Apply the Laws, if They are Good: Moral Evaluations Linearly Predict Whether Judges Should Enforce the LawEngelmann, Neele; Almeida, Guilherme da Franca Couto Fernandes; Oliveira de Sousa, Felipe; Prochownik, Karolina; Hannikainen, Ivar R.; Struchiner, Noel; Magen, Stefan
2024 Cognitive Science - A Multidisciplinary Journal
doi: 10.1111/cogs.70001pmid: 39439389
What should judges do when faced with immoral laws? Should they apply them without exception, since “the law is the law?” Or can exceptions be made for grossly immoral laws, such as historically, Nazi law? Surveying laypeople (N = 167) and people with some legal training (N = 141) on these matters, we find a surprisingly strong, monotonic relationship between people's subjective moral evaluation of laws and their judgments that these laws should be applied in concrete cases. This tendency is most pronounced among individuals who endorse natural law (i.e., the legal‐philosophical view that immoral laws are not valid laws at all), and is attenuated when disagreement about the moral status of a law is considered reasonable. The relationship is equally strong for laypeople and for those with legal training. We situate our findings within the broader context of morality's influence on legal reasoning that experimental jurisprudence has uncovered in recent years, and consider normative implications.
A Simple Computational Model of Semantic Priming in 18‐Month‐OldsGliozzi, Valentina
2024 Cognitive Science - A Multidisciplinary Journal
doi: 10.1111/cogs.13499pmid: 39400998
We propose a simple computational model that describes potential mechanisms underlying the organization and development of the lexical‐semantic system in 18‐month‐old infants. We focus on two independent aspects: (i) on potential mechanisms underlying the development of taxonomic and associative priming, and (ii) on potential mechanisms underlying the effect of Inter Stimulus Interval on these priming effects. Our model explains taxonomic priming between words by semantic feature overlap, whereas associative priming between words is explained by Hebbian links between semantic representations derived from co‐occurrence relations between words (or their referents). From a developmental perspective, any delay in the emergence of taxonomic priming compared to associative priming during infancy seems paradoxical since feature overlap per se need not be learned. We address this paradox in the model by showing that feature overlap itself is an emergent process. The model successfully replicates infant data related to Inter Stimulus Interval effects in priming experiments and makes testable predictions.
Developing Concepts of Authenticity: Insights From Parents’ and Children's Conversations About Historical SignificanceNancekivell, Shaylene E.; Stilwell, Sarah; Gelman, Susan A.
2024 Cognitive Science - A Multidisciplinary Journal
doi: 10.1111/cogs.70000pmid: 39428753
The present study investigated children's understanding that an object's history may increase its significance, an appreciation that underpins the concept of historical authenticity (i.e., the idea that an item's history determines its true identity, beyond its functional or material qualities, leading people to value real items over copies or fakes). We examined the development of historical significance through the lens of parent–child conversations, and children's performance on an authenticity assessment. The final sample was American, 79.2% monoracial White, and mid‐high socio‐economic status (SES) and included 48 parent–child pairs: 24 with younger children (R = 3.5 to 4.5 years) and 24 with older children (R = 5.5 to 6.5 years). Parent–child pairs discussed three books we created, with three storylines: a museum (culturally authentic) storyline, a clean‐up (personally authentic) storyline, and a control storyline. Across measures, conversations suggested that authenticity may begin as a “placeholder concept” that is initially rooted in a broad appreciation for the significance of old objects and only later filled in with specifics. This placeholder initially directs children's learning about authenticity by linking, in an unspecified way, the value and significance of objects to their past. For example, we found that young children appropriately appealed to history (vs. perceptual or functional features of objects) in contexts regarding authentic objects but struggled in determining which objects were more significant on the post‐test assessment, suggesting that they attend to object history but are not yet sure how histories matter for making authenticity judgments. We also found some evidence that directing children's attention toward conceptual information related to object history may in turn direct them away from material or perceptual considerations, as seen in trade‐offs in parents’ and children's conversations. Together, this exploratory report offers many new avenues for work on the development of authenticity concepts in childhood.
Grasping the Concept of an Object at a Glance: Category Information Accessed by Brief Dichoptic PresentationAntal, Caitlyn; Almeida, Roberto G.
2024 Cognitive Science - A Multidisciplinary Journal
doi: 10.1111/cogs.70002pmid: 39428757
What type of conceptual information about an object do we get at a brief glance? In two experiments, we investigated the nature of conceptual tokening—the moment at which conceptual information about an object is accessed. Using a masked picture‐word congruency task with dichoptic presentations at “brief” (50−60 ms) and “long” (190−200 ms) durations, participants judged the relation between a picture (e.g., a banana) and a word representing one of four property types about the object: superordinate (fruit), basic level (banana), a high‐salient (yellow), or low‐salient feature (peel). In Experiment 1, stimuli were presented in black‐and‐white; in Experiment 2, they were presented in red and blue, with participants wearing red‐blue anaglyph glasses. This manipulation allowed for the independent projection of stimuli to the left‐ and right‐hemisphere visual areas, aiming to probe the early effects of these projections in conceptual tokening. Results showed that superordinate and basic‐level properties elicited faster and more accurate responses than high‐ and low‐salient features at both presentation times. This advantage persisted even when the objects were divided into categories (e.g., animals, vegetables, vehicles, tools), and when objects contained high‐salient visual features. However, contrasts between categories show that animals, fruits, and vegetables tend to be categorized at the superordinate level, while vehicles tend to be categorized at the basic level. Also, for a restricted class of objects, high‐salient features representing diagnostic color information (yellow for the picture of a banana) facilitated congruency judgments to the same extent as that of superordinate and basic‐level labels. We suggest that early access to object concepts yields superordinate and basic‐level information, with features only yielding effects at a later stage of processing, unless they represent diagnostic color information. We discuss these results advancing a unified theory of conceptual representation, integrating key postulates of atomism and feature‐based theories.
Grammar and Expectation in Active Dependency Resolution: Experimental and Modeling Evidence From NorwegianKobzeva, Anastasia; Kush, Dave
2024 Cognitive Science - A Multidisciplinary Journal
doi: 10.1111/cogs.13501pmid: 39401001
Filler‐gap dependency resolution is often characterized as an active process. We probed the mechanisms that determine where and why comprehenders posit gaps during incremental processing using Norwegian as our test language. First, we investigated why active filler‐gap dependency resolution is suspended inside island domains like embedded questions in some languages. Processing‐based accounts hold that resource limitations prevent gap‐filling in embedded questions across languages, while grammar‐based accounts predict that active gap‐filling is only blocked in languages where embedded questions are grammatical islands. In a self‐paced reading study, we find that Norwegian participants exhibit filled‐gap effects inside embedded questions, which are not islands in the language. The findings are consistent with grammar‐based, but not processing, accounts. Second, we asked if active filler‐gap processing can be understood as a special case of probabilistic ambiguity resolution within an expectation‐based framework. To do so, we tested whether word‐by‐word surprisal values from a neural language model could predict the location and magnitude of filled‐gap effects in our behavioral data. We find that surprisal accurately tracks the location of filled‐gap effects but severely underestimates their magnitude. This suggests either that mechanisms above and beyond probabilistic ambiguity resolution are required to fully explain active gap‐filling behavior or that surprisal values derived from long‐short term memory are not good proxies for humans' incremental expectations during filler‐gap resolution.
Evaluation of an Algorithmic‐Level Left‐Corner Parsing Account of Surprisal EffectsSchuler, William; Yue, Shisen
2024 Cognitive Science - A Multidisciplinary Journal
doi: 10.1111/cogs.13500pmid: 39400979
This article evaluates the predictions of an algorithmic‐level distributed associative memory model as it introduces, propagates, and resolves ambiguity, and compares it to the predictions of computational‐level parallel parsing models in which ambiguous analyses are accounted separately in discrete distributions. By superposing activation patterns that serve as cues to other activation patterns, the model is able to maintain multiple syntactically complex analyses superposed in a finite working memory, propagate this ambiguity through multiple intervening words, then resolve this ambiguity in a way that produces a measurable predictor that is proportional to the log conditional probability of the disambiguating word given its context, marginalizing over all remaining analyses. The results are indeed consistent in cases of complex structural ambiguity with computational‐level parallel parsing models producing this same probability as a predictor, which have been shown reliably to predict human reading times.