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Because there are many situations in our daily life in which the option space is not discrete but continuous, recently developed decision models have been able to examine the cognitive processes underlying choice in laboratory tasks with a continuous outcome space. One of the most important of these continuous models is the circular diffusion model (CDM) by Smith, which has been shown to account for continuous space data from a wide range of paradigms, including color identification, orientation, brightness, pricing. However, in addition to the inherent complexity of this model, it has become more complex in order to predict reliable data patterns, making it a tool only for experts. Here we propose a more easy version of the CDM, the EZ version, to fit the model on continuous scale data. The EZ-CDM for continuous choice space tasks can estimate the parameter values for the cognitive processes underlying without considering the response time distribution but only using traditionally favored summary statistics (i.e. the mean and variance of response time, and angular variance of accuracy.) by simple formulas that can be computed easily and needs neither theoretical knowledge of model fitting nor much programming skills. Here, we formulate the EZ method and show that, despite being easy and fast to calculate, it’s performance in recovering true parameters is acceptable.

CogSci 2022

An EZ-circular diffusion model of continuous decision processes

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Causal relationships can generate many different kinds of correlations among variables. However, research on children’s causal reasoning has focused almost exclusively on just one kind of regularity: the temporal covariation between candidate causes and effects, and in particular, the covariation between interventions and outcomes. Here we show that young children recognize more abstract correlations – in the ways that object properties are distributed over sets, or change over time – and constrain their causal hypotheses accordingly. Specifically, we show that children (range: 48-84 months) distinguish candidate causes based on correlations in the distribution of discrete (set size, arity, and proportion) and continuous (mean and mode) properties of sets (Experiment 1), and also within monotonic, quadratic, and periodic functions (Experiment 2).
Keywords: children; causal reasoning; abstract concepts; sets; functions

Preschoolers’ sensitivity to abstract correlations in the properties of sets and functions

Affective factors such as anxiety, confidence, and motivation can impair and enhance task performance. Here, we used drift diffusion modeling (DDM) to examine how these variables affect visualization, manipulation, and decision making on a mental rotation task (MRT). The effects of affective factors on visuospatial reasoning are largely unknown, perhaps in part because analyses are generally concerned with overall accuracy and reaction time (RT), without decomposing the stages of processing. With DDM, we decompose performance on a MRT into separate processing components, particularly the speed of information update (drift rate) and the amount of evidence accumulation (decision threshold). 106 adult participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice (2-AFC) MRT, and throughout, they rated their levels of anxiety, confidence, and motivation. We found that although anxiety, confidence, and motivation all impacted drift rate, only confidence affected the decision threshold. Moreover, we observed a unique role for confidence in mediating the links between gender and model parameters, as well as a unique moderating role of motivation in this mediation. Altogether, these findings shed light on the interrelations between affective factors in accounting for mental rotation performance in men and women, including the unique combination of confidence and motivation in explaining the gender difference in mental rotation performance.

Affective Factors Affect Visuospatial Decision-making: A Dri Diffusion Modeling Approach

To achieve goals, people leverage cognitive control to adjust how they process information. Here we show that frequent adjustments in information processing strategies (e.g., response threshold) within a single task give rise to reconfiguration costs. In two experiments we induced different performance goals in a Stroop task via explicit instruction or incentives, and these goals either varied or were fixed across different blocks. Across both experiments, we find smaller adjustments in control intensity when people frequently adjust the amount of control they exert, relative to blocks in which they don’t. We show that these results can be accounted for with a model that maximizes reward rate while minimizing reconfiguration costs (proportional to the Euclidean distances between the previous and current control signals). These findings suggest that cognitive control adjustments are regularized to constrain larger adjustments in control, which has important implications for computational modeling and measurement of motivated cognitive control.

Empirical and Computational Evidence for Reconfiguration Costs During Within-Task Adjustments in Cognitive Control

People are often reluctant to reconsider their choices, sticking with their goals even when it is clear that they would be better off abandoning them. Explanations for this abound, including loss aversion, sunk costs, social and reputational pressures, and resource rational consideration of the costs of replanning. Here we propose another hypothesis: In adopting a goal, you immediately reap the rewards of gaining information about what to do and how to act. Insofar as goals are rewarding in themselves, we predict that unless a goal is specifically devalued or the costs associated with it are very high, the default is not to engage in any reconsideration at all. We test this hypothesis by creating a stripped down scenario involving choices between two goals with transparently obvious cost differentials. The task is designed to minimize other factors that might contribute to goal persistence and indeed, we test both adults and very young children on virtually the same task to ensure that the cognitive load for adults is negligible. Both adults (Experiments 1-2) and 4-6-year-old children (Experiments 3-4) choose the less costly of two goals when shown the costs and goals together. However, when participants are shown the goals first, and only then shown that their chosen goal is more costly than the alternative, participants stick with higher cost goals, unless the goals are explicitly devalued.

"Because I want to": Valuing goals for their own sake

When deciding whether and how to punish, people consider not only the potential direct consequences, but also, how their choice will affect observers’ judgements about the values and motives underlying the choice. We formalize the decision to punish as a rational communicative social action (RCSA). The model generates rational decisions to punish, incorporating anticipated observers’ judgements obtained from a recursive model of inference using an intuitive theory of mind. Using this model, we synthesize patterns of human punishment from recently published papers. RCSA thus offers a formal model of the cognitive process that humans use to balance preferences for how they are perceived, with other goals for punishing.

Modeling punishment as a rational communicative social action

We explore whether people can recognise the epistemic goal of active learners. In a novel online experiment, 110 adults watched screen recordings of other adults (``players'') manipulating objects in a 2D simulated physical microworld. Players had the goal of either identifying the magnet-like force connecting two of the objects, or their relative masses. Observers were asked to identify the learning goal of the player. By drawing from a previously collected dataset of active physical learning interactions and an ideal observer analysis, we manipulated how informative the players' actions are about the target property, and observers' level of access to the players' micro-control actions. We found observers were better at identifying the goals of successful players and of players trying to identify force, while the micro-dynamic evidence improved accuracy on identifying the mass goal. We use mixed methods to explore what cues observers used to make these judgments.

Inferring epistemic intention in simulated physical microworlds

It is commonly believed that expressions visually signal rich diagnostic information to human observers. We studied how observers interpret the dynamic expressions that people spontaneously produced during a real-life high-stakes televised game. We find that human observers are remarkably poor at recovering what events elicited others' facial and bodily expressions. Beyond simple inaccuracy, people's causal reasoning exhibits systematic model-based patterns of errors. We show that latent emotion representations can explain people's reasoning about the unseen causes of expressions. A hierarchical Bayesian model simulates which events people infer to be the cause of others' expressions by comparing the emotions inferred from the expressions against the emotions people were predicted to experience in various situations. This causal model provides a close, parameter-free fit to human causal judgments, suggesting that humans interpret expressions in the context of emotion predictions generated by a causally-structured mental model of other minds.

Reasoning about the antecedents of emotions: Bayesian causal inference over an intuitive theory of mind

Spatial perspective taking, in which people mentally adopt another person's view of the world, is a crucial component of everyday communication. We investigate spatial perspective taking in listeners interpreting ambiguous instructions from a partner, looking at how this behaviour varies with a human vs. computer partner (Exp. 1 and 2), and with individual differences in social and cognitive abilities (Exp. 3). Listeners' perspective taking tendencies vary with their individual differences in spatial orientation ability, with more othercentricism associated with better spatial orientation. In addition, partner identity influences perspective taking; however, in contrast to previous work, we find higher levels of egocentricism with a computer than a human partner.

Partner effects and individual differences on perspective taking

Speakers often use different names to refer to the same entity (e.g., "woman" vs. "tennis player"). We explore factors that affect naming variation for visually presented objects, analyzing a large dataset of object names with realistic images, and focusing on two factors: visual typicality (of objects and contexts) and name frequency. We develop a computational approach to estimate typicality, and not only study object names used by most annotators (top names), but also the second most used ones (alternative names). Our results show that variation increases for objects that are less typical for their top name, more typical for their alternative name, or whose top name has relatively low frequency. Context typicality does not show a general effect. Overall, we show that characteristics relating to name candidates beyond the top name are informative of naming variation, and the potential of using computational methods to inform models of human object naming.

Woman or tennis player? Visual typicality and lexical frequency affect variation in object naming

Research on sound symbolism has shown that speakers of different languages associate specific consonants and vowels with round and pointy shapes, a phenomenon commonly dubbed the bouba-kiki effect. Most of this work rely on forced-choice tasks in which participants assign previously crafted pseudowords (like kiki or bouba) to visual stimuli. Here we investigate this phenomenon with a production written task. Participants had to create a new word they thought would be a good name for round and spiky images. In this less constrained task, spiky images received names with more high/front vowels and voiceless stops, while round shapes were named with more back/rounded vowels and lateral and nasal consonants. In great part these results replicate previous findings, showing that participants recourse to sound symbolism even when the task at hand gives them more freedom to create names to abstract shapes.

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