Showing papers in "Cognitive Science in 2010"

TL;DR: This article proposes a framework for representing the meaning of word combinations in vector space in terms of additive and multiplicative functions, and introduces a wide range of composition models that are evaluated empirically on a phrase similarity task.

TL;DR: This paper argues, first, that analogical ability is the key factor in the authors' prodigious capacity, and, second, that possession of a symbol system is crucial to the full expression of analogICAL ability.

TL;DR: It appears that people automatically access culturally specific spatial representations when making temporal judgments even in nonlinguistic tasks.

TL;DR: The results and analysis suggest that the semantic categories people use to understand and communicate about the world can only be learned if labels are predicted from objects.

TL;DR: Like natural number, Euclidean geometry may be constructed through the productive combination of representations from these core systems, through the use of uniquely human symbolic systems.

TL;DR: It is shown that a cue-weighting metric in which cues receive weight as a function of their reliability at distinguishing the phonological categories provides a good fit to the perceptual data obtained from human listeners, but only when these weights emerge through the dynamics of learning.

TL;DR: A novel computational model of early word learning is presented to shed light on the mechanisms that might be at work in this process, and demonstrates that much about word meanings can be learned from naturally occurring child-directed utterances, without using any special biases or constraints.

TL;DR: It is argued that conceptual development progresses from simple perceptual grouping to highly abstract scientific concepts, and a large body of empirical evidence is reviewed supporting this proposal.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated here that gesturing continues to confer cognitive benefits when speakers talk about objects that are not present, and therefore cannot be directly indexed by gesture, suggesting that gesture's meaningfulness gives it the ability to affect working memory load.

TL;DR: Interaction was critical to the creation of shared sign systems, with different isolated pairs establishing different local sign systems and different communities establishing different global sign systems.

TL;DR: In this paper, a subsumptive constraints account was proposed and tested to predict that explaining guides learners to interpret what they are learning in terms of unifying patterns or regularities, which promotes the discovery of broad generalizations.

TL;DR: A subsumptive constraints account predicts that explaining guides learners to interpret what they are learning in terms of unifying patterns or regularities, which promotes the discovery of broad generalizations.

TL;DR: It is argued that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution, which helps resolve the "logical" problem of language acquisition.

TL;DR: This article explored quantitatively the degree to which natural languages reflect dependency length minimization (DLM) and found that English showed a strong effect of DLM, with dependency length much closer to optimal than to random; the optimal English grammar also has many specific features in common with English.

TL;DR: This model outperforms comparable algorithms in cognitive tasks pertaining not only to concept-internal structures but also to inter-concept relations (clustering into superordinates), suggesting the empirical validity of the property-based approach.

TL;DR: There is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true, applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse.

TL;DR: This paper reviews the extensive literature on cued attention and attentional learning in the adult literature and proposes that these fundamental processes are likely significant mechanisms of change in cognitive development.

TL;DR: Three visual habituation studies using abstract animations tested the claim that infants' attachment behavior in the Strange Situation procedure corresponds to their expectations about caregiver-infant interactions and revealed three unique patterns of expectations.

TL;DR: The structure of the lexicon influences the process of lexical access during spoken word production, and the influence of the clustering coefficient was examined in a corpus of speech errors and a picture-naming task.

TL;DR: Three studies ask whether analogous processes might be present not only in lay people, but also in young children and thereby form a foundation for supplementing explanatory understandings almost from the start of the authors' first attempts to make sense of the world.

TL;DR: This work advocates a complementary, descriptive-experimental method, based on the collection of behavioral data about the way human reasoners handle these critical cases of reinstatement, which shows that floating reinstatement yields comparable effects to that of simple reinstatement.

TL;DR: A hierarchical Bayesian framework is presented that helps to explain how learning about several causal systems can accelerate learning about systems that are subsequently encountered and confirms that humans learn rapidly about the causal powers of novel objects.

TL;DR: Five lines of evidence are marshall that cast doubt on the geometric module hypothesis, unfolded in a series of reasons: language does not play a necessary role in the integration of feature and geometric cues, although it can be helpful, and a model of reorientation requires flexibility to explain variable phenomena.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that a cognitive-attentional bias in spatial representation and memory affects both the detail of linguistic encoding during the use of spatial language and the specificity of hypotheses about spatial referents that learners build during the acquisition of the spatial lexicon.

TL;DR: This research improves upon, the hypotheses and explanatory power of recent neuroimaging studies as well as provides evidence for the claim that human linguistic abilities are constrained by computational complexity.

TL;DR: A study in which participants manually dialed a UK-style telephone number while driving a simulated vehicle shows that drivers choose to return attention to steering control before the natural subtask boundary, supporting the idea that people can strategically control the allocation of attention in multitask settings to meet specific performance criteria.

TL;DR: Results indicate that there is no necessary link between the ability to learn individual words rapidly and the capacity to acquire a large lexicon, and suggests that cross-situational word learning cannot be ruled out on the basis that it predicts unreasonably long lexicon learning times.

TL;DR: Two proposed Bayes net theories are compared as models of people's understanding of counterfactuals, and it is shown that neither makes correct predictions about backtracking counterfactUALs.