Folkscience: coarse interpretations of a complex reality

The rise of appeals to intuitive theories in many areas of cognitive science must cope with a powerful fact. People understand the workings of the world around them in far less detail than they think. This illusion of knowledge depth has been uncovered in a series of recent studies and is caused by several distinctive properties of explanatory understanding not found in other forms of knowledge. Other experimental work has shown that people do have skeletal frameworks of expectations that constrain richer ad hoc theory construction on the fly. These frameworks are supplemented by an ability to evaluate and rely on the division of cognitive labour in one's culture, an ability shown to be present even in young children.     

Causal structure learning over time: observations and interventions

Seven studies examined how people learn causal relationships in scenarios when the variables are temporally dependent - the states of variables are stable over time. When people intervene on X, and Y subsequently changes state compared to before the intervention, people infer that X influences Y. This strategy allows people to learn causal structures quickly and reliably when variables are temporally stable (Experiments 1 and 2). People use this strategy even when the cover story suggests that the trials are independent (Experiment 3). When observing variables over time, people believe that when a cause changes state, its effects likely change state, but an effect may change state due to an exogenous influence in which case its observed cause may not change state at the same time. People used this strategy to learn the direction of causal relations and a wide variety of causal structures (Experiments 4-6). Finally, considering exogenous influences responsible for the observed changes facilitates learning causal directionality (Experiment 7). Temporal reasoning may be the norm rather than the exception for causal learning and may reflect the way most events are experienced naturalistically.     

Competition effects of threatening faces in social anxiety

Threatening faces involuntarily grab attention in socially anxious individuals. It is unclear, however, whether attention capture is at the expense of concurrent visual processing. The current study examined the perceptual cost effects of viewing fear-relevant stimuli (threatening faces) relative to a concurrent change-detection task. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) were used to separate the neural response to 2 fully overlapping types of stimuli flickering at different frequencies: Task-irrelevant facial expressions (angry, neutral, happy) were overlaid with a task-relevant Gabor patch stream, which required a response to rare phase reversals. Groups of 17 high and 17 low socially anxious observers were recruited through online prescreening of 849 students. A prominent competition effect of threatening faces was observed solely in elevated social anxiety: When an angry face, relative to a neutral or happy face, served as a distractor, heightened ssVEP amplitudes were seen at the tagging frequency of that facial expression. Simultaneously, the ssVEP evoked by the task-relevant Gabor grating was reliably diminished compared with conditions with neutral or happy distractor faces. Thus, threatening faces capture and hold low-level perceptual resources in viewers symptomatic for social anxiety at the cost of a concurrent primary task. It is important to note that this competition in lower tier visual cortex was maintained throughout the viewing period and was unaccompanied by competition effects on behavioral performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Learning the Relevance of Relevance and the Trouble with Truth: Evaluating Explanatory Relevance across Childhood

ABSTRACT

In four experiments, we investigate how the ability to detect irrelevant explanations develops. In Experiments 1 and 2, 4- to 8-year-olds and adults rated different types of explanations about “what makes cars go” individually, in the absence of a direct contrast. Each explanation was true and relevant (e.g., “Cars have engines that turn gasoline into power”), true and irrelevant (e.g., “Cars have radios that play music”), or a false statement that would be relevant if it were true (e.g., “Cars have rockets that speed them up”). Participants of all ages spontaneously indicated that false explanations were less helpful than relevant explanations. However, there was a developmental shift for irrelevant explanations: 4-year-olds only detected irrelevant explanations that did not involve internal features of cars (e.g., “Cars have parking lots that they park in”). Crucially, this shift between age 4 and 5 cannot be explained by 4-year-olds’ lack of knowledge since 4-year-olds correctly indicated that relevant explanations were more helpful than irrelevant feature explanations when given a direct contrast in Experiment 3. These results are further clarified in Experiment 4, in which we provided a different explanatory goal (“where to find cars”) and found that even young children have a nuanced understanding of explanatory relevance that is sensitive to differing explanatory goals. Together, these four experiments suggest an early-emerging ability to understand relevance, but a shift between age 4 and 5 in the ability to spontaneously use this understanding when evaluating individual explanations in isolation.     

“End-of-life” biases in moral evaluations of others

When evaluating the moral character of others, people show a strong bias to more heavily weigh behaviors at the end of an individual’s life, even if those behaviors arise in light of an overwhelmingly longer duration of contradictory behavior. Across four experiments, we find that this “end-of-life” bias uniquely applies to intentional changes in behavior that immediately precede death, and appears to result from the inference that the behavioral change reflects the emergence of the individual’s “true self”.     

Getting less than their fair share: Maltreated youth are hyper‐cooperative yet vulnerable to exploitation in a public goods game

Human cooperative behavior has long been thought to decline under adversity. However, studies have primarily examined perceived patterns of cooperation, with little eye to actual cooperative behavior embedded within social interaction. Game‐theoretical paradigms can help close this gap by unpacking subtle differences in how cooperation unfolds during initial encounters. This study is the first to use a child‐appropriate, virtual, public goods game to study actual cooperative behavior in 329 participants aged 9–16 years with histories of maltreatment (n = 99) and no maltreatment (n = 230) while controlling for psychiatric symptoms. Unlike work on perceived patterns of cooperation, we found that maltreated participants actually contribute more resources to a public good during peer interaction than their nonmaltreated counterparts. This effect was robust when controlling for psychiatric symptoms and peer problems as well as demographic variables. We conclude that maltreatment may engender a hyper‐cooperative strategy to minimize the odds of hostility and preserve positive interaction during initial encounters. This, however, comes at the cost of potential exploitation by others.     

认知与情绪过程的脑诱发电位研究——情绪的适应性假说

本研究观测了30名女性被试在月经周期中的不同激素时相对图像刺激的情绪价值的主观评估和脑诱发电位反应。调节刺激的情绪价值的五类幻灯片分别为普通人像、婴儿像、皮肤病人像、男模特儿像和女模特儿像。实验发现只有脑诱发电位的P3成份随刺激的情绪价值和激素的时相而变化。被评为喜爱与不喜爱的图像(婴儿像和皮肤病人像)所诱发的P3波在幅度上均明显高于中性图像(普通人像)所致的P3反应。在高孕激素时相,对婴儿像和男模特儿像的P3反应高于在低孕激素时相对同类刺激的P3反应。高孕激素时相还伴有对各类图像性感程度评估值的降低。对各类图像喜爱程度的评估则随雌激素水平的上升而增高。上述实验结果表明,P3波敏感于刺激的情绪价值并反映了认知与情绪过程中受生理状态调节的适应性变化。     

Acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal functions in music

The acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal stabilities in music is investigated in children of elementary school age. Listeners judge how good short tone sequences sound as melodies. The ratings show a pattern of increasing differentiation of the pitches in an octave range. The youngest listeners distinguish between scale and nonscale tones; older listeners distinguish between the tonic triad tones and other scale components. A group of adult listeners show octave equivalence and temporal asymmetries, with a preference for sequences ending on the more stable tones within the hierarchy. Pitch height effects do not interact with the age of the listener. These results are discussed in terms of the primacy of physical variables, novice-expert differences, and general cognitive principles governing the acquisition and development of internal representations of pitch relationships.     

Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts

We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students’ concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects’ awareness of their theological beliefs, we were able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendency to anthropomorphize may be generalizable to other agents. God (and possibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some contexts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood nonnatural entities.