Visual Behaviour and Cognitive Preferences of Users for Constituent Elements in Forest Landscape Spaces

Background: Elements of forest landscape spaces are important media through which landscape information is conveyed. Therefore, it is very important for designers and managers of forests to explore the relationship among visual behaviour, landscape preferences, and element characteristics. Purpose: This study took forest landscape spaces as the subject, discussed the characteristics of visual behaviour and cognitive preferences for landscape elements, and analysed the relationship among element characteristics, visual behaviour, and cognitive preferences in forest landscape spaces. The findings will help designers better plan the spatial composition of forest landscapes. Methods: We collected data from 53 graduate and undergraduate students and then used Spearman’s rho correlation analysis and multiple linear regressions to analyse the experimental data. Main results: 1. As the composition of forest landscape spaces varies and landscape elements are combined in different ways, visual behaviour towards landscape elements also differs. 2. People are easily attracted by highly fascinating landscape elements, but they will spend more time on low fascinating landscape elements. 3. Element characteristics significantly affect visual behaviour and cognitive preferences. Elements with high complexity or a large proportion of elements take more time for the participants to recognize, which reduces the evaluation of satisfaction.

Lexical variation in Caribbean English

The present paper seeks to further develop an interdisciplinary research into language variation and contact studies. Integrating cognitive-onomasiological and ecolinguistic approaches, it addresses lexical diversity in the Caribbean English. The permanent contacts between English and other local and transported languages have caused a wide range of modifications in the Caribbean English lexicon, including allonymy. Allonymy is treated as a contact-induced type of lexical variation leading to the formation of alternative names for the same referents. By tracing the sources of allonyms and disclosing cognitive mechanisms involved in their formation, this study explains the vitality of allonymic lexical items in the complex language ecology of the Caribbean region. It is argued that variation in naming processes is determined by speakers’ cognitive preferences as well as their cultural vigour that manifest in multilingual and multicultural ecology.

TEACHING REASONING: A COGNITIVE-CULTURAL APPROACH

This paper describes personal reasoning peculiarities of Russian undergraduate students viewed through the prism of their culture and their psycho-typical characteristics. The experimental study showed specificity of argument formation in the students’ reasoning about their cultural values. Our experiment identified the respondents’ poles within the cognitive style ‘abstract / concrete conceptualization’ based on their verbalization of the primary values. Four levels of concept abstraction were detected and proved by the students’ verbal manifestations: the resulting students’ texts showed remarkable differences between the poles concerning preferences of argument exposition, both in its construction schemes and in the choice of components of the arguments. We thus state that the degree of variability of the students’ value assessment correlates with the degree of formation of the mechanism of differentiation in value orientations. Our recommendations for teaching reasoning concern: linguistically based principles of student cognitive differentiation which minimize distractive factors; choice of teaching tasks depending on the student specific conceptualization pole; and ways of activating differentiation and integration operations in reasoning. In a broader context of education, students’ individual peculiarities and cognitive preferences should be focused on training which stimulate the students’ learning interest.

Distal and proximal motivational processes related to flow experience: Investigating the role of implicit motives, affective and cognitive preferences, and perceived abilities

One of the prominent questions in flow research is the investigation of conditions that need to be met so that people will get involved in an activity for the sheer sake of doing it. The present study examined the relationship between distal (i.e., implicit motives) and proximal (i.e., affective preferences, cognitive preferences, perceived abilities) motivational processes and flow experience based on assumptions of the compensatory model of motivation and volition. In order to arouse the implicit agentic motive, 63 participants worked on an online platform in an open innovation environment. Results showed that affective preferences mediated the effect of the implicit agentic motive on flow experience. Moreover, a hierarchical regression analysis with simple slope tests yielded that, at the proximal level, the congruence of affective preferences, cognitive preferences, and perceived abilities was associated with flow experience. The present research adds some new and essential ingredients to Csikszentmihalyis’ traditional conception of flow.

Exploratory preferences explain the cultural success of imaginary worlds in modern societies

Imaginary worlds are one of the hallmarks of modern culture. They are present in many of the most successful fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), films (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). This phenomenon is global (e.g., the worldwide success of Lord of the Ring, the emergence of xuanhuan and xanxia genres in China), and massive: people spend an increasing amount of time, energy and resources involved in fictions with imaginary worlds. Why so much attention devoted to nonexistent worlds? In this paper, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt exploratory preferences, a set of cognitive preferences that have evolved in humans and non-human animals to motivate individuals to explore new sources of reward. Imaginary worlds are fictional superstimuli that tap into the human’s interest for unfamiliar and potentially rewarding environments. This theory predicts that 1) fictions with imaginary worlds should be more appealing for individuals higher in Openness to experience (because this personality trait is associated with exploratory preferences), 2) such fictions should be more attractive for younger people (because young people reap more rewards from exploratory behaviors) and 3) such fictions should be more successful in more economically developed societies (because affluent ecologies lower the costs of exploration). We successively test these predictions with two large cultural datasets, namely IMDb (N=85,855 films) and Wikidata (N=96,711 novels), as well the Movie Personality Dataset, which aggregates averaged personality traits and demographic data from the Facebook myPersonality Database (N=3.5 million), the films they like on Facebook and metadata for films from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). We provide evidence that the appeal for imaginary worlds relies on our exploratory psychology.

Cultural Attraction in Film Evolution: the Case of Anachronies

In many films, story is presented in an order different from chronological. Deviations from the chronological order in a narrative are called anachronies. Narratological theory and the evidence from psychological experiments indicate that anachronies allow stories to be more interesting, as the non-chronological order evokes curiosity in viewers. In this paper we investigate the historical dynamics in the use of anachronies in film. Particularly, we follow the cultural attraction theory that suggests that, given certain conditions, cultural evolution should conform to our cognitive preferences. We study this on a corpus of 80 most popular mystery films released in 1970–2009. We observe that anachronies have become used more frequently, and in a greater proportion of films. We also find that films that made substantial use of anachronies, on average, distributed the anachronies evenly along film length, while the films that made little use of anachronies placed them near the beginning and end. We argue that this can reflect a functional difference between these two types of using anachronies. The paper adds further support to the argument that popular culture may be influenced to a significant degree by our cognitive biases.

“Second guessing yourself all the time about what they really mean…”: Cognitive differences between autistic and non-autistic adults in understanding implied meaning

This study investigated cognitive differences between autistic and non-autistic people in understanding implied meaning in conversation using a novel computerized test, the Implicature Comprehension Test. Controlling for core language ability, autistic participants (N = 66) were over twice as likely to endorse a non-normative interpretation of an implied meaning and over five times as likely to select ‘don’t know’ when asked about the presence of an implied meaning, compared to non-autistic participants (N = 118). A further experiment suggested that the selection of ‘don’t know’ reflected a cognitive preference for certainty and explicit communication, and that the normative inference could often be made when the test format was more constrained. Our research supports the hypothesis that autistic individuals can find it challenging to process language in its pragmatic context, and that cognitive preferences play a role in this.

On cognitive preferences and the plausibility of rule-based models

It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In particular, we argue that—all other things being equal—longer explanations may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a crowdsourcing study based on about 3000 judgments. The results do not reveal a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic, or the recognition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and plausibility.

"Sister, I Love You!" Phatic Posts Are More Successful On Facebook Than Health Misinformation

Social media like Facebook are harshly criticized for the propagation of health misinformation. Yet, little research has provided in-depth analysis of real-world data to measure the scale of the phenomenon. This article examines an emblematic case of online health misinformation: the Facebook page Santé + Mag, which generates five times more interactions than the combination of the five best-established French media outlets. Based on the literature on cultural evolution, we hypothesized that its huge success can hardly be explained by the misleading nature of its content (H1) but rather by its diffusion of posts containing cognitive attractors that tap into evolved cognitive preferences, such as information related to sexuality, social relations, threat, disgust or negative emotions (H2-6). Drawing from media studies findings, suggesting that Facebook is primarily used to connect with friends and family, we hypothesized that the popularity of Santé + Mag could be driven by Internet users’ desire to strengthen their relationships by sharing phatic posts (i.e. statements with no practical information aiming at engaging or maintaining social interactions such as “hello”) (H7).To test these hypotheses, we examined 500 posts, along with their 6.5 million interactions and tracked the presence of misleading health contents, psychological attractors, and phatic posts. Our analyses showed that most posts were related to social relations, that only a quarter consisted of health misinformation, and that despite their emphasis on threat, they were negative predictors of interactions. Phatic posts, composed of short sentences such as “Sister I love you”, were the strongest predictor of interactions, followed by posts with a positive emotional valence. Sexual contents negatively predicted interactions and other cognitive attractors such as disgust, threat or negative emotional valence did not predict interactions. These results strengthen the idea that Facebook is first and foremost a social network used by people to foster their social relations, not to spread online misinformation. We encourage researchers working on disinformation to conduct finer-grained analysis of online contents and to adopt interdisciplinary approach to study the phatic dimension of communication, together with positive contents, to better understand the cultural evolution dynamics of social media.