Two ways of learning associations

How people learn chunks or associations between adjacent items in sequences was modelled. Two previously successful models of how people learn artificial grammars were contrasted: the CCN, a network version of the competitive chunker of Servan‐Schreiber and Anderson [J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cogn. 16 (1990) 592], which produces local and compositionally‐structured chunk representations acquired incrementally; and the simple recurrent network (SRN) of Elman [Cogn. Sci. 14 (1990) 179], which acquires distributed representations through error correction. The models' susceptibility to two types of interference was determined: prediction conflicts, in which a given letter can predict two other letters that appear next with an unequal frequency; and retroactive interference, in which the prediction made by a letter changes in the second half of training. The predictions of the models were determined by exploring parameter space and seeing howdensely different regions of the space of possible experimental outcomes were populated by model outcomes. For both types of interference, human data fell squarely in regions characteristic of CCN performance but not characteristic of SRN performance.     

Consistency in synesthetic experience to vowels and consonants: Five case studies

The present study attempted to specify the actual degree of consistency in synesthetic experience in two synesthetes and three non-synesthetes. By comparing colour chip selections, and size and density ratings, to the same set of stimulus letters on separate occasions, it was found that the synesthetic subjects showed a high consistency in responding over a short (24 hours) as well as a long (one year) time span. In comparison, the non-synesthetic subjects demonstrated less consistent responding when retested after 24 hours. However, the differences between the two groups were smaller than expected. Consistency to vowels and consonants was compared, and it was found that consistency to consonants was comparable to, or even higher than, vowel consistency in all subjects.     

Implicit Association Test (IAT) Studies Investigating Pitch-Shape Audiovisual Cross-modal Associations Across Language Groups

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a series of IAT studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception.     

Implicit and explicit COVID-19-vaccine harmfulness/helpfulness associations predict vaccine beliefs,intentions, and behaviors

We investigated the role of implicit and explicit associations between harm and COVID-19 vaccines using a large sample (N = 4668) of online volunteers. The participants completed a brief implicit association test and explicit measures to evaluate the extent to which they associated COVID-19 vaccines with concepts of harmfulness or helpfulness. We examined the relationship between these harmfulness/helpfulness COVID-19 vaccine associations and vaccination status, intentions, beliefs, and behavior. We found that stronger implicit and explicit associations that COVID-19 vaccines are helpful relate to vaccination status and beliefs about the COVID-19 vaccine. That is, stronger pro-helpful COVID-19 vaccine associations, both implicitly and explicitly, related to greater intentions to be vaccinated, more positive beliefs about the vaccine, and greater vaccine uptake.     

Masked emotional priming beyond global valence activations

An immense body of research demonstrates that emotional facial expressions can be processed unconsciously. However, it has been assumed that such processing takes place solely on a global valence-based level, allowing individuals to disentangle positive from negative emotions but not the specific emotion. In three studies, we investigated the specificity of emotion processing under conditions of limited awareness using a modified variant of an affective priming task. Faces with happy, angry, sad, fearful, and neutral expressions were presented as masked primes for 33 ms (Study 1) or 14 ms (Studies 2 and 3) followed by emotional target faces (Studies 1 and 2) or emotional adjectives (Study 3). Participants’ task was to categorise the target emotion. In all three studies, discrimination of targets was significantly affected by the emotional primes beyond a simple positive versus negative distinction. Results indicate that specific aspects of emotions might be automatically disentangled in addition to valence, even under conditions of subjective unawareness.     

An update on the search for symmetry in nonhumans

Sidman et al.'s (1982) failure to find evidence for symmetry (bidirectional associations between stimuli) in monkeys and baboons set the stage for decades of work on emergent relations in nonhumans. They attributed the failure to the use of procedures that did not (1) promote stimulus control based on the relation between the sample and correct comparison and (2) reduce control by irrelevant stimulus features. Previous reviews of symmetry in nonhumans indicated that multiple exemplar training and successive matching might encourage appropriate stimulus control. This review examined 16 studies that investigated symmetry in 94 subjects, including pigeons, rats, capuchin monkeys, and baboons. Several studies used alternative training procedures to minimize sources of irrelevant stimulus control, and many combined multiple exemplar training with other procedural modifications. Symmetry was observed in approximately 30% of subjects. Studies that reported the strongest evidence for symmetry used successive matching-to-sample procedures that included training on both symbolic and identity relations, and studies finding mixed evidence employed alternative methods. These studies highlight the challenge in creating training procedures that promote symmetry and the need to assess the underlying sources of control on positive demonstrations.     

Adaptations in driver deceleration behaviour with automatic incident detection: A naturalistic driving study

Traffic congestion and crash rates can be reduced by introducing variable speed limits (VSLs) and automatic incident detection (AID) systems. Previous findings based on loop detector measurements have revealed that drivers reduce their speeds while approaching traffic congestion when the AID system is active. Notwithstanding these behavioural effects, most microscopic traffic flow models assessing the impact of VSLs do not describe driver response accurately.This study analyses the main factors that influence driver deceleration behaviour while approaching traffic congestion with and without VSLs. The Dutch VSL database was linked to the driver behaviour data collected in the UDRIVE naturalistic driving study. Driver engagement in secondary tasks and glance behaviour were extracted from the video data. Linear mixed-effects models predicting the characteristics of deceleration events were estimated.The results show that the maximum deceleration is high when approaching a slower leader, when driving at high speeds and short distance headways, and close to the beginning of traffic congestion. The minimum time headway is short when driving at high speeds and changing lanes. Certain drivers showed higher decelerations and shorter time headways than others. Controlled for these main factors, smaller maximum decelerations were found when the VSLs were present and visible, and when the gantries were within close proximity. These factors could be incorporated into microscopic traffic simulations to evaluate the impact of AID systems on traffic congestion more realistically. Further research is needed to clarify the link between engagement in secondary tasks, glance behaviour and deceleration behaviour.     

Does change in ethical education influence core moral values? Towards history- and culture-aware morality model with application in automatic moral reasoning

In this study, we focus on ethical education as a means to improve artificial companion’s conceptualization of moral decision-making process in human users. In particular, we focus on automatically determining whether changes in ethical education influenced core moral values in humans throughout the century. We analyze ethics as taught in Japan before WWII and today to verify how much the pre-WWII moral attitudes have in common with those of contemporary Japanese, to what degree what is taught as ethics in school overlaps with the general population’s understanding of ethics, as well as to verify whether a major reform of the guidelines for teaching the school subject of “ethics” at school after 1946 has changed the way common people approach core moral questions (such as those concerning the sacredness of human life). We selected textbooks used in teaching ethics at school from between 1935 and 1937, and those used in junior high schools today (2019) and analyzed what emotional and moral associations such contents generated. The analysis was performed with an automatic moral and emotional reasoning agent and based on the largest available text corpus in Japanese as well as on the resources of a Japanese digital library. As a result, we found out that, despite changes in stereotypical view on Japan’s moral sentiments, especially due to historical events, past and contemporary Japanese share a similar moral evaluation of certain basic moral concepts, although there is a large discrepancy between how they perceive some actions to be beneficial to the society as a whole while at the same time being inconclusive when it comes to assessing the same action’s outcome on the individual performing them and in terms of emotional consequences. Some ethical categories, assessed positively before the war, while being associated with a nationalistic trend in education have also disappeared from the scope of interest of post- war society. The findings of this study support suggestions proposed by others that the development of personal AI systems requires supplementation with moral reasoning. Moreover, the paper builds upon this idea and further suggests that AI systems need to be aware of ethics not as a constant, but as a function with a correction on historical and cultural changes in moral reasoning.     

Bridging the gap between brain and behavior: cognitive and neural mechanisms of episodic memory

The notion that non-human animals are capable of episodic memory is highly controversial. Here, we review recent behavioral work from our laboratory showing that the fundamental features of episodic memory can be observed in rats and that, as in humans, this capacity relies on the hippocampus. We also discuss electrophysiological evidence, from our laboratory and that of others, pointing to associative and sequential coding in hippocampal cells as potential neural mechanisms underlying episodic memory.