Showing papers in "Cognitive Science in 2013"

TL;DR: Interactive Team Cognition theory posits that team cognition is an activity, not a property or a product, and team cognition should be measured and studied at the team level and is inextricably tied to context.

TL;DR: A theory of Narrative Grammar is presented, which demands that the canonical arc be reconsidered as a generative schema whereby any narrative category can be expanded into a node in a tree structure.

TL;DR: This article describes a method for building useful legal arguments in a consistent and repeatable way and is based on the recognition that such arguments can be built up from a small number of basic causal structures (referred to as idioms).

TL;DR: It is found that the error signal associated with a syntactic prime influences comprehenders' subsequent syntactic expectations, which follows directly from error-based implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming, but is unexpected under accounts that consider syntacticPriming a consequence of temporary increases in base-level activation.

TL;DR: A novel model of intuitive judgments of responsibility is proposed that is a function of both pivotality (whether an agent made a difference to the outcome) and criticality (how important the agent is perceived to be for the outcome, before any actions are taken).

TL;DR: It is concluded that neural computation is sui generis, which means that computational theories of cognition that rely on non-neural notions of computation ought to be replaced or reinterpreted in terms of neural computation.

TL;DR: It is experimentally demonstrated that gesture is a more effective means of bootstrapping a human communication system than non-linguistic vocalization across a range of item categories.

TL;DR: This article shows the generality of a general counterfactual framework for reasoning about causality first described by Neyman and Rubin and linked to causal graphical models by Robins (1986) and Pearl (2006) by proving a novel result which allows mediation analysis to be applied to longitudinal settings with unobserved confounders.

TL;DR: It is suggested that emotional connotations facilitate processing due to the grounding of words' meanings in emotional experience, and that emotional words, whether positive or negative, are processed faster than neutral words.

TL;DR: Results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging.

TL;DR: It is argued that pretending allows children to practice important cognitive skills, including disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representation separate from reality.

TL;DR: The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions, finding that there are properties of individual structure that the aggregate networks do not reflect.

TL;DR: Findings suggest that cardinality and equinumerosity are interrelated facets of the concepts five and six, the acquisition of which is an important conceptual achievement of early childhood.

TL;DR: Eye tracking revealed that before errors were overlooked influences of high- and low-level linguistic variables on eye fixations were reduced in a graded fashion, indicating episodes of mindless reading at weak and deep levels, supporting the levels of inattention hypothesis.

TL;DR: Investigation of social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions concludes that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation can facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration.

TL;DR: Children across cultures and ages universally endorsed the choice to follow preferences but not to perform impossible acts, suggesting that while basic notions of free choice are universal, recognitions of social obligations as constraints on action may be culturally learned.

TL;DR: It is found that learners rapidly acquired both types of regularities and that the strength of the adjacent statistics influenced learning of both adjacent and non-adjacent dependencies.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that minimizing the expected code length implies that the length of a word cannot increase as its frequency increases, and that the mean code length or duration is significantly small in human language and also in other species in all cases where agreement with the law of brevity has been found.

TL;DR: The results indicate that the surface structure of number words can heavily influence processes for dealing with numbers in this range, and it can amplify the possibility that analogous surface regularities are partially responsible for parallel phenomena in children.

TL;DR: It is argued that these findings are problematic for existing algorithms that aim to automatically generate psychologically realistic target descriptions, such as the Incremental Algorithm, as these algorithms make use of a fixed preference order per domain and do not take visual scene variation into account.

TL;DR: This study challenges the correctness of the assessment that the triviality arguments of Lewis and others have conclusively shown the Equation to be tenable only at the expense of the view that indicative conditionals express propositions by presenting data that cast doubt on an assumption underlying all triviality argued.

TL;DR: Results are interpreted as providing support for the communicative intent hypothesis, which posits that children find it especially difficult to reject deceptive information that they perceive as being intentionally communicated by others.

TL;DR: A series of four experiments demonstrate that cross-situational learning involves competition at both levels of scale, and that these mechanisms interact to support rapid learning.

TL;DR: The results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction, and supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early-emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices.

TL;DR: A new theory that connects looking to the dynamics of memory formation is presented and formally implemented in a Dynamic Neural Field model that learns autonomously as it actively looks and looks away from a stimulus.

TL;DR: It is shown that a third type of information source, the occurrence of pairs of minimally differing word forms in speech heard by the infant, is also useful for learning phonemic categories and is in fact more reliable than purely distributional information in data containing a large number of allophones.

TL;DR: The results suggest that the pro-social effects of being imitated may rely on associative mechanisms, as similarity produces positive affect in infants and can be detected by phylogenetically ancient mechanisms of associative learning.

TL;DR: The results show CRT is closely related to numerical ability and that its predictive power is limited to biases with a numerical basis, which is in line with previous findings which show that, while intelligence is useful in predicting some decision-making biases, in other cases intelligence and bias susceptibility seem independent.

TL;DR: A possible model for explaining individual differences in spatial knowledge acquisition is proposed based on the results of an examination of how different components of working memory are involved in the acquisition of egocentric and allocentric survey knowledge by people with a good and poor sense of direction.