Cognitive Science

The latest breakthroughs, innovations, and cool happenings at the cutting edge of the world of cognitive science. Updated daily.

Probing the Representational Structure of Regular Polysemy via Sense Analogy Questions: Insights from Contextual Word Vectors

Abstract Regular polysemes are sets of ambiguous words that all share the same relationship between their meanings, such as CHICKEN and LOBSTER both referring to an animal or its meat. To probe how a distributional semantic model, here exemplified by bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), represents regular polysemy, we analyzed whether its embeddings support […]

Published on March 14, 2024

Uncertain Facts or Uncertain Values? Testing the Distinction Between Empirical and Normative Uncertainty in Moral Judgments

Abstract People can be uncertain in their moral judgments. Philosophers have argued that such uncertainty can either refer to the underlying empirical facts (empirical uncertainty) or to the normative evaluation of these facts itself (normative uncertainty). Psychological investigations of this distinction, however, are rare. In this paper, we combined factor-analytical and experimental approaches to show […]

Published on March 14, 2024

Aging effects on the encoding/retrieval flip in associative memory: fMRI evidence from incidental contingency learning

IntroductionAssociative memory is arguably the most basic memory function and therein constitutes the foundation of all episodic and semantic memory processes. At the same time, the decline of associative memory represents a core feature of age-related cognitive decline in both, healthy and pathological (i.e., dementia-related) aging. The neural mechanisms underlying age-related impairments in associative memory […]

Published on March 13, 2024