Categories, Concepts, and Conceptual Development

Category learning in autistic individuals: A meta-analysis

Learning new categories is a fundamental human skill. In the present article, we report the first comprehensive meta-analysis of category learning in autism. Including studies comparing groups of autistic and nonautistic individuals, we investigated whether autistic individuals differ in category learning from nonautistic individuals. In addition, we examined moderator variables accounting for variability between studies. A multilevel meta-analysis of k = 50 studies examining n = 1,220 autistic and n = 1,445 nonautistic individuals based on 112 effect sizes in terms of the standardized mean difference revealed lower-level category learning skills for autistic compared with nonautistic individuals, g = -0.55, 95% CI = [-0.73, -0.38], p < .0001. According to moderator analyses, the significant amount of heterogeneity, Q(111) = 617.88, p < .0001, was explained by only one of the moderator variables under investigation-namely, study language. For the remaining variables-namely, age, year of publication, risk of bias, type of control group, IQ of autistic group, percentage of male autistic participants, type of category, type of task, and type of dependent measure-there were no significant effects. Although hat values and Cook's distance statistics confirmed the robustness of findings, results of Egger's test and a funnel plot suggested the presence of publication bias reflecting an overrepresentation of disadvantageous findings for autistic groups. Objectives for future work include identifying additional moderator variables, examining downstream effects of suboptimal category learning skills, and developing interventions.

Embodiment and repeated exposure do not suffice for abstract concepts acquisition: evidence from tonal music cognition

Research on abstract concepts (AC) suggests that while some AC are enacted indirectly and occasionally, others are largely grounded in our sensory-motor and affective experience, and the opportunities to enact them are countless, which would allow us to acquire them without supervision. From this, the following question arises: do embodiment and repeated exposure suffice to dispense with supervision in abstract concepts acquisition (ACA)? In the present study, this question was addressed in the context of tonal music cognition, which demands a high level of abstraction, and via musical materials that participants had frequently heard and sung. Specifically, highly trained, moderately trained, and untrained participants (24 each) were given 12 well-known melodic fragments ending on tones instantiating 6 different scale degrees (2 times each) and asked to group (round 1) or pair (round 2) those fragments whose last tone conveyed the same (or a similar enough) level of stability or rest. If embodiment and repeated exposure suffice for ACA, then one would expect a scale degree-based grouping strategy regardless of participants' training level. Results showed that only highly trained participants systematically grouped stimuli ending on the same scale degree, particularly in round 2; moderately trained participants' performance was mixed, and tonality's influence on untrained participants was negligible. Further, moderately trained and untrained participants performed inconsistently, discarding in round 2 almost all of the pairs formed in round 1. These findings are integrated with previous findings on the effect of language, affect, and category type on conceptualization to account for why and when ACA requires supervision.

Mutual influence between language and perception in multi-agent communication games

Language interfaces with many other cognitive domains. This paper explores how interactions at these interfaces can be studied with deep learning methods, focusing on the relation between language emergence and visual perception. To model the emergence of language, a sender and a receiver agent are trained on a reference game. The agents are implemented as deep neural networks, with dedicated vision and language modules. Motivated by the mutual influence between language and perception in cognition, we apply systematic manipulations to the agents’ (i) visual representations, to analyze the effects on emergent communication, and (ii) communication protocols, to analyze the effects on visual representations. Our analyses show that perceptual biases shape semantic categorization and communicative content. Conversely, if the communication protocol partitions object space along certain attributes, agents learn to represent visual information about these attributes more accurately, and the representations of communication partners align. Finally, an evolutionary analysis suggests that visual representations may be shaped in part to facilitate the communication of environmentally relevant distinctions. Aside from accounting for co-adaptation effects between language and perception, our results point out ways to modulate and improve visual representation learning and emergent communication in artificial agents.

Language is grounded in the world and used to coordinate and achieve common objectives. We simulate grounded, interactive language use with a communication game. A sender refers to an object in the environment and if the receiver selects the correct object both agents are rewarded. By practicing the game, the agents develop their own communication protocol. We use this setup to study interactions between emerging language and visual perception. Agents are implemented as neural networks with dedicated vision modules to process images of objects. By manipulating their visual representations we can show how variations in perception are reflected in linguistic variations. Conversely, we demonstrate that differences in language are reflected in the agents’ visual representations. Our simulations mirror several empirically observed phenomena: labels for concrete objects and properties (e.g., “striped”, “bowl”) group together visually similar objects, object representations adapt to the categories imposed by language, and representational spaces between communication partners align. In addition, an evolutionary analysis suggests that visual representations may be shaped, in part, to facilitate communication about environmentally relevant information. In sum, we use communication games with neural network agents to model co-adaptation effects between language and visual perception. Future work could apply this computational framework to other interfaces between language and cognition.

Abstract and concrete concepts in conversation

Concepts allow us to make sense of the world. Most evidence on their acquisition and representation comes from studies of single decontextualized words and focuses on the opposition between concrete and abstract concepts (e.g., "bottle" vs. "truth"). A significant step forward in research on concepts consists in investigating them in online interaction during their use. Our study examines linguistic exchanges analyzing the differences between sub-kinds of concepts. Participants were submitted to an online task in which they had to simulate a conversational exchange by responding to sentences involving sub-kinds of concrete (tools, animals, food) and abstract concepts (PS, philosophical-spiritual; EMSS, emotional-social, PSTQ, physical-spatio-temporal-quantitative). We found differences in content: foods evoked interoception; tools and animals elicited materials, spatial, auditive features, confirming their sensorimotor grounding. PS and EMSS yielded inner experiences (e.g., emotions, cognitive states, introspections) and opposed PSTQ, tied to visual properties and concrete agency. More crucially, the various concepts elicited different interactional dynamics: more abstract concepts generated higher uncertainty and more interactive exchanges than concrete ones. Investigating concepts in situated interactions opens new possibilities for studying conceptual knowledge and its pragmatic and social aspects.

The structure of prior knowledge enhances memory in experts by reducing interference

The influence of prior knowledge on memory is ubiquitous, making the specific mechanisms of this relationship difficult to disentangle. Here, we show that expert knowledge produces a fundamental shift in the way that interitem similarity (i.e., the perceived resemblance between items in a set) biases episodic recognition. Within a group of expert birdwatchers and matched controls, we characterized the psychological similarity space for a set of well-known local species and a set of less familiar, nonlocal species. In experts, interitem similarity was influenced most strongly by taxonomic features, whereas in controls, similarity judgments reflected bird color. In controls, perceived episodic oldness during a recognition memory task increased along with measures of global similarity between items, consistent with classic models of episodic recognition. Surprisingly, for experts, high global similarity did not drive oldness signals. Instead, for local birds memory tracked the availability of species-level name knowledge, whereas for nonlocal birds, it was mediated by the organization of generalized conceptual space. These findings demonstrate that episodic memory in experts can benefit from detailed subcategory knowledge, or, lacking that, from the overall relational structure of concepts. Expertise reshapes psychological similarity space, helping to resolve mnemonic separation challenges arising from high interitem overlap. Thus, even in the absence of knowledge about item-specific details or labels, the presence of generalized knowledge appears to support episodic recognition in domains of expertise by altering the typical relationship between psychological similarity and memory.

Disability and oral health in association of south east Asians - A survey for conceptualisation and development

Background

All member states in the Association of South East Asians (ASEAN) are ratified signatories of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. However, disability and oral health (DOH) can be an elusive ambition for developing nations.

Objectives

This survey aims to conceptualise ‘barriers’, ‘improvements’, ‘challenges in dental practice’, and ‘ways to collaborate’, to inform policy development for DOH within ASEAN.

Methods

The survey employed a novel quasi-qualitative design. It was electronically distributed to dentists with DOH specialty training in ASEAN within the International Association of Disability and Oral Health’s network from September 2018 to June 2020. The ‘barriers’ and ‘improvements’ would be categorised into five dimensions of healthcare - a framework by Levesque and colleagues (2013).

Results

21 valid responses were received from Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. From the care provider’s perspective, adequate training (appropriateness) was most prioritised. From the patient’s aspect, low oral health literacy (ability to perceive) was the most significant. ‘Social perception’ was collectively ranked as the key ‘challenge in dental practices’. Suggested ‘ways to collaborate’ could be categorised into five areas: engagement; advocacy; policies; specialty, and; upskilling.

Conclusions

The findings suggest an urgent need to address low oral health prioritisation, a drive to upskill providers, a challenge of ‘social perceptions’, and a consensual appeal for state-level support. A multi-sector collaboration is needed to align current strategies in order to achieve equity for DOH in ASEAN.

The representation of emotion knowledge across development

The present study examined how children spontaneously represent facial cues associated with emotion. 106 three‐ to six‐year‐old children (48 male, 58 female; 9.4% Asian, 84.0% White, 6.6% more than one race) and 40 adults (10 male, 30 female; 10% Hispanic, 30% Asian, 2.5% Black, 57.5% White) were recruited from a Midwestern city (2019–2020), and sorted emotion cues in a spatial arrangement method that assesses emotion knowledge without reliance on emotion vocabulary. Using supervised and unsupervised analyses, the study found evidence for continuities and gradual changes in children's emotion knowledge compared to adults. Emotion knowledge develops through an incremental learning process in which children change their representations using combinations of factors—particularly valence—that are weighted differently across development.

Emotional Valence Precedes Semantic Maturation of Words: A Longitudinal Computational Study of Early Verbal Emotional Anchoring

We present a longitudinal computational study on the connection between emotional and amodal word representations from a developmental perspective. In this study, children's and adult word representations were generated using the latent semantic analysis (LSA) vector space model and Word Maturity methodology. Some children's word representations were used to set a mapping function between amodal and emotional word representations with a neural network model using ratings from 9-year-old children. The neural network was trained and validated in the child semantic space. Then, the resulting neural network was tested with adult word representations using ratings from an adult data set. Samples of 1210 and 5315 words were used in the child and the adult semantic spaces, respectively. Results suggested that the emotional valence of words can be predicted from amodal vector representations even at the child stage, and accurate emotional propagation was found in the adult word vector representations. In this way, different propagative processes were observed in the adult semantic space. These findings highlight a potential mechanism for early verbal emotional anchoring. Moreover, different multiple linear regression and mixed-effect models revealed moderation effects for the performance of the longitudinal computational model. First, words with early maturation and subsequent semantic definition promoted emotional propagation. Second, an interaction effect between age of acquisition and abstractness was found to explain model performance. The theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

Assessing abstract thought and its relation to language with a new nonverbal paradigm: Evidence from aphasia

In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required the participant to abstract away from both perceptual features and common setting associations corresponding to the target image. The normed materials were then used with a population of people with aphasia to assess the relationship of abstract thought to language. While the language-impaired group with aphasia showed lower overall accuracy and longer response times than controls in general, of special note is that their response times were significantly longer as a function of a trial's degree of abstractness. Further, the aphasia group's response times in reporting their degree of confidence (a separate, metacognitive measure) were negatively correlated with their language production abilities, with lower language scores predicting longer metacognitive response times. These results provide some support for the hypothesis that language is an important aid to abstract thought and to metacognition about abstract thought.