Cognitive Science[JOURNAL]
Sun
200 papers
The Idiom Processing Advantage is Explained By Surprisal.
Socolof M, O'Donnell TJ, Wagner M
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 40684418 · Full text
It has been repeatedly found that idioms are processed faster than syntactically matched literal phrases, in both comprehension and production. This has led to debate about whether idioms are accessed as chunks or built...
It has been repeatedly found that idioms are processed faster than syntactically matched literal phrases, in both comprehension and production. This has led to debate about whether idioms are accessed as chunks or built compositionally, with different studies attempting to measure the effect of compositionality on processing, with differing conclusions. This paper looks at idiom processing through the lens of information update, in particular surprisal theory, which is a standard theory of sentence processing. Compositionality is just one aspect of a word's predictability; we argue that surprisal, as an expectation-based theory, provides a more general unifying framework for understanding the idiom processing advantage. In this paper, comprehension and production experiments on verb-object idioms reveal that the idiom processing advantage can be largely explained by the fact that idioms have lower surprisal than matched literal phrases. The results indicate that the idiom advantage manifests primarily on the noun in verb-object idioms.
How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan, Australia).
Kidd E, Garrido Rodríguez G, Wilmoth S … +2 more , Garrido Guillén JE, Nordlinger R
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 40684369 · Full text
Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus must necessarily influen...
Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus must necessarily influence sentence production, psycholinguistic studies of diverse languages are comparatively rare. Here, we present data from a sentence planning and production study in Pitjantjatjara, an Australian Indigenous language that has highly flexible word order. Forty-nine (N = 49) native speakers described pictures of two-participant scenes while their eye-movements were recorded. Participants produced all possible orders of agent, patient, and verb. There was a general preference to produce agent-initial orders, but word order was influenced by the semantic properties of agent and patient referents (± human). Analyses of participants' eye-movements revealed early relational encoding of the entire event, whereby speakers distributed their attention between agent and patient referents in a manner that is different than typically observed in languages that have more restricted word order options. Relational encoding was influenced by the word order that participants eventually produced. The results provide evidence to suggest that sentence planning in Pitjantjatjara is a hierarchical process, in which early relational encoding creates a wholistic conceptualization of an event, possibly driven by pressure to decide upon one of many possible word orders.
We Do Not Speak Like This Here: The Role of Perceived Foreignness in Shaping Speaker-Specific Social and Linguistic Inferences.
Trainin N, Shetreet E
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 40668749 · Full text
People use many kinds of cues that help them navigate social interactions. We examined how perceived foreignness affected people's ability to map speaker-specific naming preferences, align with their interlocutors concer...
People use many kinds of cues that help them navigate social interactions. We examined how perceived foreignness affected people's ability to map speaker-specific naming preferences, align with their interlocutors concerning these preferences, and make social inferences based on them. In a pseudo-interactive experiment, participants engaged with two simulated speakers: one with a common native name who consistently used favored words, and one who consistently used the disfavored alternatives, and had either a native name, a foreign name associated with positive stereotypes (American), or a foreign name associated with negative stereotypes (Former Soviet Union; FSU). We assessed participants' tendencies to align with each speaker's lexical choices, their ability to generalize disfavored lexical use to other sorts of language use, and the social inferences they drew about each speaker. Results showed that perceived foreignness modulated both linguistic alignment and social judgments. The alignment effect was larger for FSU and native speakers compared to the American speakers. Interestingly, this stemmed from the increased tendency to use the disfavored words with the common native speaker when the uncommon speaker was American, suggesting that speakers' nationality modulated words' perceived disfavoredness. Further, generalizations about social traits (e.g., cooperativeness) varied by nationality, with American speakers rated more positively despite similar linguistic behaviors. These findings reveal that foreignness-associated stereotypes can modulate the social consequences of language use, suggesting a bidirectional dynamics where social identity both shapes language processing and is shaped by it. This extends theories of social meaning by demonstrating how social expectations conditionally interact with linguistic behaviors.
Is Comprehension in Comics More Effective Than in Traditional Texts in Skilled Adult Readers? An Eye Movement-Based Study.
Rasamimanana M, Mizzi R, Melmi JB … +2 more , Saffi S, Colé P
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 40650389 · Full text
Reading comprehension has been mostly studied using traditional texts and very little is known about reading comprehension in comics. We wanted to find out whether comics could enhance comprehension processes, compared t...
Reading comprehension has been mostly studied using traditional texts and very little is known about reading comprehension in comics. We wanted to find out whether comics could enhance comprehension processes, compared to traditional text and what cognitive processes might be involved in this effect. Furthermore, we explored the functional role of pictures in understanding comics. Forty skilled readers read the comic and text versions of two already published stories and answered comprehension questions. Eye movements were recorded during reading. We found no differences in reading comprehension performance. However, comics were explored faster than traditional texts. Importantly, reading speed of words in balloons was faster than in traditional texts. An analysis of eye movements suggests that the presence of pictures facilitates the extraction of information, with shorter total saccadic amplitude on the pages of comics than in text. When reading comics, participants spent less time on the pictures than the balloons, and this behavior was associated with shorter and fewer fixations. Pictures were also used as an entry point for reading a panel, as the first fixation in the panel fell more frequently on the pictures and the readers returned to them more often than to the balloons. Because pictures are processed faster than words, they may be used to construct a first representation of the content of the story, which can be used to facilitate the processing of the whole story and, more specifically, of its verbal component. This strategy is not available in traditional texts.
Contractualist Moral Cognition: From the Normative to the Descriptive at Three Levels of Analysis.
Le Pargneux A
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2025 · PMID 40639915 · Full text
Contractualist moral theories view morality as a matter of mutually beneficial agreements among rational agents. Compared to its rivals in moral philosophy-consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics-contractualism h...
Contractualist moral theories view morality as a matter of mutually beneficial agreements among rational agents. Compared to its rivals in moral philosophy-consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics-contractualism has only recently started to attract attention in empirical work on the cognitive science of morality. Is it fruitful to adopt a contractualist lens to better understand how moral cognition works? After introducing the main contractualist theories in contemporary moral philosophy, I present five reasons to take inspiration from this family of normative theories to develop descriptive accounts of morality. Then, I review how the contractualist framework has been used to contribute to our understanding of moral cognition at three interrelated levels of analysis: Morality's evolutionary logic, its cognitive organization, and the specific cognitive processes and forms of reasoning involved in moral judgment and decision making. First, several evolutionary accounts of morality argue that its evolutionary logic must be understood in contractualist terms. Second, resource-rational contractualism proposes that the subcomponents of moral cognition-including well-studied rule- and outcome-based mechanisms, and much less studied agreement-based processes-are organized to efficiently approximate the outcome of explicit negotiation under resource constraints. Third, recent empirical developments suggest that three characteristically contractualist forms of reasoning-virtual bargaining, we-reasoning, and universalization-can be involved in producing moral judgments and decisions in a variety of contexts. Beyond the traditional distinction between rules and consequences, these various research programs open a third way for the cognitive science of morality, one based on agreement. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making Economics > Interactive Decision-Making Philosophy > Value.
Statistical or Embodied? Comparing Colorseeing, Colorblind, Painters, and Large Language Models in Their Processing of Color Metaphors.
Nadler EO, Guilbeault D, Ringold SM … +6 more , Williamson TR, Bellemare-Pepin A, Comșa IM, Jerbi K, Narayanan S, Aziz-Zadeh L
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 40621800 · Publisher ↗
Can metaphorical reasoning involving embodied experience-such as color perception-be learned from the statistics of language alone? Recent work finds that colorblind individuals robustly understand and reason abstractly...
Can metaphorical reasoning involving embodied experience-such as color perception-be learned from the statistics of language alone? Recent work finds that colorblind individuals robustly understand and reason abstractly about color, implying that color associations in everyday language might contribute to the metaphorical understanding of color. However, it is unclear how much colorblind individuals' understanding of color is driven by language versus their limited (but no less embodied) visual experience. A more direct test of whether language supports the acquisition of humans' understanding of color is whether large language models (LLMs)-those trained purely on text with no visual experience-can nevertheless learn to generate consistent and coherent metaphorical responses about color. Here, we conduct preregistered surveys that compare colorseeing adults, colorblind adults, and LLMs in how they (1) associate colors to words that lack established color associations and (2) interpret conventional and novel color metaphors. Colorblind and colorseeing adults exhibited highly similar and replicable color associations with novel words and abstract concepts. Yet, while GPT (a popular LLM) also generated replicable color associations with impressive consistency, its associations departed considerably from colorseeing and colorblind participants. Moreover, GPT frequently failed to generate coherent responses about its own metaphorical color associations when asked to invert its color associations or explain novel color metaphors in context. Consistent with this view, painters who regularly work with color pigments were more likely than all other groups to understand novel color metaphors using embodied reasoning. Thus, embodied experience may play an important role in metaphorical reasoning about color and the generation of conceptual connections between embodied associations.
Reconceptualizing Metacognitive Experience in Dual-Process Reasoning: The Role of Emotion in Triggering Deliberation.
Cortial C, Prado J, Caparos S
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 40621789 · Publisher ↗
Human thinking has long been posited to involve two different cognitive processes, also known as intuition and deliberation. While deliberation is effortful and cognitively costly, intuition is effortless. A central issu...
Human thinking has long been posited to involve two different cognitive processes, also known as intuition and deliberation. While deliberation is effortful and cognitively costly, intuition is effortless. A central issue for reasoning theories is to account for the trigger of deliberation. Compelling theories explain the trigger of deliberative processes by the existence of a metacognitive experience. A feeling of rightness, of error, or of uncertainty would accompany our intuitions and, depending on their strength, triggers the need to use deliberation. Despite the emotional component that can be assumed in these metacognitive phenomena, and a whole literature linking emotion to cognition, these models do not fully embrace the emotional nature of these experiences, both empirically and theoretically. We believe that the psychology of reasoning, and particularly dual-process theories, would benefit from fully accepting this emotional dimension of reasoning.
The Development of Turn-Taking Skills in Typical Development and Autism.
Fusaroli R, Cox C, Weed E … +3 more , Szabó BI, Fein D, Naigles L
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 40621781 · Full text
Social interaction depends on turn-taking and adapting to one's conversational partner, yet little is known about the typical and atypical development of these abilities. We investigated this in a longitudinal corpus of...
Social interaction depends on turn-taking and adapting to one's conversational partner, yet little is known about the typical and atypical development of these abilities. We investigated this in a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech in 64 parent-child dyads: 32 typically developing children (20.27 months at start, six girls, 24 White) and 32 with autism (linguistically matched, 32.76 months, four girls, 31 White). Contrary to prior studies, children with autism responded 189 ms faster on average than typically developing children due to more overlapping speech. Latency decreased in both groups (47-78 ms every 4 months) and depended on individual differences in socio-cognitive, linguistic, and motor skills, which for autism explained all variance by age. Both groups equally adapted their tempo to their interlocutors. With robust conceptualization and modeling techniques, we highlight the importance of overlapping speech, show that latencies in autism might be faster than in typical development and situate turn-taking into fine-grained developmental and interpersonal contexts.
Digital Screening for Early Identification of Cognitive Impairment: A Narrative Review.
Cornacchia E, Bonvino A, Scaramuzzi GF … +4 more , Gasparre D, Simeoli R, Marocco D, Taurisano P
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2025 · PMID 40616364 · Full text
As longevity increases, cognitive decline in older adults has become a growing concern. Consequently, an increasing interest in the potential of digital tools (e.g., serious games (SG) and virtual reality (VR)) for early...
As longevity increases, cognitive decline in older adults has become a growing concern. Consequently, an increasing interest in the potential of digital tools (e.g., serious games (SG) and virtual reality (VR)) for early screening of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is emerging. Traditional cognitive assessments like the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) are widely used but have limitations related to cultural bias and manual scoring, while their digital adaptations, such as MOCA-CC, maintain diagnostic accuracy while offering remote administration and automated scoring. Innovative tools, such as the Virtual Super Market (VSM) test and Panoramix Suite, instead, assess cognitive domains like memory, attention, and executive function while promoting engagement and preserving ecological validity, making assessments more reflective of real-world tasks. Several studies show that these tools exhibit strong diagnostic performance, with sensitivity and specificity often exceeding 80%. However, although digital tools offer advantages in accessibility and user engagement, challenges remain concerning technological literacy, data privacy, and long-term validation. Future research should focus on validating these tools across diverse populations and exploring hybrid models that combine traditional and digital assessments, as digital tools show promise in transforming cognitive screening and enabling earlier interventions for cognitive decline. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Development and Aging Neuroscience > Cognition.
Motion Processing in ASD: From Low-Level Information to Higher-Level Social Information.
Ricou C, Aguillon-Hernandez N, Wardak C
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2025 · PMID 40611550 · Full text
From birth, our visual system is sensitive to movement. Motion, as defined by any change in spatial position over time, is part of our daily lives and can refer to various visual information from elements of nature (like...
From birth, our visual system is sensitive to movement. Motion, as defined by any change in spatial position over time, is part of our daily lives and can refer to various visual information from elements of nature (like a tree swaying in the wind), objects (like a moving car), animals (like a running dog) or people (like two people dancing). Atypical motion processing, in particular for social and biological movement cues, could lead to difficulties in social interaction and communication, like those observed in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Extensive research has focused on coherent and biological motion processing in ASD, showing difficulties for both motion categories. Motion-related differences also emerge in several social contexts like emotion processing, joint attention, language acquisition, and body relationship with the environment. However, it remains unclear whether high-level difficulties stem from low-level processing issues or are specific to interpreting social cues. It appears that critical steps between low-level local cues processing and high-level biological/social contexts have not been studied. Adopting an approach encompassing a motion gradient from low to high levels could help identify when motion-related difficulties arise in ASD and which specific types or attributes of motion are most affected. This would offer a more comprehensive and integrated perspective on motion processing in ASD. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Cognition.
Temporal Dynamics With and Without a Nervous System: Plant Physiology, Communication, and Movement.
Bianchi M, Guerra S, Bonato B … +5 more , Avesani S, Ravazzolo L, Simonetti V, Dadda M, Castiello U
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jun · PMID 40546133 · Full text
The concept of time has long been the subject of complex philosophical reflections and scientific research, which have interpreted it differently based on the starting question, context, and level of analysis of the syst...
The concept of time has long been the subject of complex philosophical reflections and scientific research, which have interpreted it differently based on the starting question, context, and level of analysis of the system under investigation. In the present review, we first explore how time has been studied among different scientific fields such as physics, neuroscience, and bioecological sciences. We emphasize the fundamental role of an organism's ability to perceive the passage of time and dynamically adapt to its environment for survival. Growth, reproduction, and communication processes are subject to spatiotemporal variability, and the sense of time allows organisms to structure their interactions, track past, and anticipate future events. Specifically, building on a relational and multilevel approach, this paper proposes an analysis of various aspects of the temporal dimension of plants-ranging from their growth and adaptation rates to behavioral strategies and modes of communication-culminating in a focused examination of research based on the kinematical analysis of plant movement. By adopting a comparative and critical approach, we raise several questions about the temporality of processes from different perspectives. Further insights into the timing of physiological and communication processes in plants will help to recognize the central role of temporality in life and to discover mechanisms, processes, and behavioral strategies that may be common (or similar) across species or unique (species-specific) for some organisms, both with and without nervous systems.
Evaluating Dogs' Real-World Visual Environment and Attention.
Pelgrim MH, Raman SS, Serre T … +1 more , Buchsbaum D
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jun · PMID 40546117 · Publisher ↗
Dogs have a unique evolutionary relationship with humans, yet little is known about the visual information available to them or how they direct their visual attention within their environment. The present study, inspired...
Dogs have a unique evolutionary relationship with humans, yet little is known about the visual information available to them or how they direct their visual attention within their environment. The present study, inspired by comparable work in infants, classified the items available to be gazed at by dogs during a common daily event, a walk. We then explored the statistics over the availability of those categories and over the dogs' visual attention. Using a head-mounted eye-tracking apparatus that was custom-designed for dogs, 11 dogs walked on a predetermined route outdoors under naturalistic conditions generating a total of 11,698 gazes for analysis. Image stills from these fixations were analyzed using computer vision techniques to explore the items present, the space within the visual field those items occupied, and which of the items the dog was gazing at. On average, dogs looked proportionally most at buses, plants, people, the pavement, and construction equipment; however, there were significant individual differences. The results of this project provide a foundational step toward understanding how dogs look at and interact with their physical world, opening up avenues for future research into how they learn and make decisions, both independently and with a human social partner.
Cross-Situational Statistics Present in an Early Language Learning Context: Evidence From Naturalistic Parent-Child Interactions.
Cain ES, Ryskin RA, Yu C
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jun · PMID 40535997 · Publisher ↗
According to the cross-situational learning account, infants aggregate statistical information from multiple parent naming events to resolve ambiguous word-referent mappings within individual naming events. While previou...
According to the cross-situational learning account, infants aggregate statistical information from multiple parent naming events to resolve ambiguous word-referent mappings within individual naming events. While previous experimental studies have shown that infant and adult learners can build correct mappings based on statistical regularities encoded in multiple learning situations in an experiment, other studies that use more naturalistic stimuli (e.g., real-world video) reveal poor performance in adults' ability to infer the correct referent. Based on those results derived from more naturalistic stimuli, the cross-situational learning solution cannot be useful to solve the mapping problem in the real world because cross-situational statistics from the real world are much more ambiguous than those created in experimental studies. To examine the feasibility of cross-situational learning in everyday contexts, the present study aims to quantify visual-audio statistics from one of everyday activities-parent-child toy play. We analyze parent naming events in a video corpus of infant-perspective scenes during parent-child toy play in a naturalistic lab setting, where we found three distinct properties that characterize statistical regularities perceived by young learners: (1) there are a limited number of visual scene compositions perceived by young learners at the moments when they hear object names; (2) the frequencies of parent naming events are distributed in a skewed, Zipfian fashion; and (3) cross-situational statistics in naturalistic toy play are comparable to those used in laboratory experiments. Our results underscore the importance of quantifying the statistical regularities in the input from the learner's perspective in order to shed light on the mechanisms supporting early word learning.
The Use of Eye Gaze Data and Personality Traits: A Scoping Review of the Literature.
Skala J, Kim K
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci · 2025 · PMID 40500878 · Full text
This scoping review examines the use of eye movement tracking in personality research across various domains, including job interviews, education and training, human-robot interaction, and user interface design. Eye-trac...
This scoping review examines the use of eye movement tracking in personality research across various domains, including job interviews, education and training, human-robot interaction, and user interface design. Eye-tracking has proven effective in capturing behavioral cues linked to personality traits such as emotional responses, leadership potential, and learning preferences. To map existing research and identify prevailing use case scenarios, a systematic search was conducted in the ACM and IEEE digital libraries. From an initial pool of 170 studies, 21 met the inclusion criteria and were subjected to full-text analysis. The purpose of this review is to provide a structured overview of current research trends, methodological approaches, and application contexts. Its contribution lies in synthesizing key insights and highlighting opportunities for future research, particularly in the use of eye-tracking for advancing personalized technologies and behavior-based analytics in fields such as education, marketing, and psychological analysis.
The Influences of Role, Action Contribution, and Outcome Feedback on Individual and Joint Sense of Agency.
Guo H, Li L, Wang L … +2 more , Yun G, Jia F
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jun · PMID 40497735 · Publisher ↗
Individuals can experience both "I" based individual agency and "we" based joint agency during cooperative action. This study examined how three key factors, role identity (leader, follower), action contribution (high, e...
Individuals can experience both "I" based individual agency and "we" based joint agency during cooperative action. This study examined how three key factors, role identity (leader, follower), action contribution (high, equal, low), and outcome feedback (success, failure, none), influence these two forms of agency. Through three experiments using goal-directed joint tasks and subjective agency ratings, we systematically explored their main and interactive effects. In Experiment 1, without feedback, individual agency increased with greater action contributions and was stronger for leaders than for followers, while joint agency remained stable. Experiment 2 confirmed these effects, showing independent contributions of role and effort to individual agency but minimal effects on joint agency. Experiment 3 introduced outcome feedback, revealing that success amplified individual agency overall, while joint agency was shaped by complex interactions. Specifically, followers with high contributions reported stronger joint agency after success, whereas leaders with high contributions reported stronger joint agency after failure. These findings suggest that while individual agency is closely linked to leadership and effort, joint agency reflects a more dynamic integration of social roles, effort distribution, and outcome evaluation. The study highlights the importance of considering both conceptual (role-based) and sensorimotor (effort-based) cues in understanding agency. It also reveals how outcome feedback and attribution processes, such as self-serving bias, modulate perceptions of control and responsibility in cooperative contexts.
Unlearning Incorrect Associations in Word Learning: Evidence From Eye-Tracking.
Roembke TC, McMurray B
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jun · PMID 40497728 · Full text
Computational and animal models suggest that the unlearning or pruning of incorrect meanings matters for word learning. However, it is currently unclear how such pruning occurs during word learning and to what extent it...
Computational and animal models suggest that the unlearning or pruning of incorrect meanings matters for word learning. However, it is currently unclear how such pruning occurs during word learning and to what extent it depends on supervised and unsupervised learning. In two experiments (N = 40; N = 42), adult participants first completed a pretraining, in which each word was paired with two objects across trials: its target and another object (termed secondary target [T2]). Subsequently, participants learned the correct word-object-mappings in a supervised training paradigm and were then tested on the word meanings. During training, trials were structured such that some T2s never occurred with the targets, while others did, allowing us to disentangle the contributions of supervised and unsupervised pruning accounts. Eye movements were tracked during training and testing to measure the activation strength of alternative meanings. The experiments were identical but differed in how often the word was paired with the T2 during pretraining. We found that while weak incorrect associations were pruned quickly (Experiment 1), stronger ones remained present even after ceiling performance (Experiment 2), suggesting that the extent to which incorrect associations are unlearned depends on the strength of the initial mappings. Additionally, pruning was observed even for T2s that did not co-occur with their corresponding word during training in line with unsupervised pruning. Overall, these findings imply that subtle incorrect associations may remain in the lexicon and contribute to other language processes (e.g., word recognition) even after word learning is completed.
Adults Represent Others' Logical Inferences Even When It Is Unnecessary.
Fogd D, Téglás E, Kovács ÁM
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jun · PMID 40485372 · Full text
Successful social interactions require representing not only what others know, but also what they may deductively infer from evidence. For instance, to help deciding between two alternatives, we may just reveal the incor...
Successful social interactions require representing not only what others know, but also what they may deductively infer from evidence. For instance, to help deciding between two alternatives, we may just reveal the incorrect option, expecting others to draw the correct conclusion. Seemingly, we readily track others' logical inferences if it is necessary for our goals. However, it is currently unknown whether we also track them when we do not have to, and whether these inferences affect our own conclusions. To address this, in four online experiments, we presented adults with scenarios where an agent could arrive at the same or different conclusions as the participant, based on what she witnessed (via excluding one or two out of three target locations). Participants rated the likelihood of an outcome from self or from the agent's perspective. We hypothesized that if participants track others' inferences also when making self-perspective judgments, that is, when they could respond without even paying attention to the other, the spontaneous representation of the other's different conclusion may result in higher ratings for the outcome the agent (but not the participant) considers possible, compared to the one both consider impossible. In three experiments, we found such an altercentric bias in self-perspective judgments, suggesting that participants spontaneously encoded the conclusions the agent could draw (Experiments 1 and 2), even when this required multistep inferences (Experiment 4), although there were considerable individual differences and the bias was absent when task-demands were high (Experiment 3), implying a potentially resource-dependent use of the capacity.
Leveraging Context for Perceptual Prediction Using Word Embeddings.
Carter GA, Keller F, Hoffman P
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jun · PMID 40481822 · Full text
Word embeddings derived from large language corpora have been successfully used in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to represent linguistic meaning. However, there is continued debate as to how well they enc...
Word embeddings derived from large language corpora have been successfully used in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to represent linguistic meaning. However, there is continued debate as to how well they encode useful information about the perceptual qualities of concepts. This debate is critical to identifying the scope of embodiment in human semantics. If perceptual object properties can be inferred from word embeddings derived from language alone, this suggests that language provides a useful adjunct to direct perceptual experience for acquiring this kind of conceptual knowledge. Previous research has shown mixed performance when embeddings are used to predict perceptual qualities. Here, we tested if we could improve performance by leveraging the ability of Transformer-based language models to represent word meaning in context. To this end, we conducted two experiments. Our first experiment investigated noun representations. We generated decontextualized ("charcoal") and contextualized ("the brightness of charcoal") Word2Vec and BERT embeddings for a large set of concepts and compared their ability to predict human ratings of the concepts' brightness. We repeated this procedure to also probe for the shape of those concepts. In general, we found very good prediction performance for shape, and a more modest performance for brightness. The addition of context did not improve perceptual prediction performance. In Experiment 2, we investigated representations of adjective-noun phrases. Perceptual prediction performance was generally found to be good, with the nonadditive nature of adjective brightness reflected in the word embeddings. We also found that the addition of context had a limited impact on how well perceptual features could be predicted. We frame these results against current work on the interpretability of language models and debates surrounding embodiment in human conceptual processing.
The Relationship Between Community Size and Iconicity in Sign Languages.
Lev-Ari S, Stamp R, de Vos C … +3 more , Yano U, Nyst V, Emmorey K
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jun · PMID 40481821 · Full text
Communication is harder in larger communities. Past research shows that this leads larger communities to create languages that are easier to learn and use. In particular, previous research suggests that spoken languages...
Communication is harder in larger communities. Past research shows that this leads larger communities to create languages that are easier to learn and use. In particular, previous research suggests that spoken languages that are used by larger communities are more sound symbolic than spoken languages used by smaller communities, presumably, because sound symbolism facilitates language acquisition and use. This study tests whether the same principle extends to sign languages as the role of iconicity in the acquisition and use of sign languages is debated. Furthermore, sign languages are more iconic than spoken languages and are argued to lose their iconicity over time. Therefore, they might not show the same pattern. The paper also tests whether iconicity depends on semantic domain. Participants from five different countries guessed the meaning and rated the iconicity of signs from 11 different sign languages: five languages with >500,000 signers and six languages with <3000 signers. Half of the signs referred to social concepts (e.g., friend, shame) and half referred to nonsocial concepts (e.g., garlic, morning). Nonsocial signs from large sign languages were rated as more iconic than nonsocial signs from small sign languages with no difference between the languages for social signs. Results also suggest that rated iconicity and guessing accuracy are more aligned in signs from large sign languages, potentially because smaller sign languages are more likely to rely on culture-specific iconicity that is not as easily guessed outside of context. Together, this study shows how community size can influence lexical form and how the effect of such social pressures might depend on semantic domain.
Co-Represented Statistical Regularities Facilitate the Processing of Partner-Related Words During a Joint Memory Task.
Zhao M, Jiang D, Wang J
Cogn Sci · 2025 Jun · PMID 40478612 · Publisher ↗
Previous research suggests that statistical learning enhances memory for self-related information at the individual level and that individuals exhibit better memory for partner-related items than they do for irrelevant i...
Previous research suggests that statistical learning enhances memory for self-related information at the individual level and that individuals exhibit better memory for partner-related items than they do for irrelevant items in joint contexts (i.e., the joint memory effect, JME). However, whether statistical learning improves memory for partner-related information in joint contexts remains unclear. This study investigated memory performance for partner-related words when higher level statistical regularities were embedded in word streams during a joint memory task. Participants performed a word categorization task, followed by a surprise free recall task across four experiments. Experiment 1 replicated the JME, revealing improved memory for partner-related items than for irrelevant items when using Chinese words with increased repetition. Experiment 2 embedded semantic regularities within partners' word streams; Experiment 3a employed regularities based on non-adjacent fixed temporal positions; and Experiment 3b employed regularities based on adjacent fixed temporal positions. Results showed that the JME was enhanced only when semantic regularities were present (Experiment 2) and not with temporal positional rules (Experiments 3a and 3b). These findings suggest a hierarchical structure of co-representation and show that co-represented statistical regularities facilitate the processing of partner-related words, but only when the regularities align with partners' intentions. This study advances our understanding of co-representation in joint action by highlighting its hierarchical nature, and the top-down interaction between structural levels.
About
- Frequency
- Sun
- Papers found
- 200
- RSS feed
- Subscribe