http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/cognitivesciencesociety/rss Recent eScholarship items from Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Sat, 16 May 2026 21:41:25 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zz5f6bg No matter how brilliant, one person cannot achieve major technological innovations alone. Human progress relies upon our ability to think together, building beyond an existing foundation of cumulative cultural knowledge (Heinrich & Muthukrishna, 2024). From five-years-old, children show cooperative capacities fundamental to this collective success (Warneken et al., 2014; Fletcher et al., 2012). Yet, little is known about children's capacity to pool mental resources with cooperative partners – if they can think together as interconnected nodes to surpass individual computational limits (Velez et al., 2022). Prior developmental research also does not fully address cross-cultural diversity in children's cooperative strategy (Rogoff, 2014). Here, we investigate how pairs of children (N = 96 dyads) cooperate on a memory task across two cultural contexts – Nanyuki, Kenya and Beijing, China. We find that children flexibly employ different strategies based on the level of cognitive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zz5f6bg Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Jacobs, Colin Yu, Dhara Zhang, Zhen Zeidler, Henriette Thompson, Bill Engelmann, Jan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zt5f418 This workshop aims to guide cognitive science PhD students on starting a company within the start-up ecosystem., with an emphasis on how to use venture capital (VC). It will cover essential concepts, stages, decision points, and skills needed to improve chances for success. The workshop will also compare VC funding phases with those in academic research to make the concepts and processes more accessible. This workshop will begin by helping students calibrate their motivations and timelines for creating a startup company or joining one. After a review of the typical startup lifecycle by a venture capitalist, three startup founders will explain their career trajectories and critical decision points. They will then introduce important decisions about product, market, software, and funding strategies. Students will then participate in breakout sessions in one of these four areas. After the breakout sessions, the workshop will conclude with open discussion with the presenters https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zt5f418 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Liang, Linus Glushko, Robert Bemis, Douglas Ramji, Sam StuhlmŸller, Andreas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9z0408kn Analogical transfer is well studied, but much less is known about how students transfer within specific domains. Computer science presents an opportunity to study such transfer, as students often transition from block-based (e.g., Scratch) to text-based (e.g., Python) programming languages. As an early step in understanding programming transfer, we present a conceptual analysis that predicts when students may be aided by analogical supports when transferring from Scratch to Python. We are specifically guided by Structure Mapping theory, which states analogy is a process of aligning objects and relations based on their common structure (Gentner, 1983, 2010). Much research has found that surface similarity influences transfer; thus, we categorized various programming concepts (iteration, booleans, etc.) based on their perceptual similarity. Further, we make predictions about where and how progressive alignment (Kotovsky & Gentner, 1996) can be used to facilitate relational understanding.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9z0408kn Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Owen, Rosalind Houchins, Jennifer Matlen, Bryan Caballero, Elysse McKee, Kiley Kao, Yvonne https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xf709s3 Recent studies have used complex regularization procedures for whole-cortex neural decoding, with results suggesting that neural representations may be much more widely distributed and variable than previously suspected. Such work typically requires extensive parallel compute infrastructure, bespoke regularizers, and complicated workflows. We considered whether comparable results can be obtained from the iterated LASSO, a simple algorithm using standard L1 regularization to conduct an iterative voxel-selection scheme. We applied the procedure to decode stimulus class (face, place, or object) from whole-brain 3T-fMRI data individually in each of 8 participants, achieving a remarkable 98% classification accuracy on held-out images. The algorithm found signals in about 8% of voxels across cortex, many appearing outside the traditional occipito-temporal regions thought to support visual object representation. Moreover, the model weights revealed wide variation across participants... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xf709s3 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Zihan Col—n, Y. Ivette Mukherjee, Kushin Rogers, Timothy T https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w07j1fr Repeated social coordination is a crucial aspect of daily life in which individuals strategically distribute labor and resources, often to accomplish complex tasks and goals. However, social coordination is also very challenging because humans often have competing interests, especially when successful coordination persistently leaves one party better off, entrenching inequality. Here we use a novel task, the Asymmetric Social Exchange (ASE) Game, to study how individuals learn to coordinate with different kinds of social partners and how individual trait variability on key social dimensions related to negative evaluation (i.e., social anxiety), impacts compliance with disadvantageous conventions (N = 675). Using two kinds of Bayesian models, one that learns from experience and one that builds a causal model of others' hidden motivations, we show that differences in coordination strategies arise from both individual learning differences and from expressed social preferences. Further,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w07j1fr Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Lamba, Amrita Houlihan, Sean Dae Saxe, Rebecca https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vk0k3zv Humans readily make inferences of the social power dynamics at play across a wide range of environments. This ability requires people to possess an underlying intuitive theory of power. We tested 3 candidate formal models as hypotheses of how people judge which of two players has more power across 30 different economic games: Relative Expected Utility (the difference in expected resources), Relative Control over Resources (difference in control over the other player's resources) and Relative Choice (the difference in the amount of options each player can choose from). Our results across 3 human experiments reveal that human power judgments are best captured by combining Relative Expected Utility and Relative Choice models as joint predictors. This finding suggests that people perceive social power by considering not only who is expected to achieve their desired outcomes but also the extent of control each person holds within their environment. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vk0k3zv Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Okoroafor, Junior Chinomso Saxe, Rebecca Tenenbaum, Joshua B. Kleiman-Weiner, Max https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9t85d0vq Do neural network models that fail to behave human-like reflect a fundamental divergence from human cognition, or do they mirror earlier developmental or evolutionary stages? We propose that such models may, in fact, offer insights into the origins of human abstraction. We evaluated over 200 pretrained neural networks alongside macaques, Tsimane natives, US adults and children on three visual match-to-sample tasks targeting increasing levels of abstraction: visual-semantic similarity, shape regularity, and relational reasoning. As task demands grow more abstract, just like monkey's, model decisions increasingly diverge from adult human behavior. However, representational similarity analyses reveal shared internal structure with all human groups, suggesting overlapping cognitive strategy. We further show that model alignment depends on specific design choices—architecture, scale, training regime, and language supervision—highlighting which inductive biases support human-like... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9t85d0vq Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Wenjie, Li Henderson, Margaret Bisk, Yonatan Cantlon, Jessica https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9t08x24h Detecting dynamic spatial relationships, such as pursuit, can be cognitively demanding (Scholl & Gao, 2013). Research has identified visual cues that influence pursuit detection, including the distance between the pursuer and the target (Meyerhoff, Schwan & Huff, 2014) and the number of objects in a scene (Gao, Baker, et al., 2019; Kon, Khemlani & Lovett, 2024). We turn to data visualization research to explore techniques to improve pursuit detection in dynamic scenes. For example, displaying trajectory histories can aid processing by reducing cognitive load (Heer & Robertson, 2007). We conducted a study in which participants viewed visualizations of six moving dots, either with or without trace lines, and determined whether one dot was chasing another. Preliminary findings suggest that trace lines improve the speed and accuracy of pursuit detection. Our results bridge visualization and vision science, suggesting that trace lines might enhance pursuit detection... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9t08x24h Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Ji, Yishu Kon, Maria Lovett, Andrew Livingston, Mark Khemlani, Sangeet Yang, Yalong Bearfield, Cindy Xiong https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sv234nn Abstract Gestures are crucial cues in emotion communication, yet little is known about how specific emotions elicited through different stimuli link to gesture production. The present study investigated how gesture frequency and type (representational vs. nonrepresentational) varied across specific emotion categories (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, and neutral) elicited by visual stimuli and written narratives. In a within-subject design, participants (n=38) retold emotionally charged movie clips and written narratives for each emotion. The results showed that the participants overall produced fewer representational gestures while describing sadness compared to happiness and neutral, and anger compared to neutral. Interestingly, the participants overall produced more nonrepresentational gestures in narrative descriptions than in movie clip descriptions. However, gesture frequency and type did not significantly differ across movie clips and narratives. These results underscore... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sv234nn Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Ceylan, SŸleyman Can …zer, Demet Gšksun, Tilbe https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sg1m2q8 Effects of bilingualism on cognitive control remain highly debated. Such debates partly stem from reliance on behavioral measures alone, which may obscure subtle individual differences. Even studies that leverage brain electrophysiology report mixed results, often due to categorizing individuals as monolingual or bilingual. Here, we examined whether the degree of bilingualism was related to the P3b effect—an established electrophysiological measure of cognitive control. Young adults with heterogeneous language experiences completed the Language Social Background Questionnaire (Anderson et al., 2018). Electroencephalography data were recorded from 70 participants who completed the Active Visual Oddball paradigm (Kappenman et al., 2021), a task optimized to isolate the P3b response. We found that more bilingual language experience was associated with larger P3b effects, even in the absence of behavioral differences. These results highlight the importance of characterizing bilingualism... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sg1m2q8 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Rodas De Le—n, Nancy E Bortfeld, Heather Backer, Kristina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sf029m6 The ability to form paradigmatic associations plays a crucial role in language comprehension and generalization. Previous studies have demonstrated that paradigmatic associations can be implicitly formed through sequential contexts even in nonlinguistic environment. In this study, we additionally examined whether paradigmatic associations can be implicitly formed when the contexts are presented in parallel with the target items. The results did not provide evidence for forming a paradigmatic association. We have discussed several possible factors that may have contributed to the results, which would help generate future experimental designs that are more sensitive in capturing the formation of paradigmatic associations. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sf029m6 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Park, Seoni Yim, Hyungwook https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sd7j3q0 Connectionist models like the Interactive Activation (IA, McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) model serve an indispensable role in cognitive science by providing a concrete and testable framework for describing how percepts at different levels of abstraction might interact during cognitive processing. However, discontinuities in the governing equation for the IA model limits the set of analytical tools that can be used to understand the model's dynamics. We developed a novel model of word perception, gLoVIA (generalized Lotka-Volterra Interactive Activation model) which borrows the mathematical structure of a generalized Lotka-Volterra model. A robust method for initializing the community matrix yields a gLoVIA model with high word report accuracy, plausible lexical competition, and word superiority effects for vocabulary sizes up to 1000 words. Our results suggest that the gLoVIA model may be sufficient to explain empirically observed effects in word perception, while being more... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sd7j3q0 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Mitchell, Jonathan Brown, Kevin Magnuson, James Hannagan, Thomas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9s0424c0 The question of whether mental disorders are brain disorders has sparked curiosity in cognitive science for years. But does framing mental disorders as brain disorders actually help the public better understand and engage with mental health? What do people understand when we call something a brain disorder, and why does it matter if mental illnesses are described as brain-based? To explore these questions, we conducted three quantitative vignette studies with a UK-based general public sample, focusing on perceptions of seven mental disorders: ADHD, ASD, OCD, major depressive disorder, anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder (as defined in the DSM-5-TR). Our findings show that seeing mental disorders as brain disorders is linked to beliefs about greater severity, earlier onset, longer duration, lower chances of recovery, and higher effectiveness of medication. These results highlight how public perceptions might impact reasoning and decision-making about mental health. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9s0424c0 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Guley, Olha Nettle, Daniel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9r16h9gt We asked whether the concreteness and specificity of the language used by conversation participants change depending upon the familiarity and the presence/absence of an object discussed. Additionally, we explored whether interlocutors engaged in distinct abstraction processes (analogical comparison; superordinate categorization) and whether they focused more on object's features or on their own experience. We used the ECOLANG corpus (Gu et al., 2025), a semi-naturalistic dataset of interactions in which 31 knowledgeable "speakers" describe novel/known objects to an "addressee" when the object is physically present or absent. We analyzed 22,581 sentences produced by the "speaker" and measured the concreteness and specificity of 1,612 nouns used. Results showed that more concrete and specific nouns were used for novel objects suggesting a need for precise information. Additionally, abstraction processes were more likely when the object was present and novel. Finally, when... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9r16h9gt Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Lamarra, Tommaso Ravelli, Andrea Amelio Bolognesi, Marianna M Vigliocco, Gabriella https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p12k2m3 Research shows that shape perception is sensitive to both roundedness or angularity (e.g., Bar&Neta, 2006) and symmetry (e.g., Dehaene et al., 2006), and that these features also affect the perception of similarity (Tversky, 1977). Roundness is the measure of how closely the shape of an object approaches that of a circle. In an online quasi-experiment (n=74), we tested combination pairs of 19 geometric figures (created according to symmetry properties and roundedness) to answer the question whether the symmetry would contribute more than the roundedness of the figure corners to the roundness perception. Participants did a forced choice task on figure pairs presented in a random order. The results show that for regular polygons, roundedness determines the similarity assessment even when the symmetry is up to three orders higher. For pairs containing regular figures, choices were made faster compared to pairs with asymmetrical and non-regular figures. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p12k2m3 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Zarina, Liga Skilters, Jurgis Mickus, Martins Kristaps Gaugers, Edvards Henrihs https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nm7h1gr Iconic words are those whose sounds share properties in common with their referents, such as "clatter" or "hiccup." Research shows that children learn iconic words earlier than arbitrary words and that iconicity may help children form these connections. However, another factor to consider is that iconic words have forms that are easier to produce. To gain further insight into the link between iconicity and acquisition we studied homophones. This allowed us to hold the form of each word constant and examine whether iconic meanings are acquired earlier. Participants provided iconicity ratings on 1668 total meanings for 390 word forms. We ran a mixed effects linear regression and found an effect of iconicity on test-based age-of-acquisition, controlling for word form, length, frequency, phonological neighbourhood, and meaning-specific familiarity. These findings suggest that children learn iconic meanings earlier than arbitrary ones and support iconicity as an important factor in... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nm7h1gr Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Aguanno, Laura S. Sidhu, David M https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nb9z2pw Electroencephalography (EEG) provides critical insights into brain activity, yet its inherent variability and nonstationary nature pose significant challenges for computational analysis, particularly in cross-subject generalization tasks. We present SIESTA (Spectral Invariant EEG-based Semi-causal Transform Architecture), a novel EEG foundation model that addresses these challenges through three key innovations: (1) VQGAN-based spectral tokenization capturing wavelet representation of EEG; (2) a dual-stream Transformer architecture pre-trained using a semi-causal generative modeling approach; and (3) Contrastive Invariant Fine-Tuning (CIFT), a label-free domain adaptation strategy that aligns feature distributions across subjects by integrating spectral-temporal dynamics. Pre-trained on over 32,900 hours of diverse EEG data, SIESTA achieves state-of-the-art performance in epilepsy monitoring, improves F1-score by $12.4 \%$ on scalp EEG and $8.7 \%$ on intracranial EEG, respectively.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nb9z2pw Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Zheng, Ruizhe Yu, Yuguo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9mb9n50w Multiple learning processes contribute to successful goal-directed actions in response to changes in physiological states and environments. Among them, explicit strategies play a crucial role, enabling rapid and flexible sensorimotor adaptation. Yet, how the training target distribution impacts strategy discovery remains poorly understood. To address this, we conducted a visuomotor adaptation reaching task that isolated explicit strategy. We manipulated two training distribution features in a 2×2 between-participants design (N = 50/group): the spatial arrangement (dense vs. distributed) and the target number (2 vs. 8). To pinpoint the strategies participants adopted, all groups periodically reached to a shared generalization target without feedback. Learning was faster with fewer and denser targets. Strikingly, the training target number had no effect on generalization, but those trained with densely arranged targets adopted simpler yet flawed strategies, leading to poor generalization.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9mb9n50w Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Ding, Wei Tsay, Jonathan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9k7569t7 Children's word learning occurs in rich social environments. Prior research suggests that young children prefer familiar social partners, facilitating imitation learning. However, the extent to which short-term familiarity influences word learning and generalization remains unclear. This study investigated whether two-year-old children learn and generalize novel object labels differently when taught by a familiar versus an unfamiliar experimenter. Familiarity was established through a brief play session before the word-learning task. Unexpectedly, the results revealed no differences in whether children learned the words from familiar and unfamiliar partners. In contrast, vocabulary size significantly predicted word generalization performance. These findings suggest that while social familiarity influences certain types of learning, word learning may depend more on cognitive and linguistic abilities than on familiarity with the speaker. This study contributes to our understanding... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9k7569t7 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Ahn, Jina Cartmill, Erica Sandhofer, Catherine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hm9z41w We propose a method for measuring the consistency of ordinal annotations based on a pre-trained embedding vector space. Intuitively, our method finds a direction in the embedding space along which data points align as closely as possible to their annotated ranks. The proposed approach guarantees a globally optimal solution that is free from approximation errors. Thus, it yields a unique consistency measure given a dataset with human-provided ordinal annotations and a pre-trained embedding model. This feature facilitates a wide range of applications, including not only ordinal prediction but also the unsupervised detection of annotation errors within datasets, as well as consistency assessment of stage-based scales (e.g., whether the transitions "beginner to intermediate" and "intermediate to advanced" form linear progressions in the embedding space) during dataset construction. We evaluate our method using real-world datasets with ordinal annotations to demonstrate its effectiveness. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hm9z41w Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Ehara, Yo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hg1c38d Medical relation extraction (MRE) is commonly known to extract entities and their relations jointly from a medical text, which has attracted much attention in recent years. Previous studies treat MRE as a sequence tagging task, which results in either a challenging design of the tagging schema or a failed extraction of multiple relations, due to intricate relationships among medical entities. In this work, we review the task from a linguistic perspective and propose a novel pipeline framework, PiPMRE, developed on language models to enhance MRE performance. Specifically, PiPMRE consists of a relation generator and a relation filter. Given a text, the generator first yields multiple relational triplets, and then the filter scores each triplet and retains only those that pass the borderline as the final results. Implementing PiPMRE requires no tagging schema, instead, we use a simple template to reformulate the input text while ensuring entities and relations are generated in contextual... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hg1c38d Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Duan, Jiaxin Lu, Fengyu Liu, Junfei https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9h04686p Do Large Language Models (LLMs) possess a Theory of Mind (ToM)? Research into this question has found that LLMs succeed on a range of benchmark tasks. However, these evaluations do not test for the actual representations posited by ToM: namely, a causal model of mental states and behavior. Here, we use a cognitively-grounded definition of ToM to develop and test a new evaluation framework. Specifically, our approach probes whether LLMs have a coherent, abstract, and consistent model of how mental states cause behavior—regardless of whether that model matches a human-like ToM. We test our evaluation against GPT-4o and find that even though it succeeds in approximating human judgments in a simple ToM paradigm, GPT-4o fails at a logically-equivalent task and exhibits low consistency between its action predictions and corresponding mental state inferences. As such, these findings suggest that GPT-4o's social proficiency is not the result of a ToM. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9h04686p Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Muchovej, John Royka, Amanda L Lee, Shane Jara-Ettinger, Julian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gs9v9qf Recent work has shown that producing memory ratings during study may lead to greater retention than practice testing in some circumstances (Higham, 2023). This may be related to a phenomenon called judgment of learning (JOL) reactivity, in which making immediate JOLs during study can enhance later recall. However, JOLs and testing have not been directly compared in a typical testing effect (TE) paradigm. This study compared passive restudy, study with immediate JOLs, and testing in a TE paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found no clear TE and only tentative JOL reactivity when word pairs were not semantically related. In Experiment 2, the associative strength of the word pairs was increased. A robust TE emerged along with weak JOL reactivity. Importantly, testing significantly outperformed JOL and passive restudy. These findings are among the first to suggest that semantic relatedness is crucial for the TE and clarify how JOLs compare to testing. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gs9v9qf Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Carranza, Alejandro Rickard, Tim C Geller, Emma H https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gr0v7rc This study investigates how interface differences affect willingness for social sharing of emotion with conversational AI depending on motives (cognitive support vs. social-affective support vs. capitalization), while comparing social sharing of emotion with humans. Perceived impressions (warmth and competence) are examined as correlates of willingness ratings. Data from 195 Japanese undergraduates were analyzed. The results showed that for social-affective and cognitive support motives, participants preferred text-based modality over voice-based modality, particularly text-based modality without an avatar. For the capitalization motive, participants preferred interfaces with avatars. Moreover, perceived warmth was positively related to willingness for social sharing with AI for social-affective support and capitalization motives, whereas perceived competence was positively related for cognitive and social-affective support motives. A different pattern of results was found for... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gr0v7rc Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Nozaki, Yuki https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gn7s8j6 Problem-solving often requires both acting on and gathering information from the environment. Prior work in psychology proposes that people are intrinsically motivated to seek information (Ryan and Deci, 2000; Ruggeri et al., 2021). However, in realistic settings most available information has no utility, so optimal performance requires estimating its value. We introduce a model that applies the Bayesian framework of Lidayan et al. (2024), which formalizes the value of information as the resulting increase in expected rewards. Our model calculates the utility of information-gathering actions and treats humans as noisy utility-maximizers. We design a novel task in which information sources vary in their likelihood of enabling downstream rewards. Preliminary results suggest our model predicts human behavior more accurately than intrinsic motivation models, suggesting that humans learn to estimate the value of information from experience, and use it to make better decisions. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gn7s8j6 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Lidayan, Aly Acerbi, Luigi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g42c17d Recent evidence suggests that Large Language Models (LLMs) display Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities. However, experiments with LLMs typically assess only *spectatorial* ToM, where LLMs merely predict other agents' behavior, rather than *planning*. In contrast, ToM in humans also contributes to dynamically *planning action* and *intervening* on others' mental states. We present a novel task of such a `planning theory of mind' (PToM), which requires agents to infer an interlocutor's beliefs and desires and persuade them to alter their behavior. We find that humans significantly outperform o1 (an LLM) at our task, even though o1 outperforms humans in a baseline condition which requires minimal mental state inferences. The results suggest that LLM performance at other ToM tasks may be attributable to simpler predictive abilities, while people excel at counterfactual planning when reasoning about others' behavior. Our paper is here: https://jaredmoore.org/mindgames https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g42c17d Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Moore, Jared Overmark, Rasmus Cooper, Ned Cibralic, Beba Haber, Nick Jones, Cameron R https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g0060nj This study investigated the relationships among infants' attention-following (AF) abilities, caregiver linguistic input, and early language development. Using longitudinal data from home observations (6–9 months) and structured lab assessments (9–12 months), we found that AF performance at 9–12 months was significantly correlated with receptive and expressive language scores at 12 months, though these associations weakened by 18 and 22 months. Caregiver attention-directing utterances were positively associated with both 6-month AF performance and 12-month language outcomes, although their frequency declined from 6 to 9 months, suggesting caregivers adjust their strategies as infants' AF skills develop. Although moderation analyzes did not reach statistical significance, trends indicate that higher levels of caregiver attention-directing speech might enhance the relationship between AF and language outcomes. These findings highlight the dynamic role of caregiver linguistic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g0060nj Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Tang, Yueyan Deak, Gedeon O https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f85r87f Why do certain past events resurface more often in our thoughts? This study investigates the factors influencing retrospective mind wandering, particularly concerning incomplete or unresolved experiences. We used a custom-designed game in which in-game events were systematically varied, then assessed participants' spontaneous recall of those events one week later. Results revealed that offline participants and those familiar with the experimenter were likelier to experience game-related mind-wandering. The strongest predictor of recall was the time spent engaged with the game, highlighting the importance of memory encoding strength. While individual rumination tendencies did not predict whether participants would recall the game, they did predict the frequency of such episodes among those who did. Thoughts centered on the game's protagonist over peripheral details, suggesting narrative salience. Based on these insights, we propose an initiation maintenance model of retrospective... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f85r87f Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Bhardwaj, Kshiteesh Srivastava, Nisheeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9dx164zg In order to fulfill goals, humans make use of cognitive control, which is a suite of processes to plan and manage thoughts and actions. One such process is response inhibition, which entails stopping a response when an action becomes inappropriate. Traditionally, response inhibition is measured in experimental settings in which humans have unilateral responsibility for inhibiting the action. However, in the real world, humans are increasingly sharing control with artificial intelligence (AI), with the paradigmatic case being partially automated vehicles. We designed an experiment that includes some aspects of partially automated vehicles and found that when humans share control with an AI that often but does not always stop, human response inhibition is significantly slowed even when the AI does not intervene. This reveals a cost of sharing control to human cognitive control, suggesting that the benefits of partial automation should be weighed against the costs of impaired human... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9dx164zg Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Bissett, Patrick G. Achyutuni, Kriti G Rios, Jaime Ali H. Jones, Henry M. Poldrack, Russell https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9c54h9kf Learning about complex, scientific topics often involves reading competing explanations posited by multiple disagreeing sources. This necessitates comprehending both explanations, understanding the extent of their disagreement, and determining which is more likely. In a series of three experiments, we investigated the role of features of explanations and their sources in readers' evaluations of the explanations. Specifically, we presented participants with pairs of disagreeing explanations that varied in their simplicity, the expertise of their source, and the salience of each feature. We examined the extent to which these features individually and interactively affected readers' evaluation of explanations, the causes they attributed to the disagreement, and curiosity about the topic of disagreement. We also examined the role of individual differences between readers, namely their prior topic knowledge and trust in science, in these outcomes. The findings inform theory about how... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9c54h9kf Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Harsch, Rina Miyata Kendeou, Panayiota https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99z8j19z Strategic actors often manipulate others' beliefs not by lying outright, but through selective truth-telling—also known as lying by omission or paltering—by withholding crucial details while avoiding falsehoods. For example, a pharmaceutical-funded investigator might truthfully report that some patients improved, while omitting that most did not. To guard against such selective disclosures, listeners must engage in epistemic vigilance: critically evaluating information in light of the speaker's potential agenda. In this work, we develop a Bayesian computational model of this process. We present three key findings: (1) credulous listeners who assume informative intent learn quickly in cooperative settings but are highly susceptible to persuasion; (2) vigilant listeners who account for potential bias more accurately recover the underlying true world states, even from purely persuasive speakers—albeit with slower convergence; and (3) this robustness stems from their ability... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99z8j19z Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Fang, Ke Hawkins, Robert Wu, Charley M Franke, Michael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99z3d0kg Skilled readers show faster and longer saccades as they move efficiently through text. While studies of adolescents are quite sparse, teens are assumed to have adult-like behavior with rapid developmental trajectory of the oculomotor parameters (Blythe, 2014; Rayner, 1998; 2009). Age and reading skill effects on saccadic behavior were examined in young adults and adolescents reading naturalistic multi-line texts. Eye movements were recorded from 113 college students and 52 adolescents, who read publicly available English language PROVO corpus. Participants' reading expertise was measured by vocabulary and reading comprehension tests. Linear mixed-effects regression models revealed that age interacted with reading expertise in how fast readers move through text (forward, regressive and return sweep saccades velocity). Age and vocabulary affected only teens. Individual differences emerged in a more heterogeneous population that is earlier on the developmental trajectory. The study... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99z3d0kg Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Stoops, Anastasia A Montag, Jessica L https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9882j4gz Dance is more than physical exercise; it integrates cognitive, emotional, and motor skills. This study investigated the role of dance in modulating response inhibition in emotional and non-emotional contexts. We compared dancers (N = 15) and non-dancers (N = 21) on two response inhibition tasks: the non-emotional stop-signal task (NESST) and the emotional stop-signal task ESST (examined inhibition in the presence of emotional distractors). Inhibitory control was similar between the dancers and non-dancers in the non-emotional stop-signal task. However, a significant interaction between group and emotion was observed in the ESST, which may indicate that irrelevant emotional information modulates inhibitory control differently in both groups. More specifically, stop signals with irrelevant emotional happy faces (compared to angry and neural) facilitated inhibitory control in dancers only. These findings suggest that dance training is associated with enhanced cognitive control in... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9882j4gz Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Mehta, Stuti Gupta, Rashmi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9859c0xc How do languages structure word classes, and is this organization arbitrary? This study explores groundedness--the degree of association between a word in an utterance and the meaning which the utterance describes--as a potential organizing factor. In particular, we look at visual groundededness, where meaning is approximated with an image, allowing tractable estimation with neural vision-and-language models. Prior work showed that nouns, adjectives, and verbs differ in groundedness cross-linguistically. We test whether groundedness describes the atypical word class structure in Japanese, where adjectives are split split into i-adjectives (formally verb-like) and na-adjectives (noun-like). Analyzing the Crossmodal-3600 dataset with the PaliGemma model, we find that na-adjectives exhibit significantly (p=0.029) higher visual groundedness, suggesting that the formal similarities of these classes to nouns and verbs reflect their semantics. This challenges the idea that linguistic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9859c0xc Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Haley, Coleman Goldwater, Sharon https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97t8k8w0 Rather than merely solving math problems, students that self-explain correct and incorrect worked examples increase their procedural knowledge and develop deeper conceptual understandings of key concepts. The present study is a large-scale test of the efficacy of the MathByExample intervention, which targets key math concepts and common misconceptions for students in 5th grade through correct and incorrect worked examples. Our cluster-randomized controlled trial included 42 schools (n = 830 5th grade students) across two cohorts. Preliminary results show effects in the predicted direction, students who received MathByExample exercises outperformed students in the control condition, yet the difference is not significant. Our poster will discuss possible explanations for the findings, discuss exploratory moderators (e.g., dosage received of MathByExample exercises), and include data from a third cohort for which data collection is currently ongoing. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97t8k8w0 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Davenport, Jodi Bartel, Anna Powers, Jacklyn Walters, Kirk Booth, Julie L. Huyghe, Allie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9798438q We demonstrate that inducing the construction of a coherent, biodiversity-conserving moral narrative about one's place in the world can have a lasting impact on pro-biodiversity behaviors. Across two studies (n=447 and n= 509), one-time under-40-minute interventions leveraging two basic cognitive constraints — coherence and causal invariance — led to increased intentions to take biodiversity-conserving actions (Phase 1) and subsequent self-reports of engagement in these actions assessed a year later (Study 2 Phase 2, n=344). This sustained impact contrasts sharply with the typically short-lived (< 2 weeks) effects of pro-environmental messaging. Participants completed exercises implementing the constraints to foster an expanded sense of self. Results show that the expanded self (e.g., agreement with "I imagine myself to be part of a larger cyclical process of living") mediated reports of engagement in biodiversity-supporting actions (e.g., donating to biodiversity organizations).... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9798438q Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Travis, Lisa Lee, Junho Cheng, Patricia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9796p914 Access to higher education (HE) is heralded as a pathway to social mobility and equity but remains elusive for Indigenous populations in high-income countries like the United States and Australia. Systemic racial inequities, deeply rooted in colonial histories, perpetuate barriers to HE access and attainment for Native American and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This essay employs a comparative analysis based on statistics and Indigenous policy frameworks, using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and marketisation as analytical lenses to interrogate these challenges. It examines how "Whiteness" shapes educational discourses and institutional practices, reinforcing exclusion and inequality. Key disparities are analyzed, including lower enrollment, geographic isolation, socio-economic disadvantage, and financial barriers. Contrasting outcomes—declining Native American enrollment in the U.S. versus rising Indigenous completion rates in Australia—underscore the importance... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9796p914 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Yingxiang https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96b0t3sw Previous code-switching research (Carter et al., 2010) demonstrates Spanish's tendency to be the matrix language and the involvement of the determiner-noun part of speech (PoS) combination in Spanish-English code-switching. This research, however, primarily uses the spoken Miami Bangor Corpus (MBC), limiting generalizability across speech communities/modalities. We examined the MBC (N=261,711), the spoken Spanish in Texas Corpus, STC (N=416,784), and the written LinCe Corpus, LC (N=278,093) to analyze language directionality and PoS effects across speech communities and modalities. Bootstrap analyses indicate that Spanish was the matrix language at a higher proportion than English for MBC and LC, but English was for STC. Logistic regression analyses show the particle-coordinating conjunction combination was the strongest PoS predictor of a code-switch. These results suggest that corpus modality and speech community both affect matrix language proportions and that previously unconsidered... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96b0t3sw Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Higdon, Joshua Pagliai, Valeria Liu, Zoey https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94j0g8qz Empathy was mainly considered a stable trait, and few studies have investigated whether it can vary across different situations. This investigation explores how contextual empathy of study participants varies across different social group relationship and positive/negative event valence. In this study, participants were divided into high- or low-empathy group by their scores of Empathy Scale. The in/out group membership was manipulated through a point estimation paradigm, and event valence was operationalized by the emotion status of the character in the story event. As expected, results showed main effects across all factors that participants demonstrated contextual empathy differently. More importantly, an ingroup bias is significantly emerged, with participants exhibiting enhanced contextual empathy toward ingroup than outgroup character. Furthermore, positive story events elicited more contextual empathic responses than negative events. These findings evidently provide an... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94j0g8qz Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Yen-Cheng Chen, Chen Jung Peng, Shu-Ling Huang, Po-Sheng Hu, Jon-Fan Hsu, Yi Ping Pi, Huan-Yu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9477q1vj Statistical learning (SL) is a domain-general learning mechanism necessary for multiple areas of cognitive development. The present study investigates whether children can simultaneously track temporal and spatial visual statistics and how individual differences in cognitive abilities and early language experience relate to SL. Fifty-eight hearing children aged 4–6 years (mean = 5.8) completed a novel visual SL paradigm, tracking the spatiotemporal statistics of four cartoon alien triplets. Cognitive control, receptive vocabulary, and auditory SL were also assessed to measure individual differences. Children achieved 56% accuracy on 2AFC test trials, performing above chance and demonstrating learning of complex patterns. For children under 6.5 years (n = 28), visual SL performance was positively associated with receptive vocabulary (r = 0.65) and cognitive control (r = 0.56). Future testing with deaf children in oral-speech or bilingual (ASL/English) programs will explore how... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9477q1vj Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 DiStefano, Jenna Foster, Rachel Munakata, Yuko Corina, David Graf Estes, Katharine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9468h8w2 Considering the effect of collaborative learning based on the Interactive-Constructive-Active-Passive (ICAP) theory, learners can deepen their understanding by engaging in interactive activities in which they elaborate their knowledge by integrating others' elaborated knowledge. However, it is unclear from the comparison between worked-out and erroneous worked-out examples whether they facilitate interactive and deepen understanding. Therefore, this study examines the effects of erroneous worked-out examples in collaborative learning. We employed a cognitive model based on Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) to present concept map examples based on learners' relevant knowledge. Errors were adopted link error because links are important for understanding knowledge. The results showed that the worked-out example improved learning performance, but did not facilitate the collaborative learning process. Moreover, the erroneous worked-out example enhanced learning performance... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9468h8w2 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Shimojo, Shigen Hayashi, Yugo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93k5t04h Pragmatic atypicality is widely considered to be a central characteristic of autism. This is often explained as a consequence of Theory of Mind deficits. However, this account is flawed and biased. In this paper, we revisit the Double Empathy Problem and provide an experience-first approach to autistic pragmatics. We start with proposing a mechanistic explanation of a link between experiential differences and intentionality understanding in linguistic contexts using the Interpretive Sensory Access theory. Then, we explain how theories of common ground in communication involve factors beyond intention recognition and even beyond cooperation, highlighting how the egocentric nature of communication is relevant to one's attention and experiences. Taken together, we put forward an experience-based approach to understand autistic pragmatic atypicalities. This view is compatible with many other non-linguistic characteristics well-documented in autism, and prioritizes the experience of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93k5t04h Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Xin, Yage G. Luo, Dezhi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9336h04j Recent research has challenged the belief that metacognition develops only in school age, providing evidence of basic metacognitive skills as early as 12 months (Goupil & Kouider, 2016). This emerging metacognition, however, raises the question of the variables that can influence its development, the involvement of very specific parent-child interactions being postulated (Gardier et al., 2024). Using a novel eye-tracking paradigm, we assessed metacognition in 55 18-month-old children through a forced-choice recognition task where eyes movements towards a cue were used as an indicator of metacognitive uncertainty while assessing the metacognitive richness of the parent's talk during a parent-child play session. In addition to providing further evidence of early metacognitive abilities, our results indicated that parents' utterances encouraging children to monitor their mental operations were positively associated with toddlers' metacognitive accuracy (OR=1.3). These findings... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9336h04j Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Gardier, Marion Geurten, Marie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92v791vv Despite extensive research on mentalization, few studies target the representations and the cognitive systems that underlie different mental state attributions. In two eye-tracking experiments with adults (n=32) and 19-month-old infants (n=24), we examined whether factive (knowledge, ignorance) and non-factive (false belief, true belief) mental state attributions belong to seperate representational systems, relying on the assumption that transfer within-system should occur faster than between-systems. Participants watched animated videos of an agent tracking a hidden ball that could hide in two locations, requiring mental state attribution updates from non-factive to either another non-factive or to a factive mental state. Saccadic reaction times (SRTs) to the ball's reappearance were measured. Results showed that both adults and infants had faster SRTs when updates occurred between two non-factive mental states compared to updates between a non-factive and a factive mental state.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92v791vv Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Kisp‡l, Anna Kovacs, Agnes https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92c9p4v1 Stimulating language learners' engagement is essential to successful second language acquisition, but it can be hard to translate this intuition into effective learning resources. In the first large scale investigation into the linguistic and pragmatic features that make an educational conversation interesting, we collected interest ratings for 64 conversations between teachers and second language learners of English. We provide proof of concept that - despite the high degree of subjectivity involved in perceptions of interest - it is possible to extract features that make a conversation interesting for the average learner. Specifically, concreteness, comprehensibility, and uptake (i.e., the degree to which a teacher and a student's turn build on one another) all had unique relations to interest in our data. These findings lay the foundations for future work on the optimization of AI tutors for more engaging language learning interactions. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92c9p4v1 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Parvatham, Mahathi Tan, Xingwei Pergola, Gabriele Gambi, Chiara https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91z9495z The relationship between language and general cognition is a key question in cognitive science. Statistical learning (SL)—the ability to extract environmental regularities without supervision—is considered a key contributor to language ability. Our study comprehensively assessed adults' language abilities (grammatical sensitivity, pragmatic comprehension, semantic prediction, violation processing), auditory and visual SL, and other cognitive functions (short-term memory, working memory, perceptual speed) to control for their effects on both language and SL. We hypothesized that auditory and visual SL would predict language abilities, with a stronger relationship for auditory SL. Surprisingly, visual SL was the best predictor of grammatical sensitivity and pragmatic comprehension, while semantic prediction and violation processing were not explained by general cognitive abilities. These results align with findings supporting a SL-language relationship and demonstrate that language... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91z9495z Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Lukics, Krisztina S‡ra Lukacs, Agnes https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91x3v371 Learning to read requires the integration of top-down and bottom-up processing of orthographic and phonological information. This study investigates how the dorsal and ventral inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG and vIFG) interact with posterior regions, including the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) and temporoparietal cortex (pSTG-SMG), during a visual word rhyming task. Using Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) on fMRI data from children aged 10 to 17 years, we examine directional influences among these regions under four conditions involving phonological and orthographic conflict and non-conflict. We hypothesize that dIFG exerts stronger top-down influence than vIFG, particularly under conditions of conflict. Additional hypotheses address the balance between top-down and bottom-up influences, region-specific effects of phonological and orthographic conflict, and the relationship between top-down modulation and reading skills. Data collection is complete, with 72 participants assessed,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91x3v371 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Jiuru Wagley, Neelima Booth, Dr. James https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91p2n1dc Letter-position encoding is one of the constituent processes in visual word recognition. While the existing models attempt to explain letter-position encoding in English & other European languages written using the Roman Script, letter-position encoding in Hindi written using the Devanagari Script has not been studied in detail. Given that Hindi is spoken/read by over 520 million people in India and the unique properties of the Devnagari Script (Vaid & Gupta, 2002; Kandhadai & Sproat, 2010; Share et al., 2015), the current study sought to investigate letter-position encoding in Hindi. 66 participants performed a lexical decision task that employed six-prime conditions to compare hypotheses from a) the position-specific coding scheme, b) local context sensitive coding scheme and the c) position overlap coding scheme. Interestingly, the results showed that none of the aforementioned coding schemes could satisfactorily explain the obtained data. These findings may be used... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91p2n1dc Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Kumar, Suraj Khare, Anurag Verma, Ark https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91h6d0nv Social robots increasingly mimic human traits. When a human-like robot (an android) seems to engage with music, a universal human behavior, how do people judge its social attributes? Musical engagement can enhance the android's perceived human-likeness, which may increase affinity but also trigger discomfort (the uncanny valley effect). In Experiment 1 (N =192), an android showed apparent musicality through movement-music synchronization (vs uncoordinated; or without music). In Experiment 2 (N=160), we manipulated musicality by adding (vs. not adding) headphones during movement – implying the presence of music participants could not hear. In both, participants rated the android with higher apparent musicality as warmer, more competent, and eliciting less discomfort (all p's<0.01, measured by the RoSAS scale; Carpinella et al., 2017). These findings show that human perception of androids is impacted by cognitive schemas about and attribution of musicality, which can be inferred... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91h6d0nv Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Lin, Chaolan Schachner, Adena https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9156c5st Studies in speech perception have consistently found that the perceived duration of a syllable is significantly influenced by the dynamics of the contour of its fundamental frequency (f0). Syllables with a dynamic f0 contour are perceived as longer than those with a flat f0, even though their acoustic duration is identical; high f0 syllables are perceived as longer than low f0 syllables of the same acoustic duration. Yet, while some listeners exhibit the expected perceptual normalization patterns, others show no f0-induced perceptual adjustments. This study investigates the neural foundation for this individual variability by examining listeners' scalp-recorded frequency-following response (FFR), a measure of phase-locked auditory encoding in humans that has been used to study subcortical processing in the auditory system. Our findings reveal that the FFR predicts listeners' duration estimation performance in different f0 contexts. Additionally, the FFR predicts the magnitude... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9156c5st Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Tung, Tzu-Yun Yu, Alan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90b3p03b How cultural experience affects visual perception is a question of outstanding interest to debates regarding universality and cultural-specificity in human cognition. Yet, work comparing visual perception in 'typical' urban, industrialized samples with groups living in rural environments, typical for 99% of our species' history is strikingly limited (Deregowski, 2017). Here we more than double the total number of paradigms (visual illusions) in this literature, reporting data from 1) a 'typical' UK/US urban sample 2) a developing Namibian town 3) rural Namibian villages. Results reveal profound differences in visual processing, including aspects previously assumed to be universal (e.g. amodal completion in Gestalt shapes, line perception in the Cafe wall illusion). In contrast to recent arguments for the limited role of cultural experience in visual perception (Amir & Firestone, 2025), the present work indicates that a major research program in CCVS is warranted to capture... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90b3p03b Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Kroupin, Ivan Davis, Helen Elizabeth Lopes, Aparicio Jose Paredes Konkle, Talia Muthukrishna, Michael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9048k7md This study challenges traditional East-West dichotomies in cross-linguistic cognition by examining event construal preferences across English, Chinese, and Japanese speakers. We investigated how 90 participants (30 per language group) described visual stimuli depicting agent-patient interactions with varying animacy types. Statistical analysis revealed that Chinese speakers' construal patterns aligned with English speakers (p>.05), contrasting sharply with Japanese speakers despite China's cultural proximity to Japan. Both English and Chinese groups demonstrated greater flexibility in perspective-taking across all agent types (human>animal>object), while Japanese speakers showed significantly stronger constraints with inanimate agents (p<.0001). These findings suggest that grammatical flexibility in encoding perspectives, rather than cultural grouping, shapes cognitive preferences in event description. Our results indicate that linguistic structures may influence cognition... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9048k7md Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Luo, Siyu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9027m2dc Human communication is shaped by various factors, including linguistic structure, social context, and cognitive capacity. Among these, emotion plays a pivotal role in significantly influencing message delivery and reception. While emotional impact is prominent in social media posts, its effect in extended-format, information-rich communication, such as TED Talks, is less understood. This study focuses on six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) and examines their effects on TED Talk popularity using the NRC Emotion Lexicon and a BERT-based sentiment analysis model. Our findings reveal a stark contrast between social media and TED Talks: most emotions, including high-arousal emotions, have no significant effect on TED Talk viewership, and in some cases, intense emotional expressions negatively impact views. This study highlights the limited role of emotions in extended-format communication and underscores the importance of appropriate emotional expressions,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9027m2dc Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Jingyi Fu, Shuhao Dale, Rick Gao, Tao Liang, Junying https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90067717 Despite the popularity of MOOC, only a small percentage of course participants complete the course. Learners' confusion is one of the factors that impacts the overall learning process and ultimately leads to course attrition. However, extensive exchange of reviews often creates chaos, resulting in 'confusion' posts that can easily be ignored. To this end, we create a labeled dataset for post-type classification and use the public Stanford MOOCPosts dataset to detect learning confusion. We propose a hierarchical multi-task learning framework that combines post-type and confusion degree classification using fine-tuned BERT models and virtual adversarial training. Our model performs with an accuracy of 89\% and an F1 score of 88\%. Additionally, we integrate interpretability techniques to further enhance model transparency. This framework equips instructors with tools to identify and address learning confusion effectively. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90067717 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Zhao, Tongyu Gao, Jiaying Zu, Yatong Tavares, Adriano Gomes, Tiago Pinto, Sandro Xu, Hao https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zt989kp Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have replaced conventional interface designs with prompt-based natural language interactions. LLMs exhibit dynamic capabilities to fulfill a broad range of tasks and ad-hoc functionalities (e.g., "rewrite these appliance installation instructions for a five-year-old"). However, their open-ended interface replaces Norman's gulf of execution with a new cognitive challenge for end-users; namely, the gulf of envisioning clear intentions and task descriptions in prompts to obtain a desired LLM response. To address this gap, we propose a cognitive model of the Envisioning process based on protocols of generative AI prompt-based interactions. The model highlights three cognitive challenges people face when requesting help from LLMs: (1) what the task should be (intentionality gap), (2) how to give instructions to do the task (instruction gap), and (3) what to expect in the LLM's output (capability gap). We make recommendations to narrow the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zt989kp Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Subramonyam, Hariharan Seifert, Colleen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zb7b8j7 Abstract concepts are a hallmark of human cognition and culture. However, there is debate over how they are cognitively represented, and how they emerge and become conventionalized within a community. One influential approach is that abstract concepts are based on conceptual metaphors. This study investigates the emergence and conventionalization of abstract concepts and metaphors in an experimental-semiotic referential communication game in which participants communicate abstract concepts and metaphors via drawing. The study sheds light on the different strategies participants use to evoke abstract concepts and shows that participants decrease the number of strategies they use over subsequent rounds of interaction, converging on more successful strategies and thereby initiating a joint process of conventionalization. Acknowledgements: This research is part of the project No. 2021/43/P/HS2/02729 co-funded by the National Science Centre and the European Union Framework Programme... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zb7b8j7 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Namednikava, Darya Placi_ski, Marek Pleyer, Michael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z9392cx This study reports a counterintuitive reversal of Thorndike's Law of Effect in human sequential decision-making. Participants in a parlay gambling task chose between banking their current wager or betting it on a risky gamble, where winning would increase the next wager while losing or banking would reset it. We observed improving payoffs across runs, indicating learning. However, contradictory to the Law of Effect, participants were more likely to choose betting after losses rather than wins. We further developed computational models incorporating prospect theory and reinforcement learning. Consistent with our model-free analyses, models incorporating reverse updating of subjective probabilities (negative learning rate) not only significantly outperformed traditional learning models in fitting human data, but also led to higher payoff than models with positive learning rate. These findings highlights the complexity and adaptability of human learning, despite not fitting within... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z9392cx Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Yankun Zhang, Xu-Yang Zhang, Hang Su, Yunai Si, TianMei https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z71h89q This is a first exploration into a newly identified reasoning error. We explore normative (derived from Bayes' rule) and naïve (empirical data) evaluations of how order of reliability within chains of evidence (e.g., hearsay testimony) impacts overall evidential value. In a novel paradigm, we swap the position of two witnesses within the chain to determine the effect of order, when these witnesses differ in their reliability. First, a probabilistic (Bayesian) assessment is provided, including both quantitative and qualitative explanations. Second, lay reasoner qualitative intuitions are measured, using Bayesian predictions as a benchmark for accuracy. Lay reasoners significantly deviate from Bayesian predictions. Three quarters (75.41%) made an error when evaluating order effects in hearsay testimony, with 49.18% wrongly concluding that order has no impact. Only 24.59% correctly judged that the preferential order had greatest evidential value. We illustrate how hearsay testimony... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z71h89q Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Phillips, Kirsty Hahn, Ulrike https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xz037c6 In a preregistered experiment, adults living in the United States (N = 700) expected family (here, siblings) to be more likely to reconcile than friends after a conflict. To a greater extent, participants reported that siblings (vs. friends) have to reconcile and failing to do so would be less morally permissible. Further, participants expected love between siblings to be negatively affected to a lesser extent than love between friends who experienced the same conflict. We also explored potential generational differences, and found that Baby Boomers (people born in the years 1946–1964) reported that family members were significantly more obligated to reconcile than did Millennials (people born in the years 1981–1996). Our findings indicate that ties to family members are especially anticipated and obliged to persist through thick and thin. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xz037c6 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Tompkins, Rodney Yang, Chuyi Vasquez, Katie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xt2f33c This study investigates the role of memory mechanisms in the emergence of communication by comparing two instance-based learning models: one implemented using the ACT-R cognitive architecture and the other using PyIBL, a lightweight framework based on Instance-Based Learning Theory. Both models were tested on a simulated communication task requiring agents to coordinate actions message exchange using abstract symbols. The ACT-R model, featuring an explicit goal-representation module and precise memory structure, led to faster formation of communication system and more successful task performance. In contrast, the PyIBL model showed delayed emergence of communication system, attributed to its simplified memory representation and difficulty in imitation during the task. These results suggest that detailed goal representation and mechanisms for self-other distinction play a critical role in communication development. The study also demonstrates the potential of cognitive modeling... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xt2f33c Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Sasaki, Kenya Morita, Junya https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xb6q07s A hallmark of human intelligence is not only the capacity to learn from the environment, but also the ability to adapt the learning process itself in response to changing demands. This meta-learning ability, known as "learning to learn," has been extensively studied in cognitive science and artificial intelligence for decades. While task-optimized recurrent neural networks have offered qualitative accounts of biological learning-to-learn, they fall short in capturing the individual and temporal variability inherent in human decision making. To investigate how humans adjust their learning strategies over time, we introduce a neural network model that estimates dynamic changes in subjects' reinforcement learning (RL) parameters. Across four bandit tasks, we find that RL parameters change over time, indicating that humans continuously adapt their decision-making strategies at both the trial and block levels. These parameter updates are associated with greater rewards and align with... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xb6q07s Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Xiong, Hua-Dong LI, JIAN Mattar, Marcelo G Wilson, Robert https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xb5g9qw Mutual exclusivity (ME), the tendency to map novel words to unfamiliar referents, can support children's word learning (e.g., Markman & Wachtel, 1988). A recent study (in prep) demonstrated that 4-year-old English-speaking children show a weaker ME effect for novel verbs than nouns, consistent with evidence that verbs are harder to learn (e.g., Gentner, 1982). Here, we replicated this study in adults. Adults viewed videos (verb trials) or static images (noun trials), one familiar and one unfamiliar, and selected the best match for a novel verb or noun. Adults applied ME for both verbs and nouns, but significantly less for verbs (z = 4.073, p = 0.0003). Adults also had longer reaction times (β = 471.25, p < 0.0001) and lower confidence ratings (β = -7.035, p < 0.0001) for verbs than nouns. Thus, less use of ME for verbs stems from something about event conceptualization rather than child development. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xb5g9qw Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Cui, Panpan Arunachalam, Sudha https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x7821tz Individuals receive information about risk mainly via two ways: description, which provides explicit outcomes and associated probabilities of available choice options; and experience, where individuals interact with the choice options and receive feedback from their choices. In the current work, we investigate how the presence of descriptions in a risky experience-based task influenced choice behaviour and memory of past outcomes. Participants made repeated choices in either an experience-only condition or a description-plus-experience condition, where descriptions were presented alongside feedback. They were more risk seeking in the description-plus-experience condition than in the experience-only condition, particularly in the domain of losses. This suggests that descriptions have an asymmetric effect, exerting a stronger influence in loss contexts. While the presence of descriptions did not eliminate memory biases (i.e., overweighting the best and worst experienced outcomes),... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x7821tz Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 SUN, ZEPENG Weiss-Cohen, Leonardo Ludvig, Elliot Andrew Konstantinidis, Emmanouil https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wh5b3qx The impact of hormone contraceptives on cognitive function in young women remains a topic of ongoing debate, with inconsistent findings across studies. While some research suggests a beneficial effect on cognitive performance, others report no effect. The variability in these reports may be due to the different types of hormone contraceptives available, each potentially influencing memory differently. The present study examined the effects of progesterone-only contraceptives and combined hormone contraceptives (consisting of estrogen and progesterone) on spatial memory performance using the landmark memory task in young women (18-25 years old). Results indicate no significant differences in landmark memory task scores between naturally cycling women and those using hormone contraceptives. There were also no differences in spatial task scores between women using progesterone-only contraceptives and those using combined hormone contraceptives. These findings suggest that the use... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wh5b3qx Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Harburger, Lauren Palmiotto, Joseph J. Valdovinos, Litzy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8w316459 Iconicity refers to a resemblance between the form of a signal and its meaning. Examples include spoken words that imitate sound based meanings (i.e., onomatopoeia; e.g., "splash") or representational gestures (e.g., a holding the hands far apart to indicate "large"). Caregivers use iconic cues when talking to their children, however, the potential of these cues for successful word-referent mapping across communicative contexts remains unclear. This study examined the effectiveness of iconic cues when referents were physically present or absent. Using the Human Simulation Paradigm, 320 adult participants watched naturalistic videos of a parent and child discussing objects, with all utterances of a target referent "beeped". Participants' task was to guess the referent. We found that iconic cues improved accuracy when the target was absent. This supports their function of bringing referents "the to the mind's eye" in displaced contexts. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8w316459 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Sidhu, David M Krason, Anna Brekelmans, Gwen Khatchatoorian, Nareg Vigliocco, Gabriella https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vz352cz The human brain represents structure in the external world as "cognitive maps". However, it remains unknown how it represents structure in one's own behaviour. Recent findings show rodent medial-prefrontal cortex (mPFC) does this with a structure-sensitive representation, where all future actions are represented simultaneously. Here, using 7T fMRI, we test for this representation and its properties in humans. Using RSA and a computational model, we show this representation in mPFC and orbitofrontal cortex, while entorhinal and orbitofrontal cortices contain a pure abstraction of task structure. Preceding the future actions representation, action plans are ‘loaded' to mPFC once subjects were given all action-relevant information, suggestively through replay. iEEG data of patients solving the same task shows that sharp-wave ripple rate is increased during this planning time. Together, our findings suggest an algorithm of how human mPFC encodes future actions, and provide evidence... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vz352cz Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 KŸchenhoff, Svenja Baram, Alon El-Gaby, Mohamady SablŽ-Meyer, Mathias Harris, Adam Bakermans, Jacob Shah, Shraddha Bartoli, Eleonora Watrous, Andrew Anand, Adrish Donoghue, Thomas Maesta-Pereira, Sandra Topalovic, Uros Sakon, John Smith, Elliot H https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vw6p3n7 Learning abstract concepts is a core component of human cognition, yet remains challenging for artificial intelligent. We present a computational model that investigates whether abstract categories can be acquired through shared perceptual features, using a Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Model (CBM) trained to induce basic-level concepts using shared features. Concepts are represented through intermediate concepts layer, enabling the model to form grounded representations of basic-level categories. To evaluate conceptual robustness beyond surface-level accuracy, we conduct a series of generalization and ablation experiments. These assess whether the model forms robust conceptual representations rather than merely mapping inputs to labels. Our results show that the CBM achieves high accuracy on a dataset comprising four basic-level classes and twelve subordinate Image-Net subclasses, while also yielding interpretable intermediate representations. This framework demonstrates that... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vw6p3n7 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Xie, Haodong Wang, Xuena Maharjan, Rahul Singh Tavella, Federico Cangelosi, Angelo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vh2c9gh Human solutions to the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) have been proposed to employ heuristics integrating global and local spatial information (Pizlo et al., 2006). Because different neuroanatomical regions may be involved in local vs. global processing, as well as attentional shift between levels, performance on the TSP may provide useful insight into changes that occur in the brain as a result of age or of neurodegenerative disorders (Slavin, 2002). In a previous study, we compared the performance of healthy adults in conditions that varied the availability of global cues. Surprisingly, our results indicated excellent performance on configurations requiring global information, even in conditions that masked these cues. The current study uses eyetracking to examine target fixations during the TSP. The question was whether participants compensate for the presence of distractor cues by constructing a mental outline of the configuration before selecting a route. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vh2c9gh Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Levy, Kanan Majmudar, Riya Paganini, Isabella Blaser, Rachel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sz9g3qr While a growing body of work has aimed to extract spatio-temporal units directly from speech articulatory data, there have been few attempts to probe whether such representations capture phonological contrasts employed in language and to model the mapping between motor plans and phonological representations. This study employs a joint factor analysis and neural convolutive matrix factorization framework to a multi-speaker real-time MRI dataset of vocal tract contours. The framework generates both gestures, the spatio-temporal units that form a given utterance, and gestural scores, which detail the activation of individual gestures in time. Probing of the gestural scores shows some ability to capture phonological distinctions, suggesting that such information is encoded by the model. The gestures, however, show poor discriminability along crucial phonological dimensions, likely limited by cross-speaker spatial variability. The results highlight the difficulties in cross-speaker... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sz9g3qr Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Foley, Sean https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ss809vr Why do we give the explanations we do? Recent work has suggested that we should think of explanation as a kind of cooperative social interaction, between a why-question-asker and an explainer. Here, we apply this perspective to consider the role emotion plays in this social interaction. We develop a computational framework for modeling explainers who consider the emotional impact an explanation might have on a listener. We test our framework by modeling human intuitions about how a doctor should explain to a patient why they have a disease, depending on the patient's propensity for regret. Our model predicts human intuitions well, better than ablations suggestive that people do indeed reason about emotion when giving explanations. See https://sites.google.com/view/empathy-in-explanation for further details and pre-print. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ss809vr Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Collins, Katherine M Chandra, Kartik Ragan-Kelley, Jonathan Weller, Adrian Tenenbaum, Joshua B. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sp3f4cs Gestures and silent pauses are integral to the pragmatic, semantic, and temporal organization of speech. However, how gesture inhibition affects silent pauses in emotional context remains unexplored. This study examined how narrative type and gesture conditions affect (a) the distribution of silent pauses [short (250–500 ms), medium (500–1000 ms), and long (>1000 ms)], measured by frequency, average duration, and time ratio, while controlling for speech rate, and (b) self-reported emotional intensity. Thirty participants (Mage=20.61) narrated negative (sadness, fear, anger) and neutral (daily routine) experiences in Hindi-English under gesture-restricted (N=15) and gesture-free (N=15) conditions. A significant main effect of narrative type was found: short pauses increased in neutral narratives under the gesture-free condition, and long pauses increased in negative narratives under the gesture-restricted condition. No significant effect of gesture condition or interaction... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sp3f4cs Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Jain, Riya Ojha, Amitash https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sk663vb Embodied cognition theory posits cognition as fundamentally situated within and enacted through the affective and physical body and environment. Grounding in this theoretical perspective, we investigate learners' fluctuations in arousal state in the context of a math pedagogical tool, Balance Board Math, that invites children to explore concepts through bodily movement on rockable boards. Balance Board Math's design invites bodily movement as both a means to explore mathematical concepts and as a means to provide affectively-regulating sensory input to the vestibular (balance) sense. In this pilot analysis, we explore data collected with electrodermal activity wristbands (N = 9017 from 6 participants) to examine how their arousal states varied in relation to their cognitive-affective-physical activity as they explored and learned concepts through Balance Board Math movement-based activities. Using a mixed-effects regression model, we analyze how bodily rocking movements with different... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sk663vb Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Fukun Evelene Tancredi, Sofia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sb108vj To predict and prepare for near-future outcomes, infants must respond to the variability in their probability. Adults achieve that with modal concepts that quantify over multiple possibilities, but whether and how infants can do the same is unclear. In two preregistered habituation experiments, we asked whether infants can distinguish outcomes based on physical probability level (100% vs. 66% in Experiment 1. 66% vs. 33% in Experiment 2). 12-month-olds were habituated to events with 66% probability, and their proportion of looking at 100% (Exp 1., N=35) and 33% (Exp 2., N=24) events were measured before (i.e., baseline) and after habituation (i.e., test). We found that infants' proportion of looking at events with 33% probability (in Exp 2), but not at events with 100% probability (in Exp 1), increased from baseline to test. Thus, 12-month-olds distinguish likely events from unlikely ones but not from necessary events. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sb108vj Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Esmer, Åžeref Cesana-Arlotti, Nicolo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rs6b2kf Human-AI Integrated Learning (HAI-IL) reconceptualizes collaborative cognition through a four-layer constructivist framework (self, cognitive, interaction, external), demonstrating how adaptive co-evolution occurs across cognitive, decision-making, and feedback dimensions. Where traditional learning systems separate human and machine roles, HAI-IL establishes interdependent symbiosis: Externally, learners operate as unified human-AI entities (Hybrid-intelligence), while internally, AI functions as cognitive extensions rather than replacements. A self-regulation mechanism driving Ethical Dual-Spiral (human chain and AI chain) Regulation ensures alignment between human values and AI operations, dynamically monitoring system outputs against "AI for Social Good" principles. Our findings reveal this framework enhances proactive human agency while enabling neural-like adaptability in AI agents. The model demonstrates particular efficacy in multiple-fields, where HAI-IL mitigates workforce... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rs6b2kf Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Long https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rq916zg Parental mental health subclinical features, such as stress, anxiety, and depression, have been reported to significantly influence the dynamics of parent-infant interaction, which sets the stage for early attention, learning, and social communication development. However, less is known about the influence of cognitive and social features, such as those related to broad autism phenotype (BAP) traits, despite their documented impact on attention control and sensory processing. The present study examines how parental BAP traits may relate to parent-infant interaction by focusing on their behaviors, using head-mounted eye-tracking to provide objective measures. Results indicated that BAP traits were related to rates of parent sustained attention and object handling but did not predict infants' sustained attention during the interaction. The findings of variability in parental play behaviors based on BAP traits raise important questions regarding the direct impact of parental characteristics... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rq916zg Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Perkovich, Elizabeth Yoshida, Hanako https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8pn150pf Pragmatic accommodation is a key factor in maintaining smooth real-life communication, yet it is largely overlooked in pragmatic reasoning models such as the Rational Speech Act (RSA) model. The current study explores ways of extending the basic RSA model: revising the listener's belief of common ground, adjusting the listener's belief of speaker rationality, and doing both simultaneously. We evaluated model predictions for utterances varying in utility levels (i.e., how useful an utterance is for state updating) and sentence polarities. We find that (i) contra prior findings, low utility does not always trigger the expected extra inferences, but high utility does, (ii) higher utility is associated with higher speaker rationality, and (iii) our combined model predicts that lower speaker rationality and lower wonkiness co-occur. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8pn150pf Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 He, Muxuan Kaiser, Elsi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8pk85092 People rarely face the same problem twice, but many problems are similar. What strategies do people discover when solving similar problems, and what is the impact of that experience on how they approach new ones? Here we investigated how people's strategies changed over time while solving sets of related visual reasoning problems. Participants (N=42) were given a sequence of "tangram" puzzles to solve, which could be reconstructed either exclusively with small pieces or with a special large piece to reconstruct the tangram in fewer moves. Later, participants attempted puzzles where a different large piece was helpful instead, so we could measure the impact of prior experience on how they approached puzzles favoring a different strategy. We found that participants reconstructed tangrams more quickly over time, and generally used the appropriate large piece for the problem at hand, reflecting their ability to flexibly adapt their strategies to new problems. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8pk85092 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Anderson, Sean P. Wong, Lionel Bowers, Maddy L Fan, Judith E. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8p43d4kd Children must learn individual word meanings and the semantic connections among words. Prior work has probed children's sensitivity to different semantic relations, but little is known about how this knowledge develops. This study examined whether parents and children jointly created semantic regularities in naturalistic everyday interactions. Forty-four parents and their toddlers (M = 20.4 months, range: 13.2-31 months) participated in a 10-minute free play session with 27 toys from three categories (food, animals, vehicles) while wearing head-mounted eye-trackers. Children's looking from one object to another was categorized as a same category (e.g., dog-cat) or different category (e.g., dog-car) transition, revealing temporal sequences of semantically related toy play: Children were more likely to transition between objects from the same category and heard more unique words from the same category during these toy transitions. Together, these findings demonstrate that parents... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8p43d4kd Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Knabe, Melina Lauryn Yu, Chen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8p28j1h9 Young adulthood is a high-risk period for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), often linked to reduced neural responses to positive stimuli, as measured by Late Positive Potentials (LPP). This study examines the connection between childhood experiences, parental bonding, and emotional sensitivity in adulthood. Participants (n=65), without a current MDD, completed assessments on depressive symptoms (BDI-II), adverse childhood experiences (ACE), and parental bonding (PBI). Participants viewed positive, negative, and neutral images while EEG data were collected to measure LPP. Key findings showed that higher depressive symptoms (BDI-II) were associated with increased LPP to negative and decreased LPP to positive images. Higher ACE scores correlated with lower LPP to positive images. Additionally, greater parental care (PBI-Care subscale) was linked to increased LPP to positive and decreased LPP to negative images. The PBI-Overprotection subscale was not a significant factor. The study... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8p28j1h9 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Bernardis, Paolo Angeleri, Romina Dell'Acqua, Carola Messerotti Benvenuti, Simone Marchetti, Igor https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nt9d5zd Narratives and storytelling are proposed to be essential means through which humans acquire, preserve and transmit information about their environment. The current project investigated narrative transmission in the context of a multi-armed bandit task; an experimental paradigm that simulates an uncertain exploration-exploitation environment. Following the task, participants taught the next generation of players how to find rewards in the task by writing the ending to a folktale about two foragers, one explorer and one exploiter, living in the same environment. Preliminary analyses indicate that whether participants chose to transmit a story that encouraged exploration, exploitation, both strategies, or neither, was best predicted by individual differences. Reported strategy or actual behaviour and performance in the task were not key predictors. Future study plans include investigating how performance, behaviour and narrative transmission preferences are affected by receiving... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nt9d5zd Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Moore, Isobel Mollica, Francis Kashima, Yoshihisa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n55g1dk Directive Speech Acts (DSAs), encoded by the imperative mood, exhibit various interpretations across languages, including acquiescence, advice, requests, and commands (Searle 1979; Wilson & Sperber; Kaufmann 2012). This many-to-one relationship between form and meaning raises the key cognitive question: how do speakers disambiguate these interpretations? This study examines the role of intonation in Greek imperatives, focusing on Nuclear Pitch Accent placement and boundary tones within the autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology (Pierrehumbert 1980; Ladd 1996; Arvaniti & Baltazani 2005). Recordings were controlled to isolate linguistic cues provided by prosody while minimizing extralinguistic prosodic cues related to the speaker's emotional state. Preliminary findings indicate that a rising boundary tone consistently signals a request interpretation, whereas a combination of NPA and a falling boundary tone suggests weak permission. A follow-up study incorporating... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n55g1dk Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Oikonomou, Despina Tsakali, Vina Paraskevi Iliopoulou, Katerina Gatsou, Maria Vassileiou, Benedict https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n12679x Fantasy/symbolic play is central to theories of child cognitive development (Piaget 1962; Pellegrini 1985; Leslie 1987; Francis & Gibson 2022). Most studies suggest that children distinguish pretense from reality by their second year, though the cognitive mechanisms involved remain debated (Leslie 1987). Fantasy play is also linked to language development, including early literacy and metalinguistic awareness (Pellegrini & Galda 1982, 1991; Pellegrini 1984; Orr & Geva 2015). Garvey & Kramer (1989) identify two communicative levels in symbolic play: (i) enactment and (ii) emplotment. This study examines the grammar used by L1 Greek children while setting up scenes and giving instructions. Based on novel naturalistic data from 55 recorded sessions with 14 children (aged 2;7–6;4), we show that by 2;7, children produce counterfactual scenarios with a light verb meaning ‘pretend'. By 5;0, they employ counterfactual morphological marking in symbolic play before using... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n12679x Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Oikonomou, Despina Tsakali, Vina Paraskevi Gatsou, Maria Vassileiou, Benedict Kaniadaki, Mary Karatzanou, Danai Amanaki, Irini https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mt6b86j People can assist others even without knowledge of their specific goals. However, this ability remains a challenge for artificial intelligence, limiting the development of assistive technologies. This issue is particularly important in caregiving, where rather than focusing on helping with a particular task, one may aim to improve the broad autonomy of the care recipient. One promising approach to care that does not require goal inference is to maximize the empowerment of another. Empowerment is a computational measure of one's ability to control their environment. Prior work on empowerment assumes one-to-one interactions, overlooking the fact that assistive technologies are often deployed in multi-agent environments that may include caregivers or family members. Here, we show that optimizing for one person's empowerment may inadvertently disempower others. Finally, we develop and test multi-agent extensions of empowerment that enable an assistant to empower one person without... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mt6b86j Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Yang, Claire Y Cakmak, Maya Kleiman-Weiner, Max https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k14v3n8 When talking about the world in front of us, humans are remarkably efficient communicators. Our referential expressions help listeners efficiently find what we're talking about by strategically adding color or material words. But most conversations involve things not physically in front of us. In these cases, do we also use language to efficiently help a listener retrieve an item from memory? Across two experiments, we asked participants to describe images to help a listener recall them. In Experiment 1 (n = 600), participants spontaneously incorporated expectations about memorability by providing more description for images they expected to be less memorable. People's descriptions aligned more with subjective memorability estimates rather than objective, empirically-derived metrics. In Experiment 2 (n = 300), we replicated this pattern even when participants had no access to their listener's prior experience. Together, this work provides evidence that speakers spontaneously guide... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k14v3n8 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Suwal, Urvi Morris, Ben Lin, Qi Rubio-Fern‡ndez, Paula Jara-Ettinger, Julian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jt332w6 This study investigated how the length of AI-generated text explanations in Japanese influences trust and acceptance in a route selection task, a subjective decision-making task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that AI explanations increased trust and acceptance compared with no explanation; however, there was no significant difference between the effects of 100- and 300-character explanations. Experiment 2 further explored the threshold of explanation length by including 50- and 1,000-character explanations. The results showed that 300- and 1,000-character explanations increased acceptance compared to 50-character explanations; however, no differences emerged among the 100-, 300-, and 1,000-character explanations. Additionally, trust ratings were unaffected by explanation length. These results suggest that AI explanations have a threshold; in this study, AI explanations exceeding 100 characters in Japanese (approximately 50 words in English) did not lead to further changes in users'... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jt332w6 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Maehigashi, Akihiro Yamada, Seiji https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jg914pg Although students' difficulties with percentages are well-known and crucial for daily life, their underlying causes remain unclear. The present study aimed to address this gap by systematically analyzing basic characteristics of percentage problems---with a focus on answer (e.g., open-ended vs. multiple-choice) and problem (e.g., mere calculation vs. word problems) formats. We first evaluated potential biases in the frequency distributions of specific answer and problem formats, before analyzing their association with students' performance, leveraging a naturalistic large-scale data set (\textgreater18,000 students; 1.5 million problems). Students were most frequently confronted with the most difficult answer and problem format, with more than half of all percentage problems formulated as word problems using an open-ended answer format. In contrast, problems including visualizations were least common even though they were performed best. We conclude that higher frequencies of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jg914pg Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Richter, Eileen Moeller, Korbinian Spitzer, Markus https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8h20t77n During conversation, individual speakers become part of a larger conversational system. This is observable in interpersonal coordination, variously described as alignment, synchrony, convergence, and complexity matching. While this coordination is ubiquitous, the degree of coordination varies greatly between conversations, interlocutors, and group-level goals. There is growing interest in understanding the constraints that operate at the level of the conversational system. We explore how social distance, the status and demographic differences of conversation partners, constrain linguistic alignment. To do this, we leverage the CANDOR dataset (Reece et al., 2022), which contains 1656 approximately half-hour ZOOM conversations between strangers and a large battery of follow-up questions regarding their conversation, personality, and demographic information including perceptions of status. In this exploratory study, we use recurrence analysis to examine how various coordinative behaviors,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8h20t77n Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Heath, David Huette, Stephanie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gw5j9kf Knowing the truth is rarely enough---we also seek out reasons why the fact is true. While much is known about how we explain contingent truths, we understand less about how we explain facts, such as those in mathematics, that are true as a matter of logical necessity. We present a framework, based in computational complexity, where explanations for deductive truths co-emerge with discoveries of simplifying steps during the search process. When such structures are missing, we revert, in turn, to error-based reasons, where a (corrected) mistake can serve as fictitious, but explanatory, contingency-cause: not making the mistake serves as a reason why the truth takes the form it does. We simulate human subjects, using GPT-4o, presented with SAT problems of varying complexity and reasonableness, validating our theory and showing how its predictions can be tested in future human studies. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gw5j9kf Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 DeDeo, Simon Kardes, Gulce https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gv2b7vr Spatial abilities are relevant to scientific achievement, yet little is known regarding development of spatial abilities among adolescence. This study thus examines the development of spatial abilities during adolescence, and how different spatial abilities differentially predict science achievement. Over 1,006 students from grades 4, 6, and 8 were assessed with four different spatial abilities tasks, a science achievement test (TIMSS), and assessment of control variables. Significant grade differences in spatial abilities were observed. Spatial abilities account for about 14%, 13%, and 13% of variance in science achievement in Grades 4, 6, and 8. Extrinsic-dynamic abilities emerged as the strongest predictor of science achievement. The current findings showcased the development of different spatial abilities across Grades 4 to 8 and confirmed the significance of spatial abilities, particularly extrinsic-dynamic spatial abilities, in science learning. Interventions that target... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gv2b7vr Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Cheung, Kato https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gq1d0df Online meetings around data have become integral to insight generation and collaborative decision-making. However, effectively communicating data in these settings presents significant challenges. Visualizations often include multiple patterns to perceive, and verbal descriptions of these patterns can be ambiguous, leading to potential miscommunication. Visual annotations offer a means to clarify these ambiguities and enhance user engagement with the data. Yet, existing online meeting tools often render the creation and management of these annotations cumbersome, detracting from the spontaneity of discussions. To address these challenges, we introduce VisChatter, a tool that facilitates real-time visualization annotation through a multi-modal agent. This agent integrates user speech and mouse movements to generate chart annotations, informed by a formative study that evaluated the efficacy of various annotation techniques. Our evaluation suggests that VisChatter significantly... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gq1d0df Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Hu, Songwen Yu, Tong Kim, Sungchul Rossi, Ryan Bearfield, Cindy Xiong https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gk9s1vc Understanding both the processes and products of science are core components of science literacy, but do these types of knowledge interact during learning? We propose that Nature of Science (NoS) understanding can act as a schema to facilitate comprehension of science content. Across two experiments, we tested whether NoS lessons about theory change improve students' comprehension of psychology lessons which are centered around theory development. In Experiment 1, undergraduates who watched a NoS lesson showed improved NoS understanding, but this understanding did not lead to better comprehension of a matched psychology lesson compared to control. In Experiment 2, three NoS lessons were experimentally integrated into a college psychology course, preceding content lessons involving theory change. While this intervention did not improve learning, we found several relationships between science beliefs and academic performance. This work contributes to our limited understanding of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gk9s1vc Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Drexler, Rian E. Pilegard, Celeste https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8g64q3f4 Imagine pouring a box of granola into a bowl. Are you considering hundreds of individual chunks or the motion of the group as a whole? Human perceptual limits suggest we cannot be representing the individuals, implying we simulate ensembles of objects. If true, we would need to represent group physical properties beyond individual aggregates, similar to perceiving ensemble properties like color, size, or facial expression. Here we investigate whether people do hold ensemble representations of mass, using tasks in which participants watch a video of a single marble or set of marbles falling onto an elastic cloth and judge the individual or average mass. We find first that people better judge average masses than individual masses, then find evidence that the better ensemble judgments are not just due to aggregating information from individual marbles. Together, this supports the concept of ensemble perception in intuitive physics, extending our understanding of how people represent... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8g64q3f4 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Vivanco, Vicente Tenenbaum, Joshua B. Paulun, Vivian C. Smith, Kevin A https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8fw411f1 A key challenge of theory of mind, or the ability to reason about others' mental states, is understanding the process by which others' perceptions influence their beliefs. While specific tasks---like competitive feeding---benchmark participants' ability to infer beliefs, it remains unclear how such capabilities can be learned. In this work, we introduce a modular framework that solves a computational, competitive-feeding-like game in which two agents compete. By systematically replacing modules of a successful rule-based framework with neural networks, we identify which capabilities can be learned from narrow sets of experiences, and which are critical for robust generalization. Using feature extraction techniques, we analyze how different architectures process task-relevant information. Finally, we describe and compare three novel approaches to improving generalization via first-person exposure to uncertainty: role reversal with the opponent, artificial observation masking, and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8fw411f1 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Michelson, Joel Sanyal, Deepayan Kunda, Maithilee https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8f91s6ts Traditional research on children's emotion word comprehension has relied on explicit-response tasks and focused primarily on facial expressions, potentially underestimating early abilities. Using a looking-while-listening paradigm, this study examined whether 18- to 30-month-old children (N=100) could map emotion words to combined facial and bodily expressions. On each trial, children heard an emotion word while viewing a pair of emotional expressions that were either across valence (e.g., happy vs. sad) or within valence (e.g., sad vs. angry). Children aged 24-30 months preferentially looked at the matched expression on both trial types, while children aged 18-24 months old performed at chance levels. These findings suggest that the ability to map emotion words to facial and bodily emotional expressions emerges in early age two. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8f91s6ts Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Hanqi Gulati, Sahej Wu, Yang https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8f52z7hx When facing tasks that are difficult to solve optimally, people can construct simplifying strategies that trade off utility with cost (Ho et al., 2022, Callaway et al., 2022). How we do so is an open question, especially in domains with large, structured strategy spaces where strategy evaluation itself is costly. One proposal is that people select strategies without much online computation, by a process of (reinforcement) learning through experience (Lieder & Griffiths, 2017). We present an alternative, resource-rational metareasoning framework that integrates strategy learning with adaptively bounded amounts of online strategy evaluation. We compare these proposals using a new video game task in which players traverse a grid of moving colored tiles while respecting complex rules about valid color sequences. Players quickly discover simplifying strategies, such as "only step on red tiles," and adapt when the environment changes to favor new strategies, in ways that are most... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8f52z7hx Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Mills, Tracey Gershman, Samuel Tenenbaum, Joshua B. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dv8f8dz Is it more wrong to harm a plant than a rock? Little is known about the development of our moral consideration for plants—alive but not typically seen as having human-like minds. This study examined whether adults (N=153) and young children (pilot N=17) tend to value plants over non-living things. Participants watched a video of a plant restorer caring for a plant but knocking down a bucket and a plant harmer caring for a bucket but knocking down a plant. The proportion of adults who disliked or distrusted the plant harmer, and identified them as the bad guy—compared to the plant restorer—was significantly greater than chance (ps<.001). Additionally, participants judged harming the plant more severely than harming the bucket (p<.001). Although children judged harming the plant and bucket as similarly wrong, 65% of them liked the plant restorer more. After completing data collection, we will examine developmental differences. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dv8f8dz Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Pizza, Lizette Thomas, Ashley J https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d68c714 Do people's stereotype judgements align with what Bayes' Theorem dictates their judgements should be? Although prior work suggests they do, such research has generally been carried out with White undergraduates and minority social group stimuli (e.g., McCauley & Stitt, 1978; Solanki & Cesario, 2024). To determine whether these findings hold across diverse populations and stimuli, 870 Black American adults participated in a conceptual replication study that examined the congruence between stereotype judgements and a Bayesian criterion. Using trait and social group stimuli from prior research along with novel stimuli reflecting stereotypes about social groups such as White people and police officers, correlations between stereotype judgements and the Bayesian criterion were nearly half the size of those found in prior work (r = .34, vs. r = .64, Solanki & Cesario, 2024). An ongoing follow-up experiment designed to probe potential explanations is also discussed. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d68c714 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Mulwa, Kenya W Triki, Aymin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bv5t92v Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon were four of eleven participants at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, where the field of Artificial Intelligence was named. Each of these pioneering researchers helped lay the foundation for future AI research. Four of their seminal ideas are: 1) Society of Mind (Minsky), 2) Information Theory (Shannon), 3) Problem-Solving Theory (Newell & Simon), and 4) Bounded Rationality (Simon). Society of Mind contains a hidden blueprint for developing safe, SuperIntelligent AGI. Information Theory helps us identify the datasets that can best catalyze the growth of intelligent systems. Problem-Solving Theory explains how AI agents can communicate effectively and how we can increase the safety of AGI. Finally, Bounded Rationality illuminates the type of SuperIntelligence we might expect in the future and how humans might remain relevant when SuperIntelligent AI becomes vastly more intelligent than us. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bv5t92v Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Kaplan, Craig A https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bg90544 The current study investigates the formation of new phonemic categories by examining the neurophysiological changes before and after training. Native English speakers tend to perceive Mandarin retroflexes as English fricatives ([Ê‚] → [ʃ]) (Rasmussen & Bohn, 2015). In our experiment, native English speakers unfamiliar with Mandarin underwent a pre-training EEG recording in a passive auditory oddball paradigm. Then in two consecutive days, they learned Mandarin words containing retroflexes before undergoing a post-training EEG. The current result shows that the difference in the amplitude of P300 – an indicator of stimuli differentiation (Calcus et al., 2015) – between the retroflex [Ê‚] (rare) and non-retroflex [ʃ] (frequent) is larger in post-training than pre-training, suggesting that they are learning to distinguish the two fricatives. Our current findings suggest that the formation of the new phonemic category can be observed in the processing stage that overlaps... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bg90544 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Yang, Chung-Lin de Carvalho Wang, Needle Yang, Luoyi Zhang, Yuehan Jiang, Ruitong McDonough, Joyce https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8b38160g During language comprehension, words that are less expected tend to take more effort. This phenomenon has been described by the hypothesis that cognitive cost scales in surprisal (negative log probability; Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), with a core justification being that surprisal quantifies the amount by which a rational comprehender's beliefs about meaning change upon encountering a word. However, this focus on next-word prediction may be too narrow. In this work we advocate measuring processing cost directly with the size of the change in beliefs about meaning, a reframing which implies a novel class of potential situations where surprisal may systematically overestimate cost. We identify typographical errors as a test case, and implement estimators of surprisal and belief-update in a noisy-channel model of comprehension as inference about intended strings. In a self-paced reading time study, we present evidence that human reading time behaves as predicted by belief-update size,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8b38160g Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Vigly, Jacob Hoover Qian, Peng Sonderegger, Morgan O'Donnell, Timothy