Decision contamination in the wild: Sequential dependencies in online review ratings.

Current judgments are systematically biased by prior judgments. Such biases occur in ways that seem to reflect the cognitive system's ability to adapt to statistical regularities within the environment. These cognitive sequential dependencies have primarily been evaluated in carefully controlled laboratory experiments. In this study, we used these well-known laboratory findings to guide our analysis of two datasets, consisting of over 2.2 million business review ratings from Yelp and 4.2 million movie and television review ratings from Amazon. We explored how within-reviewer ratings are influenced by previous ratings. Our findings suggest a contrast effect: Current ratings are systematically biased away from prior ratings, and the magnitude of this bias decays over several reviews. This work is couched within a broader program that aims to use well-established laboratory findings to guide our understanding of patterns in naturally occurring and large-scale behavioral data.

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.

Implied motion language can influence visual spatial memory.

How do language and vision interact? Specifically, what impact can language have on visual processing, especially related to spatial memory? What are typically considered errors in visual processing, such as remembering the location of an object to be farther along its motion trajectory than it actually is, can be explained as perceptual achievements that are driven by our ability to anticipate future events. In two experiments, we tested whether the prior presentation of motion language influences visual spatial memory in ways that afford greater perceptual prediction. Experiment 1 showed that motion language influenced judgments for the spatial memory of an object beyond the known effects of implied motion present in the image itself. Experiment 2 replicated this finding. Our findings support a theory of perception as prediction.

Perceptually walking in another's shoes: goals and memories constrain spatial perception.

Perceptual variables such as perceived distance contain information about future actions. Often our goals involve the integration of another's goals, such as lifting heavy objects together. The purpose of this study was to investigate how another's actions might influence one's own goal-oriented perceptions (i.e., verbal distance estimates). Using a within-subject paradigm, we replicated a well-known finding that carrying a weighted backpack results in larger distance estimates relative to not carrying a backpack. In a crucial second condition, this effect was reversed: distance estimates were significantly greater when not carrying a weighted backpack than when carrying a backpack. In this condition, participants provided distance estimates while wearing a weighted backpack during the first phase and then gave estimates while not wearing a backpack, but following an experimenter wearing a weighted backpack in the second phase. Three additional conditions systematically documented how the observation of another's actions influenced distance estimates.

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.

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.

Perception, as you make it.

The main question that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) pose is whether "what and how we see is functionally independent from what and how we think, know, desire, act, and so forth" (sect. 2, para. 1). We synthesize a collection of concerns from an interdisciplinary set of coauthors regarding F&S's assumptions and appeals to intuition, resulting in their treatment of visual perception as context-free.

Extending Gurwitsch's field theory of consciousness.

Aron Gurwitsch's theory of the structure and dynamics of consciousness has much to offer contemporary theorizing about consciousness and its basis in the embodied brain. On Gurwitsch's account, as we develop it, the field of consciousness has a variable sized focus or "theme" of attention surrounded by a structured periphery of inattentional contents. As the field evolves, its contents change their status, sometimes smoothly, sometimes abruptly. Inner thoughts, a sense of one's body, and the physical environment are dominant field contents. These ideas can be linked with (and help unify) contemporary theories about the neural correlates of consciousness, inattention, the small world structure of the brain, meta-stable dynamics, embodied cognition, and predictive coding in the brain.

Response dynamics in prospective memory.

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to execute a delayed behavior. Most theoretical and empirical work on PM has focused on the attentional resources that might facilitate successfully executing a delayed behavior. In the present study, we enhance the current understanding of attention allocation and also introduce novel evidence for the dynamics of PM retrieval. We recorded mouse-tracking trajectories during a prospective memory task to examine the continuous nature of attentional processes that support PM cue retrieval. We found that the velocity profiles of response trajectories differed as a function of PM cue focality while controlling for the canonical measure of response time, supporting the notions that monitoring is evident in the continuous nature of response trajectories and that such trajectories are sensitive to cue focality. Conditional velocity profiles of ongoing task trials indicated that monitoring occurred when the processing of PM cues differed from ongoing task instructions (Nonfocal PM condition): responses were made later in the profile, suggestive of a more controlled retrieval process. Analysis of PM cue retrieval profiles indicated correctly retrieved Focal PM cues were qualitatively and quantitatively different from all other PM cue retrieval trials. This provides evidence that retrieval dynamics of a delayed behavior differ as a function of cue focality and suggests that controlled processing may contribute to spontaneous retrieval of a PM task.

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.

Virtual and drawing structures for the Müller-Lyer illusions.

This research assessed the relative contribution of 3-D virtual structure that generated the stimulus drawings (scene-based and picture-based theories) and 2-D structure of the drawings (object-based theories). Virtual structures were right-angle convex and concave corners in front of and behind the picture plane, respectively. Virtual corner size was manipulated directly (Experiment 1) and indirectly by manipulating drawing station point distance (Experiments 2 and 3), corner depth (Experiment 4), and corner distance from the picture plane (Experiments 5 and 6). Experiments 2 and 4 held the size of the projected corner edge (interior target line) constant, causing virtual corner size to vary, whereas Experiments 3, 4, 5, and 6 held size of the virtual corners constant, causing size of the projected corner edge or interior target line to vary. Subjects reproduced the length of the projected corner edge (interior target line). The illusions (difference between reproduced size of the projected corner edge and T-junction control) were generally well fit by the weighted sum of virtual corner size and size of the projected corner edge, but the projected distance between boundary line terminations (intertip distance) appeared as an additional contributing factor in Experiments 5 and 6. The implications of this methodological approach are discussed for theories of the illusions.