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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 &#39;Referential Belief Link&#39;: that the proportion of looks to a referent in a time window reflects participants&#39; degree of belief that the referent is the intended target in that time window. Here we test the hypothesis that participants&#39; 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&#39; production expectations in research using the visual world paradigm.

CogSci 2022

The role of production expectations in visual world paradigm linking hypotheses

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.

technical paper

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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

Learning to identify a person’s voice is a key component of speech perception. In this study, we use a categorization framework to provide insights about the mechanisms supporting talker identification. Native Mandarin Chinese listeners learned to categorize sentences in three tasks with different language contexts – native Mandarin talkers speaking Mandarin, native English talkers speaking English, and native Mandarin talkers speaking English. We compared learning when listeners received fully informative or minimal feedback. Using decision bound models, we examined the strategies participants used in each of the three tasks. Regardless of language context, full feedback was initially better for learning than minimal feedback but was no different after the second block. Across tasks, participants often used strategies based on mean fundamental frequency to separate the talkers. These results demonstrate that talker identification is a categorization problem, which enables leveraging existing category learning frameworks to understand the mechanisms of this important ability.

Talker identification as a categorization problem

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

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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

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The role of production expectations in visual world paradigm linking hypotheses

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The role of production expectations in visual world paradigm linking hypotheses

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