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Previous research demonstrated an asymmetry between Sources and Goals in people’s linguistic and non-linguistic encoding of motion events: when describing events such as a fairy going from a tree to a flower, people mention the Goal (“to a flower”) more often than the Source (“from a tree”) and are better at detecting Goal changes in a Same-different memory test. Many take these findings as evidence for a homology between linguistic and conceptual representations: an unmentioned event component is also conceptually less robust. Here, we show that the nonlinguistic Source-Goal asymmetry disappears when memory is probed with a Forced-choice task instead of a Same-different task. We argue that, despite frequent absence from linguistic descriptions, Sources are robust in event memory, but not attended to during Same-different tests due to people’s task-relevance assumption. This result bears on the nature of the Source-Goal asymmetry and calls for a finer-grained account for language-cognition homology.

CogSci 2022

The Source-Goal Asymmetry in Motion Events: Sources Are Robustly Encoded in Memory but Overlooked at Test

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Human social interactions require understanding and predict- ing other people’s behavior. A growing body of work has found that these inferences are structured around an assumption that agents act rationally and efficiently in space. While powerful, this view treats action understanding in a vacuum, ignoring that much social inference happens in the context of familiar, hierarchically structured events (e.g.: buying groceries, ordering in a restaurant). We propose that social and world knowledge is critical for efficiently interpreting behavior and test this idea through a simple block-building paradigm, where participants infer an agent’s sub-task (study 1a), next action (study 1b), and higher-level goal (study 1c), from very sparse observations. We compare these inferences against a Bayesian model of goal inference that exploits task structure to interpret agents’ actions. This model fit participant judgments with high quantitative accuracy, highlighting how world knowledge may help support social inferences in a rich and powerful way.
Keywords: Computational modeling; Social cognition

Hierarchical task knowledge constrains and simplifies action understanding

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How ‘Good-Enough’ is L2 Sentence Comprehension? Evidence from Suffixal Passive Construction in Korean

Chinese phonology features a contrast between alveolar and retroflex places of articulation, particularly in the standard Beijing variety of Mandarin. However, studies have shown that ‘outer-circle’ varieties (such as in Taiwan and Singapore) have a less clear contrast, termed “deretroflexion”, which results in poor contrastive perception for Taiwan Mandarin speakers. However, our previous study did not find this deficit in Singapore Mandarin speakers. In this preregistered follow-up study, we investigate how Singapore Mandarin speakers perceive the alveolar-retroflex contrast and examine if differences in perception are linked to Mandarin understanding proficiency. Our results (N = 62) reveal that while Singapore Mandarin speakers perceive an alveolar-retroflex phoneme contrast, there is a wide range of differences in ambiguity resolution across the alveolar-retroflex acoustic spectrum. We did not find a link between perceptual differences and Mandarin understanding proficiency, indicating that highly ‘tuned’ perceptual sensitivity is not needed for high Mandarin understanding proficiency.

Perception of a phoneme contrast in Singaporean English-Mandarin bilingual adults: A preregistered study of individual differences

A considerable number of studies have investigated whether speaking two languages improves executive function. Results, while controversial, have highlighted the influence of second language proficiency on the emergence of these cognitive advantages. To date, few studies have investigated whether other related linguistic experiences, such as dialect use, confer similar advantages. The diverse range of dialects found across the People’s Republic of China provide ideal conditions under which to explore this question. Using a heterogeneous sample of Mandarin-English bilingual, bidialectal young adults (n = 73), the present study investigated whether differences in self-reported dialect proficiency impacted on Simon Task performance. While results showed reduced Simon effects associated with higher reported dialect proficiency, it was a consequence of slower performance on congruent trials, not improved performance on incongruent trials. The observed reduction in facilitation from congruent trials associated with higher reported dialect proficiency suggests a cognitive disadvantage, but merits further investigation.

Chinese Dialect Proficiency and Executive Function: Evidence from the Simon Task

A widely researched question in bilingualism asks whether bilinguals’ vocabulary growth is equal to or lower than that of monolinguals. Some studies have found smaller vocabularies in bilingual toddlers than monolingual toddlers when comparing in one language, but others have found no significant group differences. We compared 12 to 32-month-old bilingual toddlers growing up in the UK with English and one additional language (AL) to age-matched UK English monolinguals. We evaluated both vocabulary size in English and conceptual vocabulary. Bilinguals’ English vocabulary sizes in both comprehension and production were significantly smaller than monolinguals’ after controlling for age and socioeconomic status. This was seen across bilinguals of different levels of language dominance. The bilingual lag in vocabulary size was smaller when calculated using conceptual vocabulary but still significant for both comprehension and production. We discuss the implications for measurements of bilingual toddlers’ vocabulary size.

UK bilingual toddlers show a lag in vocabulary size relative to monolinguals in both comprehension and production

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Functional Connectivity Differences between Trilinguals and Bilinguals: The Role of Orthographic Depth

Team cognition is an essential component of team functioning. Although traditionally assessed through (retrospective) questionnaires or ratings, there is increasing interest in using real-time data (e.g., skin conductance, movement) to assess team cognition through team coordination dynamics (TCD). TCD involve two or more processes or elements of the team that covary across time and conditions (e.g. synchrony or alignment). Various methods and modalities have been used to calculate TCD that show connections with team outcomes and cognition. Yet, it is unclear which ones are the most functional. In our research, we use data from four-persons teams engaging in a collaborative game to calculate various TCD indices (entropy, MdRQA, coherence, synchrony coefficient) for several modalities (skin conductance, heart rate, movement) and compare them to metrices of team cognition obtained through questionnaires. We aim for our research to facilitate the use of (multimodal) TCD for monitoring and managing team functioning.

Comparative Evaluation of Multivariate Coordination Methods to Assess Team Cognition in Multi-Modal Team Interactions.

In polarized political climates, debate is ubiquitous but minds rarely change. This raises a question: what causes people to update their views? Recent work has shown that people are persuaded more by experienced-based explanations rather than factual ones. Yet, facts surely play (or ought to play) an important role in political discourse. Is it possible to leverage the persuasive power of personal experiences without sacrificing factual information? In Experiments 1 and 2, we replicate and build on previous findings showing that people who offer experienced-based (vs. fact-based) explanations are perceived as more rational and worthy of respect. In Experiment 3, we show that more complex explanations combining factual information with personal examples reveal more nuanced results. Collectively, this work sheds new light on how experienced-based and fact-based evidence can be used to persuade.

Willingness to Interact Increases When Opponents Offer Specific Evidence

High-level cognition relies on the ability to determine what the relevant possibilities are in the face of incomplete information. For example, causal judgments require reasoning about the relevant counterfactual possibilities in the context in which the actual events occurred. Similarly, to judge that someone is morally responsible for a given action requires assessing what other actions were available to the agent in the context they acted within. Defining the set of relevant possibilities in a context---what we call the contextual 'modal space'---is computationally intractable both because such contexts are not well defined and because there are indefinitely many possibilities that one could consider. Interestingly though, high-level judgments that require reasoning over such possibilities are often made quickly and effortlessly, suggesting that they may recruit a heuristic or implicit representation of the contextually relevant modal space. In this paper we (1) introduce a sampling approach for empirically describing contextual modal spaces, (2) find that modal spaces are shaped by statistical and prescriptive normality, (3) demonstrate that the contextual modal spaces play a domain general role in high-level cognition in the sense that the same modal space is recruited across different domains of reasoning, and finally (4) we provide evidence that such judgments are made on the basis of heuristic representations of the contextual modal space rather than on-line sampling of relevant alternatives.

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Consider a causal claim like “Tom caused the train delay.” Previous research has shown that the extent to which Tom is seen to act intentionally (i.e., through his own agency) affects the extent to which people agree with this claim. But is this effect of perceived agency a unique phenomenon to causal judgments? Two experiments suggest this may not be the case. Study 1 finds that perceived agency affects people’s under- standing of both causal and non-causal events. Study 2 then finds that while perceptions of agency were similarly involved in people’s understanding of causal and non-causal events, they affected only cases where these events were brought about by animate agents (e.g., people). These results thus suggest that perceptions of agency may have a much more general influence in how people understand events involving agents, and therefore in how they understand the sentences that describe them. We discuss implications for causal cognition, broader research in agency, and the intersections between both and linguistics.

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The Source-Goal Asymmetry in Motion Events: Sources Are Robustly Encoded in Memory but Overlooked at Test

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