Canada

Understanding how humans use facial expressions to communicate social messages has remained a central question for over a century. However, this is empirically challenging due to their complexity, and the use of traditional, theory-driven approaches and Western-centric biases that have restricted understanding. New data-driven methods and advances in information-theoretic analysis tools now alleviate these constraints, giving real traction and delivering novel insights. Here, I will showcase one such approach that can objectively and precisely model dynamic facial expressions within and across cultures and characterize the specific social information they transmit. We show that four, not six, core expressive patterns are cross-cultural, that facial expressions transmit distinct social information over time in an evolving, broad-to-specific hierarchical structure, and can multiplex complex information. Our work challenges longstanding beliefs of cultural universality and forms the basis of a new theoretical framework. Finally, we show direct transference of our dynamic facial expression models to the digital economy including generative signalling models for digital agents.

CogSci 2022

Understanding dynamic facial expression communication across cultures using data-driven methods

Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Cogsci-2022-PAAG-Detailed-July-12final-1.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.pdf)

This conference requires a registration to attend. Please use the link below to secure your ticket. The website will be available to all registered attendees on July 25th. 

[Register to Attend](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/)

Registration Is Required

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





invited talk

coming by end of the month

Humans have had to grapple with challenges including infectious diseases, famines, environmental changes, wars, and other sources of catastrophic risk throughout our evolutionary history as a species. What cognitive capacities and decision rules did our ancestors use to survive these difficulties? And what can we learn from small-scale societies about how to manage risk more effectively so that we can survive (and thrive) as we face an increasingly apocalyptic world? In this talk, I'll explain how the four risk management strategies (risk retention, risk avoidance, risk reduction and risk transfer) can increase the resilience of individuals, communities and society at large. Drawing on a combination of anthropological fieldwork, agent-based computational models, and decision-making experiments with human participants, I will argue that we humans are indeed 'adapted for the apocalypse,' especially when it comes to the decision rules that we use to manage risk and help others in times of need. Scaling up these abilities to deal with the massive, wicked, and multidimensional problems of today will require creative solutions, broad interdisciplinary cooperation, and an appreciation of the fundamental interdependence that underlies all life on this planet.

The science of surviving (and thriving) in the apocalypse

Democracy is in retreat worldwide. Even formerly stable democracies such as the U.S. and U.K. have witnessed events and actions by leaders that are incompatible with democratic norms. The reasons for these trends are complex and difficult to disentangle, but commentators and researchers almost invariably invoke the spread of misinformation and social media as possible contributing factors to the erosion of democracy. I survey the pressure points between human cognition and the current architecture of social media and how these pressure points almost inevitably contribute to an erosion of democracy. In particular, I focus on the “attention economy”, algorithmic curation of content, and manipulative choice architectures, and how they facilitate behaviors and attitudes that are endangering the common knowledge base that is essential for democratic functioning. I then review potential technological and cognitive solutions to these problems.

Technology, Democracy, and Cognition: Pressure Points and Global Challenges

The spread of misinformation online is a global problem that requires global solutions. To that end, we conducted an experiment in 16 countries across 6 continents (N = 33,480) to investigate predictors of susceptibility to misinformation and interventions to combat misinformation. In every country, participants with a more analytic cognitive style and stronger accuracy-related motivations were better at discerning truth from falsehood; valuing democracy was also associated with greater truth discernment whereas political conservatism was negatively associated with truth discernment in most countries. Subtly prompting people to think about accuracy was broadly effective at improving the veracity of news that people were willing to share, as were minimal digital literacy tips. Finally, crowdsourced accuracy evaluation was able to differentiate true from false headlines with high accuracy in all countries. The consistent patterns we observe suggest that the psychological factors underlying the misinformation challenge are similar across the globe, and that similar solutions may be broadly effective. For pre-print PDF see https://psyarxiv.com/a9frz . For summary tweet thread see: https://twitter.com/DG_Rand/status/1493946312353619981?s=20 


Understanding and Reducing Online Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents

People learn to have emotions that fit the values central to their groups or cultures, and that benefit the types of relationships that are valued there. By sharing similar emotions, individuals align themselves –often unwittingly-- with these central values. Therefore, cultural variations in emotional phenomena can be understood from culturally normative relationship goals that tell individuals how to feel, when to feel and why to feel. Considered this way, having the “right” emotions is a key social competence in achieving belongingness and fit. In this talk I present cross-sectional, longitudinal and social network research on emotional acculturation, and its consequences for the belongingness and fit of immigrant minorities. I will also discuss how our insights on emotional acculturation may inform interventions to improve the belongingness of immigrant minorities.

Having the “right” emotions: The role of emotional acculturation in minority belonging

The spread of misinformation has substantially sped up in recent years, posing tangible risks to public health, democratic life, and the fight against climate change. For this reason, finding novel solutions to scale and reduce the time-intensive work of fact-checking agencies has become an urgent issue in social science. In this work, we evaluated crowdsourcing as a strategy to fact-check statements made by politicians, a type of misinformation that has been understudied in comparison to fake news. We performed a behavioural experiment (N=180) where the structure of social influence was manipulated, with the objective of identifying which communication network designs enhanced or undermined detection of 20 statements made by political leaders from a left-wing and a right-wing political party in Argentina. We found that crowds of laypeople are generally able to classify political discourse in a similar way as a fact-checking agency, but they are subject to partisan biases at the individual level. We also observed that social influence in heterogeneous dyadic interactions works as an antidote to these biases. Altogether, our results support recent efforts on developing crowdsourcing tools for aiding fact-checking over a variety of misinformation formats, adding a precautionary note on how partisanship may limit its performance, at least in the context of fact-checking politicians.

Crowdsourcing strategies to fact-check politicians are benefited from heterogeneous social influence

In the current globalized world, innovation in science and technology are vital for 
economic competitiveness, quality of life, and national security. This trend is accelerating the increasing reliance on virtual teams and their collaborative effort to solve complex environmental, 
social and public health problems. To contend with these dynamic conditions, communication, and 
collaborative problem-solving (CPS) competencies have taken a principal role in educational policy, research, and technology. Adaptive educational technologies provide a platform to deliver 
personalized training to improve learners’ CPS skills. However, for these systems to optimally 
tailor instruction, they must have key insights into learners’ interaction dynamics and team behaviors. We have been exploring these properties by employing Group Communication Analysis 
(GCA), a computational linguistics methodology for quantifying and characterizing the socio-cognitive processes between learners in online interactions. This talk will focus on recent studies 
where we have used GCA to gain a deeper understanding of role ecologies, learning and problemsolving, and issues of inclusivity in digitally mediated group interactions. The scalability of GCA 
opens the door for future research efforts directed towards improving collaborative competencies 
and creating more inclusive online interactions.

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