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1. The representational glue for incidental category learning is alignment with task-relevant behavior

   Roark, C. L.; Lehet, M.; Dick, F.; Holt, L. L. (January 2021, Journal of experimental psychology)

   null (Ed.)

   Category learning is fundamental to cognition, but little is known about how it proceeds in real-world environments when learners do not have instructions to search for category-relevant information, do not make overt category decisions, and do not experience direct feedback. Prior research demonstrates that listeners can acquire task-irrelevant auditory categories incidentally as they engage in primarily visuomotor tasks. The current study examines the factors that support this incidental category learning. Three experiments systematically manipulated the relationship of four novel auditory categories with a consistent visual feature (color or location) that informed a simple behavioral keypress response regarding the visual feature. In both an in-person experiment and two online replications with extensions, incidental auditory category learning occurred reliably when category exemplars consistently aligned with visuomotor demands of the primary task, but not when they were misaligned. The presence of an additional irrelevant visual feature that was uncorrelated with the primary task demands neither enhanced nor harmed incidental learning. By contrast, incidental learning did not occur when auditory categories were aligned consistently with one visual feature, but the motor response in the primary task was aligned with another, category-unaligned visual feature. Moreover, category learning did not reliably occur across passive observation or when participants made a category-nonspecific, generic motor response. These findings show that incidental learning of categories is strongly mediated by the character of coincident behavior. 

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2. Sparsity in an artificial neural network predicts beauty: Towards a model of processing-based aesthetics

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011703  

   Dibot, Nicolas M; Tieo, Sonia; Mendelson, Tamra C; Puech, William; Renoult, Julien P (December 2023, PLOS Computational Biology)

   Fleming, Roland W (Ed.)

   Generations of scientists have pursued the goal of defining beauty. While early scientists initially focused on objective criteria of beauty (‘feature-based aesthetics’), philosophers and artists alike have since proposed that beauty arises from the interaction between the object and the individual who perceives it. The aesthetic theory of fluency formalizes this idea of interaction by proposing that beauty is determined by the efficiency of information processing in the perceiver’s brain (‘processing-based aesthetics’), and that efficient processing induces a positive aesthetic experience. The theory is supported by numerous psychological results, however, to date there is no quantitative predictive model to test it on a large scale. In this work, we propose to leverage the capacity of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) to model the processing of information in the brain by studying the link between beauty and neuronal sparsity, a measure of information processing efficiency. Whether analyzing pictures of faces, figurative or abstract art paintings, neuronal sparsity explains up to 28% of variance in beauty scores, and up to 47% when combined with a feature-based metric. However, we also found that sparsity is either positively or negatively correlated with beauty across the multiple layers of the DCNN. Our quantitative model stresses the importance of considering how information is processed, in addition to the content of that information, when predicting beauty, but also suggests an unexpectedly complex relationship between fluency and beauty. 

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3. Mind Melds: Verbal Labels Induce Greater Representational Alignment

   https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00153  

   Suffill, Ellise; van_Paridon, Jeroen; Lupyan, Gary (January 2024, Open Mind)

   What determines whether two people represent something in a similar way? We examined the role of verbal labels in promoting representational alignment. Across two experiments, three groups of participants sorted novel shapes from two visually dissimilar categories. Prior to sorting, participants in two of the groups were pre-exposed to the shapes using a simple visual matching task designed to reinforce the visual category structure. In one of these groups, participants additionally heard one of two nonsense category labels accompanying the shapes. Exposure to these redundant labels led people to represent the shapes in a more categorical way, which led to greater alignment between sorters. We found this effect of label-induced alignment despite the two categories being highly visually distinct and despite participants in both pre-exposure conditions receiving identical visual experience with the shapes. Experiment 2 replicated this basic result using more even more stringent testing conditions. The results hint at the possibly extensive role that labels may play in aligning people’s mental representations. 

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4. Nameability predicts subjective and objective measures of visual similarity

   Zettersten, M.; Suffill, E.; Lupyan, G. (January 2020, Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Virtual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Denison, S.; Mack, M.; Xu, Y.; Armstrong, B.C. (Ed.)

   Do people perceive shapes to be similar based purely on their physical features? Or is visual similarity influenced by top-down knowledge? In the present studies, we demonstrate that top-down information – in the form of verbal labels that people associate with visual stimuli – predicts visual similarity as measured using subjective (Experiment 1) and objective (Experiment 2) tasks. In Experiment 1, shapes that were previously calibrated to be (putatively) perceptually equidistant were more likely to be grouped together if they shared a name. In Experiment 2, more nameable shapes were easier for participants to discriminate from other images, again controlling for their perceptual distance. We discuss what these results mean for constructing visual stimuli spaces that are perceptually uniform and discuss theoretical implications of the fact that perceptual similarity is sensitive to top-down information such as the ease with which an object can be named. 

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5. The Impact of Engineering Information Complexity on Working Memory Development of Construction Workers: An Eye-Tracking Investigation

   Shi, Y. (June 2020, Construction Research Congress 2020)

   Owing to the increasing complexity of construction tasks and operations performed in confined workplaces, workers rely progressively on working memory, i.e., the short-term and temporary storage of information pertaining to near future events, to ensure the seamless execution of construction tasks. Although literature has discovered a strong relationship between engineering information formats and the quality of working memory, there is still a clear theoretical disagreement on the implications of the complexity of engineering information in the development of working memory. This study addresses the knowledge gap with a human-subject experiment (n=60). Participants were required to review one of the two instructions for a pipe maintenance task: a simple 2D isometric drawing with bulletins (2D-simple) and a complex 2D isometric drawing with rich text (2D-complex). After the review session, the participants were asked to perform the pipe maintenance task in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. Collected data include participants’ task performance (accuracy and time), pupillary dilations and gaze movements. The results show that the 2D-simple group outperformed the 2D-complex group in terms of both accuracy and time. An attention pattern analysis using Approximate Entropy (ApEn) of gaze movements suggests that a higher ApEn in the vertical axis, i.e. a more irregular and complex gaze movement between instructions, may result in a more efficient use of working memory and thus contributes to a better performance. This study provides preliminary evidence regarding the impact of engineering information complexity on the working memory development of construction workers. 

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