{"title":"Facial typicality and attractiveness reflect an ideal dimension of face structure","authors":"Logan T. Trujillo , Erin M. Anderson","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101541","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101541","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Face perception and recognition are important processes for social interaction and communication among humans, so understanding how faces are mentally represented and processed has major implications. At the same time, faces are just some of the many stimuli that we encounter in our everyday lives. Therefore, more general theories of how we represent objects might also apply to faces. Contemporary research on the mental representation of faces has centered on two competing theoretical frameworks that arose from more general categorization research: prototype-based face representation and exemplar-based face representation. Empirically distinguishing between these frameworks is difficult and neither one has been ruled out. In this paper, we advance this area of research in three ways. First, we introduce two additional frameworks for mental representation of categories, <em>varying abstraction</em> and <em>ideal representation</em>, which have not been applied to face perception and recognition before. Second, we fit formal computational models of all four of these theories to human perceptual judgments of the typicality and attractiveness (a strong correlate of typicality) of 100 young adult Caucasian female faces, with the models expressed within a face space derived from facial similarity judgments via multidimensional scaling. Third, we predict the perceived typicality and attractiveness of the faces using these models and compare the predictive performance of each to the empirical data. We found that of all four models, the ideal representation model provided the best account of perceived typicality and attractiveness for the present set of faces, although all models showed discrepancies from the empirical data. These findings demonstrate the relevance of mental categorization processes for representing faces.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"140 ","pages":"Article 101541"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9899519/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9836171","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}
Tianwei Gong , Tobias Gerstenberg , Ralf Mayrhofer , Neil R. Bramley
{"title":"Active causal structure learning in continuous time","authors":"Tianwei Gong , Tobias Gerstenberg , Ralf Mayrhofer , Neil R. Bramley","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101542","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101542","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Research on causal cognition has largely focused on learning and reasoning about contingency data aggregated across discrete observations or experiments. However, this setting represents only the tip of the causal cognition iceberg. A more general problem lurking beneath is that of learning the latent causal structure that connects events and actions as they unfold in continuous time. In this paper, we examine how people actively learn about causal structure in a continuous-time setting, focusing on when and where they intervene and how this shapes their learning. Across two experiments, we find that participants’ accuracy depends on both the informativeness and evidential complexity of the data they generate. Moreover, participants’ intervention choices strike a balance between maximizing expected information and minimizing inferential complexity. People time and target their interventions to create simple yet informative causal dynamics. We discuss how the continuous-time setting challenges existing computational accounts of active causal learning, and argue that metacognitive awareness of one’s inferential limitations plays a critical role for successful learning in the wild.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"140 ","pages":"Article 101542"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9853376","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":"Demonstrative systems: From linguistic typology to social cognition","authors":"Paula Rubio-Fernandez","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101519","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101519","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study explores the connection between language and social cognition by empirically testing different typological analyses of various demonstrative systems. Linguistic typology classifies demonstrative systems as <em>distance-oriented</em> or <em>person-oriented</em>, depending on whether they indicate the location of a referent relative only to the speaker, or to both the speaker and the listener. From the perspective of social cognition, speakers of languages with person-oriented systems must monitor their listener’s spatial location in order to accurately use their demonstratives, while speakers of languages with distance-oriented systems can use demonstratives from their own, egocentric perspective. Resolving an ongoing controversy around the nature of the Spanish demonstrative system, the results of Experiment 1 confirmed that this demonstrative system is person oriented, while the English system is distance oriented. Experiment 2 revealed that not all three-way demonstrative systems are person oriented, with Japanese speakers showing sensitivity to the listener’s spatial location, while Turkish speakers did not show such an effect in their demonstrative choice. In Experiment 3, Catalan-Spanish bilinguals showed sensitivity to listener position in their choice of the Spanish distal form, but not in their choice of the medial form. These results were interpreted as a transfer effect from Catalan, which revealed analogous results to English. Experiment 4 investigated the use of demonstratives to redirect a listener’s attention to the intended referent, which is a universal function of demonstratives that also hinges on social cognition. Japanese and Spanish speakers chose between their proximal and distal demonstratives flexibly, depending on whether the listener was looking closer or further from the referent, whereas Turkish speakers chose their medial form for attention correction. In conclusion, the results of this study support the view that investigating how speakers of different languages jointly use language and social cognition in communication has the potential to unravel the deep connection between these two fundamentally human capacities.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"139 ","pages":"Article 101519"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002852200055X/pdfft?md5=162ec6489bcf03327eb6f37984527fee&pid=1-s2.0-S001002852200055X-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10608056","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}
{"title":"A language of thought for the mental representation of geometric shapes","authors":"Mathias Sablé-Meyer , Kevin Ellis , Josh Tenenbaum , Stanislas Dehaene","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101527","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101527","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In various cultures and at all spatial scales, humans produce a rich complexity of geometric shapes such as lines, circles or spirals. Here, we propose that humans possess a language of thought for geometric shapes that can produce line drawings as recursive combinations of a minimal set of geometric primitives. We present a programming language, similar to Logo, that combines discrete numbers and continuous integration to form higher-level structures based on repetition, concatenation and embedding, and we show that the simplest programs in this language generate the fundamental geometric shapes observed in human cultures. On the perceptual side, we propose that shape perception in humans involves searching for the shortest program that correctly draws the image (program induction). A consequence of this framework is that the mental difficulty of remembering a shape should depend on its minimum description length (MDL) in the proposed language. In two experiments, we show that encoding and processing of geometric shapes is well predicted by MDL. Furthermore, our hypotheses predict additive laws for the psychological complexity of repeated, concatenated or embedded shapes, which we confirm experimentally.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"139 ","pages":"Article 101527"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10615298","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":"Developmental trajectories of delay discounting from childhood to young adulthood: longitudinal associations and test-retest reliability","authors":"Samuel D. Klein, Paul F. Collins, Monica Luciana","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101518","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101518","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Delay discounting (DD) indexes an individual’s preference for smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards, and is considered a form of cognitive impulsivity. Cross-sectional studies have demonstrated that DD peaks in adolescence; longitudinal studies are needed to validate this putative developmental trend, and to determine whether DD assesses a temporary state, or reflects a more stable behavioral trait. In this study, 140 individuals aged 9–23 completed a delay discounting (DD) task and cognitive battery at baseline and every-two years thereafter, yielding five assessments over approximately 10 years. Models fit with the inverse effect of age best approximated the longitudinal trajectory of two DD measures, hyperbolic discounting (log[<em>k</em>]) and area under the indifference-point curve (AUC). Discounting of future rewards increased rapidly from childhood to adolescence and appeared to plateau in late adolescence for both models of DD. Participants with greater verbal intelligence and working memory displayed reduced DD across the duration of the study, suggesting a functional interrelationship between these domains and DD from early adolescence to adulthood. Furthermore, AUC demonstrated good to excellent reliability across assessment points that was superior to log(<em>k</em>), with both measures demonstrating acceptable stability once participants reached late adolescence. The developmental trajectories of DD we observed from childhood through young adulthood suggest that DD may index cognitive control more than reward sensitivity, and that despite modest developmental changes with maturation, AUC may be conceptualized as a trait variable related to cognitive control vs impulsivity.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"139 ","pages":"Article 101518"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10744581","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":"How “is” shapes “ought” for folk-biological concepts","authors":"Emily Foster-Hanson, Tania Lombrozo","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101507","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101507","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Knowing which features are frequent among a biological kind (e.g., that most zebras have stripes) shapes people’s representations of what category members are like (e.g., that typical zebras have stripes) and normative judgments about what they ought to be like (e.g., that zebras should have stripes). In the current work, we ask if people’s inclination to explain <em>why</em> features are frequent is a key mechanism through which what “is” shapes beliefs about what “ought” to be. Across four studies (<em>N</em> = 591), we find that frequent features are often explained by appeal to feature function (e.g., that stripes are for camouflage), that functional explanations in turn shape judgments of typicality, and that functional explanations and typicality both predict normative judgments that category members ought to have functional features. We also identify the causal assumptions that license inferences from feature frequency and function, as well as the nature of the normative inferences that are drawn: by specifying an instrumental goal (e.g., camouflage), functional explanations establish a basis for normative evaluation. These findings shed light on how and why our representations of how the natural world <em>is</em> shape our judgments of how it <em>ought</em> to be.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"139 ","pages":"Article 101507"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10608023","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":"Integrated diffusion models for distance effects in number memory","authors":"Roger Ratcliff","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101516","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101516","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>I evaluated three models for the representation of numbers in memory. These were integrated with the diffusion decision model to explain accuracy and response time (RT) data from a recognition memory experiment in which the stimuli were two-digit numbers. The integrated models accounted for distance/confusability effects: when a test number was numerically close to a studied number, accuracy was lower and RTs were longer than when a test number was numerically far from a studied number. For two of the models, the representations of numbers are distributed over number (with Gaussian or exponential distributions) and the overlap between the distributions of a studied number and a test number provides the evidence (drift rate) on which a decision is made. For the third, the exponential gradient model, drift rate is an exponential function of the numerical distance between studied and test numbers. The exponential gradient model fit the data slightly better than the two overlap models. Monte Carlo simulations showed that the variability in the important parameter estimates from fitting data collected over 30–40 min is smaller than the variability among individuals, allowing differences among individuals to be studied. A second experiment compared number memory and number discrimination tasks and results showed different distance effects. Number memory had an exponential-like distance-effect and number discrimination had a linear function which shows radically different representations drive the two tasks.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 101516"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10374944","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}
Matthew Galdo, Emily R. Weichart, Vladimir M. Sloutsky, Brandon M. Turner
{"title":"The quest for simplicity in human learning: Identifying the constraints on attention","authors":"Matthew Galdo, Emily R. Weichart, Vladimir M. Sloutsky, Brandon M. Turner","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101508","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101508","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>For better or worse, humans live a resource-constrained existence; only a fraction of physical sensations ever reach conscious awareness, and we store a shockingly small subset of these experiences in memory for later use. Here, we examined the effects of attention constraints on learning. Among models that frame selective attention as an optimization problem, attention orients toward information that will reduce errors. Using this framing as a basis, we developed a suite of models with a range of constraints on the attention available during each learning event. We fit these models to both choice and eye-fixation data from four benchmark category-learning data sets, and choice data from another dynamic categorization data set. We found consistent evidence for computations we refer to as “simplicity”, where attention is deployed to as few dimensions of information as possible during learning, and “competition”, where dimensions compete for selective attention via lateral inhibition.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 101508"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9754158","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}
Jared M. Hotaling , Chris Donkin , Andreas Jarvstad , Ben R. Newell
{"title":"MEM-EX: An exemplar memory model of decisions from experience","authors":"Jared M. Hotaling , Chris Donkin , Andreas Jarvstad , Ben R. Newell","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101517","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101517","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Many real-world decisions must be made on basis of experienced outcomes. However, there is little consensus about the mechanisms by which people make these decisions from experience (DfE). Across five experiments, we identified several factors influencing DfE. We also introduce a novel computational modeling framework, the <em>memory for exemplars model</em><span> (MEM-EX), which posits that decision makers rely on memory for previously experienced outcomes to make choices. Using MEM-EX, we demonstrate how cognitive mechanisms provide intuitive and parsimonious explanations for the effects of value-ignorance, salience, outcome order, and sample size. We also conduct a cross-validation analysis of several models within the MEM-EX framework. We compare these to three alternative models; two baseline models built on the principle of expected value maximization, and another employing a suite of choice methods previously shown to perform well in prediction tournaments. We find that MEM-EX consistently outperforms these competitors, demonstrating its value as a tool for making quantitative predictions without overfitting. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the interplay between attention, memory, and experience-based choice.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 101517"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40363062","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":"Inductive biases in theory-based reinforcement learning","authors":"Thomas Pouncy , Samuel J. Gershman","doi":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101509","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101509","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>Understanding the inductive biases that allow humans to learn in complex environments has been an important goal of cognitive science. Yet, while we have discovered much about human biases in specific learning domains, much of this research has focused on simple tasks that lack the complexity of the real world. In contrast, video games involving agents and objects embedded in richly structured systems provide an experimentally tractable proxy for real-world complexity. Recent work has suggested that key aspects of human learning in domains like video games can be captured by model-based reinforcement learning (RL) with object-oriented relational models—what we term </span><em>theory-based RL</em>. Restricting the model class in this way provides an inductive bias that dramatically increases learning efficiency, but in this paper we show that humans employ a stronger set of biases in addition to syntactic constraints on the structure of theories. In particular, we catalog a set of semantic biases that constrain the content of theories. Building these semantic biases into a theory-based RL system produces more human-like learning in video game environments.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50669,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Psychology","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 101509"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"33479570","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}