Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Francis Mollica, Geoff Bacon, Noga Zaslavsky, Yang Xu, Terry Regier, Charles Kemp
Summary: Functionalists suggest that forms and meanings in language are paired in ways that support efficient communication. Previous studies on grammatical marking and semantic typology of the lexicon show the efficiency of word forms and meanings. The information-theoretic analysis in this study reveals how communicative pressures influence both form and meaning.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Biological
Kenny R. Coventry, Harmen B. Gudde, Holger Diessel, Jacqueline Collier, Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes, Mila Vulchanova, Valentin Vulchanov, Emanuela Todisco, Maria Reile, Merlijn Breunesse, Helen Plado, Juergen Bohnemeyer, Raed Bsili, Michela Caldano, Rositsa Dekova, Katharine Donelson, Diana Forker, Yesol Park, Lekhnath Sharma Pathak, David Peeters, Gabriella Pizzuto, Baris Serhan, Linda Apse, Florian Hesse, Linh Hoang, Phuong Hoang, Yoko Igari, Keerthana Kapiley, Tamar Haupt-Khutsishvili, Sara Kolding, Katri Priiki, Ieva Maciukaityte, Vaisnavi Mohite, Tiina Nahkola, Sum Yi Tsoi, Stefan Williams, Shunei Yasuda, Angelo Cangelosi, Jon Andoni Dunabeitia, Ramesh Kumar Mishra, Roberta Rocca, Jurgis Skilters, Mikkel Wallentin, Egle Zilinskaite-Sinkuniene, Ozlem Durmaz Incel
Summary: The use of spatial demonstratives in language is influenced by the ability of speakers to reach or act on the referred object, and in some languages, it is also influenced by the position of the addressee. The similarities and differences in spatial communication across languages can be understood in terms of universal constraints on action shaping spatial language and cognition.
NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Xianglan Chen, Hulin Ren, XiaoYing Yan
Summary: This study uses eye-tracking experimentation to explore the role of contextual information in Chinese metonymy processing. The results show that readers take longer to arrive at a literal interpretation than at a metonymic one when the logical relationship between the preceding contextual information and the target word is weak. Additionally, both the preceding and the spillover contextual information contribute to metonymy processing, especially when the spillover information does more to the metonymy than it does to the literal meaning.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Geography
Cristiane Kutianski Marchi Fagundes, Kristin Stock, Luciene Stamato Delazari
Summary: Humans use spatial language in daily communication to describe locations and give directions. A cross-linguistic study found that New Zealand English uses a wider range of spatial relation terms and reference objects compared to Brazilian Portuguese which uses more projective spatial relation terms. Translation between spatial relation terms is also context-dependent.
TRANSACTIONS IN GIS
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
David Kemmerer
Summary: In this paper, the author responds to eight commentaries on their target article, which explores the implications of grounded cognition and linguistic relativity. The commentaries come from various disciplines and perspectives. The author organizes their response around different topics, including the comparison of grounded and amodal theories of concepts, the distinction between language-specific and language-independent concepts, the role of language in culture and cognition, and the importance of cross-linguistic diversity.
TOPICS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
Marcel Boehme, Valentin J. M. Manes, Sang Kil Cha
Summary: This paper discusses fuzzing from a learning perspective, using Shannon's entropy to quantify and evaluate its efficiency. By introducing the concept of entropy, the efficiency of fuzzers can be measured in terms of information gained. Experimental results demonstrate that an entropy-based power schedule can significantly improve the efficiency of fuzzing.
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Hissah Nasser Alothman, Haroon N. Alsager
Summary: This paper investigates how L2 children comprehend and produce English spatial deixis, specifically the words 'here', 'there', 'this', and 'that'. The study found that the children performed better in comprehending the spatial deixis than in producing them, and there was an improvement in their ability to change the deictic center with age.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
David Kemmerer
Summary: According to the Grounded Cognition Model, the sensory and motor features of concepts are stored within neural systems and activated during nonlinguistic processing. However, research in semantic typology shows that word meanings vary significantly across languages, which has theoretical consequences for the model.
TOPICS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Linguistics
Natalia Levshina, Steven Moran
Summary: There is a growing interest in communicative efficiency, with some arguing that efficient language use reflects language structure and usage. Evidence from multilingual corpora suggests that efficiency may be a universal feature of human language.
LINGUISTICS VANGUARD
(2021)
Article
Linguistics
Stefan Schnell, Nils Norman Schiborr
Summary: Corpus-based studies have become increasingly common in linguistic typology, giving rise to the field of corpus-based typology, which investigates text production across languages. These studies reveal universals of text production, cognitive biases influencing usage patterns, and correlations between usage patterns and language-specific structures. Future challenges include developing more representative crosslinguistic corpora and exploring their vast potential.
ANNUAL REVIEW OF LINGUISTICS
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Leona Polyanskaya, Hector M. Manrique, Antonio Marin, Azucena Garcia-Palacios, Mikhail Ordin
Summary: Previous studies have shown that bilinguals have an advantage in metacognitive processing in linguistic tasks. This project aimed to investigate which aspects of bilingualism affect metacognition. The hypothesis proposed that simultaneous acquisition and use of typologically different languages lead to the development of diverse processing strategies and enhance metacognition. The results confirmed the hypothesis in the auditory modality for linguistic stimuli, but no between-domain transfer of metacognitive abilities was observed. In the visual modality, no differences in metacognitive efficiency were observed. Additionally, it was found that bilingualism and the use of typologically different languages modulated separate metacognitive processes involved in monitoring cognitive performance in a statistical learning task.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-GENERAL
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Gianluca Amico, Sabine Schaefer
Summary: The study found that walking during encoding and recall could negatively impact working memory performance, especially in older adults. The results indicate that embodiment may not aid in memorizing spatial information, but can create a dual-task situation instead.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Geosciences, Multidisciplinary
R. M. Lark, C. Chagumaira, A. E. Milne
Summary: The paper reviews the characterization of uncertainty in spatial information, emphasizing the importance of engaging with end-users decision processes and the involvement of spatial statisticians. It suggests that decision models focused measures of uncertainty are likely to be more fruitful, especially if they come from formal decision analysis.
SPATIAL STATISTICS
(2022)
Article
Chemistry, Multidisciplinary
Nirosha J. Murugan, Daniel H. Kaltman, Paul H. Jin, Melanie Chien, Ramses Martinez, Cuong Q. Nguyen, Anna Kane, Richard Novak, Donald E. Ingber, Michael Levin
Summary: The unicellular protist Physarum polycephalum demonstrates an ability to use mechanosensation for decision-making, preferentially growing towards heavier, substrate-deforming objects. It is shown that Physarum may calculate by sensing the fraction of its perimeter distorted above a threshold substrate strain, enabling long-range decisions based on biomechanical features. These findings highlight a unique method of mechanosensation and how this aneural organism adapts to its environment.
ADVANCED MATERIALS
(2021)
Article
Linguistics
Alexander Koplenig
Summary: Information theory can be used to assess the efficiency of information transmission. The study found that written language in different languages exhibits certain patterns of information-theoretic efficiency, which is positively correlated with the number of speakers.
LINGUISTICS VANGUARD
(2021)
Article
Biophysics
Qiaoqiao Zhu, Xin Gao, Sihan Chen, Weiyong Gu, Mark D. Brown
JOURNAL OF BIOMECHANICS
(2020)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Caleb Everett, Sihan Chen
Summary: The study examined the hypothesis that a specific anatomical feature causes languages to rely more heavily on labiodental consonants, and found that labiodentals are less frequent in hunter gatherer populations compared to those that consume softer diets and use eating utensils. The findings suggest that speech adapts to anatomical differences within and among populations.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Meilin Zhan, Sihan Chen, Roger Levy, Jiayi Lu, Edward Gibson
Summary: This study tested the applicability of the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese and found that the results were similar to those found in related constructions in English, demonstrating the robustness of the noisy-channel model.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Gabor P. Haden, Fleur L. Bouwer, Henkjan Honing, Istvan Winkler
Summary: Newborn infants are capable of extracting temporal regularities from sound sequences. By manipulating the isochrony of sound sequences, researchers found that beat perception and statistical learning can be distinguished in newborns. Despite newborns' ability for statistical learning, this alone cannot fully explain their beat processing.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco, Joshua Knobe, Julian Jara-Ettinger
Summary: A study using a block-puzzle experiment found that people can prioritize what to think about based on the value of different options, and can flexibly prioritize high-value or low-value options depending on the situation. Computational modeling showed that these thinking strategies are broadly rational and maximize the value of long-term decisions.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Lei Yuan, Miriam Novack, David Uttal, Steven Franconeri
Summary: Research shows that relational language can enhance relational representation by guiding learners' attention, and this facilitative effect persists over time even in the absence of language.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Sebastian Holt, Judith E. Fan, David Barner
Summary: The ability to communicate about exact number is crucial in modern human practices. People use various strategies, such as 1-to-1 correspondence, configuration of sets, and salient numerical features of objects, to convey numbers.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Jasna Martinovic
Summary: This study investigates the acquisition of color categories and suggests that the acquisition of boundary discriminations for hue-defined categories is more efficient than for lightness-defined categories. It also highlights the importance of labels in color category learning and how they can guide attention.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Fan Yang, Steven O. Roberts
Summary: Children's evaluations of nonconformity are influenced by nonconformists' group orientations, with nonconformity motivated by positive intentions towards the ingroup being more accepted. Children also have a more positive evaluation of nonconformists who bring the ingroup and the outgroup together.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Joshua Snell
Summary: This study revealed that readers are able to extract syntactic information from multiple words simultaneously in a very short period of time, as demonstrated by significant effects on response times and accuracy. This suggests that the brain can process higher-order linguistic information from multiple words in parallel.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Angela Pasqualotto, Aaron Cochrane, Daphne Bavelier, Irene Altarelli
Summary: This article introduces a novel non-linguistic audio-visual associative learning task to study individual differences and learning rate, and correlates it with working memory performance and reading ability.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Kaichi Yanaoka, Felice van't Wout, Satoru Saito, Christopher Jarrold
Summary: This study aimed to investigate how prior task experience impacts the engagement of cognitive control in novel task environments. The results demonstrated that prior task experience influences the way individuals engage in similar task conditions and this influence can sometimes result in negative transfer. Furthermore, individuals also acquired knowledge about the temporal and hierarchical aspects of task goals.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Jesse H. Grabman, Chad. S. Dodson
Summary: Many studies have shown that competence influences an individual's ability to monitor their item-level performance. The debate about how to explain these individual differences in metacognition persists. This study investigated the competence-based account, the performance-based account, and the metacognitive awareness account. The results showed that objectively stronger face recognizers displayed better discrimination and calibration in confidence ratings compared to weaker recognizers. Additionally, participants with greater self-assessed ability used higher levels of confidence, regardless of trial accuracy. These findings support the competence-based account.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Kristina Krasich, Kevin O'Neill, Samuel Murray, James R. Brockmole, Felipe De Brigard, Antje Nuthmann
Summary: Research on gaze control has shown that mind wandering and processing demands modulate fixation durations through different mechanisms in scene viewing. This suggests that changes in fixation durations cannot solely infer processing demands without understanding the underlying mechanisms.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
James S. Magnuson, Anne Marie Crinnion, Sahil Luthra, Phoebe Gaston, Samantha Grubb
Summary: The modulation of perception by top-down feedback has significant implications for cognitive theories. This paper reviews the debate on feedback in spoken word recognition models, corrects misconceptions about computational demonstrations, and explains how interactive activation models improve word recognition through the joint effects of feedback and lateral inhibition.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Yue Chen, Weimin Mou
Summary: This project tested the interaction between self motion-based path integration and landmark-based piloting in a familiar environment. The results showed that path integration functions automatically in the absence of persistent landmarks, and that persistent landmarks suppress path integration. Path integration also updates the spatial views of the environment. The updated spatial views help eliminate ambiguous targets or landmarks within the familiar environment.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Sarah A. Wu, Tobias Gerstenberg
Summary: How replaceable a person is affects responsibility judgments. The counterfactual replacement model predicts that people are held more responsible if it would have been difficult to replace them. Three experiments using a quantitatively controlled paradigm support this model's predictions and show that it explains responsibility judgments better than alternative models based solely on what actually happened.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Talya Sadeh, Morris Moscovitch
Summary: Temporal-structure is a fundamental principle of episodic memory organization, and recent studies suggest that it is encoded automatically. This study investigated whether strategic control processes influence the retrieval of temporal structure in memory. The results showed that while dividing attention negatively affected overall recall performance, it did not affect the ability to use temporal structure to drive recall.
