AL) to age-matched UK English monolinguals. We evaluated both vocabulary size in English and conceptual vocabulary. Bilinguals’ English vocabulary sizes in both comprehension and production were significantly smaller than monolinguals’ after controlling for age and socioeconomic status. This was seen across bilinguals of different levels of language dominance. The bilingual lag in vocabulary size was smaller when calculated using conceptual vocabulary but still significant for both comprehension and production. We discuss the implications for measurements of bilingual toddlers’ vocabulary size.

UK bilingual toddlers show a lag in vocabulary size relative to monolinguals in both comprehension and production

Orthographic depth, the consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, influences brain activation in multilinguals’ first (L1) and second language (L2). The intrinsic functional connectivity of cross-language transfer was investigated between two groups of multilinguals, those whose L2 orthography is deeper than their L1 (S-to-D group) and those whose L2 orthography is shallower than their L1 (D-to-S group). We focused on two seed regions: the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) and the left posterior supramarginal gyrus (pSMG). stronger connectivity was found between the left pSMG and the right precuneus in multilinguals who spoke at least three languages (trilinguals) compared to those who only spoke two languages (bilinguals). Follow-up analyses revealed that this difference was driven by stronger intrinsic connectivity in D-to-S trilinguals compared to the S-to-D trilinguals. Multilinguals’ intrinsic functional connectivity is shaped by the orthographic distance between L1 and L2, as well as differences between bilingualism and trilingualism.

Functional Connectivity Differences between Trilinguals and Bilinguals: The Role of Orthographic Depth

In polarized political climates, debate is ubiquitous but minds rarely change. This raises a question: what causes people to update their views? Recent work has shown that people are persuaded more by experienced-based explanations rather than factual ones. Yet, facts surely play (or ought to play) an important role in political discourse. Is it possible to leverage the persuasive power of personal experiences without sacrificing factual information? In Experiments 1 and 2, we replicate and build on previous findings showing that people who offer experienced-based (vs. fact-based) explanations are perceived as more rational and worthy of respect. In Experiment 3, we show that more complex explanations combining factual information with personal examples reveal more nuanced results. Collectively, this work sheds new light on how experienced-based and fact-based evidence can be used to persuade.

Willingness to Interact Increases When Opponents Offer Specific Evidence

High-level cognition relies on the ability to determine what the relevant possibilities are in the face of incomplete information. For example, causal judgments require reasoning about the relevant counterfactual possibilities in the context in which the actual events occurred. Similarly, to judge that someone is morally responsible for a given action requires assessing what other actions were available to the agent in the context they acted within. Defining the set of relevant possibilities in a context---what we call the contextual 'modal space'---is computationally intractable both because such contexts are not well defined and because there are indefinitely many possibilities that one could consider. Interestingly though, high-level judgments that require reasoning over such possibilities are often made quickly and effortlessly, suggesting that they may recruit a heuristic or implicit representation of the contextually relevant modal space. In this paper we (1) introduce a sampling approach for empirically describing contextual modal spaces, (2) find that modal spaces are shaped by statistical and prescriptive normality, (3) demonstrate that the contextual modal spaces play a domain general role in high-level cognition in the sense that the same modal space is recruited across different domains of reasoning, and finally (4) we provide evidence that such judgments are made on the basis of heuristic representations of the contextual modal space rather than on-line sampling of relevant alternatives.

Domain-general modal spaces play a foundational role throughout high-level cognition

Consider a causal claim like “Tom caused the train delay.” Previous research has shown that the extent to which Tom is seen to act intentionally (i.e., through his own agency) affects the extent to which people agree with this claim. But is this effect of perceived agency a unique phenomenon to causal judgments? Two experiments suggest this may not be the case. Study 1 finds that perceived agency affects people’s under- standing of both causal and non-causal events. Study 2 then finds that while perceptions of agency were similarly involved in people’s understanding of causal and non-causal events, they affected only cases where these events were brought about by animate agents (e.g., people). These results thus suggest that perceptions of agency may have a much more general influence in how people understand events involving agents, and therefore in how they understand the sentences that describe them. We discuss implications for causal cognition, broader research in agency, and the intersections between both and linguistics.

No privileged link between intentionality and causation: Generalizable effects of agency in language

The well-known CRT is a test designed to measure a person’s ‘cognitive reflection’ and used as a predictor of decision making ability. Within the literature, however there is a growing consensus that it shares the majority of its variance with numerical and other cognitive abilities and thus the question increasingly asked is whether it has predictive power beyond existing measures. That is, is there something unique captured by the CRT? This study examines the CRT in parallel with a wide range of individual differences measures reflecting aspects of intelligence (8 CHC broad ability factors), personality (the Big 5 and 30 facets), other decision styles (5 measures) and attention (12 measures covering six aspects of attention). Results indicate that the CRT is, primarily, a cognitive measure, strongly linked to fluid, crystallized and quantitative ability but may also be capturing some distinct aspects of attention relating to the ability to ignore distractors.

What is the CRT? Intelligence, Personality, Decision Style or Attention?

People generally prefer functional explanations over mechanistic ones. Why? One possibility is that people value functional information more. But another possibility is that people don't have an overall preference for functional explanations; Instead, people might just expect this information to precede mechanistic information. Here, we ask whether people have preferences for the order of functional and mechanistic information in explanations. In a first set of studies, we show that adults do in fact prefer that functional information precedes mechanistic. In a second set of studies, we show that people have a more general preference for explanations to address the whole before parts. Finally, we show that the preference for function to precede mechanism may be related to the broader whole-before-parts preference.

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How ‘Good-Enough’ is L2 Sentence Comprehension? Evidence from Suffixal Passive Construction in Korean

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