Perception and Cognition Are Largely Independent, but Still Affect Each Other in Systematic Ways: Arguments from Evolution and the Consciousness-Attention Dissociation

The main thesis of this paper is that two prevailing theories about cognitive penetration are too extreme, namely, the view that cognitive penetration is pervasive and the view that there is a sharp and fundamental distinction between cognition and perception, which precludes any type of cognitive penetration. These opposite views have clear merits and empirical support. To eliminate this puzzling situation, we present an alternative theoretical approach that incorporates the merits of these views into a broader and more nuanced explanatory framework. A key argument we present in favor of this framework concerns the evolution of intentionality and perceptual capacities. An implication of this argument is that cases of cognitive penetration must have evolved more recently and that this is compatible with the cognitive impenetrability of early perceptual stages of processing information. A theoretical approach that explains why this should be the case is the consciousness and attention dissociation framework. The paper discusses why concepts, particularly issues concerning concept acquisition, play an important role in the interaction between perception and cognition

Meanings in motion and faces: Developmental associations between the processing of intention from geometrical animations and gaze detection accuracy

Aspects of face processing, on the one hand, and theory of mind (ToM) tasks, on the other hand, show specific impairment in autism. We aimed to discover whether a correlation between tasks tapping these abilities was evident in typically developing children at two developmental stages. One hundred fifty-four normal children (6-8 years and 16-18 years) and 13 high-IQ autistic children (11-17 years) were tested on a range of face-processing and IQ tasks, and a ToM test based oil the attribution of intentional movement to abstract shapes in a cartoon. By midchildhood, the ability accurately and spontaneously to infer the locus of attention of a face with direct or averted gaze was specifically associated with the ability to describe geometrical animations using mental state terms. Other face-processing and animation descriptions failed to show the association. Autistic adolescents were impaired at both gaze processing and ToM descriptions. using these tests. Mentalizing and gaze perception accuracy are associated in typically developing children and adolescents. The findings are congruent with the possibility that common neural Circuitry underlies, at least in part, processing implicated in these tasks. They are also congruent with the possibility that autism may lie at one end of a developmental continuum with respect to these skills, and to the factor(s) underpinning them

The role of appraisal in emotion

status: publishe

Reducing Test Bias Through Dynamic Assessment Of Children's Word Learning Ability

This study examined the performance of preschool children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, both typically developing and with low language ability, on a word-learning task. A pretest-teach-posttest method was used to compare a mediation group to a no-mediation group. Children in the mediation group were taught naming strategies using mediated learning experience (MLE). Results indicated that typically developing and low language ability children were differentiated on the basis of pretest-posttest change and that dynamic measures (e.g., posttest scores of single-word labeling and modifiability ratings from the mediation sessions) predicted the ability groups better than static measures (e.g., pretest scores of single-word labeling, description, and academic concepts). These results suggest that dynamic assessment approaches may effectively differentiate language difference from language disorder.Communication Sciences and Disorder

Folk Theory of Mind: Conceptual Foundations of Social Cognition

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particular conscious or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world

Cognitive Linguistics and the Law

Cognitive Linguistics (CL) believes that the study of language can be informative with regards to human thought processes. If language is built on top of more basic, non-­‐‑linguistic cognitive skills, then some of the mechanisms behind language must surely also be used in other areas of cognition. This means that some of the explanations proposed by CL could help us clarify aspects of human behavior that go well beyond language. The present work is an attempt at looking at a number of mechanisms used in CL to explain language, and see how they shed light on one specific human area: that of our current legal system. The claim is that the processes that constitute our legal systems can be seen from a fresh perspective and can probably be better understood using some of the insights of cognitive linguistics. We will focus preferentially on mechanisms such as categorization processes, the windowing of attention, and framing strategies, including the use of metaphors

Tracking linguistic and attentional influences on preferential looking in infancy

textOne unresolved issue in early word learning research is the relationship between word learning, categorization, and attention. Two distinct cognitive processes, attentional preferences related to categorical processing and inter-modal matching are involved in this relationship. Keeping the effects of these processes separate and controlled can be a difficult task. Not doing so can potentially confound the interpretation of research in this area. In a series of four preferential looking studies, the effects of referential assignment and novelty seeking in infancy were teased apart. In Study 1, 13-month olds preferred to look toward a monitor on which the stimuli changed category on every trial, and away from a monitor on which the stimuli were drawn from a single category. This preference developed in conditions in which infants listened to labels, non-language sound, or participated in silence. In Study 2, 18-month-olds developed the same preference when listening to non-language sounds or when participating in silence, but developed no preference when listening to labels. Results of studies 3 and 4 suggest that the lack of preference by 18-month-olds in the label condition result from competing behaviors of novelty seeking and referential assignment.Psycholog

Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.”This position paper proposes that the study of embodied cognitive agents, such as humanoid robots, can advance our understanding of the cognitive development of complex sensorimotor, linguistic, and social learning skills. This in turn will benefit the design of cognitive robots capable of learning to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. Four key areas of research challenges are discussed, specifically for the issues related to the understanding of: 1) how agents learn and represent compositional actions; 2) how agents learn and represent compositional lexica; 3) the dynamics of social interaction and learning; and 4) how compositional action and language representations are integrated to bootstrap the cognitive system. The review of specific issues and progress in these areas is then translated into a practical roadmap based on a series of milestones. These milestones provide a possible set of cognitive robotics goals and test scenarios, thus acting as a research roadmap for future work on cognitive developmental robotics.Peer reviewe

Towards a Theory Grounded Theory of Language

In this paper, we build upon the idea of theory grounding and propose one specific form of theory grounding, a theory of language. Theory grounding is the idea that we can imbue our embodied artificially intelligent systems with theories by modeling the way humans, and specifically young children, develop skills with theories. Modeling theory development promises to increase the conceptual and behavioral flexibility of these systems. An example of theory development in children is the social understanding referred to as “theory of mind.” Language is a natural task for theory grounding because it is vital in symbolic skills and apparently necessary in developing theories. Word learning, and specifically developing a concept of words, is proposed as the first step in a theory grounded theory of language

Do humans and Convolutional Neural Networks attend to similar areas during scene classification: Effects of task and image type

Deep Learning models like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are powerful image classifiers, but what factors determine whether they attend to similar image areas as humans do? While previous studies have focused on technological factors, little is known about the role of factors that affect human attention. In the present study, we investigated how the tasks used to elicit human attention maps interact with image characteristics in modulating the similarity between humans and CNN. We varied the intentionality of human tasks, ranging from spontaneous gaze during categorization over intentional gaze-pointing up to manual area selection. Moreover, we varied the type of image to be categorized, using either singular, salient objects, indoor scenes consisting of object arrangements, or landscapes without distinct objects defining the category. The human attention maps generated in this way were compared to the CNN attention maps revealed by explainable artificial intelligence (Grad-CAM). The influence of human tasks strongly depended on image type: For objects, human manual selection produced maps that were most similar to CNN, while the specific eye movement task has little impact. For indoor scenes, spontaneous gaze produced the least similarity, while for landscapes, similarity was equally low across all human tasks. To better understand these results, we also compared the different human attention maps to each other. Our results highlight the importance of taking human factors into account when comparing the attention of humans and CNN