Canada

Quantifying the meaning of a word is a complex challenge. Humans can encode semantic information along a large and diverse range of semantic dimensions for any given word. Whilst a number of studies have applied a range of techniques to quantify word meaning along specific dimensions, little work has focussed on the socio-semantic dimensions of meaning. Here, we present data that quantifies the socio-semantic representations of 2,700 Czech words along the dimensions of gender, location, political, valence and age. We also demonstrate the utility of the data set by calculating an estimate of socio-semantic similarity between all words, which can be used to identify words that are either proximally close or distant in socio-semantic space.

CogSci 2022

Quantifying the Socio-semantic Representations of Words

Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
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The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





poster

Learning to write is characterized by bottom-up mimicking of characters and top-down writing from memory. We introduce a CNN-RNN model that implements both pathways: It can (i) directly write a letter by generating a motion trajectory given an image, (ii) first classify the character in the image and then determine its motion trajectory `from memory', or (iii) use a combination of both pathways. The results show that, in one-shot and few-shot learning, the model profits from different combinations of the pathways: The generation of different character variants works best when the top-down is supported by the bottom-up pathway. Refilling occluded images of efficiently learned characters works best when using the top-down pathway alone. Overall, the architecture implies that a weighted merge of bottom-up and top-down information into a latent, generative code fosters the development of compositional encodings, which can be reused in efficient learning tasks.

Efficient learning through compositionality in a CNN-RNN model consisting of a bottom-up and a top-down pathway

Intelligent agents are capable of transfer and generalization. This flexibility in adapting to new tasks and environments often relies on representation learning and replay. Among these algorithms, successor representation learning and memory replay offer biologically plausible solutions. However, replay prioritization algorithms remain largely limited to value prediction errors. Here we propose PARSR, Priority-Adjusted Replay for Successor Representations, to address this caveat. Decoupling learning of the environment dynamics and rewards, PARSR can use prediction errors from either representation learning or values to prioritize memory replay. We compare PARSR to SR-Dyna, Dyna-Q, and a number of state of the art algorithms using replay and successor representations in cognitive neuroscience. We find that PARSR is able to reproduce human behavior in a number of revaluation tasks while also representing a performance improvement over SR-Dyna, its closest counterpart.

Priority-Adjusted Replay for Successor Representations

This paper describes an initial cognitive framework that captures the reasoning involved in scientific data analyses, drawing from close collaborations with scientists in different domains over many years. The framework aims to automate data analysis for science. In doing so, existing large repositories of data could be continuously and systematically analyzed by machines, updating findings and potentially making new discoveries as new data becomes available. The framework consists of a cycle with six phases: formulating an investigation, initiating the investigation, getting data, analyzing data, aggregating results, and integrating findings. The paper also describes our implementation of this framework and illustrates it with examples from different science domains.

Towards Capturing Scientific Reasoning to Automate Data Analysis

The introduction of deep learning and CNNs to image recognition problems has led to state-of-the-art classification accuracy. However, CNNs exacerbate the issue of algorithm explainability due to deep learning’s black box nature. Numerous explainable AI (XAI) algorithms have been developed that provide developers insight into the operations of deep learning. We aim to make XAI explanations more user-centric by introducing modifications to existing XAI algorithms based on cognitive theory. The goal of this research is to yield intuitive XAI explanations that more closely resemble explanations given by experts in the domain of bird watching. Using an existing base XAI algorithm, we conducted two user studies with expert bird watchers and found that our novel averaged and contrasting XAI algorithms are significantly preferred over the base XAI algorithm for bird identification.

User-Centric Enhancements to Explainable AI Algorithms for Image Classification

We demonstrate how medical-image classification decisions can be denoised by aggregating decisions on similar images. In our algorithm, the final decision on a target image is cancerous if a percentage t of the k most similar images are cancerous, else it is not cancerous. Similarity between images is calculated as the distance between representations from an artificial neural network. We vary k and t for novice and expert participants using data from Trueblood et al. (2018) and Trueblood et al. (2021). We show that increasing k improves performance for novices, with their performance approaching that of experts. We also show that the algorithm is biased towards identifying cancerous cells, which is reflected in the representational space. The percentage t allows greater control over sensitivity and specificity and can be used to debias decisions. This algorithm is less effective for experts, partially explained by them giving similar responses on similar images.

Representational Smoothing to Improve Medical Image Decision Making

Cognitive theories for reasoning are about understanding how humans come to conclusions from a set of premises. Starting from hypothetical thoughts, we are interested which are the implications behind basic everyday language and how do we reason with them. A widely studied topic is whether cognitive theories can account for typical reasoning tasks and be confirmed by own empirical experiments. This paper takes a different view and we do not propose a theory, but instead take findings from the literature and show how these, formalized as cognitive principles within a logical framework, can establish a quantitative notion of reasoning, which we call plausibility. For this purpose, we employ techniques from non-monotonic reasoning and computer science, namely, a solving paradigm called answer set programming (ASP). Finally, we can fruitfully use plausibility reasoning in ASP to test the effects of an existing experiment and explain different majority responses.

A Quantitative Symbolic Approach to Individual Human Reasoning

A central component of the predictive coding theoretical framework concerns the comparison between predictions and sensory decoding. In the probabilistic setting, this takes the form of assessing the similarity or distance between probability distributions. However, such similarity or distance measures are not associated with explicit probabilistic models, making their assumptions implicit. In this paper, we explore an original variation on probabilistic coherence variables; we define a probabilistic component, that we call a "Bayesian comparator", that mathematically yields a particular similarity measure. A geometrical analogy suggests two variants of this measure. We apply these similarity measures to simulate the comparison of known, predicted patterns to patterns from sensory decoding, first in a simple, illustrative model, and second, in a previous model of visual word recognition. Experimental results suggest that the variant that is scaled by the norms of both predicted and perceived probability distributions yields better robustness and more desirable dynamics.

Bayesian comparators: a probabilistic modeling tool for similarity evaluation between predicted and perceived patterns

The ability to infer general characteristics of populations from specific instances is critical for reasoning. While there is evidence of this capacity in infancy, prior work has not examined children’s ability to use these second-order inferences to make predictions about future outcomes. In the current study, 3-year-olds observed balls drawn at random from two containers. In one sample each ball was a different color. The other sample consisted of balls of only one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2) colors. Children were asked which of the containers was more likely to contain a novel colored ball. A significant majority of children chose the more variable sample’s container. This suggests that 3-year-olds are not only able to make inferences about hidden populations from the variability of observed samples, but also use those inferences to reason beyond their direct experience.

Reasoning from Samples to Populations: Children Use Variability Information to Predict Novel Outcomes

The "myside bias'' in evaluating arguments is an empirically well-confirmed phenomenon that consists of overweighting arguments that endorse one's beliefs or attack alternative beliefs while underweighting arguments that attack one's beliefs or defend alternative beliefs. This paper makes two contributions: First, it proposes a probabilistic model that adequately captures three salient features of myside bias in argument evaluation. Second, it provides a Bayesian justification of this model, thus showing that myside bias has a rational Bayesian explanation under certain conditions.

The Myside Bias in Argument Evaluation: A Bayesian Model

Previous work has demonstrated that relational responding in the Relational Match-to-Sample (RMTS) task can be improved compared to baseline by providing people with the opportunity to consider individual problem elements in isolation prior to receiving the full problem. However, it remains unclear whether the benefits of this intervention persist in its absence, or can be observed when a prior strategy has already been established to complete the task. To this end, we deployed a 2x2 mixed design, where presentation type was the within-subjects factor and order of presentation type was the between-subjects factor. The aims of this work were to gain further insight into the utility of isolated-focus as a means of promoting relational responding, and better understanding how processing of problem elements changes as a consequence of isolated-focus. We discuss the implications for pedagogical practices and extensions of this work to other materials and tasks.

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Efficient learning through compositionality in a CNN-RNN model consisting of a bottom-up and a top-down pathway

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