- Award ID(s):
- 2020969
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10348948
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychonomic bulletin review
- ISSN:
- 1069-9384
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
Many people report experiencing their thoughts in the form of natural language, i.e., they experience ‘inner speech’. At present, there exist few ways of quantifying this tendency, making it difficult to investigate whether the propensity to experience verbalize predicts objective cognitive function or whether it is merely epiphenomenal. We present a new instrument—The Internal Representation Questionnaire (IRQ)—for quantifying the subjective format of internal thoughts. The primary goal of the IRQ is to assess whether people vary in their stated use of visual and verbal strategies in their internal representations. Exploratory analyses revealed four factors: Propensity to form visual images, verbal images, a general mental manipulation factor, and an orthographic imagery factor. Here, we describe the properties of the IRQ and report an initial test of its predictive validity by relating it to a speeded picture/word verification task involving pictorial, written, and auditory verbal cues.more » « less
-
Abstract We examined the relationship between metaphor comprehension and verbal analogical reasoning in young adults who were either typically developing (TD) or diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The ASD sample was highly educated and high in verbal ability, and closely matched to a subset of TD participants on age, gender, educational background, and verbal ability. Additional TD participants with a broader range of abilities were also tested. Each participant solved sets of verbal analogies and metaphors in verification formats, allowing measurement of both accuracy and reaction times. Measures of individual differences in vocabulary, verbal working memory, and autistic traits were also obtained. Accuracy for both the verbal analogy and the metaphor task was very similar across the ASD and matched TD groups. However, reaction times on both tasks were longer for the ASD group. Additionally, stronger correlations between verbal analogical reasoning and working memory capacity in the ASD group indicated that processing verbal analogies was more effortful for them. In the case of both groups, accuracy on the metaphor and analogy tasks was correlated. A mediation analysis revealed that after controlling for working memory capacity, the inter‐task correlation could be accounted for by the mediating variable of vocabulary knowledge, suggesting that the primary common mechanisms linking the two tasks involve language skills.
-
Do people have dispositions towards visual or verbal thinking styles, i.e., a tendency towards one default representational modality versus the other? The problem in trying to answer this question is that visual/verbal thinking styles are challenging to measure. Subjective, introspective measures are the most common but often show poor reliability and validity; neuroimaging studies can provide objective evidence but are intrusive and resource-intensive. In previous work, we observed that in order for a purely behavioral testing method to be able to objectively evaluate a person’s visual/verbal thinking style, 1) the task must be solvable equally well using either visual or verbal mental representations, and 2) it must offer a secondary behavioral marker, in addition to primary performance measures, that indicates which modality is being used. We collected four such tasks from the psychology literature and conducted a small pilot study with adult participants to see the extent to which visual/verbal thinking styles can be differentiated using an individual’s results on these tasks.more » « less
-
Learning to process speech in a foreign language involves learning new representations for mapping the auditory signal to linguistic structure. Behavioral experiments suggest that even listeners that are highly proficient in a non-native language experience interference from representations of their native language. However, much of the evidence for such interference comes from tasks that may inadvertently increase the salience of native language competitors. Here we tested for neural evidence of proficiency and native language interference in a naturalistic story listening task. We studied electroencephalography responses of 39 native speakers of Dutch (14 male) to an English short story, spoken by a native speaker of either American English or Dutch. We modeled brain responses with multivariate temporal response functions, using acoustic and language models. We found evidence for activation of Dutch language statistics when listening to English, but only when it was spoken with a Dutch accent. This suggests that a naturalistic, monolingual setting decreases the interference from native language representations, whereas an accent in the listener's own native language may increase native language interference, by increasing the salience of the native language and activating native language phonetic and lexical representations. Brain responses suggest that such interference stems from words from the native language competing with the foreign language in a single word recognition system, rather than being activated in a parallel lexicon. We further found that secondary acoustic representations of speech (after 200 ms latency) decreased with increasing proficiency. This may reflect improved acoustic–phonetic models in more proficient listeners.
Significance Statement Behavioral experiments suggest that native language knowledge interferes with foreign language listening, but such effects may be sensitive to task manipulations, as tasks that increase metalinguistic awareness may also increase native language interference. This highlights the need for studying non-native speech processing using naturalistic tasks. We measured neural responses unobtrusively while participants listened for comprehension and characterized the influence of proficiency at multiple levels of representation. We found that salience of the native language, as manipulated through speaker accent, affected activation of native language representations: significant evidence for activation of native language (Dutch) categories was only obtained when the speaker had a Dutch accent, whereas no significant interference was found to a speaker with a native (American) accent. -
Observations abound about the power of visual imagery in human intelligence, from how Nobel prize-winning physicists make their discoveries to how children understand bedtime stories. These observations raise an important question for cognitive science, which is, what are the computations taking place in someone’s mind when they use visual imagery? Answering this question is not easy and will require much continued research across the multiple disciplines of cognitive science. Here, we focus on a related and more circumscribed question from the perspective of artificial intelligence (AI): If you have an intelligent agent that uses visual imagery-based knowledge representations and reasoning operations, then what kinds of problem solving might be possible, and how would such problem solving work? We highlight recent progress in AI toward answering these questions in the domain of visuospatial reasoning, looking at a case study of how imagery-based artificial agents can solve visuospatial intelligence tests. In particular, we first examine several variations of imagery-based knowledge representations and problem-solving strategies that are sufficient for solving problems from the Raven’s Progressive Matrices intelligence test. We then look at how artificial agents, instead of being designed manually by AI researchers, might learn portions of their own knowledge and reasoning procedures from experience, including learning visuospatial domain knowledge, learning and generalizing problem-solving strategies, and learning the actual definition of the task in the first place.