Language acquisition meets language evolution

Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the "logical" problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology.     

A Clinical Model in Action in Intensive Residential Treatment: Meeting the Needs of Adolescent Boys who have Experienced Domestic Violence

The Habitat Program at Wood’s Homes, Calgary, Alberta, is an eight bed residential treatment program for conduct-disordered youth who have been exposed or subjected to high levels of violence in their family home. The program was based on the assumption that working effectively with such youth requires consideration of the background experiences of family violence, yet traditional treatment models often ignore or minimize the importance of these experiences. We present a clinical model which incorporates aspects of milieu treatment, relationship-based daily interventions and elements of Jenkins’ invitational approach to working with men and boys who use violence as well as Wade’s response-based approach to counseling with victims and perpetrators of violence. The model also incorporates ideas based on Maruna’s research into recidivism and excuse-making. The purpose of the model is twofold: to be broad enough to structure an overall treatment strategy based on the assumption that successful treatment results from the cumulative effect of many interactions over time, and to be specific enough to guide staff in developing strategies for specific situations that typically arise in daily interaction with the youth. We use a case example format to illustrate how staff has utilized the model to engage youth in exploring both their experiences of violence in the family home and in developing new ways of thinking and talking about behavioural choices.     

A new consequence of Simpson's paradox: stable cooperation in one-shot prisoner's dilemma from populations of individualistic learners

Theories of choice in economics typically assume that interacting agents act individualistically and maximize their own utility. Specifically, game theory proposes that rational players should defect in one-shot prisoners' dilemmas (PD). Defection also appears to be the inevitable outcome for agents who learn by reinforcement of past choices, because whatever the other player does, defection leads to greater reinforcement on each trial. In a computer simulation and 4 experiments, the authors show that, apparently paradoxically, when players' choices are correlated by an exogenous factor (here, the cooperativeness of the specific PD chosen), people obtain greater average reinforcement for cooperating, which can sustain cooperation. This effect arises from a well-known statistical paradox, Simpson's paradox. The authors speculate that this effect may be relevant to aspects of real-world human cooperative behavior.     

From universal laws of cognition to specific cognitive models

The remarkable successes of the physical sciences have been built on highly general quantitative laws, which serve as the basis for understanding an enormous variety of specific physical systems. How far is it possible to construct universal principles in the cognitive sciences, in terms of which specific aspects of perception, memory, or decision making might be modelled? Following Shepard (e.g., 1987 ), it is argued that some universal principles may be attainable in cognitive science. Here, 2 examples are proposed: the simplicity principle (which states that the cognitive system prefers patterns that provide simpler explanations of available data); and the scale‐invariance principle, which states that many cognitive phenomena are independent of the scale of relevant underlying physical variables, such as time, space, luminance, or sound pressure. This article illustrates how principles may be combined to explain specific cognitive processes by using these principles to derive SIMPLE, a formal model of memory for serial order ( Brown, Neath, & Chater, 2007 ), and briefly mentions some extensions to models of identification and categorization. This article also considers the scope and limitations of universal laws in cognitive science.     

Using statistical smoothing to estimate the psycholinguistic acceptability of novel phrases

Native speakers of languages perceive differences in the acceptability of phrases even when those phrases are both grammatical and novel (previously unseen). We suggest that smoothing, a statistical technique used by natural language processing engineers, provides several candidate mechanisms for investigating this phenomenon. We describe the creation of a large data set of predictions from several smoothing algorithms about the acceptability of unseen grammatical phrases and a novel experimental method for the pairwise comparison of these models. We use this method to compare three smoothing methods and consider the results in light of the differences among the models. We argue that the data support the idea that similarity in this domain is best thought of as a form of asymmetric representational distortion and that the informational basis over which such estimates are made is broad, rather than narrow, as has been previously suggested.     

Visual search in children and adults: top-down and bottom-up mechanisms

Three experiments investigated visual search for targets that differed from distractors in colour, size, or orientation. In one condition the target was defined by a conjunction of these features, while in the other condition the target was the odd one out. In all experiments, 6-7- and 9-10-year-old children were compared with young adults. Experiment 1 showed that children's search differed from adults' search in two ways. In conjunction searches children searched more slowly and took longer to reject trials when no target was present. In the odd-one-out experiments, 6-7-year-old children were slower to respond to size targets than to orientation targets, and slower for orientation targets than for colour targets. Both the other groups showed no difference in their rate of responding to colour and orientation. Experiments 2 and 3 highlighted that these results were not a function of either differential density across set sizes (Experiment 2) or discriminability of orientation and colour (Experiment 3). Across all three experiments, the results of both conjunction and odd-one-out searches highlighted a development in visual search from middle to late childhood.     

Helping to improve the group stereotype: on the strategic dimension of prosocial behavior

Three studies consider a basis for intergroup helping. Specifically, they show that group members may help others to disconfirm a stereotype of their own group as mean. Study 1 shows that Scots believe they are seen as mean by the English, resent this stereotype, are motivated to refute it, and believe out-group helping is a particularly effective way of doing so. Study 2 shows that increasing the salience of the English stereotype of the Scottish as mean leads Scots to accentuate the extent to which Scots are depicted as generous. Study 3 shows that increasing the salience of the stereotype of the Scots as mean results in an increase in the help volunteered to out-group members. These results highlight how strategic concerns may result in out-group helping. In turn, they underscore the point that helping others may be a means to advance a group's interest.