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PloS One 2019Temperament and Psychological Types can be defined as innate psychological characteristics associated with how we relate with the world, and often influence our study... (Review)
Review
Temperament and Psychological Types can be defined as innate psychological characteristics associated with how we relate with the world, and often influence our study and career choices. Furthermore, understanding these features help us manage conflicts, develop leadership, improve teaching and many other skills. Assigning temperament and psychological types is usually made by filling specific questionnaires. However, it is possible to identify temperamental characteristics from a linguistic and behavioral analysis of social media data from a user. Thus, machine-learning algorithms can be used to learn from a user's social media data and infer his/her behavioral type. This paper initially provides a brief historical review of theories on temperament and then brings a survey of research aimed at predicting temperament and psychological types from social media data. It follows with the proposal of a framework to predict temperament and psychological types from a linguistic and behavioral analysis of Twitter data. The proposed framework infers temperament types following the David Keirsey's model, and psychological types based on the MBTI model. Various data modelling and classifiers are used. The results showed that Random Forests with the LIWC technique can predict with 96.46% of accuracy the Artisan temperament, 92.19% the Guardian temperament, 78.68% the Idealist, and 83.82% the Rational temperament. The MBTI results also showed that Random Forests achieved a better performance with an accuracy of 82.05% for the E/I pair, 88.38% for the S/N pair, 80.57% for the T/F pair, and 78.26% for the J/P pair.
Topics: Behavioral Research; Female; History, 21st Century; Humans; Machine Learning; Male; Models, Psychological; Psycholinguistics; Social Behavior; Social Media; Temperament
PubMed: 30861015
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212844 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Jul 2018Our ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed,...
Our ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed, processed, and represented in mind. For example, because abstract concepts do not designate referents that can be experienced through our body, the role of perceptual experiences in shaping their content remains controversial. Current theories suggest a variety of alternative explanations to the question of "how abstract concepts are represented in the human mind." These views pinpoint specific streams of semantic information that would play a prominent role in shaping the content of abstract concepts, such as situation-based information (e.g., Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, ), affective information (Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, & Del Campo, ), and linguistic information (Louwerse, ). Rarely, these theoretical views are directly compared. In this special issue, current views are presented in their most recent and advanced form, and directly compared and discussed in a debate, which is reported at the end of each article. As a result, new exciting questions and challenges arise. These questions and challenges, reported in this introductory article, can arguably pave the way to new empirical studies and theoretical developments on the nature of abstract concepts.
Topics: Concept Formation; Humans; Models, Theoretical; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 29932299
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12354 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Jul 2020Human languages all have a grammar, that is, rules that determine how symbols in a language can be combined to create complex meaningful expressions. Despite decades of...
Human languages all have a grammar, that is, rules that determine how symbols in a language can be combined to create complex meaningful expressions. Despite decades of research, the evolutionary, developmental, cognitive, and computational bases of grammatical abilities are still not fully understood. "Artificial Grammar Learning" (AGL) studies provide important insights into how rules and structured sequences are learned, the relevance of these processes to language in humans, and whether the cognitive systems involved are shared with other animals. AGL tasks can be used to study how human adults, infants, animals, or machines learn artificial grammars of various sorts, consisting of rules defined typically over syllables, sounds, or visual items. In this introduction, we distill some lessons from the nine other papers in this special issue, which review the advances made from this growing body of literature. We provide a critical synthesis, identify the questions that remain open, and recognize the challenges that lie ahead. A key observation across the disciplines is that the limits of human, animal, and machine capabilities have yet to be found. Thus, this interdisciplinary area of research firmly rooted in the cognitive sciences has unearthed exciting new questions and venues for research, along the way fostering impactful collaborations between traditionally disconnected disciplines that are breaking scientific ground.
Topics: Animals; Humans; Infant; Language Development; Learning; Linguistics; Models, Theoretical; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 32134565
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12493 -
Quarterly Journal of Experimental... Jun 2024All major writing systems mandate the use of commas to separate clauses and list items. However, casual writers often omit mandatory commas. Little empirical or...
All major writing systems mandate the use of commas to separate clauses and list items. However, casual writers often omit mandatory commas. Little empirical or theoretical research has been done on the effect that omitting mandatory commas has on eye movement control during reading. We present an eye-tracking experiment in Spanish, a language with a clear standard as to mandatory comma use. Sentences were presented with or without mandatory commas while readers' eye movements were recorded. There was a local increase in the go-past time for the pre-comma region when commas were presented, which was balanced out by shorter first-pass and second-pass times on the subsequent regions. In global sentence reading time, there was no evidence for an advantage of presenting commas. These findings suggest that, even when commas are mandatory, their effect is primarily to shift when processing takes place rather than to facilitate processing overall.
Topics: Humans; Reading; Female; Male; Eye Movements; Adult; Young Adult; Eye-Tracking Technology; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 37653706
DOI: 10.1177/17470218231200338 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Apr 2020Theories of dishonest behavior implicitly assume language independence. Here, we investigated this assumption by comparing lying by people using a foreign language...
Theories of dishonest behavior implicitly assume language independence. Here, we investigated this assumption by comparing lying by people using a foreign language versus their native tongue. Participants rolled a die and were paid according to the outcome they reported. Because the outcome was private, they could lie to inflate their profit without risk of repercussions. Participants performed the task either in their native language or in a foreign language. With native speakers of Hebrew, Korean, Spanish, and English, we discovered that, on average, people inflate their earnings less when they use a foreign language. The outcome is explained by a dual system account that suggests that self-serving dishonesty is an automatic tendency, which is supported by a fast and intuitive system. Because using a foreign language is less intuitive and automatic, it might engage more deliberation and reduce the temptation to lie. These findings challenge theories of ethical behavior to account for the role of the language in shaping ethical behavior.
Topics: Adult; Deception; Ethics; Humans; Multilingualism; Psycholinguistics; Social Behavior
PubMed: 29961266
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12360 -
Evolutionary Psychology : An... May 2015Recently, researchers have begun to investigate the function of memory in our evolutionary history. According to Nairne and colleagues (e.g., Nairne, Pandeirada, and... (Review)
Review
Recently, researchers have begun to investigate the function of memory in our evolutionary history. According to Nairne and colleagues (e.g., Nairne, Pandeirada, and Thompson, 2008; Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada, 2007), the best mnemonic strategy for learning lists of unrelated words may be one that addresses the same problems that our Pleistocene ancestors faced: fitness-relevant problems including securing food and water, as well as protecting themselves from predators. Survival processing has been shown to promote better recall and recognition memory than many well-known mnemonic strategies (e.g., pleasantness ratings, imagery, generation, etc.). However, the survival advantage does not extend to all types of stimuli and tasks. The current review presents research that has replicated Nairne et al.'s (2007) original findings, in addition to the research designs that fail to replicate the survival advantage. In other words, there are specific manipulations in which survival processing does not appear to benefit memory any more than other strategies. Potential mechanisms for the survival advantage are described, with an emphasis on those that are the most plausible. These proximate mechanisms outline the memory processes that may contribute to the advantage, although the ultimate mechanism may be the congruity between the survival scenario and Pleistocene problem-solving.
Topics: Humans; Learning; Mental Recall; Problem Solving; Psycholinguistics; Set, Psychology; Survival
PubMed: 25947360
DOI: 10.1177/147470491501300204 -
Cognitive Science May 2021Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas of cognitive science. Its... (Review)
Review
Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas of cognitive science. Its status, however, remains contentious. Here, I reassess the nature and scope of the principle of compositionality (Partee, 1995) from the perspective of psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. First, I review classic arguments for compositionality and conclude that they fail to establish compositionality as a property of human language. Next, I state a new competence argument, acknowledging the fact that any competent user of a language L can assign to most expressions in L at least one meaning which is a function only of the meanings of the expression's parts and of its syntactic structure. I then discuss selected results from cognitive neuroscience, indicating that the human brain possesses the processing capacities presupposed by the competence argument. Finally, I outline a language processing architecture consistent with the neuroscience results, where semantic representations may be generated by a syntax-driven stream and by an "asyntactic" processing stream, jointly or independently. Compositionality is viewed as a constraint on computation in the former stream only.
Topics: Brain; Humans; Language; Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics
PubMed: 34018238
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12949 -
International Journal of... Feb 2015A number of variables—word frequency, word length—have long been known to influence language processing. This study briefly reviews the effects in speech perception... (Review)
Review
A number of variables—word frequency, word length—have long been known to influence language processing. This study briefly reviews the effects in speech perception and production of two more recently examined variables: phonotactic probability and neighbourhood density. It then describes a new approach to study language, network science, which is an interdisciplinary field drawing from mathematics, computer science, physics and other disciplines. In this approach, nodes represent individual entities in a system (i.e. phonological word-forms in the lexicon), links between nodes represent relationships between nodes (i.e. phonological neighbours) and various measures enable researchers to assess the micro-level (i.e. the individual word), the macro-level (i.e. characteristics about the whole system) and the meso-level (i.e. how an individual fits into smaller sub-groups in the larger system). Although research on individual lexical characteristics such as word-frequency has increased understanding of language processing, these measures only assess the "micro-level". Using network science, researchers can examine words at various levels in the system and how each word relates to the many other words stored in the lexicon. Several new findings using the network science approach are summarized to illustrate how this approach can be used to advance basic research as well as clinical practice.
Topics: Adult; Age Factors; Auditory Pathways; Child; Humans; Language Development; Language Disorders; Neural Networks, Computer; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Speech; Speech Acoustics; Speech Disorders; Speech Perception; Systems Integration; Systems Theory
PubMed: 25539473
DOI: 10.3109/17549507.2014.987819 -
Editors' Introduction and Review: Visual Narrative Research: An Emerging Field in Cognitive Science.Topics in Cognitive Science Jan 2020Drawn sequences of images are among our oldest records of human intelligence, appearing on cave paintings, wall carvings, and ancient pottery, and they pervade across...
Drawn sequences of images are among our oldest records of human intelligence, appearing on cave paintings, wall carvings, and ancient pottery, and they pervade across cultures from instruction manuals to comics. They also appear prevalently as stimuli across Cognitive Science, for studies of temporal cognition, event structure, social cognition, discourse, and basic intelligence. Yet, despite this fundamental place in human expression and research on cognition, the study of visual narratives themselves has only recently gained traction in Cognitive Science. This work has suggested that visual narrative comprehension requires cultural exposure across a developmental trajectory and engages with domain-general processing mechanisms shared by visual perception, attention, event cognition, and language, among others. Here, we review the relevance of such research for the broader Cognitive Science community, and make the case for why researchers should join the scholarship of this ubiquitous but understudied aspect of human expression.
Topics: Cognitive Science; Humans; Narration; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 31865641
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12473 -
Behavior Research Methods Apr 2023We present a database of category production (aka semantic fluency) norms collected in the UK for 117 categories (67 concrete and 50 abstract). Participants verbally...
We present a database of category production (aka semantic fluency) norms collected in the UK for 117 categories (67 concrete and 50 abstract). Participants verbally named as many category members as possible within 60 seconds, resulting in a large variety of over 2000 generated member concepts. The norms feature common measures of category production (production frequency, mean ordinal rank, first-rank frequency), as well as response times for all first-named category members, and typicality ratings collected from a separate participant sample. We provide two versions of the dataset: a referential version that groups together responses that relate to the same referent (e.g., hippo, hippopotamus) and a full version that retains all original responses to enable future lexical analysis. Correlational analyses with previous norms from the USA and UK demonstrate both consistencies and differences in English-language norms over time and between geographical regions. Further exploration of the norms reveals a number of structural and psycholinguistic differences between abstract and concrete categories. The data and analyses will be of use in the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive modelling, and to any researchers interested in semantic category structure. All data, including original participant recordings, are available at https://osf.io/jgcu6/ .
Topics: Humans; Language; Semantics; Psycholinguistics; Databases, Factual; Reaction Time
PubMed: 35650380
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-021-01787-z