Epistemic Vigilance Research Articles

Definite Descriptions in the Light of the Comprehension vs. Acceptance Distinction: Comparing Self-Paced Reading with Eye-Tracking Measures

This paper presents two experiments on the processing of informative definite descriptions in plausible vs. implausible contexts. Experiment 1 is a self-paced reading task (with French native speakers,n= 69), with sentences containing a definite vs.indefinite NP, each preceded byplausibleorimplausiblecontexts. Our study replicated Singh and colleagues’ findings, namely that definite descriptions are significantly costlier when they occur inimplausiblecontexts. The translation of the original stimuli from English to French did not affect the results, suggesting that the phenomenon applies cross-linguistically. Experiment 2 consists in an eye-tracking task, designed to measure the participants’ (n= 44) gaze patterns on complete sentences with the same four conditions (definite vs.indefinite NP; implausible vs. implausible contexts). A mixed effect model analysis revealed that (a) thetotal gaze durationon target segments and (b) theprocessing of the complete sentencewere significantly longer in implausible conditions. These results show that implausible contexts predict a marked increase in the offline processing costs of definite descriptions. However, no significant difference was found for online processing measures (i.e.,first fixation duration, first-pass reading timeandregression path timemeasures) across all experimental conditions. These results suggest that it is only once the sentence is fully processed that implausible contexts increase processing costs. Furthermore, these results raise methodological issues related to the study of the online processing of definite descriptions, to the extent that self-paced reading and eye-tracking methods in the present study lead to incompatible results. With respect to the eye-tracking results, we suggest that the contrast between online and offline processing is likely to reflect the fact that participants first adopt a stance of trust to understand utterances before filtering the information through their epistemic vigilance module.

She told me about a singing cactus: Counterintuitive concepts are more accurately attributed to their speakers than ordinary concepts.

Communication is central to human life, yet it leaves humans vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation. Humans have therefore evolved a suite of psychological mechanisms for the evaluation of speakers and their messages. Here, we test a key hypothesized function of these "epistemic vigilance" mechanisms: the selective remembering of links between speakers and messages that are inconsistent with preexisting beliefs. Across four experiments, participants (N = 707) read stories associated with different contexts, with each story containing concepts that violate core knowledge intuitions ("counterintuitive concepts") and ordinary concepts. Experiment 1 revealed that after a brief distractor (2 min) participants more accurately attributed counterintuitive concepts to their speakers than ordinary concepts. Experiments 2a and 2b replicated this finding and found that this attribution accuracy advantage also extended to counterintuitive versus ordinary concepts associated with other contextual details-places and dates. Experiment 3 then tested whether this attribution accuracy advantage was more stable over time for speakers than for places. After a short distractor (20 min), there was a counterintuitive versus ordinary concept attribution accuracy advantage for both speakers and places. However, when participants were tested again after a long delay (48 hr), this attribution accuracy advantage more than doubled for speakers but disappeared entirely for places. We discuss the implications of these findings to the set of psychological mechanisms theorized to monitor and evaluate communication to guard our database of beliefs about the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Manipulative Shallow Processing Induced by Presuppositions and Topics: Theoretical Perspectives and Experimental Evidence

The paper shows that implicit strategies for questionable contents are frequent in persuasive texts, as compared to texts with other purposes. It proposes that the persuasive and manipulative effectiveness of introducing questionable contents implicitly can be explained through established cognitive patterns, namely that what is felt by addressees as information coming (also) from them and not (only) from the source of the message is less likely to be challenged. These assumptions are verified by showing examples of “implicitness of evidential responsibility” (essentially, presuppositions, and topics) as triggers of lesser attention in advertising and propaganda. A possible evolutionary path is sketched for three different pragmatic functions of presuppositions, leading to their availability for manipulation. The distraction effect of presuppositions and topics is also explained in relation with recent developments of Relevance Theory. Behavioral evidence that presuppositions and topics induce low epistemic vigilance and shallow processing is compared to recent neurophysiological evidence which does not confirm this assumption, showing greater processing costs for presuppositions and topics as compared to assertions and foci. A proposal is put forward to reconcile these apparently contrasting data and to explain why they may not be in contrast after all. Also due to natural language quick processing constraints (a “Now-or-Never processing Bottleneck”), effort devoted to accommodation of presupposed or topicalized new contents may drain resources from concurrent epistemic vigilance and critical evaluation, resulting in shallower processing.

Listeners\u2019 perceptions of the\xa0certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a common prosodic signature

The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique auditory adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability during linguistic interactions.

Epistemic Vigilance in Early Ontogeny: Children's Use of Nonverbal Behavior to Detect Deception.

This study examines the development of children's ability to modulate their trust in verbal testimony as a function of nonverbal behavior. Participants included 83 children (26 four-year-olds, 29 five-year-olds, and 28 six-year-olds) that were tasked with locating a toy hidden in one of two boxes. Before deciding the location, participants watched a video of an adult providing verbal and nonverbal cues about the location of the toy. We hypothesized that older children would display epistemic vigilance, trusting nonverbal information over verbal information when the two conflict. Consistent with our expectations, when sources were consistent, all children trusted the verbal testimony. By contrast, and as predicted, when they were inconsistent, only 6-year-olds distrusted verbal testimony and favored nonverbal cues; 4- and 5-year-olds continued to trust verbal testimony. Thus, 6-year-old children demonstrate an ability to modulate their trust in verbal testimony as a function of nonverbal information. Younger children's inability to do this is not due to their being unaware of non-verbal behavior; indeed, when nonverbal information was offered exclusively, children of all ages used it to find the object.

Borderline personality disorders: from the developmental theory of the "self" and mentalizing to "systems"

In the last fifty years the thinking around borderline personality disorder (BPD) shifted from an intra-psychic to a psychoanalytically oriented relational model. The latter described the difficulties associated with this presentation as arising from a disorganisation of the "self" structure in the context of an early caregiving relationship. The concept of inaccurate, or inconsistent "social biofeedback parental affect mirroring" has been pivotal to explain the characteristic failure to mentalize and the interpersonal difficulties associated with a diagnosis of BPD. Nevertheless, far from being the result of a sole linear relationship, these difficulties appear linked to communicative and emotional feedback loops that are reminiscent of cybernetic principles. Furthermore, recent claims have suggested that the communication feedback loops characteristic of the carer–child attachment style represent nothing less that the communication styles of the wider social environment in which the dyad is located. These claims have recently prompted a further shift from mentalizing to epistemic trust and epistemic vigilance, hence departing from a relational model towards a more systemic one. The difficulties associated with BPD are now suggested to be linked to a disorder of social learning, impacted by the rigid nature of the person's information-processing systems. This article reviews this journey.

Truth-making institutions: From divination, ordeals and oaths to judicial torture and rules of evidence

In many human societies, truth-making institutions are considered necessary to establish an officially valid or “received” description of some specific situation. These range from divination, oaths, and ordeals to judicial torture or trial by jury. In many cases, these institutions may seem odd or paradoxical, e.g., why would an ordeal reveal a defendant's guilt or innocence? Here we propose to address the questions, why those institutions are considered the source of accepted truth, and why they have recurrent features in many different cultures. Our model is based on two well-documented set of evolved cognitive mechanisms. One is epistemic vigilance, the set of cognitive processes that help us evaluate the quality of communicated information we receive. We show how our epistemic intuitions account for otherwise puzzling aspects of divination, oaths, and ordeals. The other set of mechanisms consists in human capacities for coalition building and the recruitment of social support, which explains how truth-making institutions can be strategically used by individuals to influence mutual knowledge for their own interests. Taken together, these mechanisms explain the kinds of institutions found in small-scale societies (oaths, ordeals, divination), as well as the emergence of different institutions (laws of evidence, judicial torture, trial by jury) in large-scale and modern societies.

Talk About Evidence During Argumentation

ABSTRACT Evidence is widely recognized as an essential component of argumentation. Existing research has primarily focused on students’ use of evidence to construct explanations or claims. In the present study, 54 11- to 12--year-old Chinese students participated in an extended discourse-based argumentation curriculum, along with an equivalent nonparticipating control group consisted of 50 students. We identified and traced progression in students’ meta-talk about evidence during peer-to-peer argumentive discourse and found that meta-talk grew more frequent over time, became increasingly focused on evaluating the source of evidence, and became better sustained over successive turns. Separate pre- and postassessments suggested that participants had become more advanced in epistemological understanding, manifested in a shift away from absolutist thinking, and were more likely to endorse the values of argumentive discourse. Implications for epistemic vigilance in the Information Age are discussed.

The epistemics of narrative performance in conversation

Abstract This article investigates the flow of information in conversational narrative performance in light of research on the epistemics of talk in interaction and epistemic vigilance on the part of story recipients. Based on examples from a range of corpora, it reassesses the relationship between storytellers and recipients consistent with recipient design, and investigates cases of too little and too much information in narrative. Viewing narrative performance as sharing territories of knowledge provides new insights into the notions of telling rights and tellability as well as teller competence and credibility. The narrative performance may contain gaps and discrepancies along with clusters of copious information from which recipients must pick and choose to construct a dynamic narrative model to be tested against further information. In the communal presentation of family narratives, territories of knowledge merge, shared events are illuminated from separate perspectives, gaps in knowledge are filled, and evaluations are enriched.

Epistemic Vigilance and the Science/Religion Distinction

Abstract Both science and religion are human endeavours that recruit and modify pre-existing human capacity to engage in epistemic vigilance. However, while science relies upon a focus on content vigilance, religion focusses on source vigilance. This difference is due, in turn, to the function of religious claims not being connected to their accuracy – unlike the function of scientific claims. Understanding this difference helps to understand many aspects of scientific and religious institutions.

Epistemic vigilance online: Textual inaccuracy and children's selective trust in webpages.

In this age of 'fake news', it is crucial that children are equipped with the skills to identify unreliable information online. Our study is the first to examine whether children are influenced by the presence of inaccuracies contained in webpages when deciding which sources to trust. Forty-eight 8- to 10-year-olds viewed three pairs of webpages, relating to the same topics, where one webpage per pair contained three obvious inaccuracies (factual, typographical, or exaggerations, according to condition). The paired webpages offered conflicting claims about two novel facts. We asked participants questions pertaining to the novel facts to assess whether they systematically selected answers from the accurate sources. Selective trust in the accurate webpage was found in the typos condition only. This study highlights the limitations of 8- to 10-year-olds in critically evaluating the accuracy of webpage content and indicates a potential focus for educational intervention. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Children display early epistemic vigilance towards spoken testimony. They use speakers' past accuracy when deciding whom to trust regarding novel information. Little is known about children's selective trust towards web-based sources. What does this study add? This study is the first to examine whether textual inaccuracy affects children's trust in webpages. Typos but not semantic errors led to reduced trust in a webpage compared to an accurate source. Children aged 8-10years show limited evaluation of the accuracy of online content.

Beware of vested interests: Epistemic vigilance improves reasoning about scientific evidence (for some people).

In public disputes, stakeholders sometimes misrepresent statistics or other types of scientific evidence to support their claims. One of the reasons this is problematic is that citizens often do not have the motivation nor the cognitive skills to accurately judge the meaning of statistics and thus run the risk of being misinformed. This study reports an experiment investigating the conditions under which people become vigilant towards a source’s claim and thus reason more carefully about the supporting evidence. For this, participants were presented with a claim by a vested-interest or a neutral source and with statistical evidence which was cited by the source as being in support of the claim. However, this statistical evidence actually contradicted the source’s claim but was presented as a contingency table, which are typically difficult for people to interpret correctly. When the source was a lobbyist arguing for his company’s product people were better at interpreting the evidence compared to when the same source argued against the product. This was not the case for a different vested-interests source nor for the neutral source. Further, while all sources were rated as less trustworthy when participants realized that the source had misrepresented the evidence, only for the lobbyist source was this seen as a deliberate attempt at deception. Implications for research on epistemic trust, source credibility effects and science communication are discussed.

Pragmatics and epistemic vigilance: A developmental perspective

Any form of overt communication, be it gestural or linguistic, involves pragmatic skills. This article investigates the social–cognitive foundations of pragmatic development from infancy to late childhood and argues that it is driven by, among other things, the emergence of the capacities to assess the communicator's competence (e.g. perceptual access, epistemic states) and honesty. We discuss the implications of this proposal and show how it sheds new light on the developmental trajectory of a series of pragmatic phenomena, with a specific focus on the development of irony comprehension.

Prosodic Pointing in inferential comprehension: the application of Relevance Theory to L2 listening instruction

The interface between pragmatics and prosody has been shown to be significant in intercultural communication (RIESCO BERNIER; ROMERO-TRILLO, 2008; ROMERO-TRILLO, 2002, 2012, 2015, 2019). In this paper, we re-evaluate the pragmatics-prosody interface on the grounds that prosody is seldom interpreted independently from accompanying gesture, facial modification and head movement. To enhance L2 hearers’ pragmatic competence, or what we define as attentional and inferential abilities, we introduce prosodic pointing as an ostensive phenomenon inclusive of both vocal and visual paralinguistic features used synchronously to communicate and interpret one’s intentions. We believe that the way relevance mechanisms (SPERBER; WILSON, 1986; WHARTON, 2014) focus the hearer on the speaker’s ostensive nonverbal behaviours, for him to use them as cues to speaker meaning, can be exploited in L2 listening instruction that aims to develop epistemic vigilance (SPERBER 1994; PADILLA CRUZ, 2013) and pragmatic competence in Chinese hearers of L2 English. In English, you can show disagreement by saying ‘Yes, he \was’. In Chinese, however, ‘yes’ always means agreement. Chinese speakers typically disagree by saying ‘No, he was’, thus potentially causing misunderstanding. We investigate how introducing prosodic pointing to Chinese L2 learners can help in fine-tuning their epistemic vigilance in L2 English through an intervention study involving input and immediate recall sessions. The results show (i) evidence of Chinese interpreters of L2 English fine-tuning their epistemic vigilance and, as result, the important role of prosodic pointing in enhancing their pragmatic competence, and (ii) the need for further relevance-based L2 instructional studies focused on enhancing inferential and interpretive competence in hearers of L2 English.***Apontamento prosódico na compreensão inferencial: a aplicação da Teoria da Relevância à instrução auditiva L2***A interface entre pragmática e prosódia tem se mostrado significativa em comunicação intercultural (RIESCO BERNIER; ROMERO-TRILLO, 2008; ROMERO-TRILLO, 2002, 2012, 2015, 2019). Neste artigo, nós reavaliamos a interface pragmática-prosódica assumindo que a prosódia é raramente interpretada de maneira independente de gestos, modificações faciais e movimentos de cabeça. A fim de aprimorar a competência pragmática do ouvinte em L2, ou o que definimos como habilidades inferencial e de atenção, introduzimos o conceito de indicação gestual-prosódica (prosodic pointing) como uma ferramenta baseada na relevância que inclui características tanto segmentais como paralinguísticas, usadas sincronizadamente para comunicar a intenção do falante. Acreditamos que a maneira como mecanismos de relevância (SPERBER; WILSON, 1986, WHARTON, 2014) fazem o ouvinte focar em comportamentos ostensivos não verbais - a fim de que ele as use como pistas para o significado do falante - pode informar instruções de compreensão oral em L2 que busquem desenvolver a competência pragmática e a vigilância epistêmica (PADILLA CRUZ, 2013) em falantes chineses de inglês como L2. Em inglês, você pode mostrar discordância ao dizer ‘sim, ele \foi’. Em chinês, no entanto, ‘sim’ sempre significa concordância. Falantes chineses normalmente expressam discordância ao dizer ‘Não, ele foi’, o que potencialmente pode causar um mal-entendido. Nós investigamos como a introdução de ‘instruções prosódicas’ para chineses aprendizes de L2 pode aprimorar a competência pragmática e a vigilância epistêmica através de um estudo de intervenção com uma combinação de metodologias que envolvem testes de recepção, testes de compreensão oral e testes de recordação. Os estudos mostram (i) a necessidade de instruções que coloquem o aprendiz de L2 em um papel direto de ouvinte a fim de que sua atenção selecione as pistas ostensivas do falante e as use em seu processo deinterpretação e (ii) a importância de melhorar as instruções de compreensão inferencial partindo de estudos de L2 baseados na relevância.

The journey from epistemic vigilance to epistemic trust: service-users experiences of a community mentalization- based treatment programme for Anti-Social personality disorder (ASPD)

ABSTRACTMentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) is a psychological intervention, delivered predominantly in a group-format, originally developed for individuals with a personality disorder. Evidence is growing for this approach as a successful model of treatment, with much of the research to date conducted within inpatient settings. This study explored service-users experiences of a community-based MBT programme in a probation setting for males, diagnosed with Anti-Social personality disorder (ASPD). Using thematic analysis, results from six semi-structured interviews revealed that individuals experienced MBT as largely positive and having had an impact on their lives. Five themes emerged; ‘Experience of the group’, ‘Attachment’, ‘Learning flexibility’, ‘Individual sessions’ and ‘Impact’ with associated categories and sub-categories. Participants appeared to reflect not only on their experiences but also the internal process that occurred during their time within MBT. This was understood as the transition from chronic epistemic vigilance to epistemic trust and implications for practice are discussed. Despite its limitations, this study contributes to the growing evidence-base for MBT and specifically its positive application within community contexts for offenders with ASPD – a traditionally ‘difficult to reach’ client group.

Humorous Communication and Comprehension: Manipulation and Epistemic Vigilance

Humorous Communication and Comprehension: Manipulation and Epistemic Vigilance

Accommodation: a cognitive heuristic for background information

Presuppositions are usually defined as a linguistic means to convey background information, which require very little cognitive effort to be interpreted (Sperber & Wilson [1986] 1995: 706). As for the accommodation of presupposition, it is defined as a process by which the listener updates – also at minimal costs – the presupposed information whenever it is not mutually shared. Accommodation is generally considered to be a voluntary process (cf. von Fintel 2000), which may be inhibited when information is problematic or contradicts the listener’s prior beliefs.The aim of this paper is to challenge the idea that accommodation operates only on traditional presuppositional triggers (Beaver 2001). Furthermore, I argue against the claim that this process is autonomous and always under voluntary control. To do so, I first show how traditional triggers form a heterogeneous class that is difficult to capture in terms of attention requirements and cognitive costs (see Domaneschi et al. 2014). I then present discursive presuppositions (de Saussure 2013) and underline their similarities with semantic presuppositions. I show to what extent accommodation is likely to be a process dedicated to both semantic and discursive presuppositions. Finally, I argue that accommodation can be viewed as a cognitive heuristic for background information, involving minimal attention. Such an approach should allow to explain why presupposition accommodation is likely to bypass the listener’s epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010), as evidenced by experiments in experimental psychology (Bredart & Modolo 1988; Reder & Kusbit 1991; Park & Reder 2004 inter alia).

Manipulating the Mechanism of Epistemic Vigilance in Political and Legal Discourses

Manipulating the Mechanism of Epistemic Vigilance in Political and Legal Discourses

Doing without metarepresentation: Scenario construction explains the epistemic generativity and privileged status of episodic memory.

Episodic memories are distinct from semantic memories in that they are epistemically generative and privileged. Whereas Mahr & Csibra (M&C) develop a metarepresentational account of epistemic vigilance, we propose an explanation that builds on our notion of scenario construction: The way an event of the past is presented in episodic memory recall explains the epistemic generativity and privilegedness of episodic memory.

How Gullible are We? A Review of the Evidence from Psychology and Social Science

A long tradition of scholarship, from ancient Greece to Marxism or some contemporary social psychology, portrays humans as strongly gullible—wont to accept harmful messages by being unduly deferent. However, if humans are reasonably well adapted, they should not be strongly gullible: they should be vigilant toward communicated information. Evidence from experimental psychology reveals that humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. They check the plausibility of messages against their background beliefs, calibrate their trust as a function of the source's competence and benevolence, and critically evaluate arguments offered to them. Even if humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance, an adaptive lag might render them gullible in the face of new challenges, from clever marketing to omnipresent propaganda. I review evidence from different cultural domains often taken as proof of strong gullibility: religion, demagoguery, propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, erroneous medical beliefs, and rumors. Converging evidence reveals that communication is much less influential than often believed—that religious proselytizing, propaganda, advertising, and so forth are generally not very effective at changing people's minds. Beliefs that lead to costly behavior are even less likely to be accepted. Finally, it is also argued that most cases of acceptance of misguided communicated information do not stem from undue deference, but from a fit between the communicated information and the audience's preexisting beliefs.