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Transfer of cognitive abilities has often been described in regard to Working Memory, while little has been said about Cognitive Control. Recent studies have proposed that congruency cues can be used to investigate learning-guided cognitive control adaptations in a trial-by-trial fashion during conflict tasks. In the present study, we employed congruency cues within an inducer/diagnostic paradigm to (1) induce a control learning between cue and string congruency in a Flanker task variant and (2) test whether this learning could transfer to a different Flanker variant. Results provided evidence that participants can learn to strategically employ congruency cues to adapt their cognitive control and that these learned control strategies/routines can be transferred to a very similar task variant (near transfer). Further experiments will be performed to explore the extent of this transfer.

CogSci 2022

Transfer of Learning-Guided Cognitive Control through Congruency Cues: a study involving two variants of Flanker task

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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. 





When a group member commits wrongdoing, people sometimes assign responsibility and blame not only to the wrongdoer but also to other members of the same group. We examined such assignment of collective responsibility in the context of exploitation of one family by another. Participants were recruited from the United States and South Korea, which are known to vary in cultural norms and endorsement of collectivistic values. Participants in both countries rated the degree to which an agent (grandson) should be held responsible for his grandfather’s exploitation of a victimized family, while varying the closeness of familial connection. Participants’ responsibility judgments showed sensitivity to whether the grandson received financial benefit from the wrongdoer and to the perceived closeness between the grandson and the wrongdoer. Korean participants imposed greater responsibility on the agent than did American participants. Implications for understanding the influence of social norms on moral judgments are discussed.

Familial Guilt: A Cross-Society Comparison of Judgments of Collective Family Responsibility

In the face of global climate change, investigating pro-environmental behaviors and perceptions of the human-nature relationship is increasingly important. We investigated perceived asymmetries in how humans and nature impact each other across two studies. Participants (N=331) rated the degree to which they believe humans and nature impact each other (Study 1) and were asked to list and assess instances of human-nature and nature-human impact (Study 2). Study 1 results suggest that participants generally perceive humans to have a stronger impact on nature than vice versa, whereas Study 2 results suggest that participants perceive humans to have a strong-negative and a weak-positive impact on nature and nature to have a similarly strong-positive and weak-negative impact on humans. These findings suggest that while humans’ relationship with nature is broadly perceived anthropocentrically and unidirectionally, when probed about specific human-nature impacts, the human-nature relationship is perceived as bidirectional, but still unbalanced.

Nature in the Balance: Symmetry in perceived human-nature relations predicts pro-environmental attitudes

Our perception of how time passes changes dynamically, and is influenced by psychological factors such as sense of agency (SoA), predictability, and attention. Using a reproducing time estimation task, this study investigates how predictability cues can influence time estimation by individuals with stable and unstable SoA. The results show that participants with stable SoA tended to estimate longer durations than participants with unstable SoA. Further, a cue to predictability led to even longer estimations by participants with stable SoA but made no difference in the time estimations of participants with unstable SoA. The study discusses the relationship between individual differences in SoA, predictability, and time estimation.

The role of predictability and sense of agency in time estimation

Humans must often make decisions in temporally autoregressive
environments (e.g., weather, stock market). Here, current
states of the environment regress on their previous states
(either across consecutive timesteps or from several timesteps
back in a patterned fashion). The current work investigates
people’s abilities to utilize previous states of autoregressive
sequences as cues to its current state. In Experiment 1 we determine
whether utilization of autoregressions reduces as the
temporal distance of the predictive timestep increases; and in
Experiment 2 we explore whether participants’ utilization of
previous timesteps in predictions compete such that they reduce
utilization of one timestep when increasing utilization
of another timestep. We also fit data from both experiments
with a trial-by-trial decision model. Overall, we find that participants
significantly reduced utilization of a cue with its increased
temporal distance. However, we obtained less conclusive
results on competition among timestep cues. These results
can explain people’s predictions in sequential decision tasks
(e.g., their tendencies to perceive clumpiness in random environments).

How people use the past as cues to the present

How might differences in linguistic modality influence the mental lexicon? The mental lexicon offers a window into conceptual domains and the shape of memory. On the other hand, the distinction between concrete-abstract offers a suitable approach for a comparative study. So far, studies comparing the organization of the mental lexicon between Deaf and hearers indicate similarity in lexical knowledge. This research asked if Deaf and hearing people have similar conceptual organizations of the domains of time and space. In their respective language, sixty-two participants made a repeated free association task with dual-class pieces in a concurrent domain clue format. The results showed less clustering for the deaf than the hearing group and opposed tendencies to establish semantic relations. The results matched those of previous studies done on different aged groups. The results suggest that factors associated with linguistic modality modulate the abstractness or concreteness of concepts.

Contrasting the semantic typology biases of Deaf and hearing people in their conceptualization of time and space

Traditional expectancy disconfirmation theories have focused on the discrepancy between expectations and perceptions. Here, we propose a new Bayesian framework model that takes into account human responses triggered by disconfirmation. It aims to explain, for example, the differences of responses to waiting time at a hospital reception, where the wait time discrepancy is ideally expected to be zero, by introducing the sensitivity of individuals which corresponds to the decision threshold for responses when coping with disconfirmation. The model was applied to a real-world clinical appointment dataset. The dataset contains multiple appointments with expected and actual times and individual response patterns depending on the disconfirmation. Individual sensitivity was estimated from the dataset. The sensitivity was correlated with the response patterns such as sticking to expectation. In addition, with agent-based simulations, results suggest that the introduction of sensitivity contributes to identifying different groups of responses and predicting negative responses such as "No-Show".

Sensitivity to time discrepancy: A computational model of human response to expectancy disconfirmation

Smartphones are now the most widely used devices in the world, and their usage monitoring applications have become a general interest topic. However, few experimental studies investigate the reflexive effects of this monitoring on users. To address this point, this paper presents a longitudinal experiment on the effects of monitoring on various variables (e.g. screen time, types of uses). Objective and subjective data from 60 participants, divided into treatment and control groups, were collected over a 3 weeks period. Both groups had to estimate their daily usages, but the treatment group subsequently had access to their real data. Results have shown a normalizing influence of monitoring on smartphone usage, by improving estimation of screen time, reducing time spent on some underestimated applications and increasing use of others overestimated applications. This research paves the way for public policies promoting mastery of its own technological uses and responsible digital usage.


Self-report vs. objective data. What impact of monitoring on smartphone use regulation?

Given considerable advancements in automated driving systems, the day when autonomous vehicles will be regularly present in our everyday life is impending. It is, therefore, very significant to put emphasis on the effect that giving up autonomy might have on an individual. We take into consideration an experimental data set regarding participants' reported discomfort levels to tackle the following questions: How can we represent a discomfort measurement in a meaningful way? Using this representation, can future discomfort reactions be predicted? We identify key features, identify baseline models, and develop a new approach based on the k-nearest neighbor model to considerably improve the prediction of individual user's discomfort measurements. A discussion of limits and potentials concludes the paper.

Predicting Individual Discomfort in Autonomous Driving

How are experiences of events used to update knowledge of predictive relations in semantic memory? We examined the roles of anterior-lateral entorhinal cortex (alEC), important for encoding recently experienced temporal relations, and middle temporal gyrus (MTG), involved in familiar event concepts. Participants underwent fMRI during exposure to novel event sequences and a memory probe phase (Session 1) and the same process a week later (Session 2). Across distinct sequences, predictive relations among similar events could either be Consistent, or the roles of the events could swap (Inconsistent). We examined the effect of Consistency on the strength of relational memory content. Areas that integrate across diverse experiences should be aided in the Consistent condition. We found that alEC performed this integrative role in Session 1, and at Session 2, similar effects were also observed in MTG. We suggest that these areas both contribute to building relational knowledge from experience.

Integration of Event Experiences to Build Relational Memory in the Human Brain

Event segmentation theory posits that we segment continuous experience into discrete events and event boundaries occur at large transient increases in prediction error, often related to context changes. Identifying event boundaries a priori has been difficult in naturalistic settings. To overcome this challenge for story listening, we used a deep learning language model (GPT2) to compute the predicted probability distributions of the next word, at each point in the story. For 3 stories, we computed the surprise, the entropy, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD). We then asked participants to listen to these stories while marking event boundaries. We used regression models to compare the GPT2 measures and the human segmentation data. Preliminary results indicate that event boundaries are associated with transient increases in KLD. This supports the hypothesis that prediction error serves as a control mechanism governing event segmentation, and points to important differences between operational definitions of prediction error.

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Transfer of Learning-Guided Cognitive Control through Congruency Cues: a study involving two variants of Flanker task

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