No Evidence of Experimenter Demand Effects in Three Online Psychology Experiments

Abstract. Experimenter demand effects occur when participants alter their behavior to align with perceived study hypotheses, threatening internal validity. Concern about demand effects is pervasive…

direct.mit.edu

People Adapt to Personal Singular They Through Exposure

Abstract. Although they is often considered a plural pronoun (e.g., “Liz and Will went to the library. They borrowed a textbook”), it is increasingly used as a singular pronoun for individuals whose…

direct.mit.edu

Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”

Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general…

direct.mit.edu

Do Language Models Know Who Did What to Whom?

Abstract. Language models (LMs) are commonly criticized for not “understanding” language. However, many critiques focus on cognitive abilities that, in humans, are distinct from language processing.…

direct.mit.edu

Experience Alone Can Generate Human Face Specialization: Evidence From Deep Learning Models

Abstract. The specialization of human face recognition for upright own-race faces is well-established. While experience is thought to play a key role in face specialization, establishing its direct…

direct.mit.edu

Word Trigram Frequency Predicts Failure to Detect Word Transpositions: Implications for Rational Inference in Reading

Abstract. A substantial recent literature has investigated readers’ failure to detect transposed words in otherwise grammatical sentences. This phenomenon may reflect a process of rational inference,…

direct.mit.edu

Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account

Abstract. Can you perform an action intentionally if there was only a small chance your action would succeed? Researchers studying the folk concept of intentional action have documented complex…

direct.mit.edu

Incipient Constituents: Phonesthemes Facilitate Word Processing in English

Abstract. Phonesthemes are sound clusters that recur in words with related meanings. For example, glow, gleam, and glitter begin with the phonestheme /gl/. Experiments with pseudowords provide…

direct.mit.edu

Tracking Visual Statistical Learning with Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials: Effects of Exemplar and Category Information

Abstract. This study examined visual statistical learning using EEG-based steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP). Fifty-one adults were exposed to image sequences organized into triplets…

direct.mit.edu

Expectations of Reciprocal Generosity Are Specific to Equal Relationships

Abstract. When someone acts generously, what expectations does this create? Classic theories and experiments emphasize reciprocity: the idea that generosity will be returned by the recipient. Yet…

direct.mit.edu

Resolving the Vagueness of Quantifiers With Explicit Expectations

Abstract. Vague quantifiers like many, few, and several may vary considerably with respect to the quantity they denote. Depending on the context, many may indicate different quantities in “many…

direct.mit.edu

Curriculum Learning in Humans and Neural Networks

Abstract. The sequencing of training trials can significantly influence learning outcomes in humans and neural networks. However, studies comparing the effects of training curricula between the two…

direct.mit.edu

Impact of Education and Music Training on the Development of Abstract Thinking in the First Years of Schooling

Abstract. Plato’s Republic, Einstein’s Theory of relativity, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are all remarkable examples of humans’ unique ability to create and manipulate complex abstract structures, whether…

direct.mit.edu

Where You Look Is What You Get: Individual Fixation Height Predicts Biases in Face Perception

Abstract. Individuals show robust differences in where they look on a face. Some fixate closer to the eyes while others fixate closer to the mouth. While humans infer mental states and traits from…

direct.mit.edu

Response Time as a Proxy for Decision Confidence: Insights From Type-2 ROC Analysis

Abstract. This study explores the use of response time (RT) data in type-2 receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, a method traditionally used to examine the relationship between confidence…

direct.mit.edu

Associations Between Second-Language Proficiency and Executive Functions in Autistic and Neurotypical Children

Abstract. Bilingualism is a complex experience that may enhance executive functions (EF). This potential benefit could be particularly relevant for autistic children, given that they tend to present…

direct.mit.edu

Unsupervised Classification of English Words Based on Phonological Information: Discovery of Germanic and Latinate Clusters

Abstract. Cross-linguistically, native words and loanwords follow different phonological rules. In English, for example, words of Germanic and Latinate origin exhibit different stress patterns, and a…

direct.mit.edu

Quantifying Epistemic Relevance

Abstract. In ordinary information-seeking dialogue, the relevance of an assertion seems to depend on how much progress it makes toward resolving the question under discussion (QUD). This kind of…

direct.mit.edu

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Speakers Use More Redundant Color Adjectives When Speaking to Children Than Adults

Abstract. Cross-culturally, the evolution and production of color words has been linked to communicative efficiency. In visual search tasks for instance, speakers will direct a listener to a target…

direct.mit.edu

Shared and Individual Tuning Curves for Social Perception

Abstract. Stimuli with light are clearly visual; stimuli with sound are clearly auditory. But what makes a stimulus “social”, and how do socialness judgments differ across people? Here, we…

direct.mit.edu

Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach

Abstract. Semantic roles, namely the agent (‘doer’) and patient (‘undergoer’) roles, are fundamental to language acquisition, as they enable learners to map meaning onto syntactic structure. Grammars…

direct.mit.edu

When Numbers Whisper Their Names – Number Word Processing in Multi-Digit Number Magnitude Comparison in French Speakers

Abstract. French number words provide a unique window into the relationship between numerical cognition and language, because numbers above 60 follow a vigesimal (base-20) word structure (e.g., 72 =…

direct.mit.edu

A Suite of LMs Comprehend Puzzle Statements as Well or Better Than Humans

Abstract. This paper reexamines a recent claim that Large Language Models lag behind humans in language comprehension on what were described as minimally complex statements. We argue that human…

direct.mit.edu

Plural Causes

AbstractCausal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a lightning strike, for example, people tend to say that the lightning bolt was the cause of the fire, not mentioning the presence of oxygen in the air, although they are well aware that the latter was no less indispensable for the fire to occur. The extant literature on causal selection has so far operated on the implicit premise that the only relevant variables for causal selection are individual variables, corresponding to distinct nodes in the relevant network of causes. Ours is the first systematic study of plural causes in the context of causal selection. First, we establish by means of two behavioral experiments the psychological reality and non-triviality of plural causes, ruling out potential deflationary explanations. Second, we show that state-of-the-art models of causal selection based on counterfactual dependence can be extended to make non-trivial predictions about plural causes consistent with our experimental findings. Third, we show that surprising logical properties of plurals in natural language interpretation might be found in causal reasoning with plural causes.

dlvr.it

Does It Matter What Is Said and Who Said It? The Interpretation of Trump’s and Harris’ Statements Among Republican and Democrat Voters

AbstractThe Gricean model of communication assumes that cooperation is a precondition for successful communication but humans often use language non-cooperatively. How do language users calibrate cooperation when deciphering communicated content? The current work probes how belief alignment shapes the interpretation of underinformative statements attributed to politicians (Donald Trump or Kamala Harris) presented to self-identified Republican and Democratic participants. The results show that communicated content is more likely to be derived when beliefs align between voter group and speaker. This suggests that we may arrive at different conclusions from the same statement, depending on who the speaker is and how much trust we grant them.

dlvr.it

The Role of Reinforcement Learning in Pragmatic Reasoning Tasks: Modeling and Validating the Sources of Individual Differences

AbstractIn Gricean pragmatics, inference during communication is regarded as a form of rational, domain-general reasoning about the intentions of other agents. Studies using the pictorial communication “reference game” task are sometimes used in support of this hypothesis. Yet, measures of pragmatic reasoning in this task sometimes reveal poor performance, with participants requiring many rounds of play before they exhibit patterns which match Gricean inferences, and demonstrating substantial individual differences in behavior. Do these results challenge the idea of widespread inferencing via fundamental social competence? We advance an alternative proposal here, which posits that these patterns emerge as a factor of the way participants perform pragmatic reasoning in a task: namely, they prefer to use simpler interpretation strategies until experience motivates the use of additional resources. Building off of work modeling task adaptation as reinforcement learning, we use the cognitive architecture ACT-R to simulate the expected behavior of individuals with this kind of resource-rational performance algorithm, subject to individualized parameters for reinforcement learning. These simulations provide a proof-of-concept for our adaptation proposal, recreating known patterns and generating new concrete predictions for the particular domain-general sources of individual variance in reference game tasks. We then go on to validate some of these new predictions in a pre-registered experiment, and find that pragmatic response behavior is indeed related to a participant’s general persistence in self-directed exploration of strategies for task completion. Our results offer a path to reconcile variable empirical data with models of core pragmatic competence. From a broader perspective, we see this as an important step towards more robust theories of performance factors in pragmatic reasoning, and ultimately, a case study in the value of process-level computational modeling.

dlvr.it

Core Intuitions of Psychological Non-Contradiction: Infants Assume That Individual Agents Act and Communicate Coherently

AbstractHumans generally posit that contrary mental states are unlikely to co-exist within a single mind. We tested the early ontogeny of this assumption in two domains: action and communication. Studies 1A and 1B tested whether 9-month-old infants assume that agents act coherently. Infants watched interactions between two hands whose owner(s) were invisible. In the contrary goals condition, the hand performed contrary actions—one hand reached for an object while the other impeded it. Later, during test trials, infants learned that the hands belonged to one or two people. Looking-time patterns across the contrary goals and a baseline conditions indicated that clear goal conflict led infants to infer two agents, suggesting they viewed it as unlikely for a single person to thwart their own goal. Study 2 tested whether infants assume communicative coherence, testing whether they assume that a single informant is unlikely to entertain and communicate conflicting information while two informants might do so. Informants pointed to indicate a toy’s location to 15-month-olds. When two different informants each pointed to a different place, infants did not follow one pointing gesture more than the other. However, when a single informant pointed successively to two locations, infants followed the second gesture, implying they viewed it as an updated, not contradictory, message. Thus, infants assumed that a single informant is unlikely to contradict themselves (i.e., by asserting that a toy is simultaneously in two locations). These findings reveal an early-emerging assumption of psychological coherence in infants’ representation of other minds, across both action and communication contexts.

dlvr.it

Response Requirements Shape the Spatial Coding of Location-Specific Adjustments to Conflict Frequency

AbstractHumans adjust to the frequency of conflicting stimuli so that the detrimental behavioral effects of frequent conflicts become smaller than those of rare conflicts. These adjustments become contingent on the locations where frequent and infrequent conflicts have been encountered. Experimentally such phenomena are studied by means of conflict tasks, a prominent one being the Simon task of the present experiments. Our Simon task involved four stimulus locations (upper-left, upper-right, lower-left, lower-right). Conflict frequency was manipulated for two diagonally opposite locations. For example, conflict frequency was low at the upper-left location and high at the lower-right location. At the remaining (non-manipulated) locations conflict frequency was intermediate. In Experiment 1 participants responded to stimulus colors by pressing a left or right key, in Experiment 2 by pressing a lower or upper key. We observed larger conflict effects for the low-conflict location than for the high-conflict location. Crucially, these adjustments to conflict frequency transferred to non-manipulated locations depending on the response configuration: transfer regions were the left or right hemifield with left-right responses, but the lower or upper hemifield with lower-upper responses. Assuming that transfer regions around manipulated stimulus locations are defined by identical (or similar) spatial codes, the pattern of transfer suggests a process of weighted two-dimensional location coding. According to this notion, the spatial dimension that is relevant for response discrimination has stronger weight in the coding of stimulus locations than a response-irrelevant dimension, and can therefore produce anisotropic transfer of conflict-frequency effects around manipulated locations.

dlvr.it

More Time and Effort, Same Curiosity: Expected Effort Does Not Impact Curiosity

AbstractWhy do people feel curious about some questions but not others? Recent accounts of curiosity argue that curiosity should be highest when learning is likely to occur and likely to be rapid. However, it is less clear whether practical barriers to learning—for example, the effort required to gain information—matter for how curious we feel. In three preregistered experiments with a total of 419 participants, we test whether the expected degree of effort to obtain information impacts curiosity. In Experiments 1 and 2, we prompted adult participants to rate their curiosity about the answers to trivia questions. For each question, they were informed that they would receive the answer with minimal time and effort or with substantial time and effort. In Experiment 3, we additionally varied the probability that exerting effort would lead to information. Across studies, we found that effort affected decisions to seek information, but not self-reported curiosity. This suggests that subjective feelings of curiosity are unhindered by the practical costs of information search, though our decisions to actually pursue information are highly sensitive to these costs.

dlvr.it

Plural Causes

AbstractCausal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a lightning strike, for example, people tend to say that the lightning bolt was the cause of the fire, not mentioning the presence of oxygen in the air, although they are well aware that the latter was no less indispensable for the fire to occur. The extant literature on causal selection has so far operated on the implicit premise that the only relevant variables for causal selection are individual variables, corresponding to distinct nodes in the relevant network of causes. Ours is the first systematic study of plural causes in the context of causal selection. First, we establish by means of two behavioral experiments the psychological reality and non-triviality of plural causes, ruling out potential deflationary explanations. Second, we show that state-of-the-art models of causal selection based on counterfactual dependence can be extended to make non-trivial predictions about plural causes consistent with our experimental findings. Third, we show that surprising logical properties of plurals in natural language interpretation might be found in causal reasoning with plural causes.

dlvr.it