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One of the most influential modern theories of morality, Moral Foundations Theory, proposes that morality is formed on innate and shared modular foundations. Psychologists have studied the conceptual development of these moral foundations in childhood, but there exists no comprehensive effort on characterizing the early emergence of moral foundations in naturalistic settings. We explore the emerging order of moral foundations through child and caretaker speech. Using computational methods, we contribute an annotated dataset of moral utterances and find that the individualizing foundations emerge earlier than the binding foundations. Furthermore, caretakers tend to talk more about fairness and degradation, while children talk more about cheating. These results are robust across child gender, family&#39;s social class, and race.

CogSci 2022

The emergence of moral foundations in child language development

One of the most influential modern theories of morality, Moral Foundations Theory, proposes that morality is formed on innate and shared modular foundations. Psychologists have studied the conceptual development of these moral foundations in childhood, but there exists no comprehensive effort on characterizing the early emergence of moral foundations in naturalistic settings. We explore the emerging order of moral foundations through child and caretaker speech. Using computational methods, we contribute an annotated dataset of moral utterances and find that the individualizing foundations emerge earlier than the binding foundations. Furthermore, caretakers tend to talk more about fairness and degradation, while children talk more about cheating. These results are robust across child gender, family's social class, and race.

technical paper

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Rules undoubtedly guide our moral lives. Simple moral rules prohibit lying, cheating, and stealing, for instance. But the moral mind is more flexible than a theory based only on rule-adherence can account for. In this paper, we look at one particular kind of flexibility: the ability to figure out when it is okay to break a moral rule. We elicit judgments of the moral acceptability of breaking a simple rule: it's wrong to cut in line. We created a video game environment in which agents attempt to gather water -- and sometimes must stand in line behind others to do so. Subjects watch clips of the game being played and make judgments of the moral acceptability of cutting in line across a wide range of spatio-temporally varied and dynamic scenarios. Our data suggests that subjects make judgments by using a generative understanding of the underlying function of the rule about waiting in line. We further show that our data cannot be accounted for by either 1) simple rule adherence or 2) utility maximization.

Flexibility in Moral Cognition: When is it okay to break the rules?

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Sensorimotor processes are not a source of much noise: Sensory-motor and decision components of reaction times

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Grounding meaning in the motor system: A p-curve analysis of the TMS and tDCS evidence

Using space to think about time appears to be a human universal, but the specifics of people’s space-time mappings vary across individuals and groups. What determines how people spatialize time in their minds? Here we hypothesized that motor experience contributes to individuals’ space-time mappings, independent of linguistic and cultural factors. Many everyday motor actions require using the hands in a particular sequence (e.g., positioning a nail with the nondominant hand before swinging the hammer with the dominant hand), establishing a correlation between space (left hand, right hand) and time (earlier action, later action) that reverses with handedness. These action sequences reinforce Westerners’ typical left-to-right mental timeline for right-handers, but contradict this timeline for left-handers. Accordingly, we find that right-handers associate leftward space with earlier times and rightward space with later times more strongly than left-handers, for whom cultural and bodily experiences present contrasting relationships between space and time.

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Backgroundedness Predicts Island Status of Non-finite Adjuncts in English

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No Such Thing as the Average Listener: Belief-driven versus Action-driven Strategies in Signaling

While widely used in psycholinguistics, the linking hypothesis for eye movements in the visual world paradigm is still poorly understood. Recent work on linking hypotheses for referential tasks in particular has found mixed support for the 'Referential Belief Link': that the proportion of looks to a referent in a time window reflects participants' degree of belief that the referent is the intended target in that time window. Here we test the hypothesis that participants' expectations for the utterances observed in an experiment modulate the extent to which the Referential Belief Link holds. This hypothesis is motivated by a simple idea: when utterances are unexpected, listeners engage in additional reasoning to make sense of the observed signal. In a re-analysis of a previous eye movement and incremental decision task dataset, in conjunction with two novel production experiments, we find that the more surprising an observed utterance is, the smaller the correlation between explicit and implicit beliefs is. We discuss the importance of participants' production expectations in research using the visual world paradigm.

The role of production expectations in visual world paradigm linking hypotheses

Source-goal events involve an object moving from the Source to the Goal. In this work, we focus on the representation of the object, which has received relatively less attention in the study of Source-goal events. Specifically, this study aims to investigate the mapping between language and mental representations of object locations in transfer-of-possession events (e.g. throwing, giving). We investigate two different grammatical factors that may influence the representation of object location in transfer-of-possession events: (a) grammatical aspect (e.g. threw vs. was throwing) and (b) verb semantics (guaranteed transfer, e.g. give vs. no guaranteed transfer, e.g. throw). We conducted a visual-world eye-tracking study using a novel webcam-based eye-tracking paradigm (Webgazer; Papoutsaki et al., 2016) to investigate how grammatical aspect and verb semantics in the linguistic input guide the real-time and final representations of object locations. We show that grammatical cues guide the real-time and final representations of object locations.

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The emergence of moral foundations in child language development

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