Canada

Resolving overloading in communication requires attention to context. Previous research has found that the mutual assumption of cooperation during communication can act as a powerful constraint, allowing successful resolution under ambiguity. In this study, we investigate two specific types of cooperative context used in a communicative task which arise from different sources: beliefs and actions. In belief-driven communication, signals are interpreted in context of what else a speaker could have said about the world. Here communicators assume that the speaker aims to change the listener&#39;s beliefs by providing the most straightforward signal. In action-driven communication, signals are considered in terms of what a speaker can reasonably ask others to do. Signaling can be sensitive to utility considerations of acting and interacting in the physical world. Through a communication game, we tested how listeners would interpret an ambiguous signal using belief-driven or action-driven strategies. We find that while no one strategy is dominant overall, individuals are highly consistent in which strategy they employ when forced to decide.

CogSci 2022

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

Resolving overloading in communication requires attention to context. Previous research has found that the mutual assumption of cooperation during communication can act as a powerful constraint, allowing successful resolution under ambiguity. In this study, we investigate two specific types of cooperative context used in a communicative task which arise from different sources: beliefs and actions. In belief-driven communication, signals are interpreted in context of what else a speaker could have said about the world. Here communicators assume that the speaker aims to change the listener's beliefs by providing the most straightforward signal. In action-driven communication, signals are considered in terms of what a speaker can reasonably ask others to do. Signaling can be sensitive to utility considerations of acting and interacting in the physical world. Through a communication game, we tested how listeners would interpret an ambiguous signal using belief-driven or action-driven strategies. We find that while no one strategy is dominant overall, individuals are highly consistent in which strategy they employ when forced to decide.

technical paper

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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. 





Dementia is a common and debilitating condition that typically gives rise to increasing language impairment. There is a need to understand the nature of this impairment further so that therapies may be developed, particularly in the case of bilinguals. This paper extends BiLex, an existing computational model of bilingual lexical access, to simulate language decline in dementia. Six lesion types are evaluated for their ability to reproduce the pattern of decline in the semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) subtype of dementia. Semantic memory lesions reproduce this pattern of decline best in monolinguals, and further suggest patterns that are likely to be found in longitudinal data from bilingual dementia patients in the future.

Constructing Individualized Computational Models for Dementia Patients

Visual working memory and visual mental imagery both involve the use of internal visual representations, and they likely have overlapping neural substrates. However, research on people with “aphantasia,” or a lack of visual imagery, has not found any evidence that aphantasics are impaired on visual working memory tasks, possibly because they can use non-visual strategies. We designed a task intended to prevent compensatory strategies, and also to explore what happens when aphantasics are required to shift the focus of attention between items in working memory. We found that aphantasics were not significantly different from controls, either when maintaining or shifting the focus of attention. Explanations include non-visual memory strategies, but also the possibility that aphantasics can store information in visual working memory without conscious awareness. Future research should combine behavioral methods with neuroimaging to investigate how aphantasics encode working memory representations.


Memory without Imagery: No Evidence of Visual Working Memory Impairment in People with Aphantasia

A critical part of language comprehension is inferring omitted but plausible information from linguistic descriptions of events. For instance, the verb phrase ‘preserve vegetable’ implies the instrument vinegar whereas ‘preserve fruit’ implies dehydrator. We studied the ability of distributional semantic models to perform this kind of semantic inference after being trained on an artificial corpus with strictly controlled constraints on which verb phrases occur with which instruments. Importantly, the ability to infer omitted but plausible instruments in our task requires compositional generalization. We found that contemporary neural network models fall short generalizing learned selectional constraints, and that a graph-based distributional semantic model trained on constituency-parsed data and equipped with a spreading-activation procedure for calculating semantic relatedness, achieves perfect performance. Our findings shed light on the mechanisms that give rise to compositional generalization, and using graphs to model semantic memory.

Compositional Generalization in a Graph-based Model of Distributional Semantics

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.

Mapping language onto mental representations of object locations in transfer-of-possession events: A visual-world study using webcam-based eye-tracking

People have a remarkable ability to remain steadfast in their beliefs in the face of large-scale disagreement. This has important consequences (e.g., societal polarization), yet its psychological underpinnings are poorly understood. In this paper, we answer foundational questions regarding belief persistence, from its prevalence to variability. Across two Experiments (N = 356, N = 354), we find that participants are aware of societal disagreement about controversial issues, yet overwhelmingly (~85%) do not question their views if asked to reflect on this disagreement. Both studies provide evidence that explanations for persistence vary across domains, with epistemic and meta-epistemic explanations among the most prevalent.

Mechanisms of Belief Persistence in the Face of Societal Disagreement

A number of findings suggest that people’s expectations about the future are unrealistically optimistic (e.g. Sharot et al., 2011). This bias is thought to result from the “motivational modulation” of evidence, driven by the desire to feel positively about one’s own future (Sharot, 2011). However, evaluating “bias” in belief revision requires careful comparison against a rational standard, and recent arguments and findings (Shah et al., 2016) give reason to doubt much of the evidence for optimism bias. Descriptive Bayesian models allow for a direct comparison of human belief updating against the Bayesian rational standard (Tauber et al., 2017). Here, these analyses indicate widespread “conservatism,” or weaker-than-rational belief revision. However, in contrast to the widely-reported “optimism bias,” participants more commonly displayed pessimism than optimism in their belief revision. Both effects were marked by significant heterogeneity, with a sizable fraction of participants engaging in largely rational updating.

A descriptive Bayesian account of optimism in belief revision

Numerous psychological findings have shown that mere exposure to ideas makes those ideas seem more true, a finding commonly referred to as the “illusory truth” effect (e.g. Hasheret al., 1977). In the presence of pervasive misinformation, this basic feature of cognition may undermine the functioning of a democratic society (Pennycook et al., 2018). However, genuine beliefs do not only produce judgments of truth, they also imply other beliefs and drive decision-making. Here, we sought to examine whether mere exposure to statements produces genuine beliefs by examining whether people draw inferences from statements after mere exposure. Surprisingly, and in contrast to familiarity-based accounts of the illusory truth effect (e.g. Dechene et al., 2010), we found that exposure to “premise” statements affected participants’ truth ratings for novel "implied" statements. This “illusory implication” effect suggests that exposure to false statements has further-reaching impacts than previously thought and calls for a new mechanistic account of these effects.

Does mere exposure to ideas encourage belief in them?

Humans have the exceptional ability to efficiently structure past knowledge during learning to enable fast generalization. Xia and Collins (2021) evaluated this ability in a hierarchically structured, sequential decision-making task, where participants could build “options” (strategy “chunks”) at multiple levels of temporal and state abstraction. A quantitative model, the Option Model, captured the transfer effects observed in human participants, suggesting that humans create and com- pose hierarchical options and use them to explore novel con- texts. However, it is not well understood how learning in a new context is attributed to new and old options (i.e., the credit assignment problem). In a new context with new contingencies, where participants can recompose some aspects of previously learned options, do they reliably create new options or overwrite existing ones? Does the credit assignment de- pend on how similar the new option is to an old one? In our experiment, two groups of participants (n=124 and n=104) learned hierarchically structured options, experienced different amounts of negative transfer in a new option context, and were subsequently tested on the previously learned options. Behavioral analysis showed that old options were successfully reused without interference, and new options were appropriately created and credited. This credit assignment did not depend on how similar the new option was to the old option, showing great flexibility and precision in human hierarchical learning. These behavioral results were captured by the Option Model, providing further evidence for option learning and transfer in humans.

Credit assignment in hierarchical option transfer

Human adults can figure out what happened by combining evidence from different sensory modalities, such as vision and sound. How does the ability to integrate multi-modal information develop in early childhood? Inspired by prior computational work and behavioral studies with adults, we examined 3- to 8-year-old children's ability to reason about the physical trajectory of a ball that was dropped into an occluded Plinko box. Children had to infer in which one of three holes the ball was dropped based on visual information (i.e., where the ball landed) and auditory information (i.e., the sounds of the ball colliding with parts of the box). We compare children's responses to the predictions of four computational models. The results suggest that although even the youngest children make systematic judgments rather than randomly guessing, children's ability to integrate visual and auditory evidence continues to develop into late childhood.

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

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