How Many People Know? Representing the Distribution of Knowledge

The representation of the distribution of knowledge guidesinformation gathering, help seeking, and communication. Theresearch aimed to explore adults’ and 4-year-olds’representation of the distribution of common (conventionaland procedural) knowledge and expert knowledge associatedwith five occupations in their community. In addition, weexamined estimates of occupation-related everyday (non-expert) knowledge. Both groups estimated that commonknowledge is more widely held than expert knowledge, witheveryday knowledge in between. For adults, but not children,the distribution of expert knowledge was correlated withestimates of the proportion of people in each occupation

Looking for a second opinion: Epistemic emotions and the exploration of information sources

Epistemic emotions affect learning and exploration. Specifically, beliefs held with high confidence elicit high levels of surprise and curiosity when proven wrong. In turn, these emotions lead to searching for more elaborative details about the belief topic. Do epistemic emotions also motivate exploration of how widely a belief is held? After answering a trivia question and indicating how confident they were, participants were shown an answer submitted by another participant, reported their surprise and curiosity, and then given the option of seeing up to three responses from different participants. The results supported serial mediation, with certainty predicting surprise, surprise predicting curiosity, and curiosity predicting the number of additional sources explored. However, unlike prior findings, high-certainty errors did not result in stronger emotions or more exploration than low-certainty errors. Thus, epistemic emotions motivate not just elaborative exploration but also exploration of opinion convergence - two complementary ways to justify beliefs

Context Affects Error Correction During Cross-Situational Word Learning

Adjusting expectations in response to errors is a cornerstone of several learning theories (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972; Rumelhart et al., 1986). Grimmick (2019) shows that individuals deploy attention during cross-situational word learning based on the strength of the error signal. The current study introduced an equal number of accurate and inaccurate expectations about word-referent pairs. This study manipulated the difficulty of cross-situational word learning trials to examine whether the impact of errors differs depending on task demands. Individuals learned the initially accurate items better than the initially inaccurate ones. Manipulating the demands during word learning did not significantly impact the tendency to benefit from accuracy. This research is part of an ongoing project. This ongoing research explores how individual differences in vocabulary, inhibition, and working memory abilities interact with contextual factors, such as task difficulty, as individuals learn word-referent pairs that violate their expectations

Overcoming Error: Association between Attentional Reorientation and Vocabulary Size

According to prediction-based theories, prior learning creates expectations for subsequent learning events. As they learn words, individuals develop accurate and inaccurate expectations about word meaning. Existing research shows that people who shift their gaze to the referent of words more quickly have larger vocabularies. This shifting reflects the processing of accurate expectations about the referents of these words. Is the speed of processing inaccurate expectations also related to vocabulary size? To examine this question, adults learned eight novel word-object mappings during cross-situational word learning (CSWL). The mappings were either consistent or inconsistent with a prior familiarization phase. Early in CSWL, hearing inconsistent words violated expectations about the referent of those words. Shifting from a distractor to the target of an inconsistent word during CSWL was significantly associated with productive and receptive vocabulary. These findings are consistent with prediction-based theories, in which individuals use prediction errors to adjust their expectations

Overcoming Error: Association between Attentional Reorientation and Vocabulary Size

According to prediction-based theories, prior learning creates expectations for subsequent learning events. As they learn words, individuals develop accurate and inaccurate expectations about word meaning. Existing research shows that people who shift their gaze to the referent of words more quickly have larger vocabularies. This shifting reflects the processing of accurate expectations about the referents of these words. Is the speed of processing inaccurate expectations also related to vocabulary size? To examine this question, adults learned eight novel word-object mappings during cross-situational word learning (CSWL). The mappings were either consistent or inconsistent with a prior familiarization phase. Early in CSWL, hearing inconsistent words violated expectations about the referent of those words. Shifting from a distractor to the target of an inconsistent word during CSWL was significantly associated with productive and receptive vocabulary. These findings are consistent with prediction-based theories, in which individuals use prediction errors to adjust their expectations

"Someone told me": Preemptive reputation protection in communication

Information sharing can be regarded as a form of cooperative behavior protected by the work of a reputation system. Yet, deception in communication is common. The research examined the possibility that speakers use epistemic markers to preempt being seen as uncooperative even though they in fact are. Epistemic markers convey the speakers’ certainty and involvement in the acquisition of the information. When speakers present a lie as indirectly acquired or uncertain, they gain if the lie is believed and likely do not suffer if it is discovered. In our study, speakers of English and Italian (where epistemic markers were presented lexically) and of Estonian and Turkish (where they were presented grammatically through evidentials) had to imagine being a speaker in a conversation and choose a response to a question. The response options varied 1) the truth of the part of the response addressing the question at issue and 2) whether the epistemic marker indicated that the speaker had acquired the information directly or indirectly. Across languages, if participants chose to tell a lie, they were likely to present it with an indirect epistemic marker, thus providing evidence for preemptive action accompanying uncooperative behavior. For English and Italian participants, this preemptive action depended respectively on resource availability and relationship with the addressee, suggesting cultural variability in the circumstances that trigger it

Japanese and Canadian Children's Beliefs about Child and Adult Knowledge: A Case for Developmental Equifinality?

Children do not know everything that adults know, nor do adults know everything that children know. The present research examined the universality of beliefs about child and adult knowledge and their development with 4- and 7-year-old Canadian and Japanese children (N = 96). In both countries, all children were able to identify adult-specific knowledge and only older children displayed beliefs about child-specific knowledge. However, Japanese and Canadian children differed in whether they used their own knowledge in deciding whether a person who knew an item was a child or an adult. In addition, parental and child beliefs were related in Japan but not in Canada. These findings indicate that children growing up in different cultures may take different paths in developing beliefs about age-related knowledge. Implications for theories of socio-cognitive development and learning are discussed

Measures of Phonological Typicality:Robust coherence and psychological validity

Phonological Typicality (PT) is a measure of the extent to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in the lexical category to which it belongs. There is a general coherence among words from the same category in terms of speech sounds, and we have found that words that are phonologically typical of their category tend to be processed more quickly and accurately than words that are less typical. In this paper we describe in greater detail the operationalisation of measures of a word's PT, and report validations of different parameterisations of the measure. For each variant of PT, we report the extent to which it reflects the coherence of the lexical categories of words in terms of their sound, as well as the extent to which the measure predicts naming and lexical decision response times from a database of monosyllabic word processing. We show that PT is robust to parameter variation, but that measures based on PT of uninflected words (lemmas) best predict response time data for naming and lexical decision of single words