Showing papers in "Cognition in 2008"

TL;DR: A simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension is proposed, and its equivalence to the theory of Hale is demonstrated.

TL;DR: The results show that bilingualism exerts an influence in the attainment of efficient attentional mechanisms by young adults that are supposed to be at the peak of their attentional capabilities.

TL;DR: Findings provide evidence that the metaphorical relationship between space and time observed in language also exists in their more basic representations of distance and duration, and suggest that their mental representations of things the authors can never see or touch may be built, in part, out of representations of physical experiences in perception and motor action.

TL;DR: It is found that a cognitive load manipulation selectively interferes with utilitarian judgment, providing direct evidence for the influence of controlled cognitive processes in moral judgment, and utilitarian moral judgment more specifically.

TL;DR: The results suggest that psychometric tools may provide a rich method for studying the structure of conscious experience, and point the way towards an empirically rigorous phenomenology.

TL;DR: It is shown that 12- and 14-month-old infants can resolve the uncertainty problem in another way, not by unambiguously deciding the referent in a single word-scene pairing, but by rapidly evaluating the statistical evidence across many individually ambiguous words and scenes.

TL;DR: The present study directly compares the roles of consequence, causation, belief and desire in determining moral judgments and proposes an account of these phenomena that distinguishes two processes of moral judgment: one which begins with harmful consequences and seeks a causally responsible agent, and the other which beginning with an action and analyzes the mental states responsible for that action.

TL;DR: Findings provide evidence for highly flexible speech perception processes that can adapt to speech that deviates substantially from the pronunciation norms in the native talker community along multiple acoustic-phonetic dimensions.

TL;DR: It is argued that brain images are influential because they provide a physical basis for abstract cognitive processes, appealing to people's affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena.

TL;DR: This paper argues in favor of a three-tiered dynamic model of intention, link it to an expanded version of the internal model theory of action control and specification, and uses this theoretical framework to guide an analysis of the contents, possible sources and temporal course of complementary aspects of the phenomenology of action.

TL;DR: It is concluded that eye-tracking corpora, which provide reading time data for naturally occurring, contextualized sentences, can complement experimental evidence as a basis for theories of processing complexity.

TL;DR: Evidence for three pillars of mature cooperative behavior appear to have roots extending deep into human development in 3.5-year-old children, despite their limited experience with complex cooperative networks.

TL;DR: Manipulating children's gesture during instruction in a new mathematical concept found that requiring children to gesture while learning the new concept helped them retain the knowledge they had gained during instruction and had no effect on solidifying learning.

TL;DR: An epistemological approach to rivalry is taken that considers the brain as engaged in probabilistic unconscious perceptual inference about the causes of its sensory input, which seems capable of explaining binocular rivalry and reconciling many findings.

TL;DR: The results suggest that language for exact number is a cultural invention rather than a linguistic universal, and that number words do not change the authors' underlying representations of number but instead are a cognitive technology for keeping track of the cardinality of large sets across time, space, and changes in modality.

TL;DR: This study compared 2- to 4-year-olds who understand how counting works to those who do not (subset-knowers) to better characterize the knowledge itself, finding that only children who have mastered the cardinal principle understand that adding objects to a set means moving forward in the numeral list whereas subtracting objects mean going backward.

TL;DR: It is found that 3- and 4-year-olds favor a previously accurate individual when learning new words and learning new object functions and applied the principle of mutual exclusivity to the newly learned words but not the newlylearn functions.

TL;DR: Results suggest that whereas the popular characterization of conflict detection as an actively experienced struggle can be questioned there is nevertheless evidence for Sloman's and Epstein's basic claim about the flawless operation of the monitoring.

TL;DR: A model of the mapping between the numerical symbols and the representations of numerosity on the number line is developed, which shows responses increase monotonically with numerosity, but underestimate the actual numerosity.

TL;DR: The hypothesis that implicit processing of trustworthiness is related to the degree to which participants cooperate with previously unknown partners is tested and data indicate that the perceivedTrustworthiness is a strong and important social cue that influences decision-making.

TL;DR: It is reported that 25-month-old children are sensitive to cross-linguistically valid sound-symbolic matches in the domain of action and that this sound symbolism facilitates verb learning in young children, suggesting that iconic scaffolding by means of sound symbolism plays an important role in early verb learning.

TL;DR: Results demonstrate that infants' early pointing at 12 months is already premised on an understanding of others' knowledge and ignorance, along with a prosocial motive to help others by providing needed information.

TL;DR: It is concluded that in at least some situations chimpanzees know what others know, and possible explanations for their failure in the highly similar false belief task are discussed.

TL;DR: It is concluded that shared gaze affords a highly efficient method of coordinating parallel activity in a time-critical spatial task.

TL;DR: The authors found that moral rules play an important but context-sensitive role in moral cognition, and offer an account of when emotional reactions to perceived moral violations receive less weight than consideration of costs and benefits in moral judgment and decision making.

TL;DR: Listeners are exquisitely sensitive to fine-grained acoustic detail within phonetic categories for sounds and words, and it is shown that this sensitivity is optimal given the probabilistic nature of speech cues.

TL;DR: The present experiment tested whether 6.5-month-old infants would be willing to attribute a goal to a moving inanimate box if it slightly varied its goal approach within the range of the available efficient actions, and demonstrated that featural identification of agents is not a necessary precondition of goal attribution in young infants.

TL;DR: There is cross-language activation of phonology even for different-script bilinguals, and cognate facilitation was observed for both groups.

TL;DR: Three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects offer evidence of a stimulus-driven capture of attention by faces.

TL;DR: Overall, it is argued that the data are more consistent with Alicke's model of culpable control, and there was a strong influence of foreseeability: actions were rated as more causal and more blameworthy when they were highly foreseeable.