Cognitive Literature Research Articles

Scaffolding Bad Moral Agents

AbstractRecent work on ecological accounts of moral responsibility and agency have argued for the importance of social environments for moral reasons responsiveness. Moral audiences can scaffold individual agents’ sensitivity to moral reasons and their motivation to act on them, but they can also undermine it. In this paper, we look at two case studies of ‘scaffolding bad’, where moral agency is undermined by social environments: street gangs and online incel communities. In discussing these case studies, we draw both on recent situated cognition literature and on scaffolded responsibility theory. We show that the way individuals are embedded into a specific social environment changes the moral considerations they are sensitive to in systematic ways because of the way these environments scaffold affective and cognitive processes, specifically those that concern the perception and treatment of ingroups and outgroups. We argue that gangs undermine reasons responsiveness to a greater extent than incel communities because gang members are more thoroughly immersed in the gang environment.

An inductive bias from quantum mechanics: learning order effects with non-commuting measurements

There are two major approaches to building good machine learning algorithms: feeding lots of data into large models or picking a model class with an “inductive bias” that suits the structure of the data. When taking the second approach as a starting point to design quantum algorithms for machine learning, it is important to understand how mathematical structures in quantum mechanics can lead to useful inductive biases in quantum models. In this work, we bring a collection of theoretical evidence from the quantum cognition literature to the field of quantum machine learning to investigate how non-commutativity of quantum observables can help to learn data with “order effects,” such as the changes in human answering patterns when swapping the order of questions in a survey. We design a multi-task learning setting in which a generative quantum model consisting of sequential learnable measurements can be adapted to a given task — or question order — by changing the order of observables, and we provide artificial datasets inspired by human psychology to carry out our investigation. Our first experimental simulations show that in some cases the quantum model learns more non-commutativity as the amount of order effect present in the data is increased and that the quantum model can learn to generate better samples for unseen question orders when trained on others — both signs that the model architecture suits the task.

Birthing a new maternal cognition literature: 10 recommendations for future research.

Whilst the field of maternal cognition is gaining interest, with a recent increase in publications, there are still only a handful of existing studies. This presents a unique opportunity for reflection and growth, advancing scientific rigor to ensure that future interpretations of maternal cognitive functioning are based on robust, generalizable data. With this in mind, we offer ten recommendations for future cognitive research in motherhood, with a focus on intentional study design. A study's design dictates the questions that can be asked, and the answers that can be gleaned from collected data, making study design a cornerstone of robust and reproducible science. These recommendations are intended as a resource for study conceptualization and design, participant recruitment, result interpretation, and peer review.

Manipulating response times in the cognitive reflection test: Time delay boosts deliberation, time pressure hinders it

We employ the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to assess the effectiveness of two widely applied cognitive manipulations which rely on constraining response times. The CRT measures the ability of a person to resist giving an immediate response that is intuitive but incorrect in favor of greater reflection to find out the correct answer. We have two treatments: a Time Pressure (TP) treatment (provide an answer within 30 s) and a Time Delay (TD) treatment (provide an answer after 60 s). We find that TD increases the frequency of correct answers, while TP increases the frequency of incorrect answers, especially incorrect answers that are not intuitive. Moreover, we confirm the existence of gender biases as already found in other studies. In particular, gender moderates the effects of the experimental treatments: TD increases the frequency of correct answers for males but not for females, while TP increases the frequency of incorrect but less intuitive answers for females but not for males. Our findings provide important insights on the effectiveness of the time manipulations that are widely used in the literature of cognition.

Representational similarity learning reveals a graded multidimensional semantic space in the human anterior temporal cortex

Abstract Neurocognitive models of semantic memory have proposed that the ventral anterior temporal lobes (vATLs) encode a graded and multidimensional semantic space—yet neuroimaging studies seeking brain regions that encode semantic structure rarely identify these areas. In simulations, we show that this discrepancy may arise from a crucial mismatch between theory and analysis approach. Utilizing an analysis recently formulated to investigate graded multidimensional representations, representational similarity learning (RSL), we decoded semantic structure from ECoG data collected from the vATL cortical surface while participants named line drawings of common items. The results reveal a graded, multidimensional semantic space encoded in neural activity across the vATL, which evolves over time and simultaneously expresses both broad and finer-grained semantic structure among animate and inanimate concepts. The work resolves the apparent discrepancy within the semantic cognition literature and, more importantly, suggests a new approach to discovering representational structure in neural data more generally.

Dual-Process Theory of Thought and Inhibitory Control: An ALE Meta-Analysis.

The dual-process theory of thought rests on the co-existence of two different thinking modalities: a quick, automatic, and associative process opposed to a slow, thoughtful, and deliberative process. The increasing interest in determining the neural foundation of the dual-process distinction has yielded mixed results, also given the difficulty of applying the fMRI standard approach to tasks usually employed in the cognitive literature. We report an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to investigate the neural foundation of the dual-process theory of thought. Eligible studies allowed for the identification of cerebral areas associated with dual-process theory-based tasks without differentiating between fast and slow thinking. The ALE algorithm converged on the medial frontal cortex, superior frontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and left inferior frontal gyrus. These structures partially overlap with the cerebral areas recurrently reported in the literature about the neural basis of the dual-process distinction, where the PARCS theory-based interpretation emphasizes the role of the right inferior gyrus. The results confirm the potential (but still almost unexplored) common ground between the dual-process literature and the cognitive control literature.

A chip off the old block: Founders' prior experience and the geographic diversification of export sales in international new ventures

Integrating the cognition literature in entrepreneurship and strategy with the career imprinting literature, we propose that the geographic diversification of export sales in international new ventures (INVs) resembles that of their founders' most recent (geographically diversified) employer because founders bear a repertoire of the ‘logics of action’ from their employers regarding how to diversify geographically. We then propose two boundary conditions that influence the relationship between the geographic diversification of export sales of founders' most recent employers and that of their INVs: length of exposure and time since last exposure to their most recent geographically diversified employer. We test these hypotheses using longitudinal data on a sample of 3420 INVs. Our findings broadly support our theoretical propositions except for the moderating role of founders' length of exposure.

Zero is hero: Round number effects on knowledge-sharing platforms

With the inherent public goods problem embedded in knowledge-sharing platforms, various incentive mechanisms have been implemented, most of which are in the form of gamified elements. Among those motivating elements, reputation points are the most direct feedback about individuals’ contribution effort, which use numerical units indicating progress. Although some research has found that points can incentivize users to contribute, empirical evidence regarding the influential patterns of such numerical units remains limited. Drawing on numerical cognition literature that an individual's evaluation and judgments may be influenced by certain numerical cues, we particularly focus on the round number bias on knowledge-sharing platforms. Several hypotheses regarding users’ behavioral changes when their accumulated points approach round numbers have been proposed, including their contribution level, contribution quality, and writing style. By analyzing data collected from StackOverflow.com, we find that users perceive round numbers as category boundaries or endpoints and crossing such boundaries can motivate aspirational behaviors. Concretely, users significantly increase their post frequency and length, and write answers with more function words and second-person pronouns. Meanwhile, their posts will be more likely to be accepted as the best answers and gain more votes. We also explore the moderating effects of advanced explicit incentives and numbers’ magnitude. Theoretically, our research contributes to a body of literature on knowledge-sharing platform incentive mechanisms to motivate users’ contributions and sheds light on the utilization of numerical cues to guide individuals’ behaviors in user-generated-content (UGC) provision context.

More than a moment: What does it mean to call something an 'event'?

Experiences are stored in the mind as discrete mental units, or 'events,' which influence-and are influenced by-attention, learning, and memory. In this way, the notion of an 'event' is foundational to cognitive science. However, despite tremendous progress in understanding the behavioral and neural signatures of events, there is no agreed-upon definition of an event. Here, we discuss different theoretical frameworks of event perception and memory, noting what they can and cannot account for in the literature. We then highlight key aspects of events that we believe should be accounted for in theories of event processing--in particular, we argue that the structure and substance of events should be better reflected in our theories and paradigms. Finally, we discuss empirical gaps in the event cognition literature and what the future of event cognition research may look like.

Multidimensional cognitive style: Linking founders to firm performance through strategy and resource orchestration

This study investigates the role entrepreneurs’ cognitive styles play in choice of opportunity approach strategy and resource orchestration behaviors, and how these relate to venture performance. Based on entrepreneurial cognition literature and current cognitive style framework, we use Upper Echelon Theory to postulate entrepreneurs with different cognitive styles align with different strategic approaches and resource orchestrations to exploit opportunities. In doing so, we adopt a three-dimensional conceptualization of cognitive style (knowing, planning, creating). We attempt to provide a nuanced depiction and explanation of the relationship between cognitive style and firm performance by taking into consideration different decision-making logics (causation and effectuation) as well as different approaches toward resource orchestration (bootstrapping and bricolage). Our findings confirm that implications and impact of firm founders’ cognitive style manifests in different ways based, in part, on the application of both strategic approach logics and resources orchestration techniques.

Rejection sensitivity in severe alcohol use disorder: Increased anxious anticipation of rejection

Rejection sensitivity (RS) reflects the disposition to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and disproportionately react to rejection. It is linked to interpersonal problems and psychopathological symptoms, which are frequent in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) and are known to influence clinical outcomes. Consequently, RS has been put forward as a process of interest in this disorder. However, empirical studies investigating RS in SAUD are scarce and focused on its last two components, leaving the core process of anxious expectations of rejection unexplored. To fil this gap, 105 patients with SAUD and 73 age-and-gender-matched controls completed the validated Adult Rejection Sensitivity Scale. We computed anxious anticipation (AA), and rejection expectancy (RE) scores, corresponding to the affective and cognitive dimensions of anxious expectations of rejection, respectively. Participants also completed measures of interpersonal problems and psychopathological symptoms. We found that patients with SAUD had higher AA (affective dimension) but not RE (cognitive dimension) scores. Moreover, AA was associated with interpersonal problems as well as psychopathological symptoms in the SAUD sample. These findings meaningfully extend the RS and social cognition literatures in SAUD by showing that difficulties already arise at the anticipatory stage of socio-affective information processing. Moreover, they shed light on the affective component of anxious expectations of rejection as a novel, clinically relevant process in this disorder.

Social distancing and workplace relationships in South Korea: exploring changes in negative and positive affective exchanges at work before and during COVID-19

ABSTRACT Many organisations introduced social distancing to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. However, since social distancing is designed to reduce personal interactions, it can impact workplace relationships. This paper explores how and when social distancing influences workplace relationships. Drawing on the affect theory of social exchange and the social cognition literature, we argue that when employees have more negative affective relationships with their co-workers (before COVID-19), social distancing helps improve such negative affective relationships (during COVID-19), especially when the co-worker is warm and competent. We collected data on relationships that individual employees in South Korea have with their co-workers before and during COVID-19. Our hierarchical linear modelling results show that social distancing indeed reduces the negative affective relationships that employees have with their co-workers when those co-workers are viewed as warm and competent. Conversely, social distancing does not hurt employees’ positive affective relationships. These findings suggest that contrary to view that social distancing and remote work causes misunderstanding and conflict, social distancing helps to improve employees’ workplace relationships. We therefore draw implications for human resource development professionals in facilitating high-quality relationships in remote settings.

Into the matrix: collecting psychometric data from consumers immersed in virtual worlds

ABSTRACT Consumer-oriented virtual reality (VR) brand experiences are becoming increasing popular despite the paucity of information about marketing best practices. This research describes a technique for embedding traditional psychometric measures into virtual environments that allows for the collection of data from consumers immersed in a simulated experience. Additionally, we provide proof-of-concept of this methodology by extending prior research findings in the embodied cognition literature to virtual environments. Specifically, our results demonstrate that temperature-related embodiment can be experienced by consumers immersed within a virtual world. The methodological, theoretical, and marketing implications of this research are discussed.

Magic odd numbers: The effect of numerical parity on variety-seeking

Numbers are widely employed to convey product and other marketing related information and thereby influence consumer judgment and behavior. Drawing on the literature of numerical cognition, associative learning, goal activation, and variety-seeking, the current research examines how numerical parity affects consumers' variety-seeking behavior. Across one Implicit Association Test (IAT) and four experiments, we demonstrate that consumers associate odd (vs. even) numbers with changeability (vs. stability) in their minds (Study 1). We further find that exposure to product and other marketing related information that is presented with odd (vs. even) numbers increases consumers' tendency to seek variety in subsequent purchase decisions, and that this effect consistently appears in the voluntary selection of a set of options (Study 2a), the preference for diversified products (Study 2b and 3), and the choice of diversified product bundles (Study 2c). We further demonstrate that desire for change underlines this effect, such that exposure to odd numbers (vs. even numbers) activates consumers' desire for change, which in turn elevates their subsequent variety-seeking behavior (Study 3). The findings of the current research not only contribute to the literature, but also provide marketers with effective ways to facilitate consumers' variety-seeking behavior, such as by strategically using odd numbers in their marketing efforts.

The effect of teaching style and academic motivation on student evaluation of teaching: Insights from social cognition.

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is ubiquitous in higher education as a metric for assessing teachers, gaining student feedback, and informing faculty personnel decisions. It is thus imperative to examine the dimensions along which a teacher is judged. This study tested the application of the universal dimensions of social judgment (i.e., warmth and competence) in SET. A total of 108 psychology undergraduates (M age = 23.63, SD age = 3.14) in Singapore rated a fictitious teacher (i.e., either relationship-oriented or task-oriented) based on their interactions over a programmed online chat. Participants responded to the social judgment measures of warmth and competence and rated their academic motivation. Results indicated a higher SET rating for a relationship-oriented than a task-oriented teacher. Further, student academic motivation mediated the link between teaching style and judgment of competence. The findings extend the supremacy of warmth in the context of SET, thus supporting the application of social cognition literature to educational research. In addition, the findings suggest that fostering a match in task goals between a teacher and student improves ratings of teacher competence.

Stigmergic coordination and minimal cognition in plants

The tricky question in the plant cognition debate is what theory of cognition should be used to fix the reference of cognitive concepts without skewing the debate too much one way or the other. After all, plants are rather different to animals in many respects: they are not motile, do not possess central nervous systems or even neurons, do not exhibit an invariant morphology, interact with the world in a distributed multi-centred manner, and behave through changes in their physiology. Nonetheless, there is a significant strand in the debate that asserts that plants are indeed cognitive. But what theory of cognition makes sense of this claim without baking in prior zoological assumptions? The aim of this paper is to try out a theory of minimal cognition that makes the claim of plant cognition plausible. It is primarily inspired by the distributed cognition literature and the sensorimotor coordination theory of cognition proposed by van Duijn et al. (2006) . We take a cognitive system to be a coordinated set of semi-autonomous processes running over the organism and items in its environment. Coordination is characterised in terms of two functional conditions that ensure that the system generates goal-directed action in the world. The system is stigmergic in the sense that the material results of its actions in the environment are a crucial part of the processes that coordinate further actions. The account possesses a degree of scale invariance and helps unify cognitive explanation across microorganisms, plants and animals.

Social overshadowing: Revisiting cue-competition in social interactions.

In a large variety of contexts, it is essential to use the available information to extract patterns and behave accordingly. When it comes to social interactions for instance, the information gathered about interaction partners across multiple encounters (e.g., trustworthiness) is crucial in guiding one's own behavior (e.g., approach the trustworthy and avoid the untrustworthy), a process akin to trial-by-trial learning. Building on associative learning and social cognition literatures, the present research adopts a domain-general approach to learning and explores whether the principles underlying associative learning also govern learning in social contexts. In particular, we examined whether overshadowing, a well-established cue-competition phenomenon, impacts learning of the cooperative behaviors of unfamiliar interaction partners. Across three experiments using an adaptation of the iterated Trust Game, we consistently observed a 'social overshadowing' effect, that is, a better learning about the cooperative tendencies of partners presented alone compared to those presented in a pair. This robust effect was not modulated by gender stereotypes or beliefs about the internal communication dynamics within a pair of partners. Drawing on these results, we argue that examining domain-general learning processes in social contexts is a useful approach to understanding human social cognition.

ФЕНОМЕН РАННЕЙ ПРОФОРИЕНТАЦИИ ОБУЧАЮЩИХСЯ

The phenomenon of early career guidance of students in modern conditions is a well-established pedagogical category, reflected in regulatory documents: the passport of the federal project “Success of every Child” [10], the federal educational program of preschool education [7]. The importance of preschool age in the professional formation of a personality is justified in studies reflecting the periodization of age-related development of a person as a subject of labor. Early career guidance of preschoolers is based on such features of this age as: the leading type of activity (play), the developing effect of immersing the child in various activities, cognitive needs in relation to events and phenomena of the surrounding world, the manifestation of the ability to imagine, the ability to establish cause-and-effect relationships. The phenomenon under study at preschool age is unstable, which is based on the dependence of professional preferences on the impressions received by the child and on fantasies generated by events and phenomena of the surrounding world. The leading content lines of early career guidance for preschoolers are: acquaintance with the world of professions, the formation of the image of a hard worker. The preschool child’s family has a significant impact on early career guidance, which determines the need to develop cooperation with parents as equal participants in the educational process. The condition for the effectiveness of the process of early career guidance of students is the teacher’s readiness to conduct career guidance work. At preschool age, it is permissible to use psychodiagnostic methods for developing a child’s interest and attention to their own qualities associated with the world of professions. Early career guidance of preschoolers is of an activity nature, which determines the appropriate pedagogical means: play activities, project activities, research activities, communication activities, modeling, reading fiction and cognitive literature, observing the professional work of adults, excursions.

A feature-based approach to the comparative study of "nonordinary" experiences.

At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits based on alterations they observed in their sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this comparative approach to such "nonordinary experiences" (NOEs) was never fully realized due to disciplinary siloing and the challenges involved in comparing culture-laden accounts. Today, psychologists tend to reify constructs, such as religious or spiritual, extraordinary (e.g., psychical, paranormal, anomalous, or exceptional), and psychopathological. In doing so, they face an unresolved challenge: experiences with phenomenologically distinct features may be appraised similarly within a culture (i.e., viewed as evidence for the same culturally specific construct) and experiences that share phenomenological features may be appraised differently across cultures. Here, we call for a renewed approach to comparing NOEs across cultures that prioritizes subjectively recognizable features instead of constructs. First, we review the history of the comparative approach in psychology and where it is today. Second, we introduce a feature-based approach, building on the event cognition literature, in which "lived experiences" are broken down into their phenomenological features and the claims made about them. Third, we propose ways in which cultural learning shapes experiences, and possibly the ordinary-nonordinary distinction itself. We conclude by highlighting that by building on and shifting the focus of previous efforts, the feature-based approach provides a way to compare experiences at the population level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

An eye-tracking study of biased attentional processing of emotional faces in severe alcohol use disorder

BackgroundSocial cognition impairments in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) are increasingly established. However, fundamental aspects of social cognition, and notably the attentional processing of socio-affective information, remain unexplored, limiting our understanding of underlying mechanisms. Here, we determined whether patients with SAUD show attentional biases to specific socio-affective cues, namely emotional faces. MethodIn a modified dot-probe paradigm, 30 patients with SAUD and 30 demographically matched healthy controls (HC) were presented with pairs of neutral-emotional (angry, disgusted, happy, sad) faces while having their eye movements recorded. Indices of early/automatic (first fixations, latency to first fixations) and later/controlled (number of fixations, dwell-time) processes were computed. ResultsPatients with SAUD did not differ from HC in their attention to angry/disgusted/sad vs. neutral faces. However, patients with SAUD fixated/dwelled less on happy vs. neutral faces in the first block of stimuli than HC, who presented an attentional bias to happy faces. LimitationsSample-size was determined to detect medium-to-large effects and subtler ones may have been missed. Further, our cross-sectional design provides no explanation as to whether the evidenced biases precede or are a consequence of SAUD. ConclusionsThese results extend the social cognition literature in SAUD to the attentional domain, by evidencing the absence of a controlled attentional bias toward positive social cues in SAUD. This may reflect reduced sensitivity to social reward and could contribute to higher order social cognition difficulties and social dysfunction.