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Faces are an important source of perceptual and social information. Multiple cortical regions including the fusiform faces area (FFA), the superior temporal sulcus (STS), and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) respond more to dynamic faces than videos of toy objects, human bodies, and pastoral scenes. Do face-preferring regions in FFA, STS, and MPFC have different functions? To address this question, we re-analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from seven different experiments that included a dynamic faces versus objects localizer. Each of the seven experiments tested different perceptual and social features using dynamic videos, point light displays, narratives, and animated cartoons. Using a functional region of interest approach, we observed a significant condition by region interaction in four of the seven experiments. Thus, although FFA, STS, and MPFC respond more to dynamic faces than objects, bodies, and scenes, these three regions differ from each other functionally.

CogSci 2022

Face-preferring regions in FFA, STS, and MPFC have different functions

technical paper

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Quantifying the meaning of a word is a complex challenge. Humans can encode semantic information along a large and diverse range of semantic dimensions for any given word. Whilst a number of studies have applied a range of techniques to quantify word meaning along specific dimensions, little work has focussed on the socio-semantic dimensions of meaning. Here, we present data that quantifies the socio-semantic representations of 2,700 Czech words along the dimensions of gender, location, political, valence and age. We also demonstrate the utility of the data set by calculating an estimate of socio-semantic similarity between all words, which can be used to identify words that are either proximally close or distant in socio-semantic space.

Quantifying the Socio-semantic Representations of Words

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Manipulating the face contour affects face recognition performance leaving the Face Inversion Effect unaltered

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The speed of statistical perception

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Math Self-Concept, Stereotypes, Achievement and Anxiety – A Cross-Sectional Study

Math anxiety (MA) is negatively related to math performance. One proposed intervention with potential to disrupt the MA-math performance link is expressive writing. The current study aimed to conceptually replicate Park and colleagues (2014). In that study, the authors concluded that expressive writing effectively boosted math anxious students’ performance. In our current sample of 168 college students, participants randomly assigned to the expressive writing condition were no more accurate at posttest than were other participants assigned to a math self-concept intervention, active control, or passive control. Additionally, participants in the math self-concept and active control conditions reported lower state MA immediately following the intervention; participants in the expressive writing and passive control conditions reported no differences between pretest and posttest state MA. The current study provides boundary conditions for the effectiveness of expressive writing interventions in ameliorating MA during difficult math tasks and illuminates potential mechanisms underlying MA.

Does Expressive Writing Blunt the Effects of Math Anxiety on Math Performance? A Conceptual Replication and Extension of Park et al. (2014)

Learning to write is characterized by bottom-up mimicking of characters and top-down writing from memory. We introduce a CNN-RNN model that implements both pathways: It can (i) directly write a letter by generating a motion trajectory given an image, (ii) first classify the character in the image and then determine its motion trajectory `from memory', or (iii) use a combination of both pathways. The results show that, in one-shot and few-shot learning, the model profits from different combinations of the pathways: The generation of different character variants works best when the top-down is supported by the bottom-up pathway. Refilling occluded images of efficiently learned characters works best when using the top-down pathway alone. Overall, the architecture implies that a weighted merge of bottom-up and top-down information into a latent, generative code fosters the development of compositional encodings, which can be reused in efficient learning tasks.

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Intelligent agents are capable of transfer and generalization. This flexibility in adapting to new tasks and environments often relies on representation learning and replay. Among these algorithms, successor representation learning and memory replay offer biologically plausible solutions. However, replay prioritization algorithms remain largely limited to value prediction errors. Here we propose PARSR, Priority-Adjusted Replay for Successor Representations, to address this caveat. Decoupling learning of the environment dynamics and rewards, PARSR can use prediction errors from either representation learning or values to prioritize memory replay. We compare PARSR to SR-Dyna, Dyna-Q, and a number of state of the art algorithms using replay and successor representations in cognitive neuroscience. We find that PARSR is able to reproduce human behavior in a number of revaluation tasks while also representing a performance improvement over SR-Dyna, its closest counterpart.

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This paper describes an initial cognitive framework that captures the reasoning involved in scientific data analyses, drawing from close collaborations with scientists in different domains over many years. The framework aims to automate data analysis for science. In doing so, existing large repositories of data could be continuously and systematically analyzed by machines, updating findings and potentially making new discoveries as new data becomes available. The framework consists of a cycle with six phases: formulating an investigation, initiating the investigation, getting data, analyzing data, aggregating results, and integrating findings. The paper also describes our implementation of this framework and illustrates it with examples from different science domains.

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Face-preferring regions in FFA, STS, and MPFC have different functions

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