{"title":"Devaluation of Unchosen Options: A Bayesian Account of the Provenance and Maintenance of Overly Optimistic Expectations.","authors":"Corey Yishan Zhou, Dalin Guo, Angela J Yu","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Humans frequently overestimate the likelihood of desirable events while underestimating the likelihood of undesirable ones: a phenomenon known as <i>unrealistic optimism</i>. Previously, it was suggested that unrealistic optimism arises from asymmetric belief updating, with a relatively reduced coding of undesirable information. Prior studies have shown that a reinforcement learning (RL) model with asymmetric learning rates (greater for a positive prediction error than a negative prediction error) could account for unrealistic optimism in a bandit task, in particular the tendency of human subjects to persistently choosing a single option when there are multiple equally good options. Here, we propose an alternative explanation of such persistent behavior, by modeling human behavior using a Bayesian hidden Markov model, the Dynamic Belief Model (DBM). We find that DBM captures human choice behavior better than the previously proposed asymmetric RL model. Whereas asymmetric RL attains a measure of optimism by giving better-than-expected outcomes higher learning weights compared to worse-than-expected outcomes, DBM does so by progressively devaluing the unchosen options, thus placing a greater emphasis on <i>choice history</i> independent of reward outcome (e.g. an oft-chosen option might continue to be preferred even if it has not been particularly rewarding), which has broadly been shown to underlie sequential effects in a variety of behavioral settings. Moreover, previous work showed that the devaluation of unchosen options in DBM helps to compensate for a default assumption of environmental non-stationarity, thus allowing the decision-maker to both be more adaptive in changing environments and still obtain near-optimal performance in stationary environments. Thus, the current work suggests both a novel rationale and mechanism for persistent behavior in bandit tasks.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":"42 ","pages":"1682-1688"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8336429/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39281170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sheer Time Spent Expecting or Maintaining a Representation Facilitates Subsequent Retrieval during Sentence Processing.","authors":"Hossein Karimi, Michele Diaz, Eva Wittenberg","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Previous research has shown that modified noun phrases (henceforth NPs) are subsequently retrieved faster than unmodified NPs. This effect is often called the \"semantic complexity effect\". However, little is known about its mechanisms and underlying factors. In this study, we tested whether this effect is truly caused by the semantic information added by the modification, or whether it can be explained by the sheer amount of time that the processor spends expecting or maintaining an NP in the encoding phase. The results showed that time spent expecting or maintaining an NP can explain the effect over and above semantic and/or syntactic complexity. Our results challenge the current memory-based mechanisms for the modification effect such as the \"distinctiveness\" and \"head-reactivation\" accounts, and offer new and valuable insight into the memory processes during sentence comprehension.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":"2020 ","pages":"2728-2734"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10234091/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9945668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Memory integration into visual perception in infancy, childhood, and adulthood.","authors":"Sagi Jaffe-Dax, Christine Potter, Tiffany Leung, Casey Lew-Williams, Lauren L Emberson","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We compared the influence of prior knowledge on visual perception in infants, children, and adults in order to explore the developmental trajectory by which prior knowledge is integrated with new sensory input. Using an identical task across age groups, we tested how participants' accumulated experience affected their ability to judge the relative saturation levels within a pair of sequentially-presented stimuli. We found that infants and children, relative to adults, showed greater influence of the current observation and reduced influence of memory in their perception. In fact, infants and children outperformed adults in discriminating between different levels of saturation, and their performance was less biased by previously-experienced exemplars. Thus, the development of perceptual integration of memory leads to less precise discrimination in the moment, but allows observers to make use of their prior experience in interpreting a complex sensory environment.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":" ","pages":"3322-3328"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8455085/pdf/nihms-1619788.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39440494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The everyday statistics of objects and their names: How word learning gets its start.","authors":"Elizabeth M Clerkin, Linda B Smith","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A key question in early word learning is how infants learn their first object names despite a natural environment thought to provide messy data for linking object names to their referents. Using head cameras worn by 7 to 11-month-old infants in the home, we document the statistics of visual objects, spoken object names, and their co-occurrence in everyday meal time events. We show that the extremely right skewed frequency distribution of visual objects underlies word-referent co-occurrence statistics that set up a clear signal in the noise upon which infants could capitalize to learn their first object names.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":"2019 ","pages":"240-246"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8549651/pdf/nihms-1685392.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39573177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Arun Kumar, Zhengwei Wu, Xaq Pitkow, Paul Schrater
{"title":"Belief dynamics extraction.","authors":"Arun Kumar, Zhengwei Wu, Xaq Pitkow, Paul Schrater","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Animal behavior is not driven simply by its current observations, but is strongly influenced by internal states. Estimating the structure of these internal states is crucial for understanding the neural basis of behavior. In principle, internal states can be estimated by inverting behavior models, as in inverse model-based Reinforcement Learning. However, this requires careful parameterization and risks model-mismatch to the animal. Here we take a data-driven approach to infer latent states directly from observations of behavior, using a partially observable switching semi-Markov process. This process has two elements critical for capturing animal behavior: it captures non-exponential distribution of times between observations, and transitions between latent states depend on the animal's actions, features that require more complex non-markovian models to represent. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, we apply it to the observations of a simulated optimal agent performing a foraging task, and find that latent dynamics extracted by the model has correspondences with the belief dynamics of the agent. Finally, we apply our model to identify latent states in the behaviors of monkey performing a foraging task, and find clusters of latent states that identify periods of time consistent with expectant waiting. This data-driven behavioral model will be valuable for inferring latent cognitive states, and thereby for measuring neural representations of those states.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":"2019 ","pages":"2058-2064"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7754614/pdf/nihms-1654209.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39103239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hadar Karmazyn Raz, Drew H Abney, David Crandall, Chen Yu, Linda B Smith
{"title":"How do infants start learning object names in a sea of clutter?","authors":"Hadar Karmazyn Raz, Drew H Abney, David Crandall, Chen Yu, Linda B Smith","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Infants are powerful learners. A large corpus of experimental paradigms demonstrate that infants readily learn distributional cues of name-object co-occurrences. But infants' natural learning environment is cluttered: every heard word has multiple competing referents in view. Here we ask how infants start learning name-object co-occurrences in naturalistic learning environments that are cluttered and where there is much visual ambiguity. The framework presented in this paper integrates a naturalistic behavioral study and an application of a machine learning model. Our behavioral findings suggest that in order to start learning object names, infants and their parents consistently select a set of a few objects to play with during a set amount of time. What emerges is a frequency distribution of a few toys that approximates a Zipfian frequency distribution of objects for learning. We find that a machine learning model trained with a Zipf-like distribution of these object images outperformed the model trained with a uniform distribution. Overall, these findings suggest that to overcome referential ambiguity in clutter, infants may be selecting just a few toys allowing them to learn many distributional cues about a few name-object pairs.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":"2019 ","pages":"521-526"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7903936/pdf/nihms-1673092.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25406160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Everett Mettler, Austin S Phillips, Christine M Massey, Timothy Burke, Patrick Garrigan, Philip J Kellman
{"title":"The Synergy of Passive and Active Learning Modes in Adaptive Perceptual Learning.","authors":"Everett Mettler, Austin S Phillips, Christine M Massey, Timothy Burke, Patrick Garrigan, Philip J Kellman","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Adaptive learning systems that generate spacing intervals based on learner performance enhance learning efficiency and retention (Mettler, Massey & Kellman, 2016). Recent research in factual learning suggests that initial blocks of passive trials, where learners observe correct answers without overtly responding, produce greater learning than passive or active trials alone (Mettler, Massey, Burke, Garrigan & Kellman, 2018). Here we tested whether this passive + active advantage generalizes beyond factual learning to perceptual learning. Participants studied and classified images of butterfly genera using either: 1) <i>Passive Only</i> presentations, 2) <i>Passive Initial Blocks</i> followed by active, adaptive scheduling, 3) <i>Passive Initial Category Exemplar</i> followed by active, adaptive scheduling, or 4) <i>Active Only</i> learning. We found an advantage for combinations of active and passive presentations over <i>Passive Only</i> or <i>Active Only</i> presentations. Passive trials presented in initial blocks showed the best performance, paralleling earlier findings in factual learning. Combining active and passive learning produces greater learning gains than either alone, and these effects occur for diverse forms of learning, including perceptual learning.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":"2019 ","pages":"2351-2357"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10658780/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138178174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Meta-Analysis of Infants' Mispronunciation Sensitivity Development.","authors":"Katie Von Holzen, Christina Bergmann","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Before infants become mature speakers of their native language, they must acquire a robust word-recognition system which allows them to strike the balance between allowing some variation (mood, voice, accent) and recognizing variability that potentially changes meaning (e.g. cat vs hat). The current meta-analysis quantifies how the latter, termed mispronunciation sensitivity, changes over infants first three years, testing competing predictions of mainstream language acquisition theories. Our results show that infants were sensitive to mispronunciations, but accepted them as labels for target objects. Interestingly, and in contrast to predictions of mainstream theories, mispronunciation sensitivity was not modulated by infant age, suggesting that a sufficiently flexible understanding of native language phonology is in place at a young age.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":"2018 ","pages":"1157-1162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6476320/pdf/nihms-1017988.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41221806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Darrell A Worthy, A Ross Otto, Astin C Cornwall, Hilary J Don, Tyler Davis
{"title":"A Case of Divergent Predictions Made by Delta and Decay Rule Learning Models.","authors":"Darrell A Worthy, A Ross Otto, Astin C Cornwall, Hilary J Don, Tyler Davis","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Delta and Decay rules are two learning rules used to update expected values in reinforcement learning (RL) models. The delta rule learns <i>average</i> rewards, whereas the decay rule learns <i>cumulative</i> rewards for each option. Participants learned to select between pairs of options that had reward probabilities of .65 (option A) versus .35 (option B) or .75 (option C) versus .25 (option D) on separate trials in a binary-outcome choice task. Crucially, during training there were twice as AB trials as CD trials, therefore participants experienced more cumulative reward from option A even though option C had a higher average reward rate (.75 versus .65). Participants then decided between novel combinations of options (e.g, A versus C). The Decay model predicted more A choices, but the Delta model predicted more C choices, because those respective options had higher cumulative versus average reward values. Results were more in line with the Decay model's predictions. This suggests that people may retrieve memories of cumulative reward to compute expected value instead of learning average rewards for each option.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":"2018 ","pages":"1175-1180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8086699/pdf/nihms-997021.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38941524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modeling Semantic Fluency Data as Search on a Semantic Network.","authors":"Jeffrey C Zemla, Joseph L Austerweil","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Psychologists have used the semantic fluency task for decades to gain insight into the processes and representations underlying memory retrieval. Recent work has suggested that a censored random walk on a semantic network resembles semantic fluency data because it produces optimal foraging. However, fluency data have rich structure beyond being consistent with optimal foraging. Under the assumption that memory can be represented as a semantic network, we test a variety of memory search processes and examine how well these processes capture the richness of fluency data. The search processes we explore vary in the extent they explore the network globally or exploit local clusters, and whether they are strategic. We found that a censored random walk with a priming component best captures the frequency and clustering effects seen in human fluency data.</p>","PeriodicalId":72634,"journal":{"name":"CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference","volume":"2017 ","pages":"3646-3651"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5796672/pdf/nihms888346.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"35793381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}