331 research outputs found
Music cognition as mental time travel.
As we experience a temporal flux of events our expectations of future events change. Such expectations seem to be central to our perception of affect in music, but we have little understanding of how expectations change as recent information is integrated. When music establishes a pitch centre (tonality), we rapidly learn to anticipate its continuation. What happens when anticipations are challenged by new events? Here we show that providing a melodic challenge to an established tonality leads to progressive changes in the impact of the features of the stimulus on listeners' expectations. The results demonstrate that retrospective analysis of recent events can establish new patterns of expectation that converge towards probabilistic interpretations of the temporal stream. These studies point to wider applications of understanding the impact of information flow on future prediction and its behavioural utility
Computational fact checking from knowledge networks
Traditional fact checking by expert journalists cannot keep up with the
enormous volume of information that is now generated online. Computational fact
checking may significantly enhance our ability to evaluate the veracity of
dubious information. Here we show that the complexities of human fact checking
can be approximated quite well by finding the shortest path between concept
nodes under properly defined semantic proximity metrics on knowledge graphs.
Framed as a network problem this approach is feasible with efficient
computational techniques. We evaluate this approach by examining tens of
thousands of claims related to history, entertainment, geography, and
biographical information using a public knowledge graph extracted from
Wikipedia. Statements independently known to be true consistently receive
higher support via our method than do false ones. These findings represent a
significant step toward scalable computational fact-checking methods that may
one day mitigate the spread of harmful misinformation
Rising tides or rising stars?: Dynamics of shared attention on twitter during media events
"Media events" generate conditions of shared attention as many users simultaneously tune in with the dual screens of broadcast and social media to view and participate. We examine how collective patterns of user behavior under conditions of shared attention are distinct from other "bursts" of activity like breaking news events. Using 290 million tweets from a panel of 193,532 politically active Twitter users, we compare features of their behavior during eight major events during the 2012 U.S. presidential election to examine how patterns of social media use change during these media events compared to "typical" time and whether these changes are attributable to shifts in the behavior of the population as a whole or shifts from particular segments such as elites. Compared to baseline time periods, our findings reveal that media events not only generate large volumes of tweets, but they are also associated with (1) substantial declines in interpersonal communication, (2) more highly concentrated attention by replying to and retweeting particular users, and (3) elite users predominantly benefiting from this attention. These findings empirically demonstrate how bursts of activity on Twitter during media events significantly alter underlying social processes of interpersonal communication and social interaction. Because the behavior of large populations within socio-technical systems can change so dramatically, our findings suggest the need for further research about how social media responses to media events can be used to support collective sensemaking, to promote informed deliberation, and to remain resilient in the face of misinformation. © 2014 Lin et al
A dimensional summation account of polymorphous category learning
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via the DOI in this record.Data and code availaibility: The data and code for all analyses for all experiments are available at the OSF addresses
given in each Results section. The stimuli are available at the same locations.Polymorphous concepts are hard to learn, and this is perhaps surprising because
they, like many natural concepts, have an overall similarity structure. However, the dimensional summation hypothesis (Milton & Wills, 2004) predicts this difficulty. It also makes a
number of other predictions about polymorphous concept formation, which are tested here.
In Experiment 1 we confirm the theory’s prediction that polymorphous concept formation
should be facilitated by deterministic pretraining on the constituent features of the stimulus.
This facilitation is relative to an equivalent amount of training on the polymorphous concept itself. In Experiments 2–4, the dimensional summation account of this single feature
pretraining effect is contrasted with some other accounts, including a more general strategic
account (Experiment 2), seriality of training and stimulus decomposition accounts (Experiment 3), and the role of errors (Experiment 4). The dimensional summation hypothesis
provides the best account of these data. In Experiment 5, a further prediction is confirmed
— the single feature pretraining effect is eliminated by a concurrent counting task. The
current experiments suggest the hypothesis that natural concepts might be acquired by the
deliberate serial summation of evidence. This idea has testable implications for classroom
learning.Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC
Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months
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Visual similarity effects on short-term memory for order: The case of verbally labeled pictorial stimuli
Four experiments examined the effect of visual similarity on immediate memory for order. Experiments 1 and 2 used easily nameable line drawings. Following a sequential presentation in either silent or suppression conditions, participants were presented with the drawings in a new, random order and were required to remember their original serial position. In Experiment 3, participants first learned to associate a verbal label with an abstract matrix pattern. Then they completed an immediate memory task in which they had to name the matrices aloud during presentation. At recall, the task required remembering either the order of the matrices or the order of their names. In Experiment 4, participants learned to associate nonword labels with schematic line drawings of faces; the phonemic similarity of the verbal labels was also manipulated. All four experiments indicate that the representations supporting performance comprise both verbal and visual features. The results are consistent with a multiattribute encoding view
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