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Mental imagery is theorized to play a key role in mood and mood disorders due to the emotional impact of visualizations and biases in the processing of negative versus positive imagery. Although differences in emotional imagery have been linked to mental health outcomes, it is unclear if individuals experiencing emotional distress differ in their baseline ability to generate mental images (i.e., ‘imagery ability’). Recent research has highlighted linkages between imagery ability and facets of trait mindfulness, such as the tendency to observe and describe inner thoughts. Thus, we suspected that individual differences in trait mindfulness may help explain inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between imagery ability and emotional distress. A path analysis revealed that trait mindfulness significantly and fully mediated the relationship between imagery vividness and depression, indicating that mindfulness is a critical aspect of imagery phenomenology, as well as emphasizing the importance of mindfulness to mental health.

CogSci 2022

The relationship between individual differences in mental imagery vividness and emotional distress

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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. 





What factors induce empathy for virtual agents? To explore this question, we examine the relationship between humans and agents in the inverted cyberball task where a participant chose to help an ostracised agent. This study especially controls experience in the preparation task from self-involvement as the base of empathy. In the one condition, participants have induced the same experience as the ostracised agent, while in the other condition, participants observed ostracising relations between two agents. As a result, self-involvement in the preparation task does not influence the helping behavior of the ostracised agent. The factor relating to the helping behavior is whether the participants noticed the relation. This notice was also associated with empathy trait. From these results, we can conclude that empathy can acquire others' perspectives even when they have no experience with the pain of ostracism.

Effect of self-experience on empathic helping to virtual agents

Inferring others' preferences is one of the central cognitive tasks of social life. The inferred preferences are used to predict the behavior of others in novel situations; therefore, a certain level of abstraction is required. We considered the inference of preferences as a classification problem on an abstract latent feature space. Participants (n=96) were asked to show 89 images of automobiles to either an agent that had been programmed with a specific person's preference and which showed facial expressions according to that preference or an agent that did not show facial expressions. Next, participants were asked to predict the agent's likes and dislikes for novel 23 automobiles. The results showed that participants could predict the agent's likes and dislikes for the unseen automobiles with 74% accuracy, indicating that they learned the decision boundary of agents' preferences on the latent feature space using expressions of emotion as labels.

People learn other's preferences on a latent feature space using emotion expressions as labels

The ancient Greek hero Ulysses chose to bind himself to resist the temptation of Sirens, highlighting the fact that humans may voluntarily sacrifice their freedom of choice to achieve committed goals. In this work, we propose a computational model for such commitment under the framework of Bayesian Theory of Mind. The model is based on the idea that even when alone, humans act to better demonstrate their intentions to an imagined third-party observer (ITO) censoring their actions. Our model successfully captures the Ulysses-constraint of freedom, as the freedom confuses the ITO’s inference of their intention. We further show that, trajectories generated both by human actors and actors modeled with ITO censorship are easy to interpret both in the eyes of an actual human ob- server and an ITO. The results demonstrate that under conflict- ing desires, humans achieve commitment by spontaneously censoring their actions with an internalized theory of mind.

Intentional commitment through an internalized theory of mind: Acting in the eyes of an imagined observer

People collaborate daily to achieve joint goals, negotiating sidewalks, preparing meals, constructing furniture. Here we analyzed how strangers coordinate a complex novel task, assembling a TV cart. Before beginning and before major actions, partners used a photo of the completed cart, speech, and gesture to establish a joint model of the structure of the completed cart. Most coordination was implicit, a conversation of actions that could be understood in the context of the current state of the object and the shared mental representation. Actions served a dual purpose, both to communicate and to advance the task. The basic unit of coordination was the dyad, not the individual.

Explicit and Implicit Coordination of Joint Action

Although pointing is sparse, overloaded, and indirect, it allows humans to effectively decode shared information, (ex)change their minds, and plan accordingly. Pointing is an invitation to jointly attend to an object, which triggers the mutual inference between agents of each other’s mind. Relevance is a fundamental assumption underlying all human communication, including pointing. We define relevance as how much a signaler’s belief can make a positive difference to its receiver’s well being. We build a Theory of Mind (ToM) model to test our definition of relevance and use pointing as a case study. In two experiments, we test our relevance model in a classic artificial intelligence (AI) task, the Wumpus world, with the key difference that there is a guide that points to help a hunter. Agents with our relevance model gain significantly higher rewards than agents who ignore signals from the guide. Agents with our model also achieve better performance than agents who receive an additional observation of the environment. The results show that the power of pointing comes from the ToM inference of relevance, rather than providing more precise individual perception.

What Is the point? a Theory of Mind Model of Relevance

Testing on previously learned materials can enhance the learning of new materials studied after the test (the forward effect of testing). We examined how the timing of interim testing influenced subsequent learning. Participants studied trivia facts in two learning sections (A & B) and provided a mental effort rating for each section. Between the two sections, participants either restudied, took an immediate test, or a 15-min delayed test on Section A. They then proceeded to Section B and took a final test on both sections. The results demonstrated that both the immediate and delayed testing groups outperformed the restudy group on Section B, indicating that the forward effect of testing was independent of the test timing. Furthermore, the testing groups showed a bigger increase in their mental effort from Section A to B than the restudy group, suggesting that the forward testing effect occurred probably due to more mental effort.

Does delayed interim testing enhance subsequent learning?

Computational cognitive theories of Autism Spectrum Disorder have received renewed attention in recent years. Consistent with the predictive processing framework, ASD has
been re-conceptualized as a disorder of aberrant prediction and learning-rate estimation involving multiple levels of a putative cognitive computational hierarchy. Specifically, behavioral symptoms of individuals with ASD might manifest due to an aberrant overestimation of the volatility of environmental contingencies (i.e. tendency of change in cue-outcome probabilities) which in turn might induce a dysfunctional setting of learning rates. In this work, we attempted to conceptually replicate computational modeling analyses of an impactful study of the recent ASD modeling literature in an independent
sample of subjects. We were not able to replicate some prior reported effects likely due to differences in model architecture and cognitive task setup. We found statistical trends in similar directions.

Modeling aberrant volatility estimates in Autism Spectrum Disorder

While problem-solving is central in our daily life, its underlying mechanisms remain elusive. The dominant theory states that one must restructure a problem (i.e., reorganize problem-related representations) to solve it. As empirical evidence supporting this mechanism is scarce, we used network science methodology to demonstrate the key role of restructuring in problem-solving. Individual semantic memory networks were estimated before and after participants attempted to solve a riddle. These networks represent the organization of solution-relevant and irrelevant words as nodes, with edges representing the strength of the relationship between them based on the participants’ relatedness judgments. Restructuring was quantified as the difference in semantic network metrics between pre- and post-solving phases. Successful problem-solving was predicted by local semantic network restructuring, only in edges and nodes assessed as helpful to solve the riddle. These results shed new light on the mental restructuring in problem-solving and provide a new method to quantify it.

Restructuring problem-related semantic associations promotes solving success

Logico-semantic theories have long noted parallels between the linguistic representation of temporal entities (events) and spatial entities (objects): bounded (or telic) predicates such as fix a car resemble count nouns such as sandcastle because they are “atoms” with well-defined boundaries. By contrast, unbounded (or atelic) phrases such as drive a car resemble mass nouns such as sand in that they are unspecified for atomic features. Here, we show for the first time that there are similarities in the perceptual-cognitive representation of events and objects in non-linguistic tasks. Specifically, after viewers form a bounded or an unbounded event category, they can extend the category to objects or substances respectively (Experiment 1). Furthermore, viewers can intuitively make event-to-object mappings that respect atomicity (Experiment 2). These striking similarities between the mental representation of events and objects have implications for current theories of event cognition, as well as the relationship between language and thought.

Events and Objects Are Similar Cognitive Entities

Events are considered as temporal segments with a beginning and an endpoint. Philosophical and linguistic literature on events distinguishes between bounded events that include distinct temporal stages leading to culmination (e.g., fix a car) and unbounded events that include largely undifferentiated stages and lack an inherent endpoint (e.g., drive a car). The present study shows that event viewers spontaneously compute this distinction through an interruption detection task. People watched videos of bounded or unbounded events with a visual interruption lasting .03s at the midpoint or close to the endpoint of the event stimulus. People indicated whether they saw an interruption after each video (Experiments 1) or responded as soon as possible during each video (Experiment 2). In both cases, the endpoint-midpoint difference depended on whether participants were watching a bounded or an unbounded event. As people perceive dynamic events, they spontaneously track boundedness, or the internal temporal structure of events.

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The relationship between individual differences in mental imagery vividness and emotional distress

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Effect of self-experience on empathic helping to virtual agents

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