Cognitive Account Research Articles

Cross- and multimodal anaphoric references in mystery movies: A cognitive perspective

Abstract The article presents findings from both quantitative and qualitative research regarding the resolution of cross- and multi-modal anaphoric references to objects in two Sherlock Holmes movies directed by Guy Ritchie. The goal is to illustrate how words referring to objects are linked to images depicting the objects as well as sounds produced by the objects to constitute coreferential chains with respect to the viewers’ perception. The theoretical assumptions draw concepts primarily from cognitive linguistics (such as mental spaces, compression, frame-metonymic relations), with additional notions adopted from (verbal) semantics, pragmatics, visual semantics, and film studies. A cognitive account of regular and associative cross- and multimodal anaphora is suggested, along with a model for the representation of cross- and multi-modal coreferential chains for future manual and automated annotation tools. Overall, the work emphasizes the importance of considering both verbal and nonverbal cues in understanding anaphoric references in cinematic contexts by highlighting the cognitive processes involved while viewers integrate information from different modes.

Manipulating Through Poems: Composition, Emotions, and Agency in Amelia Opie’s The Only Child; or, Portia Bellenden

ABSTRACT Amelia Opie’s novels have typically been received as following the structure of the fallen-woman plot. This article reveals how Opie’s late understudied novel The Only Child; or, Portia Bellenden (1821) forms a radical departure from this genre as the heroine uses her skill in writing and poetry composition to orchestrate for another character to die in her place. Using recent approaches in cognitive narratology, in particular the theory of predictive processing, I analyse how Portia utilises composition to manipulate emotions and genre expectations, and thus attain agency over plot events. This new cognitive account of composition’s representation demonstrates how the novel’s original poems model a method for constructing decisions that depart patriarchal scripted narratives. The cognitive approach to composition reveals how the novel’s radical politics lie, not in offering specific political values, but in demonstrating how the reader can use composition to interrogate gendered ideologies that are represented as moral behaviour.

Why Can’t Angels See Our Future? Aquinas’s View of the Relation between Continuous and Discrete Time

Aquinas’s account of angelic cognition presents an intriguing puzzle. Aquinas denies, for both theological and philosophical reasons, that angelic natural knowledge extends to future contingents. Yet Aquinas also insists, strictly for philosophical reasons, that angelic life is measured by a “discrete time” radically distinct from our physical universe’s continuous time. How can two times share the same “now,” such that what is future for us would also be future for the angels? Aquinas does little to address this problem, but I propose two possible solutions. Both solutions argue that angelic instants, like the instants of aeviternity and eternity, can be simultaneous with physical time periods, but only if the corresponding act aims at physical things. This means the angel cannot “skip” physical time, and so determinately aligns angelic instants with physical times. The solutions diverge over whether the extensionless angelic instant is simultaneous with the physical time period all at once, like God’s eternity, or successively, thanks to a temporally extended simultaneity-relation. The first solution prevents angelic natural foreknowledge of what follows an angelic intervention, since intervention requires a new angelic instant. The second solution prevents angelic natural foreknowledge tout court by tying “all-at-once” simultaneity to causal knowledge, which is God’s unique privilege.

Pragmatic realism: towards a reconciliation of enactivism and realism

AbstractThis paper addresses some apparent philosophical tensions between realism and enactivism by means of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Enactivism’s Mind-Life Continuity thesis has been taken to commit it to some form of anti-realist ‘world-construction’ which has been considered controversial. Accordingly, a new realist enactivism is proposed by Zahidi (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,13(3), 461–475, 2014), drawing on Ian Hacking’s ‘entity realism’, which places subjects in worlds comprised of the things that they can successfully manipulate. We review this attempt, and argue that whilst Zahidi rightly urges enactivists towards ‘internal realism’, he cannot sustain a non-negotiable aspect of realism that is crucial for scientific progress – the claim that multiple subjects inhabit the same world. We explore Peirce’s pragmatism as an alternative solution, foregrounding his distinction between existence and reality, and his inquiry-based account of cognition. These theoretical innovations, we argue, fruitfully generalize Zahidi’s manipulation-based enactivist realism to a richer, inquiry-based enactivist realism. We explore how this realism’s pan-species monism about truth encourages and supports the investigation of non-human animal cognition, and conclude by considering some implications of our discussion for long-standing realism debates within pragmatism.

The Role of Emotions in the Capabilities Approach: A Critical Analysis

AbstractThe capabilities approach is the theory according to which, in order to assess people's quality of life and reflect on the basic political entitlements, we should consider what people are capable of doing and being. Focusing mostly on Nussbaum's account, a number of scholars analysed the metaethical structure underlying the approach, showing her Aristotelian and Kantian sources. This article explores another aspect of Nussbaum's theory which has so far been somewhat overlooked: the role of emotions in the justification and motivational support of the approach. After showing the importance Nussbaum places on compassion (and other benevolent emotions) to warrant her moral theory, I argue that – assuming her own cognitive account of compassion – her argument begs the question. I will then contend that Nussbaum's case does not have the inner tools to overcome such a circularity, trying to suggest, in conclusion, a possible way out which is consistent with it.

Manner, result, and intention: implications for event typology from a cognitive account of verb semantics based on fulfilment types

Abstract Verb semantics has been widely approached as a dichotomy of manner and result. However, from a cognitive perspective, manner and result are often linked by intention, as captured by the ‘fulfilment type’ property formulated in the Realisation event domain in Talmy’s event integration theory. The four ‘fulfilment types’ (intrinsic-, moot-, implied-, and attained-fulfilment) indicate different degrees of result certainty in verbs. This study investigates whether manner/result complementarity is cognitively less dichotomous and more nuanced, as the four fulfilment types in verbs could indicate more than two mental representations of verbs. Through two psycholinguistic experiments, we examine whether fulfilment types influence the cognitive salience of manner and result in novel verb meaning interpretation (Experiment 1) and the semantic relatedness between English verbs with different fulfilment types (Experiment 2). Our results demonstrate that manner and result in the mental lexicon act less like a dichotomy but more like a cline. This blur between manner and result verb statuses has consequences for a language’s typological stance in the Realisation domain and implications for how Talmyan event research should be extended beyond well-studied Motion.

(Mal)adaptive Mentalizing in the Cognitive Hierarchy, and Its Link to Paranoia.

Interacting competitively requires vigilance to avoid deception. However, excessive caution can have adverse effects, stemming from false beliefs of intentional harm. So far there is no formal cognitive account of what may cause this suspiciousness. Here we present an examination of this phenomenon through the lens of Theory of Mind - the cognitive ability to consider the beliefs, intentions, and desires of others. By simulating interacting computer agents we illustrate how well-aligned agents can give rise to successful deception and justified skepticism. Crucially, we also reveal that overly cautious agents develop false beliefs that an ingenuous partner is attempting malicious trickery, leading to tangible losses. As well as formally defining a plausible mechanism for suspiciousness, paranoia, and conspiratorial thinking, our theory indicates that rather than a deficit in Theory of Mind, paranoia may involve an over-application of strategy to genuine behaviour.

An Embodied View on Collaboration in Early Childhood Education: Combining Microanalysis and Introspective Analysis of Experiences to Understand Meaning-Making Between Children With and Without Intellectual Disabilities

AbstractThis paper has a twofold aim. The first is to report a qualitative study exploring the construction of collaborative interactions between typically developing children and children with intellectual disabilities in early childhood education, shifting from a cognitivist toward an embodied account of social cognition. The study combined microanalysis of embodied engagements and a phenomenological method of systematic introspective analysis of experience (PRISMA) to investigate the emergence and maintenance of collaborative interactions. The second aim is to showcase the complementarity of the methods and their potential use as a tool for understanding intersubjectivity in children’s social interactions. Participants were twenty-four children aged 3–4: six with intellectual disabilities and eighteen typically developing children. Data consisted of eighteen video recordings of collaborative interactions in a semi-natural context in daycare centres. The results show how typically developing children start the interaction and lead it toward task completion through a scaffolding process of non-verbal regulations facilitated by abbreviations of communication and a combination of sequential actions. This process created bodily invitations for the peer’s engagement, notably stronger amongst preferable peers, corroborating previous research on the relevance of such relationships in this age group. The introspective analysis provided insights into how the desire to work together surpasses the need to complete the task—collaboration can emerge outside the pre-determined task and relies on joint actions rather than understanding tasks’ goals. Peer relations built during the interactions guided children’s behaviours and changed their engagement in the task. This result brings a new perspective to pedagogical planning in early childhood education, indicating the need for teachers to understand children’s intersubjective processes as well as elaborate on task instructions and organisation of space and materials. Results also suggest that previous individual embodied experiences can influence such collaborative efforts, which, although may be expected intuitively, is an underexplored perspective in education sciences. This insight underscores the importance of considering students’ backgrounds and relationships when designing pedagogical approaches. Understanding how prior experiences and peer dynamics affect collaboration can inform more effective teaching strategies in inclusive early childhood education and guide professional training in the field. The findings are critically discussed concerning the implications for professional education and training in inclusive early childhood education.

The role of political devotion in sharing partisan misinformation and resistance to fact-checking.

Online misinformation is disproportionality created and spread by people with extreme political attitudes, especially among the far-right. There is a debate in the literature about why people spread misinformation and what should be done about it. According to the purely cognitive account, people largely spread misinformation because they are lazy, not biased. According to a motivational account, people are also motivated to believe and spread misinformation for ideological and partisan reasons. To better understand the psychological and neurocognitive processes that underlie misinformation sharing among the far-right, we conducted a cross-cultural experiment with conservatives and far-right partisans in the Unites States and Spain (N = 1,609) and a neuroimaging study with far-right partisans in Spain (N = 36). Far-right partisans in Spain and U.S. Republicans who highly identify with Trump were more likely to share misinformation than center-right voters and other Republicans, especially when the misinformation was related to sacred values (e.g., immigration). Sacred values predicted misinformation sharing above and beyond familiarity, attitude strength, and salience of the issue. Moreover, far-right partisans were unresponsive to fact-checking and accuracy nudges. At a neural level, this group showed increased activity in brain regions implicated in mentalizing and norm compliance in response to posts with sacred values. These results suggest that the two components of political devotion-identity fusion and sacred values-play a key role in misinformation sharing, highlighting the identity-affirming dimension of misinformation sharing. We discuss the need for motivational and identity-based interventions to help curb misinformation for high-risk partisan groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Measuring Internet Meme engagement and individual differences: a novel scale and its correlates

Introduction & BackgroundInternet Memes (IMs) are social, digital artefacts that act as information vectors on social networking sites. Memetic scholarly literature has mainly focused on analysing IMs content with mixed methods. However, little scholarly attention has been devoted to exploring the relationships between IMs and users through survey methodologies.
 Users engage with IMs in many ways, but scholarly literature lacks studies on Individual Differences (ID) that might make users more or less prone to engage with them. The results suggest that certain psychological factors may affect IM engagement.
 Objectives & ApproachThis study examines how individual determinants relate to general and political internet meme engagement. An exploratory survey design is employed on an online sample of 472 participants.
 To measure meme engagement, we develop a novel scale by asking participants how likely (1-7) they are to exhibit certain behaviours (liking, commenting, sharing on account, tagging or sending privately to someone) on general memes and politically-centred ones. The novel scales’ feasibility is tested, achieving good internal reliability (α>0.7) and a good fit in confirmatory factor analysis.
 The survey included validated measures of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), Conspiracy Belief (CB), personality traits (Big-5), Bullshit Receptivity (BR), Critical Reflection Test (CRT) and an adaptation of Social Network Intensity (SNI). All the measures employed achieved good internal consistency (α>0.7)The study thematically groups the measures related to IMs (engagement, familiarity and attitude), social media (FOMO, SNI), cognitive style (CRT, BR, CB), personality (Big-5) and socio-demographics (age, gender, education, ethnicity, nationality, ideology).
 Relevance to Digital FootprintsWith increasing interest and research being done on computational analysis of social media and its phenomena, there is a need for survey research to explore connections between IDs and user behaviour through using a mix of validated and novel ad-hoc measures.
 User interaction with internet memes creates a data trail that can be used to infer several individual determinants through machine learning techniques. However, further psychological research is needed to assess and underpin the linkages between IDs and IM engagement before inferring IDs on large datasets.
 ResultsBivariate correlations reveal that young age, extraversion, neuroticism, SNI, FOMO, BR and CB are positively associated with internet meme engagement regardless of content. Further, t-tests of dependent correlations show that age, FOMO and ideology differ significantly in their correlations between general vs political meme engagement.
 Engagement with political IMs is slightly higher in people with left-leaning ideology and lower levels of conscientiousness. A positive attitude towards IMs correlates with a marginally higher openness to experience and left ideology while strongly correlating with younger age.
 Interestingly, traditional measures of cognitive style do not correlate with IM engagement, while lower education weakly correlates with self-assessed IM familiarity. Only BR positively correlates with IM engagement, suggesting that gullibility plays a role in engagement.
 In hierarchical regressions, thematic groupings predict differences in variance shares in IM engagement. More overall variance (+10%) is explained in the general IM engagement scale compared to political IM engagement; socio-demo and cognitive account for less variance in political IMs. In comparison, personality accounts for slightly more variance in political IM engagement. This analysis further supports different relational structures of IDs when looking at general vs political IM engagement.
 Conclusions & ImplicationsStudy results suggest a difference in the pattern of engagement depending on the content of IMs and participants’ IDs.
 This exploratory study shows early signs that IDs play a role in IM engagement, opening avenues for further survey research and identifying which specific IDs might be interesting to investigate when performing this type of research.
 This study’s findings help researchers and users better understand the heterogeneous world of IM topical engagement by highlighting what IDs might make users more prone to engage with these social, digital artefacts.

Reputation and prosocial lies in development

AbstractChildren start to engage in self‐serving deception from approximately 2½ years of age. This emerging self‐centered propensity toward the deliberate covering of truth is predicted by the child's degree of executive function and level of theory of mind. In contrast, existing studies on the emergence of other‐oriented lies point to a significant developmental lag—children begin to produce prosocial lies not prior to 3–4 years of age. What may account for such a lag? In this article, we review the recent literature and conclude that the existing cognitive account does not fully explain the developmental lag between self‐ and other‐serving deception. As an alternative, we propose that reputational concerns may drive the ontogeny of prosocial lies and account for their later emergence.

Neo-Kantian conceptualism: between scientific experience and everyday perception

ABSTRACT This paper reconstructs the major transformations in the Marburg neo-Kantian account of experience. By focusing on the problem of ‘conceptualism’, it traces connections between four issues that are central to the transcendental projects of the Marburg philosophers: the interpretation of Kant, the critique of experiential givenness, the account of objective cognition in science, and the relation between scientific and pre-scientific experience. My historical narrative identifies two shifts. The first is from Cohen's conceptualist answer to the threat of subjectivism to Cassirer's functionalist answer to empiricism. The second is from Cassirer's conceptualism about scientific experience to his symbolic non-conceptualism about everyday perception. My reconstruction reveals the fate of neo-Kantian conceptualism to be linked to the fate of pre-scientific perception and suggests that the continuing significance of the Marburg philosophers lies in their responses to the coming apart of the manifest and the scientific image.

Conceptual engineering, predictive processing, and a new implementation problem

According to predictive processing, an increasingly influential paradigm in cognitive science, the function of the brain is to minimize the prediction error of its sensory input. Conceptual engineering is the practice of assessing and changing concepts or word meanings. We contribute to both strands of research by proposing the first cognitive account of conceptual engineering, using the predictive processing framework. Our model reveals a new kind of implementation problem as prediction errors are only minimized if enough agents embrace conceptual changes. This problem can be overcome by emphasizing the importance of social norms and conceptual pluralism.

On Radical Enactivist Accounts of Arithmetical Cognition

Hutto and Myin have proposed an account of radically enactive (or embodied) cognition (REC) as an explanation of cognitive phenomena, one that does not include mental representations or mental content in basic minds. Recently, Zahidi and Myin have presented an account of arithmetical cognition that is consistent with the REC view. In this paper, I first evaluate the feasibility of that account by focusing on the evolutionarily developed proto-arithmetical abilities and whether empirical data on them support the radical enactivist view. I argue that although more research is needed, it is at least possible to develop the REC position consistently with the state-of-the-art empirical research on the development of arithmetical cognition. After this, I move the focus to the question whether the radical enactivist account can explain the objectivity of arithmetical knowledge. Against the realist view suggested by Hutto, I argue that objectivity is best explained through analyzing the way universal proto-arithmetical abilities determine the development of arithmetical cognition.

Ronald P. Leow's essential bookshelf: The L2 learning process in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA)

Ronald P. Leow is Professor (Applied Linguistics) in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Language Program Director of Spanish Language Instruction at Georgetown University. He has initiated and published (over 100 articles and chapters) in several strands of research that include language curriculum development, research methodology, cognitive processes and depth of processing in language learning, (written and computerized) corrective feedback, textual enhancement, reactivity, and CALL. He has contributed to the field his 2015 Model of the L2 Learning Process in ISLA (in Explicit learning in the L2 classroom: A student-centered approach, Routledge) and his 2020 Feedback Processing Framework (in R. M. Manchón (Ed.), Writing and language learning. Advancing research agendas, John Benjamins) to provide a cognitive account for how L2 data and feedback are processed by L2 learners. His i10-index is 58 with over 6,500 citations.

A cognitive account of trace conditioning in insects.

Trace conditioning is a form of Pavlovian learning in which the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US) are separated by a temporal gap. Insects learn trace associations of variable nature (appetitive, aversive) and involving CSs of different sensory modalities (olfactory, visual). The accessibility of the insect neural system in behaving animals allowed identifying neural processes driving trace conditioning: the existence of prolonged neural responses to the CS after stimulus offset and the anticipation of US responses during the free-stimulus gap. Specific brain structures, such as the mushroom bodies seem to be allocated to this learning form. Here, we posit that a further component facilitating trace conditioning in insects relates to neuromodulatory mechanisms underlying enhanced attention. We thus propose a model based on different types of mushroom-body neurons, which provides a cognitive account of trace conditioning in insects.

Fear is an illness of the brain. A cognitive account of a novel constructive scenario of fear

Abstract Once we perceive a situation as a danger, threat, or shock, the information about a fearful stimulus is immediately sent to the amygdala, which, being a component of the limbic system, is responsible for fear and anxiety processing, and plays an important role in emotion and behaviour. As the research suggests, the message about a potentially frightening situation can reach the amygdala long before we are even consciously aware of it. Then, the amygdala is to trigger a fight-or-flight reaction, marked by our increased heart rate and respiration to prepare for action (cf. LeDoux 2007). The aim of the research is, first, to account for the most prototypical cognitive scenario of fear through the prism of Cognitive Linguistics (cf. Kövecses 1986, 2015) and supply it with this neuroscientific and psychological knowledge of fear. We learn that in addition to the most common human reactions to fear, i.e. the one of a fighter or the one of a runaway, a modern man reacts to fear by denying it as well as by displacing fear from their subconscious mind. Second, by investigating the novel metaphor FEAR IS AN ILLNESS OF THE BRAIN, we aim to propose a novel constructive cognitive scenario of fear, which helps us deal with this unwanted emotion in contemporary situations that generate fear, e.g. in the era of (post)Covid-19 pandemic (WHO 2021, July 15).

Relating relational networks: An initial experimental analysis.

Studying relating of relational networks is a complex and challenging task. The main objective of the present study was to demonstrate relating within and across relational networks based on same/opposite and bigger/smaller contextual cues and establish antecedent control. After nonarbitrary pretraining of the contextual cues, two nonsense stimulus classes were established based on comparative relations. Participants were trained to select stimuli from an array of options based on a symbolic rule that established a relation between two stimuli: one of Network 1 and one of Network 2. Training involved relating Network 1 to Network 2, and testing assessed relating Network 2 to Network 1. Seven of eight participants reached the mastery criterion in training and responded accordingly in test. In a final stage, reinforcing and punishing consequences were varied systematically in the presence of two novel stimuli and antecedent control was observed for all 7 participants. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 but using contextual cues taken from natural language, and Experiment 3 sought to understand the effects of pretraining relational responding using natural language. The mastery criteria were reached by four of seven participants in Experiment 2 and by all eight participants in Experiment 3. Future studies could develop and refine the methods employed here in analyzing the relating of relational networks, thus allowing for an increasingly sophisticated behavior-analytic account of human language and cognition.

Visual resemblance and interaction history jointly constrain pictorial meaning

How do drawings—ranging from detailed illustrations to schematic diagrams—reliably convey meaning? Do viewers understand drawings based on how strongly they resemble an entity (i.e., as images) or based on socially mediated conventions (i.e., as symbols)? Here we evaluate a cognitive account of pictorial meaning in which visual and social information jointly support visual communication. Pairs of participants used drawings to repeatedly communicate the identity of a target object among multiple distractor objects. We manipulated social cues across three experiments and a full replication, finding that participants developed object-specific and interaction-specific strategies for communicating more efficiently over time, beyond what task practice or a resemblance-based account alone could explain. Leveraging model-based image analyses and crowdsourced annotations, we further determined that drawings did not drift toward “arbitrariness,” as predicted by a pure convention-based account, but preserved visually diagnostic features. Taken together, these findings advance psychological theories of how successful graphical conventions emerge.

Mindfulness training reduces slippery slope effects in moral decision-making and moral judgment

Extant research has demonstrated the positive intrapersonal effects of mindfulness training. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the effects of mindfulness training on interpersonal processes are less clear. Here, we combined a randomized control mindfulness training design with computational approach to moral decision-making and moral judgments. Participants were randomly assigned to a Training group (N = 32) who received an 8-week mindfulness training or a Control group (N = 26) who waited for the same period of time. Before and after the 8-week period, participants completed a moral decision-making task, where they made tradeoff between money for themselves and unpleasant electric shocks to another person, and a moral judgment task, where they evaluated the blameworthiness of someone else’s choices in the same moral decision-making task. Trait mindfulness, as measured by the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, significantly increased from the pre- to post-training session for the Training group, but not the Control group, demonstrating the effectiveness of the mindfulness manipulation. For the Control group, participants’ moral preference in both the decision-making task and the judgment task declined over time, exhibiting a “slippery slope” effect. In contrast, for the Training group, mindfulness training prevented moral preferences from declining. Computational modeling revealed that mindfulness training specifically reduced the increase in the weights of money over time in both the decision-making and judgment tasks, thereby curbing the “slippery slope” effects. These findings provide a cognitive account of the prosocial effects of mindfulness training on moral decision-making and moral judgments.