Talking Nets: A Multi-Agent Connectionist Approach to Communication and Trust between Individuals

A multi-agent connectionist model is proposed that consists of a collection of individual recurrent networks that communicate with each other, and as such is a network of networks. The individual recurrent networks simulate the process of information uptake, integration and memorization within individual agents, while the communication of beliefs and opinions between agents is propagated along connections between the individual networks. A crucial aspect in belief updating based on information from other agents is the trust in the information provided. In the model, trust is determined by the consistency with the receiving agents’ existing beliefs, and results in changes of the connections between individual networks, called trust weights. Thus activation spreading and weight change between individual networks is analogous to standard connectionist processes, although trust weights take a specific function. Specifically, they lead to a selective propagation and thus filtering out of less reliable information, and they implement Grice’s (1975) maxims of quality and quantity in communication. The unique contribution of communicative mechanisms beyond intra-personal processing of individual networks was explored in simulations of key phenomena involving persuasive communication and polarization, lexical acquisition, spreading of stereotypes and rumors, and a lack of sharing unique information in group decisions

Beyond gender stereotypes in language comprehension: self sex-role descriptions affect the brain’s potentials associated with agreement processing

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the Event Related Potential response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more “feminine” or “expressive” self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less “expressive” participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent

Gender inferences: Grammatical features and their impact on the representation of gender in bilinguals

We investigated the effects of grammatical and stereotypical gender information on the comprehension of human referent role nouns among bilinguals of a grammatical (French) and a natural gender language (English). In a sentence evaluation paradigm, participants judged the acceptability of a gender-specific sentence referring to either a group of women or men following a sentence containing the plural form of a role noun female (e.g., social workers), male (e.g., surgeons) or neutral (e.g., musicians) in stereotypicality. L1 French and L1 English bilinguals were tested both in French and English. The results showed that bilinguals construct mental representations of gender associated with the language of the task they are engaged in, shifting representations as they switch languages. Specifically, in French, representations were male-dominant (i.e., induced by the masculine form), whereas in English, they were stereotype-based. Furthermore, the results showed that the extent to which representations shifted was modulated by participants' proficiency in their L2, with highly proficient L2 participants resembling native speakers of the L2 and less proficient L2 participants being influenced more by their native languag

Animacy, frequency and working memory effects in the acquisition of a noun-adjective agreement pattern in L2 under incidental learning conditions

Animacy is recognized as an important feature in cognition and language processing. The present paper reports the results of an experiment that investigated the effects of animacy of the head noun (animate, denoting animals-epicenes, and inanimate, denoting non-living objects) and working memory on the learning of a noun-adjective agreement pattern in Russian. Participants were 60 novice learners whose L1 did not mark grammatical gender. The between-subjects design manipulated token frequency (high vs. low) under incidental learning conditions. No animacy effect was found in either learning condition. Working memory was a significant factor in both incidental learning conditions, and it explained a greater amount of variance in the high token frequency condition where accuracy was also significantly higher than in the low token condition. The results have implications for incidental learning research and language learning practices, specifically how different factors contribute to the acquisition of L2 grammatical knowledge