Similarity on the rebound: Inhibition of similarity assessment leads to an ironic postsuppressional rebound

A widely held but rarely tested assumption among cognitive scientists is that different cognitive tasks may rely upon a single basic cognitive process. Using an established methodology to examine the suppression and subsequent rebound of mental operations, the present research indicates that suppressing use of similarity in one domain results in the subsequent rebound of similarity assessment in a different domain, suggesting that both domains rely on the same underlying cognitive process. In two studies, we demonstrate that leading people to suppress natural similarity assessment in one task produces increased reliance on similarity in subsequent, different, and apparently unrelated tasks. In Experiment 1, participants led to suppress similarity in a concentration task subsequently made more errors in a false-memory paradigm than did control participants. In Experiment 2, participants suppressing similarity in a categorization task made more false-memory errors and perceived more similarity between word pairs than participants who did not suppress. The findings suggest that the cognitive process of similarity assessment may be a domain-general process, such that it is widespread across a number of different mental tasks.     

False recall in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm: The roles of gist and associative strength

Theories of false memories, particularly in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm, focus on word association strength and gist. Backward associative strength (BAS) is a strong predictor of false recall in this paradigm. However, other than being defined as a measure of association between studied list words and falsely recalled nonpresented critical words, there is little understanding of this variable. In Experiment 1, we used a knowledge-type taxonomy to classify the semantic relations in DRM stimuli. These knowledge types predicted false-recall probability, as well as BAS itself, with the most important being situation features, synonyms, and taxonomic relations. In three subsequent experiments, we demonstrated that lists composed solely of situation features can elicit a gist and produce false memories, particularly when monitoring processes are made more difficult. Our results identify the semantic factors that underlie BAS and suggest how considering semantic relations leads to a better understanding of gist formation.     

What is “theory of mind”? Concepts,cognitive processes and individual differences

Research on “theory of mind” has traditionally focused on a narrow participant group (preschool children) using a narrow range of experimental tasks (most notably, false-belief tasks). Recent work has greatly expanded the age range of human participants tested to include human infants, older children, and adults, has devised new tasks, and has adopted methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, theoretical work has not kept pace with these changes, with the result that studies using one kind of method or participant group often inherit assumptions about the nature of theory of mind from other research, with little regard for whether these assumptions are appropriate. I argue that three distinct approaches to thinking about theory of mind are already implicit in research practice, and that future work, whether with infants, children, or adults, will benefit from articulating these approaches more clearly and following their different implications for what theory of mind is and how it should be studied.     

Variation in individuals' semantic networks for common knowledge is associated with false memory

Three experiments assessed the relationships between false memories of words and their degree of connectedness within individual semantic networks. In the first two experiments, participants studied associated word lists (e.g., hot, winter, ice), completed a recognition test that included related nonstudied words (e.g., cold, snow), and then rated the semantic relatedness of all word pairs including studied and nonstudied words. In the third experiment, the task order was reversed; participants completed pairwise ratings and then, two weeks later, completed the false memory task. The relatedness ratings were analysed using the Pathfinder scaling algorithm. In all experiments, items that an individual falsely recognized had higher semantic Pathfinder node densities than those items correctly rejected.     

Differential effects of cue specificity and list length on the prospective and retrospective prospective-memory components

Event-based prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to perform an intended action at an appropriate moment that is indicated by some cue. It has been shown that increasing the number of PM cues as well as decreasing the cues' specificity can impair PM performance. Although both manipulations result in similar detrimental effects to PM accuracy, they may affect different underlying cognitive processes. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated both the number of cues and cue specificity and found the expected detrimental effects on PM accuracy. Analyses with the multinomial model of PM, which considers false PM responses and accounts for guessing biases, imply that the cue-list-length manipulation affected cue singularisation as well as intention retrieval, whereas cue specificity selectively affected intention retrieval. These results are original evidence that the performance decrements from the two manipulations have different cognitive underpinnings.     

False memories in patients suffering from obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS)

We assessed the propensity for false memories among patients with obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS). Twenty-one patients with OSAS and 21 controls matched for sex, age and education were recruited. At encoding, an adaptation of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm was used to induce false memories. At retrieval, participants completed a forced-choice recognition task to distinguish memories based on verbatim traces from those based on gist traces. When the task encouraged retrieval based on either gist or verbatim traces, the groups performed similarly. However, when the task required retrieval based solely on verbatim traces, OSAS patients exhibited poor discrimination and produced more false memories. Our finding that OSAS leads to an increased propensity to produce false memories is discussed within the framework of both fuzzy-trace theory and activation-monitoring theory.     

Scientific Discovery on Positive Data via Belief Revision

A model of inductive inquiry is defined within a first-order context. Intuitively, the model pictures inquiry as a game between Nature and a scientist. To begin the game, a nonlogical vocabulary is agreed upon by the two players along with a partition of a class of structures for that vocabulary. Next, Nature secretly chooses one structure (the real world) from some cell of the partition. She then presents the scientist with a sequence of atomic facts about the chosen structure. With each new datum the scientist announces a guess about the cell to which the chosen structure belongs. To succeed in his inquiry, the scientist's successive conjectures must be correct all but finitely often, that is, the conjectures must converge in the limit to the correct cell. A special kind of scientist selects his hypotheses on the basis of a belief revision operator. We show that reliance on belief revision allows scientists to solve a wide class of problems.     

Conditional Probability and Defeasible Inference

We offer a probabilistic model of rational consequence relations (Lehmann and Magidor, 1990) by appealing to the extension of the classical Ramsey–Adams test proposed by Vann McGee in (McGee, 1994). Previous and influential models of non-monotonic consequence relations have been produced in terms of the dynamics of expectations (Gärdenfors and Makinson, 1994; Gärdenfors, 1993).Expectation is a term of art in these models, which should not be confused with the notion of expected utility. The expectations of an agent are some form of belief weaker than absolute certainty. Our model offers a modified and extended version of an account of qualitative belief in terms of conditional probability, first presented in (van Fraassen, 1995). We use this model to relate probabilistic and qualitative models of non-monotonic relations in terms of expectations. In doing so we propose a probabilistic model of the notion of expectation. We provide characterization results both for logically finite languages and for logically infinite, but countable, languages. The latter case shows the relevance of the axiom of countable additivity for our probability functions. We show that a rational logic defined over a logically infinite language can only be fully characterized in terms of finitely additive conditional probability. The research of both authors was supported in part by a grant from NSF, and, for Parikh, also by support from the research foundation of CUNY.     

学前儿童对事实、信念、愿望和情绪间关系的认知

76名3至5岁儿童接受了区分事实和信念、根据信念推测他人愿望、根据愿望推测他人情绪等实验任务,通过考查学前儿童对事实、信念、愿望和情绪间关系的认知,探察学前儿童心理理论发展的特点。结果显示3岁儿童在区分信念和事实时,出现错报事实或错报信念两种错误,而不单纯是现实主义偏向错误;在推测他人愿望时,部分3岁和4岁儿童虽然能够正确报告他人的信念却不能正确推测他人愿望,愿望认知发展有其复杂性的一面。学前儿童主要依据愿望推测他人情绪,儿童对信念和愿望的认知水平制约儿童对他人情绪的理解。     

Infants' understanding of false labeling events: the referential roles of words and the speakers who use them

The four studies reported here examine whether 16-month-old infants' responses to true and false utterances interact with their knowledge of human agents. In Study 1, infants heard repeated instances either of true or false labeling of common objects; labels came from an active human speaker seated next to the infant. In Study 2, infants experienced the same stimuli and procedure; however, we replaced the human speaker of Study 1 with an audio speaker in the same location. In Study 3, labels came from a hidden audio speaker. In Study 4, a human speaker labeled the objects while facing away from them. In Study 1, infants looked significantly longer to the human agent when she falsely labeled than when she truthfully labeled the objects. Infants did not show a similar pattern of attention for the audio speaker of Study 2, the silent human of Study 3 or the facing-backward speaker of Study 4. In fact, infants who experienced truthful labeling looked significantly longer to the facing-backward labeler of Study 4 than to true labelers of the other three contexts. Additionally, infants were more likely to correct false labels when produced by the human labeler of Study 1 than in any of the other contexts. These findings suggest, first, that infants are developing a critical conception of other human speakers as truthful communicators, and second, that infants understand that human speakers may provide uniquely useful information when a word fails to match its referent. These findings are consistent with the view that infants can recognize differences in knowledge and that such differences can be based on differences in the availability of perceptual experience.