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Infant language development is facilitated by social environments and predicted by their parents’ timely responses. However, the increasing uptake in digital technologies raises important questions about how digitally mediated interactions influence parents’ responsiveness. In the present study, the quantity (total numbers of words) and quality (unique words) of parents’ utterances to their infants were examined in contingent (less than 2 seconds) and non-contingent segments across two digital conditions (face-to-face with a tablet present vs. video-chat) during a peekaboo play (N = 67, infants’ age: 18 – 26 months-old). We assessed the lexical variability using a natural language processing (NLP) approach with size-matched random sampling simulation. Preliminary results indicate (1) less lexical diversity was used in non-contingent video-chat and (2) the lexical variability was similar between contingent video-chat and non-contingent while playing peekaboo with a tablet. These findings suggest parents’ timely inputs play a more critical role in video-chat environment.

CogSci 2023

Lexical diversity in parents’ responses to infants’ vocalisations during peekaboo play across digital media contexts

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Biases and stereotypes about social groups emerge from a young age. This study examines whether counterevidence that is statistically representative of the entire group can change children’s attitudes and beliefs about minimally defined social groups. We found that 5- to 6-year-olds and 9- to 10-year-olds’ initial attitudes and beliefs about minimal groups were positive overall, and more positive for the ingroup than the outgroup. Observing a 90% mean sample randomly drawn from the group, or a 10% mean sample in some cases, reduced this positivity for both the ingroup and the outgroup. This work has important implications for combating biases and stereotypes in the real world.

Changing Children’s Intergroup Biases and Social Stereotypes Through Statistical Counterevidence

Over-engaged parenting is on the rise and detrimental to children. However, it is unclear why parents choose to take over and complete developmentally appropriate tasks for their children. Across two preregistered studies, we test the novel hypothesis that parents’ decisions to take over are guided by their beliefs about children's learning. In line with this hypothesis, parents of 4-5-year-olds (N = 77) reported taking over more on tasks from which they believe their child learns less, which was more often the case for non-academic (versus academic) tasks (Study 1). Study 2 found causal evidence for this hypothesis: Increasing parents' (N = 60) beliefs about what their child could learn from doing a novel, non-academic task reduced their taking over actions by half. This work shows that parents take over less when they think that their young child is learning and opens new avenues for interventions to reduce over-engaged parenting.


Parents take over less when they think their young child is learning

During social interactions, we adapt our behavior in anticipation and response to the actions of our partners. This project explores whether anticipating that we are going to do something together also affects how we perceive objects in the world. In 4 Experiments, children and adults estimated the weight of objects when they anticipated that they will be lifted alone and when they thought they would have help. Results showed that the estimated weight of objects varied for adults and children depending on whether they thought they would lift alone or together. Children reliably perceived objects as lighter when they expected help from an adult parent compared to lifting them alone or with the help of a sibling. Parents, in turn, estimated objects would be heavier when they were helping their child. Overall, results suggest that we take into account the costs and benefits of helping another person when acting together.

Costs and Benefits of Helping; How Children and Adults Estimate the Intended Effort of Acting Together

How do young children acquire harmful gender stereotypes? This project tests one potential input: representations of others’ stereotypes. In a pilot study (n=16), 6-8 year-olds learned about a classroom with engineering games and story games. Children were shown four teacher-student pairs and for each were told that the teacher chose the game that the teacher thought a girl or boy student would like more. In line with gender-stereotypical reasoning, participants were more likely to predict that the teacher gave the engineering game to boys (68.75%) than to girls (28.13%, p = .031). Ongoing work is testing whether children make these same predictions when they, but not the teacher, know the students’ non-stereotypical interests (e.g., when a boy student likes stories over engineering), and how their responses are related to their own stereotypes. So far, this work suggests that young children expect adults to hold harmful gender stereotypes.

Children’s representations of others’ gender biases

Research suggests that perspective-taking in children is associated with greater cognitive and emotion understanding as well as parent use of mental state language—words concerning inner mental states or feelings. However, prior research shows conflicting results on which categories of mental state language—cognition (e.g., think, know), emotion (e.g., happy), or desire (e.g., want)—facilitate children’s perspective-taking. The current study examines the relationship between parent mental state language and children’s perspective-taking.

We are coding parent mental state language categories from a wordless book task with two-year-old children and assessing children’s perspective-taking using a card task (Flavell et al., 1981). Preliminary results (N=7, planned 41) show that, on average, parents use more cognition words per session than emotion and desire words and, on average, children score at chance on the perspective-taking task. Differences between mental state categories on children’s perspective-taking skills as well as individual variability will be analyzed.

The association between types of caregiver mental state language and toddler perspective-taking

Forgiveness plays a significant role in our everyday social life, and, because of that, it has received an increasing amount of attention in academic research. However, philosophers and psychologists are equally worried by the fact that we still lack an empirically adequate characterization of forgiveness. In this paper, we present two preregistered study in which we explore what ordinary people believe a speaker does when he or she perform the speech act of forgiving by uttering the phrase, “I forgive you”. Experiment 1 uses a vignette-based stimulus to examine what participants believe to change after the victim granted forgiveness to their wrong-doer. In Experiment 2, we apply a linguistic test, the cancellability test, to determine whether participants consider it compatible to forgive the wrong-doer but to still blame them.

“I forgive you!” — Exploring the Impact of Forgiveness on Negative Emotions and Blame

Social biases can negatively impact our sense of belonging, achievement, and social relationships. However, it is unclear what inferential processes underlie how people detect biases. We propose that people infer social biases by positing prior beliefs to account for potential gaps between what someone observed (e.g., seeing you succeed on a challenging task) and how they responded (e.g., recommending you try something easier). We present a computational model formalizing this process, and validate it with two experiments. We find a strong quantitative fit between model predictions and participant judgments across a range of inferences, namely which prior bias the coach held, and even the player's emotional reactions to the coach's actions (i.e., how offended or flattered the player feels). This work bridges computational methods with social psychological research on social biases, by showing how mental state inferences contribute to our ability to rapidly detect biases.

Detecting social biases using mental state inference

People have a remarkable capacity to infer other people’s goals and intentions based on how they behave. Yet, humans are also motivated to ensure that others can infer their mental states easily and accurately. Past work has argued that people achieve this by introducing inefficiencies to their behavior, which reveal its underlying goal (e.g., exaggerating one’s movements so as to make their purpose obvious). We hypothesized that inefficiency is not a constitutive feature of signaling, and that people will often signal their goals and intentions solely through efficient action. We test this idea in a signal-design experiment where participants need to reach a goal while also making their behavior as inferable as possible. We find that people shape their behavior to increase inferability without jeopardizing efficiency. We then test how well these efficient signals reveal their goals using a computational model to simulate observer inferences. Our results show that humans not only exploit opportunities to reveal their goals without deviating from efficient action, but that these signals are shaped to allow observers to more quickly understand the intention underpinning the movement.

Guiding Inference: Signaling intentions using efficient action

People engage in intentional misunderstandings to get around direct non-compliance. In other words, they use loopholes. Previous work showed that adults and children consider loophole behavior to be less costly than direct noncompliance (Bridgers, Schulz, & Ullman, 2021), and suggested this is a primary reason for their use: loopholes will land you in less trouble than defiance. However, we propose that this difference between loopholes and defiance will not hold for a specific context: moral violations. We replicate the finding that loopholes are less costly in a neutral context, but find that engaging in loopholes in a moral context is as bad as non-compliance (Experiment 1, N=360). We then use a direct comparison between loopholes and non-compliance (N=150), to investigate whether in some contexts loopholes will be seen as even worse than non-compliance. We discuss possible extensions and limitations, and consider why loopholes in moral violations may be uniquely unacceptable.

Skirting the Sacred: Moral Violations make Intentional Misunderstandings Worse

We provide an empirical test for shared reality theory, which predicts individuals seek to share similar impressions about the world with others in order to connect and reduce uncertainty. We built an online platform permitting synchronous communication between groups of participants time-locked to video stimuli. We first presented participants with the same introduction to a reality show and then seamlessly showed different dyads within a group separate video segments depicting different social interactions between pairs of contestants. People reported feeling more connected to group members who underwent the same video experience compared to those who unknowingly watched a different video. The nature of the interactions also appeared to impact relationships as participants reported feeling more connected to partners who responded to their messages more quickly during the group chat. Together, these results highlight the importance of communication during shared experiences in aligning shared interpretations of reality and facilitating social connection.

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Lexical diversity in parents’ responses to infants’ vocalisations during peekaboo play across digital media contexts

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Changing Children’s Intergroup Biases and Social Stereotypes Through Statistical Counterevidence

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