Trabajo presentado en la EAPCogSci 2015, EuroAsianPacific Joint Conference on Cognitive Science (4th European Conference on Cognitive Science y 11th International Conference on Cognitive Science), celebrada en Turin del 25 al 27 de septiembre de 2015.
Literacy: Many studies have been showing that anxious individuals display attention biases including preferential engagement, difficulty in disengagement, or attention avoidance. Research in patients suggests that pathological anxiety may specifically impair spatial short-term and longterm episodic memory. Recently, many authors have emphasized the role of aversive stimulation on attention, working memory and anxiety. Purpose: The present study investigated the influence of anxiety on memory and attention, to contribute to our understanding of the anxiety effects on cognitive function. Methods: 130 students were included in this study (57 male and 73 female). Procedure: Each subject completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). After this measure, only 41 participants with the highest (n=21) and the lowest (n=20) levels of anxiety complete the Trail Making Test A-B, Attentive Matrices Test, Babcock Story Recall Test and Short-Term Visual Memory Test. Results: Less anxious participants showed best memory capacity and less attention biases than more anxious participants.
Many cross cultural studies have mentioned two distinct forms of thinking, holistic and analytic thought, and argued that one of the crucial differences between them is their attentional focus on focal object and its context. Furthermore, in face recognition studies, it has been replicated that face recognition is a configural process and is fostered by prior global processing orientation. The present study explores a possible link between global-local processing bias and holistic-analytic ways of thinking. One hundred twenty three Japanese participants completed either classification or similarity judgement tasks based on categories in which the contextual information conflicted with abstract rules, after processing orientation was manipulated by Navon stimuli. Results showed that participants preferred familyresemblance (i.e. holistic) solution to rule-based solution, and that manipulating the precedence (global, local, or mixed) Navon stimuli did not affect overall response pattern. However, prior local orientation slowed response latencies more than did global orientation. It may imply that preceding global-local processing orientation influences focus on the focal object and thus modifies our ways of reasoning.
This study examines 7-to-12-year-old Singaporean bilingual children’s use of noun classifiers in Mandarin Chinese and their reasoning while making the associations between nouns and classifiers as a given task. The results show that the children made the association by applying their cognitive understanding of the properties and functions of the noun objects, comparing between them, as well as following self-generated or learned rules. To investigate other factors that may affect the children’s learning, the children and their parents were given the task to make another 120 classifier phrases separately based on the list of the noun objects given. The results show that schooling, parents’ language proficiency, father’s age, mother’s academic attainment, and family income had correlations with the children’s result of this task-based language performance.
Conditionals are basic for human reasoning. In our paper, we present two experiments, which for the first time systematically compare how people reason about indicative conditionals (Experiment 1) and counterfactual conditionals (Experiment 2) in causal and non-causal task settings (N = 80). The main result of both experiments is that conditional probability is the dominant response pattern and thus a key ingredient for modeling causal, indicative, and counterfactual conditionals. In the paper, we will give an overview of the main experimental results and discuss their relevance for understanding how people reason about conditionals.
Pointing is a gesture that people use to specify and convey information about objects in the environment. Previous research has mostly explored peoples’ comprehension and production of others’ “straight” pointing gestures, that is, pointing at an object with arm and index finger kept straight while aiming at a visible object. However, we seem to use various types of pointing in addition to typical straight pointing to denote both visible and invisible objects. This study examined comprehension of pointing with a “bent” index finger at an invisible object behind a wall. The experimenter pointed either at an object in front of a wall or one behind a wall with a straight index finger or a bent index finger, and the participants guessed which object was being denoted. The results were that when the participants looked at straight pointing, they thought objects in front of the wall were being denoted. However, when they looked at bent pointing, they thought objects behind the wall could be denoted. The study suggested that people have “common ground” in terms of interpretation of different types of pointing.
A theoretical link between reasoning and mathematical abilityhas been supported by some recent empirical evidence. Weargue that some of this evidence is indirect and measureselection may have influenced this relationship. We reportone study in which mathematical ability was measured usinga fluency and a calculation measure (Wood-cock Johnson-III,2001) and reasoning ability was measured using the extendedcognitive reflection test (Toplack, West & Stanovich, 2014)and a belief bias conditional reasoning task. Results from 68undergraduate students suggest that mathematical ability ispredicted by performance on the cognitive reflection test butnot conditional reasoning performance. We discuss theimplications of these findings for research on the link betweenmathematical ability and reasoning skills.
The question of how symbol systems can be instantiated in neural network-like computation is still open. Many technical challenges remain and most proposals do not scale up to realistic examples of symbol processing, for example, language understanding or language production. Here we use a top-down approach. We start from Fluid Construction Grammar, a wellworked out framework for language processing that is compatible with recent insights into Construction Grammar and investigate how we could build a neural compiler that automatically translates grammatical constructions and grammatical processing into neural computations. We proceed in two steps. FCG is translated from symbolic processing to numeric processing using a vector symbolic architecture, and this numeric processing is then translated into neural network computation. Our experiments are still in an early stage but already show promise.
Patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) often show communicative-pragmatic deficits involving different expressive modalities, i.e. linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic. Most previous research has evaluated pragmatic ability using linguistic tasks only, while the extralinguistic aspects of communication have received less attention. The aim of the present study was to provide a multifocal assessment of communicative abilities in RHD patients, describing their communicative impairment and abilities, both in comprehension and production. The study revealed communicative deficits in RHD patients in all the expressive modalities investigated, i.e. linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic, with patients performing worse in extralinguistic tasks than in linguistic tasks.
This paper is an empirically based contribution on the communication of corrections in synchronized swimming. Our claim is that marking is a socially organized skill that can be found in sports corrections. Through video-aided ethnographic work, which includes observation and interviewing the Spanish Olympic team for four months, we captured standardized communication patterns. Conversation Analysis allows us to locate the pathways of communication modalities in real professional trainings. We analyzed the video of the training sessions with ELAN software for micro-interactions. Our results show that the modalities of speech, marking, gesture and gaze appear in synchronized swimming. There is an epistemological asymmetry between the trainer and the swimmers as experts from different domains. Still, we found instances of distributed marking in gaze behavior. Moreover, marking for others in synchronized swimming is a modality that goes beyond individual reflexivity and recall. Corrections in sports training are a product of socially managed turn taking.
Turing’s (1950) article on the Turing test is often interpreted as supporting the behaviouristic view that human intelligence can be represented in terms of input/output functions, and thus emulated by a machine. We show that the properties of functions are not decidable in practice by the behaviour they exhibit, a result, we argue, of which Turing was likely aware. Given that the concept of a function is strictly a Platonic ideal, the question of whether or not the mind is a program is a pointless one, because it has no demonstrable implications. Instead, the interesting question is what intelligence means in practice. We suggest that Turing was introducing the novel idea that intelligence can be reliably evidenced in practice by finite interactions. In other words, although intelligence is not decidable in practice, it is testable in practice. We explore the connections between Turing’s idea of testability and subsequent developments in computational complexity theory.
In order to support the use of cognitive architectures in computer simulation studies involving virtual environments, an integration solution is proposed that enables ACT-R cognitive models to communicate with the Unity game engine. The integration solution is tested using virtual robots that are able to move around a 3D virtual environment and interact with various objects. The robots are equipped with visual, tactile and proprioceptive sensor systems, which yield information about the current sensory state of the robot. This information is communicated to an ACT-R model that subsequently controls the behaviour of the robot by making decisions about motor output. The performance of the model and the integrity of the integration solution are evaluated using a task that requires a virtual robot to retrieve target objects and deposit them in a specified goal location.
Conditionals are basic for human reasoning. In our paper, we present two experiments, which for the first time systematically compare how people reason about indicative conditionals (Experiment 1) and counterfactual conditionals (Experiment 2) in causal and non-causal task settings (N = 80). The main result of both experiments is that conditional probability is the dominant response pattern and thus a key ingredient for modeling causal, indicative, and counterfactual conditionals. In the paper, we will give an overview of the main experimental results and discuss their relevance for understanding how people reason about conditionals.
This article presents and evaluates a model to automatically derive word association networks from text corpora. Two aspects were evaluated: To what degree can corpus-based word association networks (CANs) approximate human word association networks with respect to (1) their ability to quantitatively predict word associations and (2) their structural network characteristics. Word association networks are the basis of the human mental lexicon. However, extracting such networks from human subjects is laborious, time consuming and thus necessarily limited in relation to the breadth of human vocabulary. Automatic derivation of word associations from text corpora would address these limitations. In both evaluations corpus-based processing provided vector representations for words. These representations were then employed to derive CANs using two measures: (1) the well known cosine metric, which is a symmetric measure, and (2) a new asymmetric measure computed from orthogonal vector projections. For both evaluations, the full set of 4068 free association networks (FANs) from the University of South Florida word association norms were used as baseline human data. Two corpus based models were benchmarked for comparison: a latent topic model and latent semantic analysis (LSA). We observed that CANs constructed using the asymmetric measure were slightly less effective than the topic model in quantitatively predicting free associates, and slightly better than LSA. The structural networks analysis revealed that CANs do approximate the FANs to an encouraging degree.
The main purpose of the study was to examine whether M Capacity, as it is defined in Pascual-Leone’s Theory of Constructive Operators as the maximum number of schemes which can be simultaneously activated by attentional resources, is predictive of motor learning – in this case, of the acquisition and development of the “third touch” in volleyball. This hypothesis, supported by some preliminary observations on a small sample of young volleyball players (Bisagno & Morra, 2013), was investigated through a study with the participation of 120 volleyball players, aged between 6 and 26 years, engaged both in working memory tests and practical tests of volleyball. Furthermore, each athlete reported on his expertise, in terms of years of practice and number of trainings per week. The results pointed to a very clear dissociation: while M Capacity represents the best predictor of correct motor performance, experience was the key for the precision of the athletic skills.
This study investigated preschoolers’ drawing flexibility, operationalized as their ability to draw a dog that is different from the human figure. The role of working memory (M capacity) and executive function in drawing flexibility was examined. The participants were 123 children, 36-73 months old. Regression analyses showed that both M capacity and executive function predicted development in dog drawing; the dog drawing score correlated with M capacity and executive function even partialling out age, motor coordination, and drawing ability (measured with Goodenough’s Draw-a-man test). These results suggest that both M capacity and executive function play an important role in the early development of drawing flexibility.
This study examined the validity of the Bose-Einstein (B-E) model of the Compound Stimuli Visual Information (CSVI) task, and its assumptions. Two experiments compared adults’ performance on the CSVI task in standard (5 sec) presentation condition and with shorter presentation times. Individual participants’ performance was analyzed with the B-E model, with different assumptions on the number of attending acts in each condition. Both experiments found that the capacity limit estimates found in both conditions were highly correlated with each other, and their means did not differ. The goodness of fit of B-E distributions to the data was also tested. It is concluded that the B-E model provides a valid estimate of attentional capacity limits in the CSVI.
Previous research has shown that visual cues (depicted events) can have a strong effect on language comprehension and guide attention more than stereotypical thematic role knowledge (‘depicted / recent event preference’). We examined to which extent this finding generalizes to another visual cue (gender from the hands of an agent) and to which extent it is modulated by picture-sentence incongruence. Participants inspected videos of hands performing an action, and then listened to non-canonical German OVS sentences while we monitored their eye gaze to the faces of two potential subjects / agents (one male and one female). In Experiment 1, the sentential verb phrase matched (vs. mismatched) the video action and in Experiment 2, the sentential subject matched (vs. mismatched) the gender of the agent’s hands in the video. Additionally, both experiments manipulated gender stereotypicality congruence (i.e. whether the gender stereotypicality of the described actions matched or mismatched the gender of the hands in the video). Participants overall preferred to inspect the target agent face (i.e. the face whose gender matched that of the hands seen in the previous video), suggesting the depicted event preference observed in previous studies generalizes to visual gender cues. Stereotypicality match did not seem to modulate this gaze behavior. However, when there was a mismatch between the sentence and the previous video, participants tended to look away from the target face (post-verbally for action-verb mismatches and at the final subject region for hand gender – subject gender mismatches), suggesting outright picture-sentence incongruence can modulate the preference to inspect the face whose gender matched that of the hands seen in the previous video.
Why do we listen to sad music? One reason could be that it generates pleasant emotions as well as sadness. Accordingly, it is necessary to determine what kind of person experiences pleasant affect by listening to sad music. In the current study, we focused on empathy as a personal trait and examined the relationship between trait empathy and emotional response, including liking for the sad music. We targeted children because we considered that this age group is appropriate to highlight individual differences in empathy. Our findings indicated that perspective-taking ability, a sub-component of trait empathy, was correlated with emotional responses to the sad music. In addition, children who experienced pleasant emotions preferred sad music.
The relationship between emotions elicited by film clips and spontaneous dynamic facial expressions was investigated. Participants (n = 10) watched 13 emotional film clips, and their facial responses were recorded using a motion capture system. We extracted 3-sec length intervals in which facial events occurred from motion sequences. The participants were asked to self-assess their felt emotional arousal and positive and negative affect for each interval. To find the spatiotemporal components of dynamic facial expressions, we employed the multiway decomposition method, PARAFAC, on a time sequence of facial landmark coordinates standardized via methodologies of geometric morphometrics. The second component was related to facial movement that appears slowly and then maintains a stable state over a long term. Finally, the third component was linked to movement that appears and rapidly returns to the initial state. Local regression analysis was performed to obtain the distribution of the component scores on a two-dimensional plane: pleasure–displeasure and arousal–sleepiness. The third component was negatively correlated with arousal level.
