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Evidence suggests that the processing of graspable object nouns elicits specific motor programs related to potential hand-object interactions. Notably, adjectives specifying manipulative features of these objects are integrated into this sensorimotor representation. The present experiment investigated the effect of adjectives denoting the position of the object in space on the sensorimotor representation of graspable object nouns. We used a reach-to-grasp compatibility task, in which participants had to categorize object nouns as artifact or natural, by performing either a power or precision grip matching or not the typical grip associated with the object. On each trial the object noun was presented with a near or far adjective. While reliable grasp-compatibility effects emerged for object nouns on RTs, this was not modulated by the spatial position denoted by the adjective. Spatial adjectives appear not to be integrated into the noun sensorimotor representation, supporting the distinction between stable and variable affordances.

CogSci 2023

The space of words: on the sensorimotor processing of variable affordances in noun-adjective combinations

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

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The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

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Psycholinguistic studies are now more frequently considering the role of embodied information in language processing. While the perceptual features of nouns lend themselves well to cataloguing and norming, verbs also contain important perceptual information that may be useful to researchers. We present preliminary analyses of an ongoing study norming the directionality and strength of motion implied by verbs in three dimensions. We sought to assess the convergent and divergent validity of our pilot database using data derived from other psycholinguistic norm databases and distributional semantic techniques. Results suggest that this norming method is supported by convergent validity while capturing unique psycholinguistic information. More specifically, these norms may contribute to stimulus selection and refinement, generating computational representations of verbs, and novel research designs in future studies.

The spatial role of verbs in embodied language processing

Mathematical concepts are paragons of abstraction. The actual practice of mathematics, though, is decidedly concrete, material, one might even say fleshy. This raises the question, What is the body doing, when the body is doing mathematics? We answer by analyzing a video corpus of mathematicians in their natural habitat: at the blackboard, chalk in hand. Mixing qualitative and quantitative analyses, we describe systematically the ways mathematicians use their bodies to write, move, and gesture. Some surprises arise, such as the observation that mathematicians point nearly constantly but seldom produce representational gestures; and that they spend most of their time away from the blackboard at which they are writing. We discuss implications for creativity, mathematical cognition, and theories of embodied and distributed cognition more broadly.

What does the body do, when it's doing mathematics?

Current approaches to empathetic response generation typically encode the entire dialogue history directly and put the output into a decoder to generate friendly feedback. These methods focus on modelling contextual information but neglect capturing the direct intention of the speaker. We argue that the last utterance in the dialogue empirically conveys the intention of the speaker. Consequently, we propose a novel model named InferEM for empathetic response generation. We separately encode the last utterance and fuse it with the entire dialogue through the multi-head attention based intention fusion module to capture the speaker's intention. Besides, we utilize previous utterances to predict the last utterance, which simulates human's psychology to guess what the interlocutor may speak in advance. To balance the optimizing rates of the utterance prediction and response generation, a multi-task learning strategy is designed for InferEM. Experimental results demonstrate the plausibility and validity of InferEM in improving empathetic expression.

InferEM: Inferring the Speaker's Intention for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

Which auditory features drive everyday listeners’ preferences for and emotional experiences of their favorite music? To test how various features contribute to listeners’ experiences of popular music, we created a novel corpus of covers of 50 popular songs from 2008 to 2019, capturing a wide variety of genres and styles. Cover versions of popular songs offer a rich space of natural musical stimuli that match original songs on some dimensions (e.g., lyrics) but not others (e.g., genre). We pseudo-randomly selected one cover per song and asked subjects to rate similarity between clips of original and cover versions. Other subjects rated emotional valence and arousal of the same clips. We found a relationship between similarity ratings and differences in arousal ratings between originals and covers (p = 0.00069) but not differences in valence ratings (p = 0.27), suggesting that similarity ratings are more driven by perceived arousal differences.

Quantifying the Influence of Musical Features on Perceptual Similarity of Popular Songs

Previous research has found emotional colour connotations (red=negative, green=positive) to rapidly impact emotional judgements of faces presented in different colour contexts. However, it remains unclear whether this influence is reciprocal. We consider differences in processing speed and difficulty between perceptual (colour) and conceptual (emotion) stimuli to determine whether emotion information influences colour processing. We examined whether emotional face primes (angry/happy/neutral) influence red-green colour judgements and if this effect is greater under increased ambiguity of the colour stimuli. The findings suggest that primed emotional information can guide colour judgements. Specifically, happy face primes led to better categorisation accuracy for predominantly green stimuli, while angry face primes led to better categorisation accuracy for predominantly red stimuli. For ambiguous colour stimuli, a categorisation response bias was found for green following happy face primes. Our findings provide support for a reciprocal influence of emotional stimuli on colour judgements.

Emotional face priming influences colour judgements

A large body of evidence demonstrates that emotion impacts memory. Although visual information dominates emotional memories, previous studies have not examined the role of visual imagery as an individual difference variable in the representation of emotional memories. This study examines the role of visual imagery skills (namely, object and spatial imagery) on emotional memories. Participants (N = 115) recalled positive, negative, and neutral events in response to the cue words and then rated the phenomenological characteristics of each event. Event accounts were coded for episodic detail categories (event, place, perceptual, time, emotion-thought details). The results showed that visual imagery skills contributed to the remembrance of the episodic details of positive memories and the phenomenology of both positive and negative events. Overall, this study emphasizes the importance of considering the individual differences in memory research and highlights the differences between emotional and neutral events.

Exploring the Role of Visual Imagery in the Recall of Emotional Autobiographical Memories

In many cultures, adults use simple, slow, and dynamic speech when talking to infants ("parentese," or infant-directed speech) and make expansive, repetitive movements when demonstrating object properties to infants ("motionese," or infant-directed actions). These modifications enhance infants’ attention to and learning about language and goal-directed actions. Adults’ interactions with infants are also full of emotions –– do adults also modify their emotional expressions when interacting with infants? Here we showed parents of infants (aged 6 to 14 months; N = 25) emotion-evoking pictures including colorful bubbles, adorable stuffed animals, yummy snacks, broken toys, dangerous fire, and rotten fruits. We asked parents to describe their feelings about these pictures either to their infant or to an adult partner (i.e., an experimenter). While the parents’ use of emotion words did not differ between conditions, their emotional expressions did: Their infant-directed emotional expressions were more positive when they discussed positive pictures and more negative when they discussed negative pictures compared to their adult-directed emotional expressions. These findings suggest that besides "parentese" and "motionese," there is also a unique form of emotional communication in parent-child interaction – "emotionese."

Adults tailor their emotional expressions to infants through "emotionese"

Previous research suggests that negative emotions invoked by failure feedback might lead people to tune out from the task, which is detrimental to their learning. However, failure feedback is pervasive in the real world and we need to identify ways we can learn from it optimally. In the current study, the participants’ (n = 218) task expectations were randomly set to be easy or hard. Then, the participants solved a novel type of equation problems that involved manipulation of researcher-invented symbols, followed by either success (“You solved the equations CORRECTLY!”) or failure feedback (“You solved the equations INCORRECTLY!”). Next, the participants were provided instruction about the rules of the equation tasks and solved posttest questions across two rounds. Across different learning outcomes, we identify the cases in which the influence of feedback is moderated by task difficulty expectations (on identical items), failure feedback results in equally high performance with success feedback (on isomorphic items), and participants learn better when they receive failure than success feedback (at a new independent task). We conclude that the tune-out reactions to failure during feedback might be diminished, and even be reversed, after feedback.

Influences of Task Expectations and Failure Feedback on Learning from Subsequent Tasks

The present study investigated the effect of mindfulness on response inhibition, and its interaction with emotions. Individuals with prior experience in mindfulness meditation and those without any meditation experience participated. During a stop signal task, participants responded to a target stimulus on go trials and inhibited responding on stop trials. An emotional face (angry, happy, or neutral) always preceded the target stimulus, which was to be ignored. Participants also completed self-reports associated with affect, awareness, and impulsivity. There were no group differences on any self-report. The task results showed that happy faces enhanced response inhibition in non-meditators, whereas angry faces enhanced response inhibition in mindfulness meditators. Results are explained through functional perspectives of how mindfulness influences attentional resource deployment to emotional stimuli, affecting response processes over time. The findings contribute to understanding the dynamic patterns through which mindfulness modulates the attention-emotion interface to promote meaning in the face of difficulty.

Mindfulness Skill Enhances Inhibition of Irrelevant Negative Emotions: Evidence from a Stop Signal Task

Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from generalized anxiety disorder. Inhibition is the most studied executive function in anxiety disorders and research has shown that elevated levels of anxiety are related to slower response times on tasks assessing inhibition. The aim of the present study was to compare inhibitory control toward emotional words, including those eliciting anxiety, in naturally cycling (NC) women and women taking different kinds of oral contraceptives (OC), androgenic and anti-androgenic OC. We present two phases of one study: a cross-sectional phase with 240 women and a daily diary phase with 89 women. Inhibitory control was measured by an Emotional Stroop task in the two phases. In both phases, there was no difference in anxiety levels between groups. However, the cross-sectional study showed that in women taking anti-androgenic OC, the higher the level of anxiety, the longer the reaction time on the Stroop task. The daily diary study showed that anti-androgenic OC users had slower response times on all the categories of words, compared to androgenic OC users. Further studies should focus on the link between different kinds of OC and inhibitory control as it can be linked to anxiety symptoms in women.

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The spatial role of verbs in embodied language processing

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