Cognition

Journal: Cognition

Abbreviation

Cognition

Publisher

Elsevier

ISSN

0010-0277
1873-7838

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Publications 1 - 10 of 15

Kinematics in context: Predicting other's action intentions entails the perception of affordances
Alhasan, Ayeh; Karin, Eyal; Caruana, Nathan; et al. (2025)
Cognition
Intention prediction is essential for successful social interaction, but traditional research focusing solely on movement kinematics often overlooks the array of action possibilities in natural settings. This study employs a mixed-methods approach to explore intention prediction, analysing free-text responses from participants who watched videos of an actor reaching for a cup, bottle, or spoon, each with a distinct intention. Each video included varied environmental contexts to suggest specific intentions (e.g., full cups for drinking, empty cups for clearing) or presented ambiguous contexts (e.g., half-full cups). We found that participants’ intention predictions depended on the variety of action possibilities presented by both kinematics and context. Participants tended to identify the primary action possibility of the grasped item as the intended action when both kinematics and context supported its feasibility. Predictions diversified when kinematics or context suggested that the object's primary action was less likely. Our findings suggest that while intention predictions can sometimes be inaccurate, they align with the (most functional) action possibilities (i.e., affordances) indicated by the actor's movements within a given context.
Dissociating embodiment and emotional reactivity in motor responses to artworks
Finisguerra, Alessandra; Ticini, Luca F.; Kirsch, Louise P.; et al. (2021)
Cognition
Perceiving art is known to elicit motor cortex activation in an observer's brain. This motor activation has often been attributed to a covert approach response associated with the emotional valence of an art piece (emotional reaction hypothesis). However, recent accounts have proposed that aesthetic experiences could be grounded in the motor simulation of actions required to produce an art piece and of the sensorimotor states embedded in its subject (embodied aesthetic hypothesis). Here, we aimed to test these two hypotheses by assessing whether motor facilitation during artwork perception mirrors emotional or motor simulation processes. To this aim, we capitalized on single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation revealing a two-stage motor coding of emotional body postures: an early, non-specific activation related to emotion processing and a later action-specific activation reflecting motor simulation. We asked art-naïve individuals to rate how much they liked a series of pointillist and brushstroke canvases; photographs of artistic gardens served as control natural stimuli. After an early (150 ms) or a later (300 ms) post-stimulus delay, motor evoked potentials were recorded from wrist-extensor and finger muscles that were more involved in brushstroke- and pointillist-like painting, respectively. Results showed that observing the two canvas styles did not elicit differential motor activation in the early time window for either muscle, not supporting the emotional reaction hypothesis. However, in support of the embodied aesthetic hypothesis, we found in the later time window greater motor activation responses to brushstroke than pointillist canvases for the wrist-extensor, but not for the finger muscle. Furthermore, this muscle-selective facilitation was associated with lower liking ratings of brushstroke canvases and with greater empathy dispositions. These findings support the claim that simulation of the painter's movements is crucial for aesthetic experience, by documenting a link between motor simulation, dispositional empathy, and subjective appreciation in artwork perception.
Entropy and a sub-group of geometric measures of paths predict the navigability of an environment
Yeşiltepe, Demet; Fernández Velasco, Pablo; Coutrot, Antoine; et al. (2023)
Cognition
Despite extensive research on navigation, it remains unclear which features of an environment predict how difficult it will be to navigate. We analysed 478,170 trajectories from 10,626 participants who navigated 45 virtual environments in the research app-based game Sea Hero Quest. Virtual environments were designed to vary in a range of properties such as their layout, number of goals, visibility (varying fog) and map condition. We calculated 58 spatial measures grouped into four families: task-specific metrics, space syntax configurational metrics, space syntax geometric metrics, and general geometric metrics. We used Lasso, a variable selection method, to select the most predictive measures of navigation difficulty. Geometric features such as entropy, area of navigable space, number of rings and closeness centrality of path networks were among the most significant factors determining the navigational difficulty. By contrast a range of other measures did not predict difficulty, including measures of intelligibility. Unsurprisingly, other task-specific features (e.g. number of destinations) and fog also predicted navigation difficulty. These findings have implications for the study of spatial behaviour in ecological settings, as well as predicting human movements in different settings, such as complex buildings and transport networks and may aid the design of more navigable environments.
Physical attraction to reliable, low variability nervous systems: Reaction time variability predicts attractiveness
Butler, Emily E.; Saville, Christopher W.N.; Ward, Robert; et al. (2017)
Cognition
The human face cues a range of important fitness information, which guides mate selection towards desirable others. Given humans’ high investment in the central nervous system (CNS), cues to CNS function should be especially important in social selection. We tested if facial attractiveness preferences are sensitive to the reliability of human nervous system function. Several decades of research suggest an operational measure for CNS reliability is reaction time variability, which is measured by standard deviation of reaction times across trials. Across two experiments, we show that low reaction time variability is associated with facial attractiveness. Moreover, variability in performance made a unique contribution to attractiveness judgements above and beyond both physical health and sex-typicality judgements, which have previously been associated with perceptions of attractiveness. In a third experiment, we empirically estimated the distribution of attractiveness preferences expected by chance and show that the size and direction of our results in Experiments 1 and 2 are statistically unlikely without reference to reaction time variability. We conclude that an operating characteristic of the human nervous system, reliability of information processing, is signalled to others through facial appearance.
AI contextual information shapes moral and aesthetic judgments of AI-generated visual art
Bara, Ionela; Ramsey, Richard; Cross, Emily S. (2025)
Cognition
Throughout history, art creation has been regarded as a uniquely human means to express original ideas, emotions, and experiences. However, as Generative Artificial Intelligence reshapes visual, aesthetic, legal, and economic culture, critical questions arise about the moral and aesthetic implications of AI-generated art. Despite the growing use of AI tools in art, the moral impact of AI involvement in the art creation process remains underexplored. Understanding moral judgments of AI-generated art is essential for assessing AI's impact on art and its alignment with ethical norms. Across three pre-registered experiments combining explicit and implicit paradigms with Bayesian modelling, we examined how information about AI systems influences moral and aesthetic judgments and whether human art is implicitly associated with positive attributes compared to AI-generated art. Experiment 1 revealed that factual information about AI backend processes reduced moral acceptability and aesthetic appeal in certain contexts, such as gaining financial incentives and art status. Experiment 2 showed that additional information about AI art's success had no clear impact on moral judgments. Experiment 3 demonstrated that an implicit association task did not reliably link human art with positive attributes and AI art with negative ones. These findings show that factual information about AI systems shapes judgments, while different information doses about AI art's success have limited moral impact. Additionally, implicit associations between human-made and AI-generated art are similar. This work enhances understanding of moral and aesthetic perceptions of AI-generated art, emphasizing the importance of examining human—AI interactions in an arts context, and their current and evolving societal implications.
An information-theoretic analysis of targeted regressions during reading
Wilcox, Ethan Gotlieb; Pimentel, Tiago; Meister, Clara Isabel; et al. (2024)
Cognition
Regressions, or backward saccades, are common during reading, accounting for between 5% and 20% of all saccades. And yet, relatively little is known about what causes them. We provide an information-theoretic operationalization for two previous qualitative hypotheses about regressions, which we dub reactivation and reanalysis. We argue that these hypotheses make different predictions about the pointwise mutual information or PMI between a regression's source and target. Intuitively, the PMI between two words measures how much more (or less) likely one word is to be present given the other. On one hand, the reactivation hypothesis predicts that regressions occur between words that are associated, implying high positive values of PMI. On the other hand, the reanalysis hypothesis predicts that regressions should occur between words that are not associated with each other, implying negative, low values of PMI. As a second theoretical contribution, we expand on previous theories by considering not only PMI but also expected values of PMI, E[PMI], where the expectation is taken over all possible realizations of the regression's target. The rationale for this is that language processing involves making inferences under uncertainty, and readers may be uncertain about what they have read, especially if a previous word was skipped. To test both theories, we use contemporary language models to estimate PMI-based statistics over word pairs in three corpora of eye tracking data in English, as well as in six languages across three language families (Indo-European, Uralic, and Turkic). Our results are consistent across languages and models tested: Positive values of PMI and E[PMI] consistently help to predict the patterns of regressions during reading, whereas negative values of PMI and E[PMI] do not. Our information-theoretic interpretation increases the predictive scope of both theories and our studies present the first systematic crosslinguistic analysis of regressions in the literature. Our results support the reactivation hypothesis and, more broadly, they expand the number of language processing behaviors that can be linked to information-theoretic principles.
Individual differences in social and non-social cognitive control
Darda, Kohinoor M.; Butler, Emily E.; Ramsey, Richard (2020)
Cognition
Cognitive control refers to the ability of human beings to adapt flexibly and quickly to continuously changing environments. Several decades of research have identified a diverse range of mental processes that are associated with cognitive control but the extent to which shared systems underlie cognitive control in social and non-social contexts, as well as how these systems may vary across individuals, remains largely unexplored. By integrating methodological approaches from experimental and differential psychology, the current study is able to shine new light on the relationships between stable features of individuals, such as personality and sex, and the architecture of cognitive control systems using paradigms that index social (automatic imitation) and spatial processes. Across three large-sample experiments (>600 participants in total), we demonstrate that cognitive control systems are largely invariant to stable aspects of personality, but exhibit a sex difference, such that females show greater task-interference than males. Moreover, we further qualified this sex difference in two ways. First, we showed that the sex difference was unrelated to the sex of the interaction partner and therefore did not reflect an in-group bias based on sex. Second, we showed that the sex difference was tied to a form of spatial interference control rather than social (imitative) control and therefore it does not reflect a specialised mechanism for guiding social interactions exclusively. Instead, our findings suggest that a robust sex difference exists in the system (or set of subsystems) that operate in resolving a form of spatial interference control, and that such systems are unaffected by social factors such as the sex of the interaction partner. The results highlight the value of integrating approaches from experimental and differential psychology by providing a deeper understanding of the structure of cognitive control systems, while also providing new dimensions to incorporate into theories and models of social and non-social control.
Fluid intelligence and working memory support dissociable aspects of learning by physical but not observational practice
Apšvalka, Dace; Cross, Emily S.; Ramsey, Richard (2019)
Cognition
Humans have a remarkable ability to learn by watching others, whether learning to tie an elaborate knot or play the piano. However, the mechanisms that translate visual input into motor skill execution remain unclear. It has been proposed that common cognitive and neural mechanisms underpin learning motor skills by physical and observational practice. Here we provide a novel test of the common mechanism hypothesis by testing the extent to which certain individual differences predict observational as well as physical learning. Participants (N = 92 per group) either physically practiced a five-element key-press sequence or watched videos of similar sequences before physically performing trained and untrained sequences in a test phase. We also measured cognitive abilities across participants that have previously been associated with rates of learning, including working memory and fluid intelligence. Our findings show that individual differences in working memory and fluid intelligence predict improvements in dissociable aspects of motor learning following physical practice, but not observational practice. Working memory predicts general learning gains from pre- to post-test that generalise to untrained sequences, whereas fluid intelligence predicts sequence-specific gains that are tied to trained sequences. However, neither working memory nor fluid intelligence predict training gains following observational learning. Therefore, these results suggest limits to the shared mechanism hypothesis of physical and observational learning. Indeed, models of observational learning need updating to reflect the extent to which such learning is based on shared as well as distinct processes compared to physical learning. We suggest that such differences could reflect the more intentional nature of learning during physical compared to observational practice, which relies to a greater extent on higher-order cognitive resources such as working memory and fluid intelligence.
Decreased reward value of biological motion among individuals with autistic traits
Williams, Elin H.; Cross, Emily S. (2018)
Cognition
The Social Motivation Theory posits that a reduced sensitivity to the value of social stimuli, specifically faces, can account for social impairments in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Research has demonstrated that typically developing (TD) individuals preferentially orient towards another type of salient social stimulus, namely biological motion. Individuals with ASD, however, do not show this preference. While the reward value of faces to both TD and ASD individuals has been well-established, the extent to which individuals from these populations also find human motion to be rewarding remains poorly understood. The present study investigated the value assigned to biological motion by TD participants in an effort task, and further examined whether these values differed among individuals with more autistic traits. The results suggest that TD participants value natural human motion more than rigid, machine-like motion or non-human control motion, but this preference is attenuated among individuals reporting more autistic traits. This study provides the first evidence to suggest that individuals with more autistic traits find a broader conceptualisation of social stimuli less rewarding compared to individuals with fewer autistic traits. By quantifying the social reward value of human motion, the present findings contribute an important piece to our understanding of social motivation in individuals with and without social impairments.
Timing is everything: Dance aesthetics depend on the complexity of movement kinematics
Orlandi, Andrea; Cross, Emily S.; Orgs, Guido (2020)
Cognition
What constitutes a beautiful action? Research into dance aesthetics has largely focussed on subjective features like familiarity with the observed movement, but has rarely studied objective features like speed or acceleration. We manipulated the kinematic complexity of observed actions by creating dance sequences that varied in movement timing, but not in movement trajectory. Dance-naïve participants rated the dance videos on speed, effort, reproducibility, and enjoyment. Using linear mixed-effects modeling, we show that faster, more predictable movement sequences with varied velocity profiles are judged to be more effortful, less reproducible, and more aesthetically pleasing than slower sequences with more uniform velocity profiles. Accordingly, dance aesthetics depend not only on which movements are being performed but on how movements are executed and linked into sequences. The aesthetics of movement timing may apply across culturally-specific dance styles and predict both preference for and perceived difficulty of dance, consistent with information theory and effort heuristic accounts of aesthetic appreciation.

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Journal: Cognition

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