Showing papers in "Cognitive Science in 2020"

TL;DR: A new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models, and demonstrates that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory‐based theories, can be derived from lossy‐context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality.

TL;DR: It is argued that the gap between theory and its biological and computational bases contributes to the arrested development of PP as a unificatory theory and is urged to focus on its critical problems instead of offering mere re‐descriptions of known phenomena.

TL;DR: This integrative framework can help researchers in the field of alignment and related phenomena to formulate their hypotheses and operationalizations in a more transparent and systematic manner and enables us to discover unexplored research avenues and derive new hypotheses regarding alignment.

TL;DR: Preliminary results from a two-layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short-term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans allow the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human-like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition.

TL;DR: It is shown that word vectors can capture some types of perceptual and spatiotemporal information about concrete concepts and some relevant word categories, suggesting that language statistics can encode more perceptual knowledge than often expected.

TL;DR: This article found that different pairs discover a wide variety of idiosyncratic but efficient and stable solutions to the problem of reference and that these conventions are shaped by the communicative context: words that are more discriminative in the initial context (i.e., that are used for one target more than others) are more likely to persist through the final repetition.

TL;DR: This work developed a novel paradigm to test statistical learning by leveraging a robust phenomenon observed in serial recall tasks: that short-term memory is fundamentally shaped by long-term distributional learning, and demonstrates that SICR effectively captures learning in both the auditory and visual modalities.

TL;DR: A framework is proposed for how the multiplex lexical network approach allows for understanding the influence of mental lexicon structure on word retrieval processes, with an eye toward a better understanding of the nature of clinical impairments, like aphasia.

TL;DR: It is shown that phonological and semantic connectivity in the learning environment drives growth in both production- and comprehension-based vocabularies, even controlling for word frequency and length, which suggests a word learning process where children harness their statistical learning abilities to detect and learn highly connected words in thelearning environment.

TL;DR: It is shown for the first time that experts report greater vividness of wine imagery, with no difference in vividness across sensory modalities, exemplifying the extent of plasticity of cognition underlying the chemical senses.

TL;DR: A corpus study for a group of 38 languages, which were either Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) or Subject-Object- Verb (SOV), in order to investigate the role of word order typology in determining syntactic complexity and shows evidence for "limited adaptability" to the default word order preferences in a language.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore an alternative way of explaining temporal binding both within and outside the context of voluntary action as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality, and show that principles of causal inference and causal selection have the potential to explain why the strength of people's causal beliefs can be affected by the extent to which they are themselves actively involved in bringing about events.

TL;DR: It is suggested that academics across a wide range of disciplines share a similar concept of knowledge, and that this concept aligns closely with the intuitions held by laypeople, and differs considerably from the concept ofknowledge described in the philosophical literature.

TL;DR: This study investigated whether and how experts change their eye movements and mouse clicks when they perform a task naturally versus teach a task didactically and characterized experts’ natural problem‐solving behavior by contrasting it with that of novices.

TL;DR: Improvements in causal information-seeking extend into adolescence and may be driven by metacognitive sensitivity to the efficacy of previous interventions in discriminating competing ideas, according to a Bayesian measurement model.

TL;DR: The authors developed a formal representation of the cultural transition from Oldowan to Acheulean tool technology using Reflexively Autocatalytic and Food set generated (RAF) networks.

TL;DR: The authors constructed a diagnostic set of word prediction prompts to evaluate whether neural contextualized language models trained on large text corpora capture tacit assumptions (STAs), or propositional beliefs about generic concepts.

TL;DR: Attention to negligence is revealed among all participants across a range of different moral judgment measures (including acceptability judgments, punishment judgments, and attributions of blame), with age-related increases in attention to negligence evident.

TL;DR: The findings indicate that linguistic category learning is differentially guided by pre‐ and postmarking, and that the influence of each is modulated by the specific characteristics of a given category system.

TL;DR: Findings suggest that sensitivity to the regularity with which different entities co-occur in children's environments shapes the organization of semantic knowledge during development.

TL;DR: Support is found for the view that a broad range of categories-living natural kinds, non-livingnatural kinds, and artifactual kinds-are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts.

TL;DR: The results suggest that comprehenders' cognitive resources are taxed by processing infelicitous use of beat gesture and contrastive accenting to convey contrast on both the local and global levels.

TL;DR: The authors evaluate whether BERT, a widely used neural network for sentence processing, acquires an inductive bias towards forming structural generalizations through pretraining on raw data and find that BERT makes a structural generalization in three out of four empirical domains (subject-auxiliary inversion, reflexive binding, and verb tense detection in embedded clauses) but makes a linear generalization when tested on NPI licensing.

TL;DR: The authors presented the first such model, drawing on algorithms proposed for unsupervised learning from naturalistic speech, and tested it on a single phone contrast, comparing the results to infants' discrimination patterns.

TL;DR: It is concluded that these findings are difficult to explain under accounts based on the notion of A(rgument) movement or of a monostratal, semantics-free, level of syntax, and instead necessitate some form of semantic construction prototype account.

TL;DR: The more meaningful a multiword sequence was judged to be, the faster it was processed, independently of whether it was idiomatic, compositional in nature, or a phrasal fragment.

TL;DR: Examination of the formation of new languages created in the lab by micro-societies that varied in their network structure revealed that small-world networks showed the greatest variation in their convergence, stabilization, and emerging structure patterns, indicating that network structure can influence the community's susceptibility to random linguistic changes.

TL;DR: This work establishes the utility of RSA for analysis of large stimulus sets and offers novel insights into the stimulus parameters underlying sound symbolism, showing that sound-to-shape mapping is driven by acoustic properties of pseudowords and suggesting audiovisual cross-modal correspondence as a basis for language users' sensitivity to this type of sound symbolism.

TL;DR: It is found that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility.