Cognitive Constraints Research Articles

Crisis? What crisis? Exploring the cognitive constraints on boards of directors in times of uncertainty

Board-level decision-makers often fail to understand that a crisis is imminent and to proactively interpret environmental stimuli through their cognitive schemas. Directors have a selective perception of the environment, resulting in a filtered and narrowed vision of a crisis; this explains why boards often lack proactivity in crisis detection and response. This study draws on qualitative data from interviews with directors, chairs and CEOs of medium-large companies that were in crisis at the time of the interview or had recently tackled a crisis. We identify three main categories of factors that can hinder directors’ cognitive schemas: individual, collective and hybrid constraints. Our research contributes to the cognitive model in a context of uncertainty, exploring the mechanisms underpinning board passivity during a crisis. This study has implications for both boards of directors, who should re-design the ways in which directors respond during crisis situations, and the policymakers who support this process.

Codeswitching: A Bilingual Toolkit for Opportunistic Speech Planning.

The ability to engage in fluent codeswitching is a hallmark of the flexibility and creativity of bilingual language use. Recent discoveries have changed the way we think about codeswitching and its implications for language processing and language control. One is that codeswitching is not haphazard, but subject to unique linguistic and cognitive constraints. Another is that not all bilinguals codeswitch, but those who do, exhibit usage patterns conforming to community-based norms. However, less is known about the cognitive processes that regulate and promote the likelihood of codeswitched speech. We review recent empirical studies and provide corpus evidence that highlight how codeswitching serves as an opportunistic strategy for optimizing performance in cooperative communication. From this perspective, codeswitching is part and parcel of a toolkit available to bilingual codeswitching speakers to assist in language production by allowing both languages to remain active and accessible, and therefore providing an alternative means to convey meaning, with implications for bilingual speech planning and language control more generally.

Domain-specific experience and dual-process thinking

Prominent dual process models assert that reasoning processes can transition from effortful (Type 2) to intuitive (Type 1) with increases in domain-specific experience. In two studies we directly examine this automation hypothesis. We examine the nature of the relationship between mathematical experience and performance on the cognitive reflection test (CRT; Frederick, 2005). We test performance and response time at different levels of experience and cognitive constraint. Participants are required to complete a secondary task of varying complexity while solving the CRT. In Study 1, we demonstrate changes in thinking Type across real-world differences in mathematical experience. In Study 2, convergent with Study 1, we demonstrate changes in thinking Type across a mathematical training paradigm. Our findings suggest that for some individuals low experience is associated with Type 1 processing, intermediate experience is associated with Type 2 processing, and high experience is associated with Type 1 processing. Whereas, for other individuals low experience is associated with ineffective Type 2 processing, intermediate experience is associated with effective Type 2 processing, and high experience is associated with Type 1 processing.

Synchronized Elections, Voter Behavior and Governance Outcomes: Evidence from India

Voters in decentralized democracies make voting decisions in multiple elections across tiers, often on the same day. Theories of decentralization implicitly presume that they have sufficient cognitive capacity to follow separate decision-making processes for different elections. Exploiting variation in the timing of Indian national and state elections, we find that voters’ cognitive costs are significantly higher when they need to vote for multiple elections at the same time than otherwise. We estimate the importance of cognitive constraints shaping voters’ decision-making processes, final decisions, and electoral outcomes across tiers. Consistent with the predictions of a model of behaviorally constrained voters, we show that simultaneous elections increase political parties’ salience among voters and increase straight-ticket voting, without significantly affecting turnout. Consequently, the likelihood of the same political party winning constituencies in both tiers increases by 21.6%. We rule out alternative mechanisms that might explain this result. Our findings suggest that, in the presence of behavioral voters, election design can shape the experience of decentralization in democracies

Default Rules Beyond a State: Special-Purpose Lawmakers in the Platform Economy

The paper addresses the phenomenon of default rules created by private entities for other market actors (with a special focus on online intermediary platforms acting in the sharing economy, such as eBay, Airbnb and Amazon). The rule makers in question produce a normative framework for fractioned communities of contractors, who conclude “horizontal” agreements, using the regulatory and institutional framework established by the platform. Some of the rules created in this way have various degrees of optionality. In other words, they are shaped as typical default rules, which can be contracted around by their addressees (i.e. clients and suppliers). Observation of normative schemes produced by platforms provides many instances of both “simple” default rules and “menus”. Rules of this kind play a predominantly utility-enhancing role, as they allow parties to shape the idiosyncratically selected details of their relation. This applies both to default rules which operate on an opt-out basis (as gap-fillers for contracts between clients and suppliers), as well as to those that need to be proactively opted-in to (e.g. by choosing one of the elements of a menu). Sometimes, default rules are also used to steer the behavior of platform members, operating as nudges (e.g. in queuing schemes recently applied by Uber). Rules of this kind are based on a particular preferences paradox. On the one hand, by establishing those rules, online platforms principally aim to maximize their own utility (for instance, by enhancing the efficiency of particular “horizontal” contracts, increasing the volume of transactions by attracting new members with a more flexible regulatory design). On the other hand, however, by doing so platforms act also for the benefit of the entire community of clients and suppliers. Therefore, privately-created default rules may – under certain premises, which the text tries to further frame and explore – approximate the classic defaults established by a state, and hence contribute to overall social welfare. The existence of default rules created by platforms also poses a question of possible regulatory intervention. Rules of this sort can undoubtedly generate several negative externalities. In particular, their shape can limit or channel the choices made by clients or suppliers, making them sub-optimal. Secondly, inequality of bargaining power, which is a common feature of client-supplier relations, can skew the operation of default rules, ultimately diminishing the efficiency of an agreement. In particular, it seems justifiable to introduce regulatory instruments that would enhance the honesty and efficiency of those rules for both parties, mitigating the risk that cognitive constraints might be exploited to benefit one side excessively or disproportionately.

Growth theory under heterogeneous heuristic behavior

Over the last decades, conceptual frameworks formulated to address the dynamics of economic growth have hypothesized, discussed and tested a large number of different assumptions concerning the role of capital accumulation, labor productivity, learning-by-doing, formal education, innovation, and diffusion of ideas. Underlying all these theoretical contributions is, on the demand side, a pervasive and apparently unshakable structure of analysis: economic agents invariably set an optimal intertemporal consumption plan which allows then to maximize utility over an infinite horizon. Such behavior, however, suggests a planning ability that agents often lack. In fact, household decisions are frequently designed on the basis of heuristics or rules-of-thumb that, although not optimal, are reachable under the cognitive constraints typically faced by human beings. This paper revisits some of the most prominent models of the mainstream growth theory, taking a specific heuristic to account for consumption-savings decisions. The heuristic, which allows for the consideration of distinct profiles of saving behavior across individual agents, is a static rule, which might suggest a return to a Solow-like growth analysis. Notwithstanding, the adopted rule-of-thumb encloses a series of novel and relevant implications for growth theory. Such implications are duly highlighted and discussed in this study.

VIDÍŠ TÝM LEPŠIE, ČÍM BLIŽŠIE SA POZERÁŠ SLOVAK COMPARATIVE CORRELATIVE CC' CONSTRUCTIONS FROM A CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR PERSPECTIVE

Abstract The Slovak Comparative Correlative (CC) construction has received little attention, although it is interesting regarding both its semantics and its form: As discussed in Horsch (2019), CCs are characterized by their complex symmetric (parallel change over time) and asymmetric (cause-effect) semantics, which are encoded in a biclausal structure in which each clause consists of a combination of fixed material and obligatory/optional slots. Typically, the first clause (C1) encodes a cause/protasis, and precedes the second clause (C2), which encodes an effect/apodosis: [čím bližšie sa pozeráš,]C1 [tým lepšie vidíš.]C2 ‘the closer you look, the better you see.’ However, there are also structures that retain the same meaning but in which C2 precedes C1 (often referred to as CC’): [Tým lepšie vidíš]C2 [čím bližšie sa pozeráš.]C1. ‘You see the better, the closer you look.’ Additionally, there is a variant in Slovak where the clause precedes the clause-initial element and comparative element: [Vidíš tým lepšie,]C2 [čím bližšie sa pozeráš.]C1. Embedded in a Usage-based Construction Grammar approach, this is the first large-scale corpus study to investigate the C2C1 order in Slovak, and how semantics influences its formal properties. It is argued that both the significantly higher amount of C1C2 order in the corpus data and the significantly higher amount of C2C1 structures in which the clause precedes the comparative element in C2 can be explained with the principle of iconicity (linguistic form is influenced by the semantics of a construction), which makes certain strings easier to process and thus leads to performance preference. From a cross-linguistic perspective, the present investigation provides evidence in support of Goldberg’s Tenet #5 (2003, p. 219), which posits that cross-linguistic generalizations can be accounted for with general cognitive constraints.

Testing the Constraint Theory of Addiction: Cannabis Constraints Discriminate Users from Nonusers and Heavy from Light Users.

Constraint theory (Hammersley, 2014) offers a novel way of understanding addiction as a lack of cognitive, behavioural, and social constraints on substance use. Here, cannabis constraints were studied in a large online opportunity sample: N = 302; 205 men, 97 women. Age ranged from 14 to 60 years (mean = 25, SD = 8.0). Most participants were from UK or North America. Participants completed a questionnaire assessing 15 cannabis constraints and standard self-report frequency measures of drug use. Factor analysis of the constraint questionnaire found 15 factors, similar to those proposed theoretically. These factors could discriminate well between past and current users and heavy and light users. The best discriminator was concerns about the possibility of becoming addicted; the less concerned the heavier was use, although those who actually felt addicted were more concerned than others. Past users also constrained due to using legal highs instead, concerns about illegality, and using only when others used. Light users constrained due to availability and cost issues, as well as unpleasant effects. These findings suggest that there is utility in constraint theory and that heavy use occurs due to a relative lack of constraints.

Comparing with the average: Reference points and market reactions to above-average earnings surprises

Abstract We examine whether the average earnings surprises announced yesterday affect investors’ responses to earnings news announced today. We find that in the short window surrounding an earnings announcement, the market rewards today's earnings news that is above yesterday's average earnings surprises with a premium, consistent with yesterday's average becoming a reference point for investors to classify today's earnings news as a gain or a loss. The price premium for an above-average earnings surprise is larger when more earnings announcements are made on the same day and when investors face greater uncertainty in assessing firms’ performance. We interpret this evidence as suggesting that investors rely more on the average as a reference point when they are more likely to be subject to cognitive constraints in processing information. We also find that firms announcing above-average earnings surprises exhibit a greater abnormal trading volume, consistent with the notion that beating reference points prompts investors to trade.

Intuitive biology, moral reasoning, and engineering life: Essentialist thinking and moral purity concerns shape risk assessments of synthetic biology technologies

The field of synthetic biology heralds a new era in our relationship with nature, as organisms are engineered to meet human goals. But little attention has been paid to potential cognitive constraints on reasoning about such technologies. Across four studies with American adults (N = 649), the present research investigates the proposal that essentialist reasoning and moral purity concerns conspire to shape risk assessments of engineered organisms. Moral purity concerns but not moral harm concerns predict moral wrongness judgments of adding a foreign gene to a plant (Studies 1, 2 & 4), as well as assessments of risk (Studies 1 and 2), and risk of harm from eating (Study 4). Adding a gene from a taxonomically distant organism is considered more morally wrong (Studies 2, 3 and 4), more risky (Studies 2 & 3), and more risky to eat (Study 4), than adding either a gene from a similar organism or a new-to-nature gene. Assessments of the risk of gene spread follow a different pattern, with the new-to-nature gene considered safest (Study 4). The findings support the proposal that gene change is reasoned about as essence change that threatens notions of moral purity, with direct implications for certain types of risk perceptions (eating), but not others (gene spread). The findings elucidate cognitive constraints on risk perceptions of synthetic biology, shed fresh light on essentialist and moral reasoning in a novel biological context, and demonstrate the need to differentiate between both risk context and risk type in cognitive accounts of risk perception.

The predictive validities of individual working‐memory capacity profiles and note‐taking strategies on online search performance

AbstractOnline search involves multitasking and may demand better working‐memory capacities (WMC) and additional cognitive aids. Given the constraints of human cognition, we tested the effectiveness of note‐taking strategies on university students' online search performance. Also examined were the profile configurations of WMC tests in silence and in irrelevant speech as well as its interaction effects with note‐taking strategies on online search performance. Among the participants of 60 university students, we found a four‐group WMC profile composition that differed significantly across WMC scores in both silence and irrelevant speech. Results showed that WMC profiles, note‐taking groups and their interaction effect were significant factors on online search performance. Both Free Note and Matrix Note were beneficial for the students in low silent WMC profile groups. Study results have both theoretical and practical implications, advancing our understanding of the interrelationship of WMC under different conditions and informing instructional practice of online search performance.

Relieving effects of prefabricated chunks in conference interpreting from English to Chinese in an ELF context

ABSTRACT English has become a lingua franca worldwide including among multilinguals across Asia. Influenced by local languages and diversified cultures, English in Southeast Asia has formed unique linguistic variations. These may interfere with interpreters’ listening comprehension and instantaneity during the interpreting process and may have a detrimental effect on target text output. However, studies of corpus linguistics reveal that in natural languages a large number of prefabricated chunks stored in memory can be retrieved directly without lexical or grammatical analysis. The new perspective of prefabricated chunks calls for fresh approaches to listening for interpreting in a context of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). This paper aims to explore how knowledge of prefabricated chunks achieves relieving effects by easing cognitive constraints in listening comprehension during the CI phase of conference interpreting from English into Chinese in an ELF context. The paper is based on a comparative study involving two groups of trainee interpreters to interpret an extract of an English speech with a strong Lao accent into Chinese. Their interpreting performance was assessed and compared by conducting a quantitative analysis of data records and semi-structured interviews with the interpreters. The research would shed light on interpreter education in an ELF context.

Analysis of Older Pedestrian Accidents: A Case Study of Lithuania

However, for several decades, Europe has been witnessing demographic ageing. As a result of these changes, a more significant number of elderly road users will be involved in future traffic, and therefore safe mobility management of the older will become an increasingly important issue. Various physical, sensory, and cognitive constraints affecting elderly road users lead to a rise in the likelihood of an accident, which, due to the increased physical vulnerability, cause more serious consequences of road accidents. The findings reported by the authors of an in-depth analysis of accidents for four years have demonstrated that the risk of road fatalities for elderly road users is by one fifth more significant than the average of all age groups, and the pedestrian plays the most critical role in road traffic. To adequately compensate for the observed age-related physiological changes, the authors discuss actions and road safety measures to ensure appropriate conditions for older pedestrians on the streets.

Selective exposure shapes the Facebook news diet.

The social brain hypothesis approximates the total number of social relationships we are able to maintain at 150. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can access online, our attention span still remains limited. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that online users are more likely to ignore dissenting information, choosing instead to interact with information adhering to their own point of view. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse users’ attention economy in news consumption on social media by analysing 14 million users interacting with 583 news outlets (pages) on Facebook over a time span of six years. In particular, we explore how users distribute their activity across news pages and topics. On the one hand, we find that, independently of their activity, users show a tendency to follow a very limited number of pages. On the other hand, users tend to interact with almost all the topics presented by their favoured pages. Finally, we introduce a taxonomy accounting for users’ behaviour to distinguish between patterns of selective exposure and interest. Our findings suggest that segregation of users in echo chambers might be an emerging effect of users’ activity on social media and that selective exposure—i.e. the tendency of users to consume information adhering to their preferred narratives—could be a major driver in their consumption patterns.

How cognitive and environmental constraints influence the reliability of simulated animats in groups.

Evolving in groups can either enhance or reduce an individual’s task performance. Still, we know little about the factors underlying group performance, which may be reduced to three major dimensions: (a) the individual’s ability to perform a task, (b) the dependency on environmental conditions, and (c) the perception of, and the reaction to, other group members. In our research, we investigated how these dimensions interrelate in simulated evolution experiments using adaptive agents equipped with Markov brains (“animats”). We evolved the animats to perform a spatial-navigation task under various evolutionary setups. The last generation of each evolution simulation was tested across modified conditions to evaluate and compare the animats’ reliability when faced with change. Moreover, the complexity of the evolved Markov brains was assessed based on measures of information integration. We found that, under the right conditions, specialized animats could be as reliable as animats already evolved for the modified tasks, and that reliability across varying group sizes correlated with evolved fitness in most tested evolutionary setups. Our results moreover suggest that balancing the number of individuals in a group may lead to higher reliability but also lower individual performance. Besides, high brain complexity was associated with balanced group sizes and, thus, high reliability under limited sensory capacity. However, additional sensors allowed for even higher reliability across modified environments without a need for complex, integrated Markov brains. Despite complex dependencies between the individual, the group, and the environment, our computational approach provides a way to study reliability in group behavior under controlled conditions. In all, our study revealed that balancing the group size and individual cognitive abilities prevents over-specialization and can help to evolve better reliability under unknown environmental situations.

Lexical category bias across interpreting types: Implications for synergy between cognitive constraints and language representations

While previous results based on quantitative approaches to interpreting output have evidenced distinctive lexical, syntactic and language sequence features across interpreting types as a result of processing differences, none of them has probed into the lexical category realm. In this paper, the activity index, a normalized ratio between verb and adjective occurrences in the text, was used to capture the lexical-category-related patterns across output texts of three interpreting types, namely, simultaneous interpreting (SI), consecutive interpreting (CI) and read-out translated speech (TR). The results showed that the CI outputs yielded greater activity than the SI outputs due to lower frequencies of adjectives in the former. The discrepancy remained significant when differences in activity of input, text size and average sentence length were controlled for, suggesting processing differences as the chief factor underlying this lexical category bias. Given the syntactic priority of verbs over adjectives, the striking loss of adjectives from CI processing probably derives from “underestimated” cognitive demands in CI, which may exceed those in SI. Our research captures a lexical category bias in language processing under extreme cognitive pressure, and this biased language behaviour may reflect a dynamic adaptive mechanism of language representations to accommodate cognitive constraints.

The Aesthetics of X-Junctions: Cognitive Constraints in the Art of Continuous-Line Caricature

This article exposes cognitive constraints in production and perception of caricatures drawn with one continuous line. Constraints in production enable an artist to overcome the complexity of connecting all individual line segments of a conventional caricature. Constraints in perception enable an audience to overcome the complexity of inferring three-dimensional edges and shapes from two-dimensional line segments. In both production and perception, constraints exploit Xjunctions where the continuous line meets itself in crossing and tangent configurations that contribute to the aesthetics of these artworks.

L’information implicite entre économie d’effort et esquive du jugement critique

Abstract The implicit transmission of contents in a message is one of the most effective means of persuasive communication. In both commercial and political propaganda, discursive strategies such as presuppositions, implicatures and topicalisations (which we propose to recast as implicit communicative devices) are frequently used. This trend may hinge on the fact that these strategies conceal the actual communicative intention of the speaker (implicature) or his responsibility for the truth of the content conveyed (presuppositions and topicalisations). The paper proposes a reflection on the use of presuppositions, implicatures and topicalisations to achieve persuasive aims in communication. A discussion will be devoted to the cognitive constraints underlying the brain response to the processing of these categories, as well as to their influence on the receiver’s mental representation of the discourse model.

The biology of emotion is missing.

Although augmenting rational models with cognitive constraints is long overdue, the emotional system - our innately evaluative "affective" constraints - is missing from the model. Factoring in the informational nature of emotional perception, its explicit self-regulatory functional logic, and the predictable pitfalls of its hardwired behavioral responses (including a maladaptive form of "identity management") can offer dramatic enhancements.

Sampling as a resource-rational constraint

Resource rationality is useful for choosing between models with the same cognitive constraints but cannot settle fundamental disagreements about what those constraints are. We argue that sampling is an especially compelling constraint, as optimizing accumulation of evidence or hypotheses minimizes the cost of time, and there are well-established models for doing so which have had tremendous success explaining human behavior.