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Item Infants do not use payoff information to infer individual goals in joint-action events(2023-04-01) Tatone, Denis; Schlingloff-Nemecz, Laura; Pomiechowska, BarbaraFor observers the occurrence of a joint action (JA) is inherently ambiguous with respect to the goals of the individuals involved. People may work together, for instance, because they are motivated to obtain material rewards or to help others. We hypothesized that to solve this interpretive ambiguity observers leverage information about the JA's payoff structure. Specifically, when a JA yields material rewards for a participating agent (as well as their partner), their behavior can be straightforwardly explained as instrumental to the obtainment of these rewards. Conversely, when a JA does not yield material rewards for the agent (but does so for her partner), the unrewarded agent's contribution needs to be accounted for by positing other types of goals, such as assisting her partner in obtaining her rewards. We examined this hypothesis across three looking-time experiments with 12-month-olds: specifically, we tested whether the absence of material rewards for an agent participating in a JA would prompt infants to interpret her participation as prosocially motivated. Consistent with this hypothesis, Experiment 1 showed that, after having been familiarized to two dyadic JA events resulting in one or both agents being rewarded, infants selectively expected the unrewarded agent to act altruistically towards her former JA partner by giving her a resource. Experiments 2–3 examined whether this expectation was driven by the prosocial interpretation of the unrewarded agent's behavior or by changes in the number or distribution of resources between familiarization and test. Contradicting the hypothesis that infants interpreted the agent's behavior as prosocially motivated, in Experiment 2 we observed similar looking times when the unrewarded agent performed a prosocial action (giving) or an antisocial action (taking) towards her partner at test. Further, in a close replication of the original experiment in which the change in the number of familiarized objects occurred in the test event featuring the rewarded agent rather than the unrewarded one (Experiment 3), infants produced a looking-time pattern opposite to the one first obtained. Taken together, these findings suggest that infants encoded the payoff structure of JA events (i.e., the number/distribution of resources that the interaction brought about) but did not leverage this information to infer the individual goals of participating agents. The present evidence calls for a critical re-evaluation of our original hypothesis and for further research into the mechanisms by which infants disambiguate the motives of agents involved in joint actions.Item A Psycholinguistic Investigation into Diminutive Strategies in the East Franconian NP : Little Schnitzels Stay Big, but Little Crooks Become Nicer(2021-11-11) Wittenberg, Eva; Trotzke, Andreas; Department of Cognitive ScienceUpper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects of those devices. This paper is the first to present two large-scale psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken in Bavaria. Franconian uses both the diminutive suffix-la and the quantifying construction a weng a lit. 'a little bit a' to modify noun phrases. Our first experiment shows that diminutization has no effect on conceptualization of magnitude: People do not think of a smaller/weaker/shorter etc. referent when the NP is modified by the morphological diminutive, the quantifying construction, or their combination. The second experiment involves gradable NPs and shows that, again, the morphological diminutive has no effect on how people conceptualize the degree to which a gradable nominal predicate holds; in contrast, a weng a reduces it significantly. These experiments suggest that diminutization does not have uniform effects across semantic domains, and our results act as a successful example of extending the avenue of cognitive psychology into dialectology with the active participation of a speaker community.∗Item Semantic incorporation and discourse prominence : Experimental evidence from English pronoun resolution(2021-12) Wittenberg, Eva; Trotzke, Andreas; Department of Cognitive ScienceThe semantic incorporation of nouns into predicates, like give a hug, is not morphologically marked in English, and how syntactic incorporation strategies like light verb constructions influence the discourse-prominence structure of an utterance has not yet been studied systematically. One hypothesis is that since semantically incorporated nouns are not morphosyntactically incorporated in English, they can function like any other noun as prominent and accessible referents for anaphora. Another hypothesis is that their semantic status and their predicative meaning influence their discourse prominence, and hence their accessibility by anaphoric means. We tested these two hypotheses in two experimental studies on different anaphoric preferences of English pronouns. Our studies demonstrate that the felicity patterns for the two different pronominal reference strategies are determined at different linguistic levels: For it, we found an impact of morphosyntactic form; for that, the semantic type of the referent (object vs. event) seems to play a role. Crucially, the degree of semantic incorporation does not affect discourse prominence and pronoun choice to the extent that we had expected.Item Making the Question under Discussion explicit shifts counterfactual interpretation(2022) Evcen, Ebru; Wittenberg, EvaThe comprehension of counterfactual statements ('If there had been zebras, there would have been lions') has been subject to much research, but two key questions remain: Can comprehenders interpret counterfactuals without relying on causal inferences? And can comprehenders reach the actual state interpretation relying only on grammatical cues, or is this interpretation triggered by communicative goals? We answer these questions by relying on non-causal counterfactuals, and by manipulating the Question under Discussion between experiments: In Exp. 1, we replicate Orenes et al. (2019), using a web-based eye-tracking paradigm. In Exp. 2, we make the QuD explicit by asking about the actual state of affairs. The results reveal that making a contextually relevant alternative explicit via the QuD shifts counterfactual interpretation, but in general, the suppositional state interpretation is preferred in non-causal counterfactuals. These results imply that the driving forces behind counterfactual processing are pragmatic, not syntactic.Item Event structure predicts temporal interpretation of English and German past-under-past relative clauses(2022) Marx, Elena; Wittenberg, Eva; Department of Cognitive ScienceLinguistic descriptions of complex events have to map their temporal structure onto language. Formal accounts of embedded tense have argued that syntax mirrors event structure: Following directly from the syntactic properties of relative clauses, in complex sentences, events described by a relative clause are interpreted only relative to the utterance time and bear no temporal relation to the events of a matrix clause. From an event structural perspective, however, the temporal relationships between events do not have to mirror syntactic relations; rather, a central, salient event may anchor peripheral situations in time independent of its syntactic encoding. In two studies in English and German, we test which interpretations are accessible for past-under-past relative clauses, showing that tense interpretation in relative clauses is dependent on the matrix clause - at least when the matrix sentence describes a salient anchoring event, and the relative clause a backgrounded situation. Our results challenge the assumption that syntactic dependencies determine the temporal construal of events and provide new insight into how temporal semantic features are mapped onto linguistic structure.Item Lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on language processing(2022-06) Kleinman, Daniel; Morgan M, Adam; Ostrand, Rachel; Wittenberg, Eva; Department of Cognitive ScienceA central question in understanding human language is how people store, access, and comprehend words. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic presented a natural experiment to investigate whether language comprehension can be changed in a lasting way by external experiences. We leveraged the sudden increase in the frequency of certain words (mask, isolation, lockdown) to investigate the effects of rapid contextual changes on word comprehension, measured over 10 months within the first year of the pandemic. Using the phonemic restoration paradigm, in which listeners are presented with ambiguous auditory input and report which word they hear, we conducted four online experiments with adult participants across the United States (combined N = 899). We find that the pandemic has reshaped language processing for the long term, changing how listeners process speech and what they expect from ambiguous input. These results show that abrupt changes in linguistic exposure can cause enduring changes to the language system.Item Eventuality type predicts temporal order inferences in discourse comprehension(2024-05-28) Marx, Elena; Wittenberg, Eva; Department of Cognitive ScienceOne kind of temporal inference in discourse operates over iconicity, such that inferred temporal order follows reported order. In two preregistered experiments (combined N = 930), we asked whether this temporal inference is predictably modulated by linguistic eventuality. Based on event-structural theories of temporal interpretation, stative descriptions, corresponding to cognitively less salient states in the world, should serve as backgrounds for eventive descriptions, locating states earlier in time. Participants read descriptions like Mary got/was married to John. She got/was pregnant and indicated which happened first. Eventuality type of both sentences and reported order were crossed. We find that states tend to be ordered before events, and longer states before shorter states. Our results support a model of discourse comprehension in which eventuality framing is crucial for (temporal) inferences.Item Temporal construal in sentence comprehension depends on linguistically encoded event structure(2025-01) Marx, Elena; Wittenberg, Eva; Department of Cognitive ScienceHow events are ordered in time is one of the most fundamental pieces of information guiding our understanding of the world. Linguistically, this order is often not mentioned explicitly. Here, we propose that the mental construal of temporal order in language comprehension is based on event-structural properties. This prediction is based on a central distinction between states and events both in event perception and language: In perception, dynamic events are more salient than static states. In language, stative and eventive predicates also differ, both in their grammatical behavior and how they are processed. Consistent with our predictions, data from seven pre-registered video-sentence matching experiments, each conducted in English and German (total N = 674), show that people draw temporal inferences based on this difference: States precede events. Our findings not only arbitrate between different theories of temporal language comprehension; they also advance theoretical models of how two different cognitive capacities - event cognition and language - integrate to form a mental representation of time.Item Dynamicity Predicts Inferred Temporal Order in Complex Sentences : Evidence from English, German, and Polish(2025-02-14) Marx, Elena; Iwan, Oliwia; Wittenberg, Eva; Department of Cognitive ScienceTo build an accurate mental model of complex situations, people infer temporal order from sometimes underspecified linguistic information. The basis on which these inferences are drawn is an open question. While previous literature has focused on the role of linguistic structure and discourse pragmatic strategies as important contributors to temporal inferences, here we argue that, under uncertainty, people also use the dynamic properties of the described situations to derive temporal order from language. In three pre-registered studies using English, German, and Polish, adult participants used toys to act out complex situations described by main clause-relative clause structures. We consistently find that non-dynamic state descriptions are temporally ordered first, if the other clause describes a dynamic event. This pattern arises independently of whether dynamicity differences are lexically encoded, like in English or German, or grammatically encoded, like in Polish. More generally, our findings address an important gap in the discussion on the role of eventuality type for temporal inference. While there is substantial research on the significance of telicity and durativity, a third, much more overlooked feature is dynamicity, a concept rooted in event perception, not language. Our results therefore provide a crucial thread to closely weave together language comprehension and event cognition.Item Crazy for you! Understanding Utility in Joint Actions(2020) Curioni, Arianna; Voinov, Pavel; Allritz, Matthias; Call, Josep; Knoblich, Gunther Klaus; Department of Cognitive SciencePredicting others' actions and inferring preferences from their choices is indispensable for successfully navigating social environments. Yet, the cognitive tools agents employ for prediction and decision may differ when involved in social interactions. When pursuing a goal individually, humans maximize utility by minimizing costs, while when engaged in joint actions utility maximization might not be the only heuristic in place. We investigate if human adults represent costs and rewards of joint vs. individual actions, and how do they decide whether to engage in a joint action. We test participants' decisions when solving a task alone or together with a partner as a function of the cost of coordination. Our results show that human adults decide based on a preference for joint actions, despite engaging in coordination reduces their individual utility. We discuss a framework for decision-making which accounts for cognitive heuristics and preferences for joint actions characterizing agents' cooperative behavior.Item Do implicit and explicit measures of the sense of agency measure the same thing?(2014-10-16) Dewey, John A.; Knoblich, Günther; Department of Cognitive ScienceThe sense of agency (SoA) refers to perceived causality of the self, i.e. the feeling of causing something to happen. The SoA has been probed using a variety of explicit and implicit measures. Explicit measures include rating scales and questionnaires. Implicit measures, which include sensory attenuation and temporal binding, use perceptual differences between self- and externally generated stimuli as measures of the SoA. In the present study, we investigated whether the different measures tap into the same self-attribution processes by determining whether individual differences on implicit and explicit measures of SoA are correlated. Participants performed tasks in which they triggered tones via key presses (operant condition) or passively listened to tones triggered by a computer (observational condition). We replicated previously reported effects of sensory attenuation and temporal binding. Surprisingly the two implicit measures of SoA were not significantly correlated with each other, nor did they correlate with the explicit measures of SoA. Our results suggest that some explicit and implicit measures of the SoA may tap into different processes.Item Do humans recalibrate the confidence of advisers or take confidence at face value?(2022) Stanciu, Oana; Fiser, Jozsef; Department of Cognitive ScienceWho we choose to learn from is influenced by the relative confidence of potential informants (Birch, Akmal, & Frampton, 2010). More confident advisers are preferred based on an assumption that confidence is a good indicator of accuracy. However, oftentimes, accuracy and confidence are not calibrated, either due to strategic manipulations of confidence or unintentional failures of metacognition. When accuracy information is readily available, people are additionally vigilant to the calibration of informants, penalizing incorrect, yet confident advisers (Tenney, MacCoun, Spellman, & Hastie, 2007). The current experiment tested whether participants can leverage inferences about two advisers' calibration profiles to make optimal trial-by-trial decisions. We predicted that choice of advisers reflects relative differences in the advisers' probability of being correct given their stated confidence (recalibrated confidence), as opposed to stated confidence differences. The prediction was not supported by data, but calibration had a modulating effect on choices, as more confident advisers were more influential only when they were also calibrated. Further, participants' decision confidence was informed only by the confidence of the adviser whose advice was chosen, disregarding the confidence of the second adviser.Item Interpersonal synchrony enhanced through 20 Hz phase-coupled dual brain stimulation(2017-04-01) Novembre, Giacomo; Knoblich, Günther; Dunne, Laura; Keller, Peter E.; Department of Cognitive ScienceSynchronous movement is a key component of social behavior in several species including humans. Recent theories have suggested a link between interpersonal synchrony of brain oscillations and interpersonal movement synchrony. The present study investigated this link. Using transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) applied over the left motor cortex, we induced beta band (20 Hz) oscillations in pairs of individuals who both performed a finger-tapping task with the right hand. In-phase or anti-phase oscillations were delivered during a preparatory period prior to movement and while the tapping task was performed. In-phase 20Hz stimulation enhanced interpersonal movement synchrony, compared with anti-phase or sham stimulation, particularly for the initial taps following the preparatory period. This was confirmed in an analysis comparing real vs pseudo pair surrogate data. No enhancement was observed for stimulation frequencies of 2Hz (matching the target movement frequency) or 10 Hz (alpha band). Thus, phase-coupling of beta band neural oscillations across two individuals' (resting) motor cortices supports the interpersonal alignment of sensorimotor processes that regulate rhythmic action initiation, thereby facilitating the establishment of synchronous movement. Phase-locked dual brain stimulation provides a promising method to study causal effects of interpersonal brain synchrony on social, sensorimotor and cognitive processes.Item Prioritization of arbitrary faces associated to self : An EEG study(2018-01) Woźniak, Mateusz; Kourtis, Dimitrios; Knoblich, Günther; Department of Cognitive ScienceBehavioral and neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that people process preferentially self-related information such as an image of their own face. Furthermore, people rapidly incorporate stimuli into their self-representation even if these stimuli do not have an intrinsic relation to self. In the present study, we investigated the time course of the processes involved in preferential processing of self-related information. In two EEG experiments three unfamiliar faces were identified with verbal labels as either the participant, a friend, or a stranger. Afterwards, participants judged whether two stimuli presented in succession (ISI = 1500ms) matched. In experiment 1, faces were followed by verbal labels and in experiment 2, labels were followed by faces. Both experiments showed the same pattern of behavioral and electrophysiological results. If the first stimulus (face or label) was associated with self, reaction times were faster and the late frontal positivity following the first stimulus was more pronounced. The self-association of the second stimulus (label or face) did not affect response times. However, the central-parietal P3 following presentation of the second stimulus was more pronounced when the second stimulus was preceded by self-related first stimulus. These results indicate that even unfamiliar faces that are associated to self can activate a self-representation. Once the self-representation has been activated the processing of ensuing stimuli is facilitated, irrespective of whether they are associated with the self.Item Eye movements reflect active statistical learning(2024-05-01) Arató, József; Rothkopf, Constantin A.; Fiser, József; Department of Cognitive ScienceWhat is the link between eye movements and sensory learning? Although some theories have argued for an automatic interaction between what we know and where we look that continuously modulates human information gathering behavior during both implicit and explicit learning, there exists limited experimental evidence supporting such an ongoing interplay. To address this issue, we used a visual statistical learning paradigm combined with a gaze-contingent stimulus presentation and manipulated the explicitness of the task to explore how learning and eye movements interact. During both implicit exploration and explicit visual learning of unknown composite visual scenes, spatial eye movement patterns systematically and gradually changed in accordance with the underlying statistical structure of the scenes. Moreover, the degree of change was directly correlated with the amount and type of knowledge the observers acquired. This suggests that eye movements are potential indicators of active learning, a process where long-term knowledge, current visual stimuli and an inherent tendency to reduce uncertainty about the visual environment jointly determine where we look.Item Neural correlates tracking different aspects of the emerging representation of novel visual categories(2024-01-31) Jellinek, Sára; Fiser, József; Department of Cognitive ScienceCurrent studies investigating electroencephalogram correlates associated with categorization of sensory stimuli (P300 event-related potential, alpha event-related desynchronization, theta event-related synchronization) typically use an oddball paradigm with few, familiar, highly distinct stimuli providing limited insight about the aspects of categorization (e.g. difficulty, membership, uncertainty) that the correlates are linked to. Using a more complex task, we investigated whether such more specific links could be established between correlates and learning and how these links change during the emergence of new categories. In our study, participants learned to categorize novel stimuli varying continuously on multiple integral feature dimensions, while electroencephalogram was recorded from the beginning of the learning process. While there was no significant P300 event-related potential modulation, both alpha event-related desynchronization and theta event-related synchronization followed a characteristic trajectory in proportion with the gradual acquisition of the two categories. Moreover, the two correlates were modulated by different aspects of categorization, alpha event-related desynchronization by the difficulty of the task, whereas the magnitude of theta-related synchronization by the identity and possibly the strength of category membership. Thus, neural signals commonly related to categorization are appropriate for tracking both the dynamic emergence of internal representation of categories, and different meaningful aspects of the categorization process.Item Perceptual Learning : Policy Insights From Basic Research to Real-World Applications(2023-10) Seitz, Aaron R.; Sekuler, Allison; Dosher, Barbara; Wright, Beverly A.; Huang, Chang Bing; Shawn Green, C.; Pack, Christopher C.; Sagi, Dov; Levi, Dennis; Tadin, Duje; Quinlan, Elizabeth; Jiang, Fang; Diaz, Gabriel J.; Ghose, Geoffrey; Fiser, Jozsef; Banai, Karen; Visscher, Kristina; Huxlin, Krystel; Shams, Ladan; Battelli, Lorella; Carrasco, Marisa; Herzog, Michael; Webster, Michael; Eckstein, Miguel; Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.; Censor, Nitzan; De Weerd, Peter; Vogels, Rufin; Hochstein, Shaul; Watanabe, Takeo; Sasaki, Yuka; Polat, Uri; Lu, Zhong Lin; Kourtzi, Zoe; Department of Cognitive SciencePerceptual learning is the process by which experience alters how incoming sensory information is processed by the brain to give rise to behavior—it is critical for how humans educate children, train experts, treat diseases, and promote health and well-being throughout the lifespan. Knowledge of perceptual learning requires basic and applied research in humans and nonhuman animal models, which informs strategic targets for advancing applications. Commercial products to induce perceptual learning are proliferating rapidly with limited regulation (e.g., for rehabilitation), while at the same time basic science is increasingly restricted by changing regulations (such as new granting-agency definitions of clinical trials). Realizing the full potential of perceptual learning requires balancing basic and translational science to advance new knowledge, while serving and protecting consumers. Reforms can promote open, accessible, and representative research, and the translation of this research to applications across different sectors of society.Item Coding of low-level position and orientation information in human naturalistic vision(2019-02) Christensen, Jeppe H.; Bex, Peter J.; Fiser, József; Department of Cognitive ScienceOrientation and position of small image segments are considered to be two fundamental low-level attributes in early visual processing, yet their encoding in complex natural stimuli is underexplored. By measuring the just-noticeable differences in noise perturbation, we investigated how orientation and position information of a large number of local elements (Gabors) were encoded separately or jointly. Importantly, the Gabors composed various classes of naturalistic stimuli that were equated by all low-level attributes and differed only in their higher-order configural complexity and familiarity. Although unable to consciously tell apart the type of perturbation, observers detected orientation and position noise significantly differently. Furthermore, when the Gabors were perturbed by both types of noise simultaneously, performance adhered to a reliability-based optimal probabilistic combination of individual attribute noises. Our results suggest that orientation and position are independently coded and probabilistically combined for naturalistic stimuli at the earliest stage of visual processing.Item The relationship between initial threshold, learning, and generalization in perceptual learning(2019-04-01) Lengyel, Gábor; Fiser, József; Department of Cognitive ScienceWe investigated the origin of two previously reported general rules of perceptual learning. First, the initial discrimination thresholds and the amount of learning were found to be related through a Weber-like law. Second, increased training length negatively influenced the observer's ability to generalize the obtained knowledge to a new context. Using a five-day training protocol, separate groups of observers were trained to perform discrimination around two different reference values of either contrast (73% and 30%) or orientation (25° and 0°). In line with previous research, we found a Weber-like law between initial performance and the amount of learning, regardless of whether the tested attribute was contrast or orientation. However, we also showed that this relationship directly reflected observers' perceptual scaling function relating physical intensities to perceptual magnitudes, suggesting that participants learned equally on their internal perceptual space in all conditions. In addition, we found that with the typical five-day training period, the extent of generalization was proportional to the amount of learning, seemingly contradicting the previously reported diminishing generalization with practice. This result suggests that the negative link between generalization and the length of training found in earlier studies might have been due to overfitting after longer training and not directly due to the amount of learning per se.Item Correction : Coding of low-level position and orientation information in human naturalistic vision (PLoS ONE (2019) 14: 2 (e0212141) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212141)(2019-07-01) Christensen, Jeppe H.; Bex, Peter J.; Fiser, József; Department of Cognitive ScienceNotice of republication Incorrect versions of Fig 1 and Fig 9 were published in error. This article was republished on July 17, 2019 to correct for this error. Please download this article again to view the correct version.