Social Context Modulates Tolerance For Pragmatic Violations In Binary But Not Graded Judgments

A common method for investigating pragmatic processing and its development in children is to have participants make binary judgments of underinformative (UI) statements such as Some elephants are mammals. Rejection of such statements indicates that a (not-all) scalar implicature has been computed. Acceptance of UI statements is typically taken as evidence that the perceiver has not computed an implicature. Under this assumption, the results of binary judgment studies in children and adults suggest that computing an implicature may be cognitively costly. For instance, children under 7 years of age are systematically more likely to accept UI statements compared to adults. This makes sense if children have fewer processing resources than adults. However, Katsos and Bishop (2011) found that young children are able to detect violations of informativeness when given graded rather than binary response options. They propose that children simply have a greater tolerance for pragmatic violations than do adults. The present work examines whether this pragmatic tolerance plays a role in adult binary judgment tasks. We manipulated social attributes of a speaker in an attempt to influence how accepting a perceiver might be of the speaker’s utterances. This manipulation affected acceptability rates for binary judgments (Experiment 1) but not for graded judgments (Experiment 2). These results raise concerns about the widespread use of binary choice tasks for investigating pragmatic processing and undermine the existing evidence suggesting that computing scalar implicatures is costly

A Novel Approach to Multimedia Ontology Engineering for Automated Reasoning over Audiovisual LOD Datasets

Multimedia reasoning, which is suitable for, among others, multimedia content analysis and high-level video scene interpretation, relies on the formal and comprehensive conceptualization of the represented knowledge domain. However, most multimedia ontologies are not exhaustive in terms of role definitions, and do not incorporate complex role inclusions and role interdependencies. In fact, most multimedia ontologies do not have a role box at all, and implement only a basic subset of the available logical constructors. Consequently, their application in multimedia reasoning is limited. To address the above issues, VidOnt, the very first multimedia ontology with SROIQ(D) expressivity and a DL-safe ruleset has been introduced for next-generation multimedia reasoning. In contrast to the common practice, the formal grounding has been set in one of the most expressive description logics, and the ontology validated with industry-leading reasoners, namely HermiT and FaCT++. This paper also presents best practices for developing multimedia ontologies, based on my ontology engineering approach

Data for: What do you know? ERP evidence for immediate use of common ground during online reference resolution

Description of data from the article “What do you know? ERP evidence for immediate use of common ground during online reference resolution”, by Sikos, Tomlinson, Heins, and Grodner.Repository: Mendeley DataThe zipped folder DATA.zip contains pre-processed behavioral and electrophysiological data for the final 50 participants (see Methods for exclusion and outlier removal criteria).----------------Behavioral data----------------All behavioral data are gathered into a single tab-delimited document. Variable names are self-explanatory.---------ERP data---------A. for_cluster_analyses Five separate tab-delimited files are provided for each participant (e.g., s2_CG-NO.txt). Each file contains data capturing the voltage difference (μV) between two conditions (e.g., CGC minus NoC) during the -200 to 1600 ms epoch for that particular subject (e.g., s2). Rows correspond to time points. Columns correspond to electrode channels:E1=F10E2=AF4E3=F2E4=FCZE5=FP2E6=FZE7=FC1E8=AFZE9=F1E10=FP1E11=AF3E12=F3E13=F5E14=FC5E15=FC3E16=C1E17=F9E18=F7E19=FT7E20=C3E21=CP1E22=C5E23=T9E24=T7E25=TP7E26=CP5E27=P5E28=P3E29=TP9E30=P7E31=P1E32=P9E33=PO3E34=PZE35=O1E36=POZE37=OZE38=PO4E39=O2E40=P2E41=CP2E42=P4E43=P10E44=P8E45=P6E46=CP6E47=TP10E48=TP8E49=C6E50=C4E51=C2E52=T8E53=FC4E54=FC2E55=T10E56=FT8E57=FC6E58=F8E59=F6E60=F4E61=HEORE62=VEORE63=VEOLE64=HEOLCZ=CZNote: Ocular channels were excluded from cluster analyses. B. for_quartile_analyses Mean voltage (μV) averaged across all non-ocular electrodes in the 600-1200 ms window are gathered by subject x condition x quartile into a single tab-delimited document. Variable names are self-explanatory

Altered States: Undergraduate-Driven EEG/ERP Research On Attention, Cognition, And Emotion

We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study the effects of a short meditation session on attention in healthy young adults. Participants were randomly assigned to either listen to a 10-min audio-guided meditation or a matched control, then completed the attention network task (ANT), which tests three attentional networks including alerting, orienting, and executive control. Following meditation participants were on average faster on the ANT than were control participants, regardless of cue type (i.e., center, double, no cue, spatial) or trial type (i.e., incongruent, congruent, neutral); importantly, there were no differences in accuracy between the meditation and control groups. Within the meditation group, larger P3b components were associated with reduced response times on incongruent trials, suggesting that greater resource allocation on trials that require behavioral inhibition results in faster RTs following meditation. There was no relationship between P3bs and RTs in the control group