Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Recursive Pattern Processing in Human Adults

Published on April 13, 2023

Imagine your brain as an architect, tirelessly constructing intricate buildings of thoughts and ideas. Just like a skilled architect, our minds possess the remarkable ability to generate recursive sequences – patterns nested within patterns, like a set of Russian dolls. But how exactly does this magical process occur? In a quest to uncover the secrets of our cognitive blueprint, scientists delved into three potential mechanisms: hierarchical reasoning, ordinal reasoning, and associative chaining. By developing a Bayesian mixture model, they measured the contribution of each mechanism to human adults’ performance in sequence generation tasks. To further understand the role of relational information, both perceptual and semantic, researchers conducted experiments. The findings revealed that the presence of relational information facilitates hierarchical reasoning and triggers the creation of recursive sequences across different levels of nesting. On the other hand, without relational information, our minds rely on ordinal reasoning as the dominant mechanism. These results highlight the significance of hierarchical reasoning in recursive pattern processing across various depth levels and relational domains. Ready to dive into this fascinating research? Grab your thinking cap and explore the full article now!

Abstract
The capacity to generate recursive sequences is a marker of rich, algorithmic cognition, and perhaps unique to humans. Yet, the precise processes driving recursive sequence generation remain mysterious. We investigated three potential cognitive mechanisms underlying recursive pattern processing: hierarchical reasoning, ordinal reasoning, and associative chaining. We developed a Bayesian mixture model to quantify the extent to which these three cognitive mechanisms contribute to adult humans’ performance in a sequence generation task. We further tested whether recursive rule discovery depends upon relational information, either perceptual or semantic. We found that the presence of relational information facilitates hierarchical reasoning and drives the generation of recursive sequences across novel depths of center embedding. In the absence of relational information, the use of ordinal reasoning predominates. Our results suggest that hierarchical reasoning is an important cognitive mechanism underlying recursive pattern processing and can be deployed across embedding depths and relational domains.

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