Cognition最新文献

{"title":"Generics and Quantified Generalizations: Asymmetry Effects and Strategic Communicators","authors":"Kevin Reuter ,&nbsp;Eleonore Neufeld ,&nbsp;Guillermo Del Pinal","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and developmentally early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work suggests that generics display a unique asymmetry between the prevalence levels required to accept them and the prevalence levels typically implied by their use. This asymmetry effect is thought to have serious social consequences: if speakers use socially problematic generics based on prevalence levels that are systematically lower than what is typically inferred by their recipients, then using generics will likely exacerbate social stereotypes and biases. This paper presents evidence against the popular hypothesis that this asymmetry effect is unique to generics. Correcting for various shortcomings of previous studies, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics and various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’). In addition, to better understand the conditions under which generalized asymmetry effects may exacerbate biases, we examine whether speakers choose generalizing sentences based simply on their acceptance conditions, or are systematically sensitive to the implications likely drawn by their typical recipients. In support of the latter view, we found that, in neutral or cooperative scenarios, speakers reliably choose generalizing sentences whose implied prevalence levels closely match the actual ones. In non-cooperative scenarios, many speakers exploit asymmetry effects to further their own goals by choosing generalizing sentences that are strictly true but likely to mislead their recipients. These results refine our understanding of the source of asymmetry effects and the conditions under which they may introduce biased beliefs into social networks.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 106004"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142848006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The role of goal constructs in conceptual acquisition","authors":"Seth Chin-Parker,&nbsp;Eric Brown,&nbsp;Eric Gerlach","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106039","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106039","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Within a given situation, an individual's goal motivates and structures how they interact with their surroundings. The goal also organizes the available information and specifies the role of a given item or attribute in terms of how it relates to the other aspects of the situation. We propose these ideas should inform the study of concept acquisition. There is abundant evidence that the goal orients an individual to goal-relevant attributes of items during concept acquisition. A more speculative claim is that the goal structures the conceptual knowledge acquired. We introduce a new paradigm for examining goal-directed concept acquisition (Experiment 1) and then assess how both attention to an attribute and its goal-relevance affect its centrality within the acquired concept (Experiment 2). Participants were given items to use as they completed a specified task. In both experiments, we found evidence that task goals oriented participants to goal-relevant attributes of the items. Category-based ratings for items during a transfer task, as well as how the participants sorted the items into groups, indicated that the goal-relevant attributes were more central within the acquired concepts. In Experiment 2, we found that the goal-relevance of the attribute, beyond attentional allocation to the attribute during the task, affected the organization of attribute information within the acquired concept. These results support the thesis that information captured within the conceptual knowledge is structured with respect to the goal.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 106039"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beauty is in the eye of your cohort: Structured individual differences allow predictions of individualized aesthetic ratings of images","authors":"Elif Celikors,&nbsp;David J. Field","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106036","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106036","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in computational models that are capable of predicting the aesthetic ratings of images based on objective image features. Given that aesthetic ratings vary across individuals, models that predict the <em>average</em> aesthetic ratings ignore the unique taste of an individual. In this paper, our goal is to better understand the individual differences in aesthetic ratings by investigating <em>if individual differences follow structural rules or if taste is due to a random component of an individual's ratings</em>. We address this question by using a collaborative filtering model that uses the similarities in ratings of a cohort of observers to predict individuals' ratings on a new set of images. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, 299 online participants were instructed to rate how much they like a set of 50 art images. Using a subset of the images (40), we formed cohorts of individuals with similar ratings and used these cohorts to predict how each person would rate the remaining 10 images not included in the training set. The selected cohorts predicted individual ratings significantly better than random cohorts and outperformed predictions based on the mean image ratings. We also found that the optimal size was approximately 12 % of the sample size. These results imply that individual differences in fact have an underlying structure that is consistent across the cohort and are <em>not</em> random. Using personality scores and subject backgrounds, we also looked at the subject characteristics of the cohorts and found that the participants' art background was the only significant factor. Finally, we explored whether the cohorts used particular visual features in a consistent way. For our small set of features, we didn't find any evidence for this. These results provide important insights into the sources of individual differences in aesthetic preferences and highlight the potential for computational models to improve predictions of individual preferences by leveraging structured individual differences rather than relying solely on population averages.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 106036"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Is an eye truly for an eye? Magnitude differences affect moral praise more than moral blame","authors":"Lishi Tan,&nbsp;Rajen A. Anderson,&nbsp;Shankha Basu","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106040","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106040","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Does the amount of perceived moral responsibility correspond to the magnitude of the act to the same degree regardless of whether the act is moral or immoral? In four experiments (<em>N</em> = 1617; all preregistered), we found that—when evaluating two agents who performed similar acts but with different magnitude—observers judged greater differences in their moral responsibility when those acts were moral than when they were immoral. That is, the same difference in magnitude had greater influence on perceived moral responsibility for moral acts compared to immoral acts. Furthermore, we also found that the asymmetry effect impacted perceivers' judgment of the moral character of the agent (Studies 2 and 3). Evaluating immoral (vs. moral) acts led participants to use a more affect-based (vs. reason-based) decision mode, which, in turn, led them to be more scope insensitive to the magnitude difference of the two acts (Study 3). Lastly, we showed that this asymmetry effect is moderated by the individual's concern with the relevant moral issue (Study 4). When perceivers care less about the issue (e.g., animal welfare), the asymmetry effect attenuates. These results together suggest that, when comparing the moral responsibility of different moral agents, magnitude of behavior matters more for positive than for negative acts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 106040"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142822645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hidden size: Size representations in implicitly coded objects","authors":"Elif Memis ,&nbsp;Gizem Y. Yildiz ,&nbsp;Gereon R. Fink ,&nbsp;Ralph Weidner","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106041","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106041","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Its angular representation on the retina does not solely determine the perceived size of an object. Instead, contextual information is interpreted. We investigated the levels of processing at which this interpretation occurs. Combining three experimental paradigms, we explored whether masked and more implicitly coded objects are already size-rescaled. We induced object size rescaling using a modified variant of the Ebbinghaus illusion. In this variant, six dots altered the size of a central stimulus and served as inducers generating Object-Substitution Masking (OSM). Participants reported the average size of multiple circles using the size-averaging paradigm, allowing us to test the contribution of masked and non-masked central target circles. Our Ebbinghaus illusion variant altered perceived stimulus size and showed robust masking via OSM. Furthermore, size-averaging was sensitive enough to detect perceived size changes in the magnitude of the ones induced by the Ebbinghaus illusion. Finally, combining all three paradigms, we observed that masked and non-masked stimuli contributed to size averaging in a size-rescaled manner. In a control experiment testing the general effects of Ebbinghaus inducers, we observed a contrast-like effect on size averaging. Large inducers decreased the perceived average size, while small inducers increased it. In summary, our experiments indicate that context integration, induced by the Ebbinghaus illusion, alters size representations at an early stage. These modified size representations are independent of whether a target is recognisable. Moreover, perceived average size appears to be coded relative to surrounding perceptual groups.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 106041"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142822641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"People expect artificial moral advisors to be more utilitarian and distrust utilitarian moral advisors","authors":"Simon Myers ,&nbsp;Jim A.C. Everett","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106028","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106028","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>As machines powered by artificial intelligence increase in their technological capacities, there is a growing interest in the theoretical and practical idea of artificial moral advisors (AMAs): systems powered by artificial intelligence that are explicitly designed to assist humans in making ethical decisions. Across four pre-registered studies (total <em>N</em> = 2604) we investigated how people perceive and trust artificial moral advisors compared to human advisors. Extending previous work on algorithmic aversion, we show that people have a significant aversion to AMAs (vs humans) giving moral advice, while also showing that this is particularly the case when advisors - human and AI alike - gave advice based on utilitarian principles. We find that participants expect AI to make utilitarian decisions, and that even when participants agreed with a decision made by an AMA, they still expected to disagree with an AMA more than a human in future. Our findings suggest challenges in the adoption of artificial moral advisors, and particularly those who draw on and endorse utilitarian principles - however normatively justifiable.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 106028"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142822650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"London taxi drivers exploit neighbourhood boundaries for hierarchical route planning","authors":"Eva-Maria Griesbauer ,&nbsp;Pablo Fernandez Velasco ,&nbsp;Antoine Coutrot ,&nbsp;Jan M. Wiener ,&nbsp;Jeremy G. Morley ,&nbsp;Daniel McNamee ,&nbsp;Ed Manley ,&nbsp;Hugo J. Spiers","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106014","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106014","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Humans show an impressive ability to plan over complex situations and environments. A classic approach to explaining such planning has been tree-search algorithms which search through alternative state sequences for the most efficient path through states. However, this approach fails when the number of states is large due to the time to compute all possible sequences. Hierarchical route planning has been proposed as an alternative, offering a computationally efficient mechanism in which the representation of the environment is segregated into clusters. Current evidence for hierarchical planning comes from experimentally created environments which have clearly defined boundaries and far fewer states than the real-world. To test for real-world hierarchical planning we exploited the capacity of London licensed taxi drivers to use their memory to construct a street by street plan across London, UK (&gt;26,000 streets). The time to recall each successive street name was treated as the response time, with a rapid average of 1.8 s between each street. In support of hierarchical planning we find that the clustered structure of London's regions impacts the response times, with minimal impact of the distance across the street network (as would be predicted by tree-search). We also find that changing direction during the plan (e.g. turning left or right) is associated with delayed response times. Thus, our results provide real-world evidence for how humans structure planning over a very large number of states, and give a measure of human expertise in planning.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 106014"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142792617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Blocking of associative learning by explicit descriptions","authors":"Tom Kelly ,&nbsp;Elliot A. Ludvig","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106015","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106015","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>People given written descriptions often learn and decide differently from those learning from experience, even in formally identical tasks. This paper presents two experiments detailing how telling participants about the value of one stimulus impacts a keystone learning effect – blocking. The paper investigates if descriptions can be used to effectively block future trial-by-trial learning. Participants were presented with coloured shape stimuli and asked if those shapes caused reward. Experiment 1 found both standard, trial-by-trial experienced blocking and the novel effect of described blocking of future trial-by-trial learning. Experiment 2 investigated the conditions that promote described blocking by manipulating the training that occurred prior to exposure to the description. In the Pre-training Present group, participants exposed to a training set of compound and elemental stimuli produced more pronounced blocking than the Pre-training Absent group, which had no such training. These results show that explicit descriptions about causal relations can block learning from subsequent experience, providing a new extension of associative learning toward the verbal domain.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"256 ","pages":"Article 106015"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142786606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Number adaptation: Reply","authors":"David Burr,&nbsp;Giovanni Anobile,&nbsp;Roberto Arrighi","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105870","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105870","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Adaptation is a ubiquitous property of perceptual systems, increasing sensitivity to change and allowing them to operate over a large dynamic range. The <em>number sense</em>, like most other perceptual systems, is adaptable. Yousif et al. (2024) challenge the existence of number adaptation, offering an alternate explanation that they term the “old news hypothesis”. Here we consider the major evidence advanced for their theory and show that, while their predicted effects may reach statistical significance, they are far too small to begin to explain the robust phenomenon of adaptation. We also highlight a series of studies using fMRI, EEG, pupillometry and psychophysical techniques that support the existence of adaption, and are inconsistent with “old news”. We conclude that number adaptation, while not fully understood, does indeed exist, and remains an invaluable concept for understanding the <em>number sense</em>.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"254 ","pages":"Article 105870"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142744569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exploring the hierarchical structure of human plans via program generation","authors":"Carlos G. Correa ,&nbsp;Sophia Sanborn ,&nbsp;Mark K. Ho ,&nbsp;Frederick Callaway ,&nbsp;Nathaniel D. Daw ,&nbsp;Thomas L. Griffiths","doi":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105990","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105990","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Human behavior is often assumed to be hierarchically structured, made up of abstract actions that can be decomposed into concrete actions. However, behavior is typically measured as a sequence of actions, which makes it difficult to infer its hierarchical structure. In this paper, we explore how people form hierarchically structured plans, using an experimental paradigm with observable hierarchical representations: participants create programs that produce sequences of actions in a language with explicit hierarchical structure. This task lets us test two well-established principles of human behavior: utility maximization (i.e. using fewer actions) and minimum description length (MDL; i.e. having a shorter program). We find that humans are sensitive to both metrics, but that both accounts fail to predict a qualitative feature of human-created programs, namely that people prefer programs with <em>reuse</em> over and above the predictions of MDL. We formalize this preference for reuse by extending the MDL account into a generative model over programs, modeling hierarchy choice as the induction of a grammar over actions. Our account can explain the preference for reuse and provides better predictions of human behavior, going beyond simple accounts of compressibility to highlight a principle that guides hierarchical planning.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48455,"journal":{"name":"Cognition","volume":"255 ","pages":"Article 105990"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142744998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}