{"title":"Editor's Introduction: Best Papers from the 20th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling.","authors":"Terrence C Stewart","doi":"10.1111/tops.12718","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12718","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The International Conference on Cognitive Modelling is dedicated to understanding how the complex processes of the mind can be explained in terms of detailed inner processing. In this issue, we present four representative papers of this field of research from our 20th meeting, ICCM 2022. This meeting was our first hybrid meeting, with a virtual version happening July 11-15, 2022, and an in-person event from July 23-27, 2022, held in Toronto, Canada. The four papers presented here were the top-ranked papers across both the virtual and in-person events. Three of the papers develop novel computational theories about low-level components within the mind and how those components result in high-level phenomena such as motivation, anhedonia, and attention. The final paper demonstrates the use of cognitive modeling to develop novel explanations of a paired associate learning task, and uses those insights to develop and explain human performance in a more complex version of that task.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"71-73"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139418295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Representing the World in Language and Thought.","authors":"Barbara C Malt","doi":"10.1111/tops.12719","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12719","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Internal representations guide our navigation of the world, while language allows us to share some of what is encoded internally with others. I have been interested in the content of thought, the nature of word meanings and what they reveal about thought, and how thoughts are expressed in words. My work has combined evidence from laboratory experimentation with observation of word use in natural settings, including from people who speak different languages. Some of the ideas guiding the work are these: understanding entities in the world non-linguistically engages different representations and processes than talking about them; patterns of word use in a language reflect cultural and linguistic history, not only conceptual representations of current speakers; linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge is therefore at least partially independent, and so language and thought will not always closely parallel one another; the beliefs people express about their concepts and word meanings may not accurately reflect the implicit knowledge they draw on in interacting with and talking about the world; and only by carefully observing actual word use can we understand how word meanings come about and how linguistic knowledge is used to select words for communication.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"6-24"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139106713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bridget A Kelly, Charles Kemp, Daniel R Little, Duane Hamacher, Simon J Cropper
{"title":"Visual Perception Principles in Constellation Creation.","authors":"Bridget A Kelly, Charles Kemp, Daniel R Little, Duane Hamacher, Simon J Cropper","doi":"10.1111/tops.12720","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12720","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Many cultures share common constellations and common narratives about the stars in the night sky. Previous research has shown that this overlap in asterisms, minimal star groupings inside constellations, is clearly present across 27 distinct culture groups and can be explained in part by properties of individual stars (brightness) and properties of pairs of stars (proximity) (Kemp, Hamacher, Little, & Cropper, 2022). The same work, however, found no evidence that properties of triples (angle) and quadruples (good continuation) predicted constellation formation. We developed a behavioral experiment to explore how individuals form constellations under conditions that reduce cultural learning. We found that participants independently selected and connected similar stars, and that their responses were predicted by two properties of triples (angle and even spacing) in addition to the properties of brightness and proximity supported by previous work. Our findings lend further evidence to the theory that commonality of constellations across cultures is not a result of shared human history but rather stems from shared human nature.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"25-37"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139098942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kartik Chandra, Tzu-Mao Li, Joshua B Tenenbaum, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley
{"title":"Storytelling as Inverse Inverse Planning.","authors":"Kartik Chandra, Tzu-Mao Li, Joshua B Tenenbaum, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley","doi":"10.1111/tops.12710","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12710","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Great storytelling takes us on a journey the way ordinary reality rarely does. But what exactly do we mean by this \"journey?\" Recently, literary theorist Karin Kukkonen proposed that storytelling is \"probability design:\" the art of giving an audience pieces of information bit by bit, to craft the journey of their changing beliefs about the fictional world. A good \"probability design\" choreographs a delicate dance of certainty and surprise in the reader's mind as the story unfolds from beginning to end. In this paper, we computationally model this conception of storytelling. Building on the classic Bayesian inverse planning model of human social cognition, we treat storytelling as inverse inverse planning: the task of choosing actions to manipulate an inverse planner's inferences, and therefore a human audience's beliefs. First, we use an inverse inverse planner to depict social and physical situations, and present behavioral studies indicating that inverse inverse planning produces more expressive behavior than ordinary \"naïve planning.\" Then, through a series of examples, we demonstrate how inverse inverse planning captures many storytelling elements from first principles: character, narrative arcs, plot twists, irony, flashbacks, and deus ex machina are all naturally encoded in the flexible language of probability design.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"54-70"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"92156967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Allocating Mental Effort in Cognitive Tasks: A Model of Motivation in the ACT-R Cognitive Architecture.","authors":"Yuxue C Yang, Andrea Stocco","doi":"10.1111/tops.12711","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12711","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Motivation is the driving force that influences people's behaviors and interacts with many cognitive functions. Computationally, motivation is represented as a cost-benefit analysis that weighs efforts and rewards in order to choose the optimal actions. Shenhav and colleagues proposed an elegant theory, the Expected Value of Control (EVC), which describes the relationship between cognitive efforts, costs, and rewards. In this paper, we propose a more fine-grained and detailed motivation framework that incorporates the principles of EVC into the ACT-R cognitive architecture. Specifically, motivation is represented as a specific slot in the Goal buffer with a corresponding scalar value, M, that is translated into the reward value R<sub>t</sub> that is delivered when the goal is reached. This implementation is tested in two models. The first model is a high-level model that reproduces the EVC predictions with abstract actions. The second model is an augmented version of an existing ACT-R model of the Simon task. The motivation mechanism is shown to permit optimal effort allocation and reproduce known phenomena. Finally, the broader implications of our mechanism are discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"74-91"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138177506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interval Timing as a Computational Pathway From Early Life Adversity to Affective Disorders.","authors":"Nora C Harhen, Aaron M Bornstein","doi":"10.1111/tops.12701","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12701","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Adverse early life experiences can have remarkably enduring negative consequences on mental health, with numerous, varied psychiatric conditions sharing this developmental origin. Yet, the mechanisms linking adverse experiences to these conditions remain poorly understood. Here, we draw on a principled model of interval timing to propose that statistically optimal adaptation of temporal representations to an unpredictable early life environment can produce key characteristics of anhedonia, a transdiagnostic symptom associated with affective disorders like depression and anxiety. The core observation is that early temporal unpredictability produces broader, more imprecise temporal expectations. As a result, reward anticipation is diminished, and associative learning is slowed. When agents with such representations are later introduced to more stable environments, they demonstrate a negativity bias, responding more to the omission of reward than its receipt. Increased encoding of negative events has been proposed to contribute to disorders with anhedonia as a symptom. We then examined how unpredictability interacts with another form of adversity, low reward availability. We found that unpredictability's effect was most strongly felt in richer environments, potentially leading to categorically different phenotypic expressions. In sum, our formalization suggests a single mechanism can help to link early life adversity to a range of behaviors associated with anhedonia, and offers novel insights into the interactive impacts of multiple adversities.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"92-112"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10842617/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41216184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jarean Carson, Ion Juvina, Kevin O'Neill, Chi Hang Wong, Preston Menke, Kristin M Kindell, Erin Harmon
{"title":"Peer-Assisted Learning Is More Effective at Higher Task Complexity and Difficulty.","authors":"Jarean Carson, Ion Juvina, Kevin O'Neill, Chi Hang Wong, Preston Menke, Kristin M Kindell, Erin Harmon","doi":"10.1111/tops.12708","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12708","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper presents two studies in which a peer-assisted learning condition was compared to an individual learning condition. The first study used the paired-associates learning task and the second study used an incrementally more complex task-the remote associate test. Participants in the peer-assisted learning condition worked in groups of four. They had to solve a given problem individually and give a first answer before being able to request to see their peers' solutions; then, a second answer was issued. After six sessions of peer-assisted practice, a final individual test was administered. Peer interaction was found to benefit learning in both studies but the benefit transferred to the final test only in the second study. Fine-grained behavioral analyses and computational modeling suggested that the benefits of peer interaction were (partially) offset by its costs, particularly increased cognitive load and error exposure. Overall, the superiority of peer-assisted learning over individual learning was more pronounced in the more complex task and for the more difficult problems in that task.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"129-153"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72211355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Information-Theoretic Account of Availability Effects in Language Production.","authors":"Richard Futrell","doi":"10.1111/tops.12716","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12716","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>I present a computational-level model of language production in terms of a combination of information theory and control theory in which words are chosen incrementally in order to maximize communicative value subject to an information-theoretic capacity constraint. The theory generally predicts a tradeoff between ease of production and communicative accuracy. I apply the theory to two cases of apparent availability effects in language production, in which words are selected on the basis of their accessibility to a speaker who has not yet perfectly planned the rest of the utterance. Using corpus data on English relative clause complementizer dropping and experimental data on Mandarin noun classifier choice, I show that the theory reproduces the observed phenomena, providing an alternative account to Uniform Information Density and a promising general model of language production which is tightly linked to emerging theories in computational neuroscience.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"38-53"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139038111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Taylor M Curley, Lorraine Borghetti, Megan B Morris
{"title":"Gamma Power as an Index of Sustained Attention in Simulated Vigilance Tasks.","authors":"Taylor M Curley, Lorraine Borghetti, Megan B Morris","doi":"10.1111/tops.12700","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12700","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Performance on the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT; Dinges & Powell, 1985)-a common index of sustained attention-is affected by the opposing forces of fatigue and sustained effort, where reaction times and error rates typically increase across trials and are sometimes offset by additional efforts deployed toward the end of the task (i.e., an \"end-spurt\"; cf. Bergum & Klein, 1961). In ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational; Anderson et al., 2004), these influences on task performance have been modeled as latent variables that are inferred from performance (e.g., Jongman, 1998; Veksler & Gunzelmann, 2018) without connections to directly observable variables. We propose the use of frontal gamma (γ) spectral power as a direct measure of vigilant effort and demonstrate its efficacy in modeling performance on the PVT in both the aggregate and in individuals.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"113-128"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41160525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}