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Prior work suggests children understand how speech conveys information and influences others’ minds. Although these studies have focused on communication under ideal conditions, auditory noise plagues the real world, often corrupting the transmission of information. The current study examines how children reason about the impact of auditory noise on communication. Children (N=72, Age:3;0-5;11) watched scenarios where a teacher tells a learner about two toys, but loud auditory noise masks one of the explanations. When asked which toy the learner wants to hear about again, children were more likely to select the noise-masked toy when the learner knew about neither toy (No Knowledge) than when he already knew about the masked toy (Partial Knowledge). However, their preference for the masked toy also increased with age in both conditions. Overall, these results demonstrate children&#39;s developing understanding of when and how communication affects listeners&#39; knowledge and information-seeking behaviors.

CogSci 2022

Young children&#39;s reasoning about the epistemic consequences of auditory noise

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Prior work suggests children understand how speech conveys information and influences others’ minds. Although these studies have focused on communication under ideal conditions, auditory noise plagues the real world, often corrupting the transmission of information. The current study examines how children reason about the impact of auditory noise on communication. Children (N=72, Age:3;0-5;11) watched scenarios where a teacher tells a learner about two toys, but loud auditory noise masks one of the explanations. When asked which toy the learner wants to hear about again, children were more likely to select the noise-masked toy when the learner knew about neither toy (No Knowledge) than when he already knew about the masked toy (Partial Knowledge). However, their preference for the masked toy also increased with age in both conditions. Overall, these results demonstrate children's developing understanding of when and how communication affects listeners' knowledge and information-seeking behaviors.

Young children's reasoning about the epistemic consequences of auditory noise

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Apperly and Butterfill (2009) argue that adult theory of mind (ToM) requires two parallel systems. One system, efficient but inflexible, enables rapid judgements by operating without explicit modeling of beliefs, while a separate, effortful system, enables richer predictions over more complex belief encodings. Here, we agree with their qualitative distinction but propose a different model: a single process, but with effortful re-representation leading to two phases of ToM reasoning. Efficient reasoning, in our view, occurs over representations that include actions, but not necessarily explicit belief states. Effortful reasoning, then, involves re-representation of these initial encodings in order to handle errors, resolve real-world conflicts, and fully account for others’ belief states. We present an implemented computational model, based in memory retrieval and structural alignment, that illustrates our approach.

Efficient and Effortful Theory of Mind Reasoning in the AToM Cognitive Model

As efficient systems of communication, languages are usually expected to map meanings to forms in a one-to-one way, using for example the same affix form (e.g., -s in English) every time a particular meaning is intended (e.g., plural number), and placing affixes with the same meaning consistently in the same position (e.g., always suffixal). Forms and positional rules extending over contexts with a common meaning (e.g., plural in 1PL, 2PL, 3PL) are thus considered natural, and those extending over contexts with no consistent common meaning (e.g., 1PL and 3SG) are considered unnatural. Natural patterns are most common cross-linguistically, and most learnable in experiments; however, little is yet know about differences between unnatural classes. In this study we explore syncretism (i.e., use of the same form in different functions) and affix position in the domain of person and number agreement in verbs, both cross-linguistically and in artificial language learning experiments. Results from the two approaches and both phenomena converge in finding a gradient of (un)naturalness. Rather than a dichotomous natural/unnatural distinction, we found that both cross-linguistic frequency and learnability are proportional to the amount of shared feature values among the contexts requiring the same form or position. We argue that a cognitive bias towards similarity-based structure explains our experimental results and could be driving the patterns observed in natural languages.

A Naturalness Gradient Shapes the Learnability and Cross-Linguistic Distribution of Morphological Paradigms

Words in human languages cluster together in phonological neighborhoods more closely than would be expected by chance. But why? One explanation is that large neighborhoods are directly selected for, possibly because they scaffold word learning and production. But it's also possible that they emerge as a byproduct of other constraints or selection pressures operating over real lexica. We advance one such selection pressure as a candidate explanation. A pressure to avoid overloading unique wordforms with homophones may lead to clusters of words that are not identical but similar. Using simulated baselines, we test the viability of this alternative account. We find that a pressure against loading too many meanings on unique wordforms––paired with the phonotactics of a target language––produces lexica with neighborhoods that are at least as large on average as those in real lexica. This does not rule out the possibility of a pro-neighborhood pressure, but it does demonstrate the viability of a parsimonious alternative account based on a pressure against homonymy for which there is independent evidence.

Can a pressure against homophones explain phonological neighborhoods?

Recent experimental and computational modelling work has found that languages are shaped by the referential context in which they operate. Wray and Grace (2007) argue that even compositionality, traditionally regarded as a universal and fundamental feature of human languages, may have only culturally evolved in response to changing social contexts. But how can the referential contexts of individual interactions come to shape the level of compositionality in the language of an entire community? To explore this question, we propose an iterated hierarchical Bayesian model that shows how partner-specific linguistic innovations can be generalized as community-wide features via a context-sensitive pathway. Our simulations show that the degree of compositionality that evolves in the language of a community depends on the communicative needs of its members, but also on the degree of user uncertainty over the nature of those needs, and on the level of heterogeneity in the community's needs.

The complexity of a language is shaped by the communicative needs of its users and by the hierarchical nature of their social inferences

Typological data shows a tendency for languages to exhibit harmonic (i.e. consistent) ordering between heads and dependents. However, some categories seem to contradict this tendency. Here we investigate one such case, the order of the noun with respect to two dependents—adjectives, which tend to follow the noun and genitives which precede. We report two silent gesture experiments examining (i) whether there are cognitive biases favouring postnominal adjective and prenominal genitive order in a single trial judgement task, and (ii) if those preferences continue to influence order when participants learn a complete word order system. Our results shed light on how biases for individual categories of elements interact with biases that affect the wider linguistic system. While participants strongly prefer postnominal adjectives and prenominal genitives when these are judged in isolation, when they learn a system of ordering, these biases are obscured and (at least in some cases) harmony emerges.

The Influence of Category-specific and System-wide Preferences on Cross-Linguistic Word Order Patterns

In an experimental study, we investigated how social interaction dynamics affect collective creativity. Pairs of participants collaborated in a computer game, creating “beautiful and interesting” shapes by moving tiles on a large touchscreen. We identified naturally emerging interaction styles by applying k-means clustering on participants’ tile moves. The game allowed us to quantify the unfolding creative process in a well-defined search space. Pairs characterized by a single dominating member tended to visit fewer areas of the solution space, stay there longer and created on average more (but less original) shapes. In contrast, pairs that took turns with every tile move tended to explore more, stayed in each area of the solution space for less time and created fewer (but more original) shapes. While previous literature found conflicting effects of ‘creating with another’, the current paper suggests naturally emerging interaction styles as a differentiating factor underlying how collective creativity unfolds.

Social Interaction Dynamics Modulates Collective Creativity

Studies have found that when innovation involves recombining cultural traits, partially-connected populations produce higher levels of cultural complexity than fully-connected populations by avoiding cultural homogenization. However, population connectedness is only one of many factors that could promote cultural diversity and thus cultural complexity. Here, we examine whether people's preference for copying members of their own social group could also fill this role. Our simulations reveal that even in fully-connected populations, ingroup-biased transmission results in greater cultural complexity than unbiased transmission. Moreover, in partially-connected populations, this bias interacts with population structure to produce even higher levels of cultural complexity than population structure alone. Finally, by incorporating population turnover into our model, we shed light on the trade-off between promoting cultural diversity versus limiting cultural loss.

Ingroup-Biased Copying Promotes Cultural Diversity and Complexity

Despite progress in understanding the sources of difficulty in solving insight problems, how new ideas are discovered, implemented, and learned is poorly understood. We report an experiment testing a theory of how individuals use failed attempts to discover new ideas. We compared performance on the nine-dot problem with a variant requiring solution using three lines rather than four. Results supported predictions that the three-line variant is easier than the four-line, and that transfer of solution knowledge from the three- to the four-line version is facilitative, but not vice-versa. Additionally, varying the spacing between dots facilitated discovery and transfer of solutions in both variants. Our theory specifies a priority order for seeking new ideas that offers a partial solution to the frame problem. Individuals first seek ideas from the problem statement and attempts they make. Only when these sources fail do they resort to searching memory or the external task environment.

Conceptual recoding of new ideas during and aer solution of an insight problem

The opportunistic assimilation hypothesis posits that struggling and failing to solve a problem creates failure indexes, or long-term memory traces of the problem, that creates sensitivity to environment hints that trigger insight experiences. Past laboratory research has cast doubt on the usefulness of such hints during incubation breaks, but laboratory work is limited in its ability to recreate the diversity of stimuli in everyday life the opportunistic assimilation hypothesis requires. The current paper evaluates the insight experiences of over 150 participants who solved an insight math puzzle outside the lab for the presence of incidental hints that aided with problem solving. Across two studies, participants reported that chance hints in the wild had helped them to solve the puzzle and triggered insight moments. This suggests that opportunistic assimilation may play a role in everyday insight experiences and should not be discounted in future research.

Diversity in Mathematical Insight Experiences in the Wild: Evidence of Opportunistic Assimilation

Where do mathematical insights come from? According to classic accounts, creativity is a multi-stage process that involves combining ideas in novel ways. Evidence for these accounts, however, is drawn from artificial lab-based settings or is zoomed out from the messy, moment-to-moment details of discovery. Here, we examine a video corpus of expert mathematicians generating proofs in an ecologically valid setting. We find that mathematicians begin by creating a variety of inscriptions. They then interact with these inscriptions through gaze, speech, gesture, and writing. When they experience an insight, however, their interactions become unpredictable, and they begin to connect inscriptions in novel ways (quantified by an information-theoretic measure, surprisal). Expert mathematical discovery, we conclude, exhibits the stages and combinatorial processing that have been proposed to characterize creativity. Even at the pinnacle of abstraction, at the highest levels of expertise, new ideas are born when the body discovers unexpected affinities among ideas.

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Efficient and Effortful Theory of Mind Reasoning in the AToM Cognitive Model

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