Fukuda, KeisukeWoodman, Geoffrey F.Wang, SisiSutterer, David W....
18页
查看更多>>摘要：Although researchers have been recording the human electroencephalogram (EEG) for almost a century, we still do not completely understand what cognitive processes are measured by the activity of different frequency bands. The 8- to 12-Hz activity in the alpha band has long been a focus of this research, but our understanding of its links to cognitive mechanisms has been rapidly evolving recently. Here, we review and discuss the existing evidence for two competing perspectives about alpha activity. One view proposes that the suppression of alpha-band power following the onset of a stimulus array measures attentional selection. The competing view is that this same activity measures the buffering of the task-relevant representations in working memory. We conclude that alpha-band activity following the presentation of stimuli appears to be due to the operation of an attentional selection mechanism, with characteristics that mirror the classic views of attention as selecting both perceptual inputs and representations already stored in memory.
Atit, KinnariPower, Jason RichardPigott, TerriLee, Jihyun...
22页
查看更多>>摘要：Much recent research has focused on the relation between spatial skills and mathematical skills, which has resulted in widely reported links between these two skill sets. However, the magnitude of this relation is unclear. Furthermore, it is of interest whether this relation differs in size based on key demographic variables, such as gender and grade-level, and the extent to which this relation can be accounted for by shared domain-general reasoning skills across the two domains. Here we present the results of two meta-analytic studies synthesizing the findings from 45 articles to identify the magnitude of the relation, as well as potential moderators and mediators. The first meta-analysis employed correlated and hierarchical effects meta-regression models to examine the magnitude of the relation between spatial and mathematical skills, and to understand the effect of gender and grade-level on the association. The second meta-analysis employed meta-analytic structural equation modeling to determine how domain-general reasoning skills, specifically fluid reasoning and verbal skills, influence the relationship. Results revealed a positive moderate association between spatial and mathematical skills (r = .36, robust standard error = 0.035, tau(2) = 0.039). However, no significant effect of gender or grade-level on the association was found. Additionally, we found that fluid reasoning and verbal skills mediated the relationship between spatial skills and mathematical skills, but a unique relation between the spatial and mathematical skills remained. Implications of these findings include advancing our understanding for how to leverage and bolster students' spatial skills as a mechanism for improving mathematical outcomes.
查看更多>>摘要：Spatial navigation is a complex cognitive activity that depends on perception, action, memory, reasoning, and problem-solving. Effective navigation depends on the ability to combine information from multiple spatial cues to estimate one's position and the locations of goals. Spatial cues include landmarks, and other visible features of the environment, and body-based cues generated by self-motion (vestibular, proprioceptive, and efferent information). A number of projects have investigated the extent to which visual cues and body-based cues are combined optimally according to statistical principles. Possible limitations of these investigations are that they have not accounted for navigators' prior experiences with or assumptions about the task environment and have not tested complete decision models. We examine cue combination in spatial navigation from a Bayesian perspective and present the fundamental principles of Bayesian decision theory. We show that a complete Bayesian decision model with an explicit loss function can explain a discrepancy between optimal cue weights and empirical cues weights observed by (Chen et al. Cognitive Psychology, 95, 105-144, 2017) and that the use of informative priors to represent cue bias can explain the incongruity between heading variability and heading direction observed by (Zhao and Warren 2015b, Psychological Science, 26[6], 915-924). We also discuss (Petzschner and Glasauer's , Journal of Neuroscience, 3 1(47), 17220-17229, 2011) use of priors to explain biases in estimates of linear displacements during visual path integration. We conclude that Bayesian decision theory offers a productive theoretical framework for investigating human spatial navigation and believe that it will lead to a deeper understanding of navigational behaviors.
查看更多>>摘要：Making errors is part of human nature, and it is thus important to know how to get the best out of them. Experimental evidence has shown that generating errors can enhance learning when these are followed by corrective feedback. However, little is known about the specific conditions and mechanisms that underlie this benefit of experiencing errors. This review aimed to shed some light on this type of learning. First, we highlight certain conditions that may influence errorful learning. These include the timing of corrective feedback, error types, learner awareness about errorful learning, motivation to learn the study material, differences in special populations (e.g., amnesia), incidental versus intentional encoding, the importance of selecting an appropriate final test procedure, whether the study material needs to be semantically related, and if it is necessary to recover the previous errors at the time of retrieval. We then consider four explanatory theories of errorful learning: (1) The Mediator Effectiveness hypothesis, (2) the Search Set theory, (3) the Recursive Reminding theory, and (4) the Error Prediction theory. According to these theories, two factors are decisive for observing the benefits of errorful learning: the level of a pre-existing semantic relationship between the study materials, and whether the error must be explicitly recovered on the final test. To conclude, we discuss some limitations of using a pretesting procedure to study errorful learning and we reflect on further research. This review brings us closer to understanding why experiencing errors confers a memory advantage.
查看更多>>摘要：We examine the conceptual development of kinship through the lens of program induction. We present a computational model for the acquisition of kinship term concepts, resulting in the first computational model of kinship learning that is closely tied to developmental phenomena. We demonstrate that our model can learn several kinship systems of varying complexity using cross-linguistic data from English, Pukapuka, Turkish, and Yanomamo. More importantly, the behavioral patterns observed in children learning kinship terms, under-extension and over-generalization, fall out naturally from our learning model. We then conducted interviews to simulate realistic learning environments and demonstrate that the characteristic-to-defining shift is a consequence of our learning model in naturalistic contexts containing abstract and concrete features. We use model simulations to understand the influence of logical simplicity and children's learning environment on the order of acquisition of kinship terms, providing novel predictions for the learning trajectories of these words. We conclude with a discussion of how this model framework generalizes beyond kinship terms, as well as a discussion of its limitations.
查看更多>>摘要：The perception of consonance and dissonance in intervals and chords is influenced by psychoacoustic and cultural factors. Past research has provided conflicting observations about the role of frequency in assessing musical consonance that may stem from comparisons of limited frequency bands without much theorizing or modeling. Here we examine the effect of register on perceptual consonance of chords. Based on two acoustic principles, we predict a decrease in consonance at low frequencies (roughness) and a decrease of consonance at high frequencies (sharpness). Due to these two separate principles, we hypothesize that frequency will have a curvilinear impact on consonance. A selection of tetrads varying in consonance were presented in seven registers spanning 30 to 2600 Hz. Fifty-five participants rated the stimuli in an online experiment. The effect of register on consonance ratings was clear and largely according to the predictions; The low registers impacted consonance negatively and the highest two registers also received significantly lower consonance ratings than the middle registers. The impact of register on consonance could be accurately described with a cubic relationship. Overall, the influence of roughness was more pronounced on consonance ratings than sharpness. Together, these findings clarify previous empirical efforts to model the effect of frequency on consonance through basic acoustic principles. They further suggest that a credible account of consonance and dissonance in music needs to incorporate register.
查看更多>>摘要：Studies examining the neural mechanisms of face perception in humans have mainly focused on cortical networks of face-selective regions. However, subcortical regions are known to play a significant role in face perception as well. For instance, upon presenting pairs of faces sequentially to the same eye or to different eyes, superior performance is observed in the former condition. This superiority was explained by monocular, pre-striate processing of face stimuli. One of the intriguing face-related effects is the face pareidolia phenomenon, wherein observers perceive faces in inanimate objects. In this study, we examined whether face pareidolia involves similar low-level neural substrates to those that are involved in face perception. We presented participants with pairs of houses or face-like houses using a stereoscope to manipulate the information presented to each eye and asked them to determine whether the stimuli were similar or different. We managed to examine the contribution of monocular channels (mostly subcortical) in processing face-like stimuli. We hypothesized that besides their involvement in actual face perception, subcortical structures are engaged in face pareidolia as well. To test our hypothesis, we conducted three experiments to replicate and strengthen the reliability of our results and rule out alternative explanations. We demonstrated a perceptual benefit when presenting similar face-like houses to the same eye in comparison to their presentation to different eyes. This finding matches previous results found for images of real faces and indicates subcortical involvement not only in face perception but also in processing face-like objects.
查看更多>>摘要：Sensing the passage of time is important for countless daily tasks, yet time perception is easily influenced by perception, cognition, and emotion. Mechanistic accounts of time perception have traditionally regarded time perception as part of central cognition. Since proprioception, action execution, and sensorimotor contingencies also affect time perception, perception-action integration theories suggest motor processes are central to the experience of the passage of time. We investigated whether sensory information and motor activity may interactively affect the perception of the passage of time. Two prospective timing tasks involved timing a visual stimulus display conveying optical flow at increasing or decreasing velocity. While doing the timing tasks, participants were instructed to imagine themselves moving at increasing or decreasing speed, independently of the optical flow. In the direct-estimation task, the duration of the visual display was explicitly judged in seconds while in the motor-timing task, participants were asked to keep a constant pace of tapping. The direct-estimation task showed imagining accelerating movement resulted in relative overestimation of time, or time dilation, while decelerating movement elicited relative underestimation, or time compression. In the motor-timing task, imagined accelerating movement also accelerated tapping speed, replicating the time-dilation effect. The experiments show imagined movement affects time perception, suggesting a causal role of simulated motor activity. We argue that imagined movements and optical flow are integrated by temporal unfolding of sensorimotor contingencies. Consequently, as physical time is relative to spatial motion, so too is perception of time relative to imaginary motion.
查看更多>>摘要：In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in perception, evaluation, and memory for social interactions from a third-person perspective. One intriguing finding is a spatial distance compression effect when target dyads are facing each other. Specifically, face-to-face dyads are remembered as being spatially closer than back-to-back dyads. There is a vibrant debate about the mechanism behind this effect, and two hypotheses have been proposed. According to the social interaction hypothesis, face-to-face dyads engage a binding process that represents them as a social unit, which compresses the perceived distance between them. In contrast, the configuration hypothesis holds that the effect is produced by the front-to-front configuration of the two visual targets. In the present research we sought to test these accounts. In Experiment 1 we successfully replicated the distance compression effect with two upright faces that were facing each other, but not with inverted faces. In contrast, we found no distance compression effect with three types of nonsocial stimuli: arrows (Experiment 2a), fans (Experiment 2b), and cars (Experiment 3). In Experiment 4, we replicated this effect with another social stimuli: upright bodies. Taken together, these results provide strong support for the social interaction hypothesis.
Mittelstaedt, VictorMiller, JeffLeuthold, HartmutMackenzie, Ian Grant...
18页
查看更多>>摘要：The cognitive processes underlying the ability of human performers to trade speed for accuracy is often conceptualized within evidence accumulation models, but it is not yet clear whether and how these models can account for decision-making in the presence of various sources of conflicting information. In the present study, we provide evidence that speed-accuracy tradeoffs (SATs) can have opposing effects on performance across two different conflict tasks. Specifically, in a single preregistered experiment, the mean reaction time (RT) congruency effect in the Simon task increased, whereas the mean RT congruency effect in the Eriksen task decreased, when the focus was put on response speed versus accuracy. Critically, distributional RT analyses revealed distinct delta plot patterns across tasks, thus indicating that the unfolding of distractor-based response activation in time is sufficient to explain the opposing pattern of congruency effects. In addition, a recent evidence accumulation model with the notion of time-varying conflicting information was successfully fitted to the experimental data. These fits revealed task-specific time-courses of distractor-based activation and suggested that time pressure substantially decreases decision boundaries in addition to reducing the duration of non-decision processes and the rate of evidence accumulation. Overall, the present results suggest that time pressure can have multiple effects in decision-making under conflict, but that strategic adjustments of decision boundaries in conjunction with different time-courses of distractor-based activation can produce counteracting effects on task performance with different types of distracting sources of information.
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Springer Nature