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Reasoning and reflective thought are critical to the study and practice of philosophy. However, findings from social cognition have challenged the extent to which many decisions are driven by explicit reasoning. We report an experiment that examines how reflective thinking impacts subjects’ judgements on various philosophical topics. Subjects were presented various scenarios on common philosophical topics (e.g., mind-body dualism); each scenario stated a given position. Some subjects were asked to indicate the extent to which they endorsed these positions (control), whereas others were asked to engage in a reflective thinking task before making this choice. Our results revealed that the reflective thinking group was more skeptical of the scenarios’ stated positions than the control group, but this effect depended on the topic of the scenarios. Thus, reflective thinking and reasoning do indeed seem to impact philosophical judgments, but this effect seems to depend on the topic under consideration.

CogSci 2022

The Effects of Reflective Reasoning on Philosophical Dilemmas

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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. 





To grasp visual relationships, such as those presented in figures or diagrams, viewers must often compare the spatial relationships between visual structures (e.g., the slopes of two lines, sequences of DNA strands). Past work has found that this visual comparison process is optimized when visuals are placed directly, such that the relational correspondences are obvious (e.g., horizontal spatial structures placed vertically), and weakened when relational correspondences are impeded (e.g., horizontal spatial structures placed horizontally) (Matlen et al. 2020). However, this principle of spatial alignment has yet to be tested with other spatial structures beyond horizontal and vertical structures. Here, we tested this principle using diagonal spatial structures. The results bore out the spatial alignment principle – participants were faster and more accurate when diagonal structures were in direct relative to impeded placements. These findings have important implications for theories of comparison as well as for design and instruction.

Spatial alignment facilitates visual comparison in diagonal structures

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

Understanding how people generalize and extrapolate from
limited amounts of data remains an outstanding challenge. We
study this question in the domain of scalar function learning,
and propose a simple model based on the Principle of Maxi-
mum Entropy (Jaynes, 1957). Through computational model-
ing, we demonstrate that the theory makes two specific predic-
tions about peoples’ extrapolation judgments, that we validate
through experiments. Moreover, we show that existing Gaus-
sian Process models of function learning cannot account for
these effects.

Maximum Entropy Function Learning

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.

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

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.

Event Segmentation In Story Listening Using Deep Language Models

The Distribution Question (DQ) asks: Can we know which animals beside humans are conscious? The current best practices for answering DQ rely on a version of a marker approach, which seeks to find some observable features that indicate consciousness. I argue that the marker approach all but guarantees a positive answer regarding any animal selected for investigation-including sponges. This makes answering the DQ currently unachievable. What will turn it into an achievable goal is to have a robust theory of consciousness, which, I argue, requires we adopt the premise that all animals are conscious.

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The Effects of Reflective Reasoning on Philosophical Dilemmas

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Spatial alignment facilitates visual comparison in diagonal structures

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