David W. Vinson

The observer's observer's paradox

Perspectives are central to paradox, from perceptual illusions (Bruno, N. (2001). When does action resist visual illusions? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(9), 379–382), to dialetheism (Dietrich, E. (2008). The Bishop and Priest: Toward a point-of-view based epistemology of true contradictions. Logos Architekton. Journal of Logic and Philosophy of Science, 2, 35–58.; Dietrich & Webber, this issue). But why? We argue that apparent inconsistencies among perspectives are driven by the observers methods, goals, etc., of inquiry: The manner in which the observer is observing. It is well known in various areas of science that observers inherently disrupt the system that is being studied. But even after we have measurement schemes (or theoretical apparatus) for collecting maximally observer-untainted behavioural data, there remains an inextricable observer-centred influence. We consider the case of cognitive science, in which diverse theoretical frameworks on offer continue to be pitted against one another as if one were going to be churned out as true, and the others falsified. A simulation is developed in which the observers observers paradox is demonstrated in a highly idealised computational model of a scientist studying a system. We use a model-building method referred to as ‘ε-machine reconstruction’ (Crutchfield, 1994) and provide readers a basic introduction to it. By using this framework to model the observer–measurement process, we explore how different measurement schemes impact resultant theories. The end product is a kind of existence proof, which we liken to more complicated circumstances of cognitive science. We argue that progress in cognitive science – overcoming apparently paradoxical persistence of several theoretical frameworks – may come from rendering the observer as an active aspect of these cognitive theories. The upshot would be one of two possibilities. Either theories are inconsistent because they ‘access’ divergent levels of organisation in the human cognitive system, or they may be integrated in an as-yet unknown theoretical framework.

High-level context effects on spatial displacement: the effects of body orientation and language on memory

Three decades of research suggests that cognitive simulation of motion is involved in the comprehension of object location, bodily configuration, and linguistic meaning. For example, the remembered location of an object associated with actual or implied motion is typically displaced in the direction of motion. In this paper, two experiments explore context effects in spatial displacement. They provide a novel approach to estimating the remembered location of an implied motion image by employing a cursor-positioning task. Both experiments examine how the remembered spatial location of a person is influenced by subtle differences in implied motion, specifically, by shifting the orientation of the person’s body to face upward or downward, and by pairing the image with motion language that differed on intentionality, fell versus jumped. The results of Experiment 1, a survey-based experiment, suggest that language and body orientation influenced vertical spatial displacement. Results of Experiment 2, a task that used Adobe Flash and Amazon Mechanical Turk, showed consistent effects of body orientation on vertical spatial displacement but no effect of language. Our findings are in line with previous work on spatial displacement that uses a cursor-positioning task with implied motion stimuli. We discuss how different ways of simulating motion can influence spatial memory.

Interacting Timescales in Perspective-Taking

Through theoretical discussion, literature review, and a computational model, this paper poses a challenge to the notion that perspective-taking involves a fixed architecture in which particular processes have priority. For example, some research suggests that egocentric perspectives can arise more quickly, with other perspectives (such as of task partners) emerging only secondarily. This theoretical dichotomy–between fast egocentric and slow other-centric processes–is challenged here. We propose a general view of perspective-taking as an emergent phenomenon governed by the interplay among cognitive mechanisms that accumulate information at different timescales. We first describe the pervasive relevance of perspective-taking to cognitive science. A dynamical systems model is then introduced that explicitly formulates the timescale interaction proposed. This model illustrates that, rather than having a rigid time course, perspective-taking can be fast or slow depending on factors such as task context. Implications are discussed, with ideas for future empirical research.

Conflicts everywhere! Perceptions, actions, and cognition all entail memory and reflect conflict

Morsella et al. assert that the function of consciousness is to determine which of many competing action options is expressed through the skeletomuscular system at any given moment. The present commentary addresses this issue from the first-person perspective and agrees with Morsella and colleagues, yet further proposes that the option-selection function of consciousness plays out in cognition as well.

Efficient n-gram analysis in R with cmscu

We present a new R package, cmscu, which implements a Count-Min-Sketch with conservative updating (Cormode and Muthukrishnan Journal of Algorithms, 55(1), 58–75, 2005), and its application to n-gram analyses (Goyal et al. 2012). By writing the core implementation in C++ and exposing it to R via Rcpp, we are able to provide a memory-efficient, high-throughput, and easy-to-use library. As a proof of concept, we implemented the computationally challenging (Heafield et al. 2013) modified Kneser–Ney n-gram smoothing algorithm using cmscu as the querying engine. We then explore information density measures (Jaeger Cognitive Psychology, 61(1), 23–62, 2010) from n-gram frequencies (for n=2,3) derived from a corpus of over 2.2 million reviews provided by a Yelp, Inc. dataset. We demonstrate that these text data are at a scale beyond the reach of other more common, more general-purpose libraries available through CRAN. Using the cmscu library and the smoothing implementation, we find a positive relationship between review information density and reader review ratings. We end by highlighting the important use of new efficient tools to explore behavioral phenomena in large, relatively noisy data sets.

An exploration of semantic tendencies in word of mouth business reviews

Explicit customer review ratings mark future business success. One important and well-studied aspect of customer satisfaction is a reviews affective - positive or negative - valence. More recently, tools from natural language processing (NLP) applied to reviews show less obvious linguistic differences in review texts dependent on reviewer rating. Consistent with this is previous work using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), showing that language use changes depending on ones current psychological state. Finer-grained analyses of review text focusing on less obvious linguistic categories may provide insight into customer values. In an attempt to explore how the content of a review is related to a reviews explicit rating, we analyzed review texts using LIWC. LIWC determines the percentage of review text associated with a variety of different psychologically relevant categories such as social or cognitive words. We explore how certain categories of words relate to review ratings and use a support vector machine to determine how well each category predicts reviewers review rating. We relate our findings to previous work and speculate that businesses would benefit from the application of various Natural Language Processing tools in attempting to obtain comprehensive insight into customer satisfaction. We end with the connection between this work and theories of language use, for which data sets of customer reviews may be useful for exploring the role of psychological state in determining word choice.