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Mechanisms underlying children’s attempts to solve referential ambiguity have been described as a process-of-elimination or a novelty bias. We measured 2.5-year-old children’s pointing and eye movements during referent selection in ostensive and non-ostensive naming contexts. Compared to familiar targets, for novel targets, looking proportions were lower and children took longer to point; and looked significantly more at competitors before focusing on targets, indicating more time spent considering competitors. Ostensive naming also predicted better delayed retention, but retention dropped significantly in the non-ostensive condition. Greater novel target looking during referent selection predicted better immediate retention for the ostensive condition, but better delayed retention for the non-ostensive condition. Thus, in contexts with minimal encoding support, a focus on novel targets strengthens word-object associations over time. For toddlers, referent selection is best explained as both a process-of-elimination and a novelty bias; and the latter supports encoding which facilitates long-term retention of novel words.

CogSci 2023

Do Toddlers Rely On a Process-of-Elimination or a Novelty Bias in Ambiguous Word Learning Contexts?

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

We conducted two experiments to investigate what triggers sarcasm between close friends and whether the factors prompting sarcastic comments in production are also shared with an external observer. In Experiment 1, participants freely reacted to different types of situations in written form and rated their perception of the given contexts, the level of sarcasm of their responses, and the intentions behind their responses. Results showed that the intentions to say clever things or to mock the addressee in a hilarious or friendly manner triggered a higher number of sarcastic answers. In contrast, the intentions to be direct or be nice to the addressee triggered less sarcastic answers. In Experiment 2, a new group of participants rated the responses collected in Experiment 1 on the same dimensions. Overall, we observed similar patterns in both experiments. However, the intentions to criticize the addressee softly and to say clever things were stronger predictors of sarcasm for the observers than for the producer of the statement.

Intended and Perceived Sarcasm Between Close Friends: What Triggers Sarcasm and What Gets Conveyed?

The meanings of iconic signs are usually not easily accessible to sign-naive people. However, most previous studies asked participants to guess the meaning of iconic signs in isolation and without any contextual cues. We ask whether signs whose form is based on more cross-linguistically common underlying motivations are easier to interpret than signs based on less common underlying motivations. Since recent research suggests that iconicity is a relationship of resemblance between the signifier and the signified that is instantiated contextually, we also provide participants with a contextual cue (in the form of a word). We find that interpretability of iconic signs does correlate with cross-linguistic frequency of the underlying motivation of the sign.

Transparency in Sign Language Animal Signs

How do people prepare for an upcoming distracting stimulus? It has been recently suggested that not only observers do not inhibit distractors before their appearance, but they are rather more alert at those moments. Interestingly, a similar effect was found when the observers were expecting a task-relevant, informative stimulus, supporting a mandatory "attend-all" mechanism. However, thus far, the preparation effect was only demonstrated in speeded dot-probe tasks and it is yet to be determined whether preparing for distractors merely facilitates motor preparation or whether it has other outcomes, such as modifying early perceptual processes. Replacing the dot-probe task with a four-letter difficult memory task revealed that memory encoding was facilitated when the letters appeared when informative stimuli were expected. In contrast, there was no benefit, nor cost, for memory encoding when distracting stimuli were expected. These results indicate that the preparation effect is more flexible than thought.

The consequences of preparing for informative or distracting stimuli

Perceptual-motor tasks offer redundant solutions to achieve a goal. However, not all solutions are equally robust to error-producing variability and thus, skill learning requires the search for behaviors that are error-tolerant. Throwing a ball to hit a target is a skill that has been studied via the “skittles” task, a simplified 2-dimensional throwing environment. This paper investigated whether participants learning the skittles task benefit from task scaffolding via the placements of targets provided by either a human confederate posing as a teacher, or by the participant. These groups were compared to a third sample who received an unstructured curriculum consisting of randomly placed targets. The results demonstrate that participants in the unstructured training condition were better able to perceive the task’s underlying solution geometry, compared to scaffolding provided by a human. Future work will explore methods to design training curricula that are more efficient in facilitating perceptual-motor skill development.

Influence of Curriculum Structure on Early Skill Learning during a Virtual Throwing Task

Response inhibition—our ability to suppress actions—is achieved through coordinated reactive and proactive processes that may recruit different neurophysiological mechanisms. Here we adapted a two-step continuous performance task in which the decision to respond depends on a combination of an initial context cue and a subsequent target probe. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we mapped changes in corticospinal excitability and inhibition, providing indices of reactive and proactive processes that influence the state of the motor system in the lead-up to initiating or suppressing a response. We found distinct changes in corticospinal excitability at critical timepoints when participants were preparing in advance to inhibit a response (during the cue) and while inhibiting a response (during the probe). Motor system activity during early timepoints correlated with behavioural indices of proactive capacity and predicted whether participants would later successfully inhibit their response. Implications for theories of inhibitory control will be discussed.

Distinct patterns of proactive and reactive inhibition in the human motor system

The ability to discriminate between large and small quantities is a core aspect of basic numerical competence in both humans and animals. In this work, we examine the extent to which the state-of-the-art neural networks designed for vision exhibit this basic ability. Motivated by studies in animal and infant numerical cognition, we use the numerical bisection procedure to test number discrimination in different families of neural architectures. Our results suggest that vision-specific inductive biases are helpful in numerosity discrimination, as models with such biases have lowest test errors on the task, and often have psychometric curves that qualitatively resemble those of humans and animals performing the task. However, even the strongest models, as measured on standard metrics of performance, fail to discriminate quantities in transfer experiments with differing training and testing conditions, indicating that such inductive biases might not be sufficient.

Evaluating Visual Number Discrimination in Deep Neural Networks

Recent work in computer vision and cognitive reasoning has given rise to an increasing adoption of the Violation-of-Expectation (VoE) paradigm in synthetic datasets. Inspired by infant psychology, researchers are now evaluating a model’s ability to label scenes as either expected or surprising with knowledge of only expected scenes. However, existing VoE-based 3D datasets in physical reasoning provide mainly vision data with little to no heuristics or inductive biases. Cognitive models of physical reasoning reveal infants create high-level abstract representations of objects and interactions. Capitalizing on this knowledge, we established a benchmark to study physical reasoning by curating a novel large-scale synthetic 3D VoE dataset armed with ground-truth heuristic labels of causally relevant features and rules. To validate our dataset in five event categories of physical reasoning, we benchmarked and analyzed human performance. We also proposed the Object File Physical Reasoning Network (OFPR-Net) which exploits the dataset's novel heuristics to outperform our baseline and ablation models. The OFPR-Net is also flexible in learning an alternate physical reality, showcasing its ability to learn universal causal relationships in physical reasoning to create systems with better interpretability.

A Benchmark for Modeling Violation-of-Expectation in Physical Reasoning Across Event Categories

In cognitive science, we often assume that human learning is characterized by a limited capacity to represent the information relevant for a given task. We argue that excess capacity --- using more representational resources than needed for a task at hand --- is a plausible alternative paradigm for the study of human learning. Through a review of recent results from machine learning, we show that excess capacity is consistent with high predictive ability. Through review of cognitive science literature, we demonstrate that excess capacity learning can account for a range of empirical phenomena, such as humans' simultaneous yet apparently contradictory tendency to both memorize observations and capture higher-level patterns in them, as well as a tendency to learn complex and redundant solutions to the tasks. We conclude by discussing promising directions for future inquiry under the excess capacity learning paradigm.

Excess Capacity Learning

Efficient representation of our motor memories is essential for developing and deploying the plethora of human motor skills we use every day, yet there is little cohesion in understanding how these representations are organized and develop over time. In this study, we developed a novel behavioral paradigm aimed at probing experience-dependent representational change of a motor skill with training. Across several experiments, participants trained to coordinate novel finger configurations in a speeded reaction time task and performed a similarity judgment task to probe for changes in the psychological representation of the recently acquired skill. We sought to determine if learned representations of action can be found through behavioral methods and if such representations are organized based on similarity and independent reorganization patterns predicted by theories of sensorimotor neuroscience. Together, we propose a novel behavioral measure complementary to neuroimaging capable of observing human representational change of a motor skill over time.

Experience-Dependent Representational Change During Motor Skill Learning

In cognitive science, research about mental imagery is often limited to visual, often overlooking olfactory imagery. In this study, we examined the relationship between beauty and olfactory imagery evoked by haiku. We used an odor priming that is commonly used in cognitive science to measure olfaction so that we could examine the effects of environmental aromas on the aesthetic experience. 44 participants were asked to evaluate 30 haikus. Half of them were exposed to a cypress aroma while the other half had no aroma exposure. The results showed that olfactory imagery during haiku appreciation positively influenced the beauty of haiku, and higher olfactory imagery ability led to a deeper immersion in the haiku. Odor priming did not affect evaluations, but it did affect gaze bias as measured by eye tracking. This is the first time to demonstrate the influence of olfactory imagery on aesthetic evaluation in psychology of aesthetics.

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Intended and Perceived Sarcasm Between Close Friends: What Triggers Sarcasm and What Gets Conveyed?