United States

Human learning is often motivated by self-imposed challenges, which guide behavior even in the absence of external rewards. Previous studies have shown that humans can use personal goals to “hack” the definition of reward, warranting an extension of the classic reinforcement learning framework to account for the flexible attribution of value to outcomes according to current goals. However, previous studies have shown that learning through goal-derived outcomes is less efficient than learning through more established reinforcers, such as numeric points. At least three possible explanations exist for this sort of impairment. First, such differences may be due to occasional lapses in executive function, which is required to encode and recognize goals, resulting in subsequent failure to update values accordingly. Second, the higher working memory load required to encode one-shot, novel stimuli as desirable outcomes may impair people’s ability to update and remember correct stimulus-reward associations. Third, a weaker commitment to arbitrary goals may result in dimmer appetitive signals. By extending existing experimental paradigms that include learning from both familiar rewards and abstract, goal-contingent outcomes and combining them with computational modeling techniques, we find evidence for each of the proposed accounts. While other factors might also play a role in this process, our results provide an initial indication of the key elements supporting (or impairing) the attribution of rewarding properties to otherwise neutral stimuli, which enable humans to better pursue arbitrarily set goals.


CogSci 2023

Human hacks and bugs in the recruitment of reward systems for goal achievement

technical paper

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>
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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.

Why do babies look longer when they see an object pass through a solid wall, or a person act inefficiently, during violation-of-expectation (VOE) studies? Here we test two non-mutually exclusive hypotheses: (i) VOE involves domain-general processes, like visual prediction error, and curiosity about the source of surprise. (ii) VOE involves domain-specific processes, like prediction error over distinctively physical and psychological expectations (objects fall; agents behave rationally). In a pre-registered experiment, we scanned 32 adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they watched videos of agents and objects, adapted from infant behavioral research. Early visual regions responded equally to surprising and expected events in both domains, providing evidence against domain-general visual prediction error. Some multiple demand regions, that are engaged when people deploy goal-directed attention, responded more to surprising events from both domains, providing evidence for domain-general endogenous attention. Domain-specific regions, that prefer stimuli involving agents vs objects more broadly, showed similar preferences for the current videos of agents and objects. One region implicated in physical reasoning responded selectively to unexpected events from the physical domain, providing evidence for domain-specific physical prediction error. Thus, in adult brains, both domain-specific and high-level domain-general regions encode violation-of-expectation involving agents and objects, paving the way towards future developmental work.


Domain-specific and domain-general neural responses to surprising psychological and physical events

This paper presents a method for reproducing a simple central pattern generator (CPG) using a modified Echo State Network (ESN). Conventionally, the dynamical reservoir needs to be damped to stabilize and preserve memory. However, we find that a reservoir that develops oscillatory activity without any external excitation can mimic the behaviour of a simple CPG in biological systems. We define the specific neuron ensemble required for generating oscillations in the reservoir and demonstrate how adjustments to the leaking rate, spectral radius, topology, and population size can increase the probability of reproducing these oscillations. The results of the experiments, conducted on the time series simulation tasks, demonstrate that the ESN is able to generate the desired waveform without any input. This approach offers a promising solution for the development of bio-inspired controllers for robotic systems.

Generating oscillation activity with Echo State Network to mimic the behaviour of a simple central pattern generator

According to the embodied approach to cognition, perception and action are tightly intertwined, as perception is for action and is guided by action. To better understand what this view implies behaviorally, we studied how active movement and intentionality during perceptual exploration affect perceptual accuracy. Participants explored two-dimensional objects using a sensory substitution device, then reported their object size estimates. We manipulated 1) their control over exploratory movements as being either Active (control present) or Passive (control absent) and 2) their knowledge of the task goals, being either Specific (task-focused) or Generic. We found no difference between the Active and Passive conditions but significantly higher perceptual accuracy in Specific Intention trials compared to Generic Intention ones. These results clarify the nature of ''active'' perception and contribute to the growing body of evidence that ''higher level'' cognitive goals shape how we dynamically sample even ''low level'' sensory information from the world.


Uncovering the Role of Intention in Active and Passive Perception

Human cognition is shaped by our bodies and actions. The influence of embodiment on cognition is particularly crucial during early development. Recent evidence shows that infants use actions to accomplish cognitive and social tasks that may later be solved internally. In our study, we propose that a sensorimotor mechanism to hand-eye coordination is through a full path from manual action, to visual saliency, and to visual attention. To provide a rigorous test of this pathway, we analyzed multimodal behavioral data collected from parent-infant toy play. We focused on linking infants’ manual actions with visual properties in the infant’s view and attention. Further, we extended our analyses to quantify the effects of manual actions on one’s own visual attention, infant’s actions on parent attention, and parent’s actions on infant attention. Results suggest that both infants’ and parents’ actions create visual saliency of objects to support visual attention and joint attention.

Using manual actions to create visual saliency: an outside-in solution to sustained attention and joint attention

This paper presents interdisciplinary and participatory research conducted with laryngectomees with an aim to widen research paradigms for cognitive sciences. Studying daily communication in an interactive context of people living without larynx, we put special emphasis on methodology combining engaged epistemology with ethnographic fieldwork, novel in the domain of this specific perturbation. Results valuable for designers, therapists and research participants themselves demonstrate that the greater awareness is needed of i) influences of anatomical and physiological adaptations on communication and social relations, ii) multimodal and context-dependent alternative strategies of conversation, iii) the crucial role of participants’ agency. We claim that some of our unexpected observations were possible, because of choosing the research approach that extended our epistemological capacities, namely by remaining open to novel interpretive categories and perspectives. We describe how dialogue between epistemologically engaged cognitive science and ethnographic fieldwork facilitated our understanding of the problem in a specific case.

Researching Communication in Context: Engaged Epistemology and Ethnographic Fieldwork Transforms Understanding of Interactions after Laryngectomy

The ability to generalize previous knowledge to new contexts is a key aspect of human cognition and relational learning. A well-known learning maxim is that breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. When examples vary in their surface features, this provides evidence that only the common relational structure is relevant. However, there is some evidence suggesting that the above maxim may not apply well in early relational learning. Here, we present a further test whether the maxim holds for young infants. We find that 3-month-old infants perform better with a narrow, perceptually similar training set than with a broad, perceptually variable set. We argue that lower-level perceptual similarities can prompt comparison processes that facilitate relational abstraction. These findings cohere with research arguing that without alignment, relational learning cannot occur.

The Less is More Paradox in Relational Learning

Previous work has demonstrated that relational preference in the Relational Match-to-Sample task can be improved compared to baseline by providing people with the opportunity to consider the target item in isolation prior to receiving the full triad. However, it remains unclear whether the benefits of these supports persist in their absence, or can be observed when a prior strategy has already been established to complete the task. To this end, we conducted two experiments using 2 (presentation-type) by 2 (order) mixed designs to examine the efficacy of two previously established task supports: isolated-focus and description. The aims of this work were to gain further insight into the utility of these supports as a means of promoting relational preference both when the supports are present and when they are absent. We discuss the implications for pedagogical practices and extensions of this work to other materials and tasks.


Sustaining Relational Preference in a Repeated Relational Match-to-Sample Task in the Absence of Task Support

Humans exhibit a remarkable ability to learn relational concepts from a small number of examples. On the Synthetic Visual Reasoning Test (SVRT), a collection of 23 problems that require learning relational concepts, people typically discover the relational rules from a handful of examples. An important question is what learning mechanisms underlie human ability to acquire relational concepts so quickly. Here, we examine whether analogical comparisons serve as an efficient strategy to facilitate learning with small samples. We conducted two experiments that varied the display format and problem order for the SVRT. When problems are presented in an easy-to-hard order, people learn more efficiently when prior examples are displayed in spatially-segregated sets, consistent with the use of analogical mapping as a learning strategy. However, when the problems are presented in a random order, the advantage of spatially-segregated displays is eliminated. We propose that when hard problems are encountered early in a problem sequence, analogical mapping becomes too demanding, causing people to fall back on a less efficient learning strategy that does not require the comparison of multiple examples.


Human Relational Concept Learning on the Synthetic Visual Reasoning Test

We propose a novel process account for how verb metaphors (e.g., The boat waddled) are understood: they are processed as analogical comparisons between the event denoted by the verb and an event schema activated by the noun. We first review evidence that this account is consistent with findings in analogical reasoning and with both literal and metaphoric sentence comprehension. Next, we report the results of an online study of verb metaphor comprehension that supports our claims. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for theories of metaphor processing and language change over time.

Verb Metaphors are Processed as Analogies

Commutativity–the fact that changing the order of operands in an operation does not change the results–is a fundamental principle of mathematics. How does its understanding develop in children? While this question has mostly been addressed for addition, here we focus on multiplication. We ask whether children’s formal learning of multiplication commutativity relies on pre-existing non-symbolic intuitions, or whether it is first learnt symbolically and only later elaborated as a general principle that extends to concrete situations. 2nd and 3rd graders received an intervention on commutative multiplication, before and after which they played a number comparison game testing their understanding of commutativity in symbolic and non-symbolic contexts. Our results suggest that the commutative principle of multiplication may not be available to intuition before formal teaching: perceiving that 2 groups of 3 dots and 3 groups of 2 dots contain the same number of dots requires mastering commutativity symbolically first.

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Human hacks and bugs in the recruitment of reward systems for goal achievement

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Domain-specific and domain-general neural responses to surprising psychological and physical events