How cognitive selection affects language change.

Like biological species, words in language must compete to survive. Previously, it has been shown that language changes in response to cognitive constraints and over time becomes more learnable. Here, we use two complementary research paradigms to demonstrate how the survival of existing word forms can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties that impact language production. In the first study, we analyzed the survival of words in the context of interpersonal communication. We analyzed data from a large-scale serial-reproduction experiment in which stories were passed down along a transmission chain over multiple participants. The results show that words that are acquired earlier in life, more concrete, more arousing, and more emotional are more likely to survive retellings. We reason that the same trend might scale up to language evolution over multiple generations of natural language users. If that is the case, the same set of psycholinguistic properties should also account for the change of word frequency in natural language corpora over historical time. That is what we found in two large historical-language corpora (Study 2): Early acquisition, concreteness, and high arousal all predict increasing word frequency over the past 200 y. However, the two studies diverge with respect to the impact of word valence and word length, which we take up in the discussion. By bridging micro-level behavioral preferences and macro-level language patterns, our investigation sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying word competition.

Why do valence asymmetries emerge in value learning? A reinforcement learning account.

The Value Learning Task (VLT; e.g., Raymond & O'Brien, 2009) is widely used to investigate how acquired value impacts how we perceive and process stimuli. The task consists of a series of trials in which participants attempt to maximize accumulated winnings as they make choices from a pair of presented images associated with probabilistic win, loss, or no-change outcomes. The probabilities and outcomes are initially unknown to the participant and thus the task involves decision making and learning under uncertainty. Despite the symmetric outcome structure for win and loss pairs, people learn win associations better than loss associations (Lin, Cabrera-Haro, & Reuter-Lorenz, 2020). This learning asymmetry could lead to differences when the stimuli are probed in subsequent tasks, compromising inferences about how acquired value affects downstream processing. We investigate the nature of the asymmetry using a standard error-driven reinforcement learning model with a softmax choice rule. Despite having no special role for valence, the model yields the learning asymmetry observed in human behavior, whether the model parameters are set to maximize empirical fit, or task payoff. The asymmetry arises from an interaction between a neutral initial value estimate and a choice policy that exploits while exploring, leading to more poorly discriminated value estimates for loss stimuli. We also show how differences in estimated individual learning rates help to explain individual differences in the observed win-loss asymmetries, and how the final value estimates produced by the model provide a simple account of a post-learning explicit value categorization task.

Losing Money and Motivation: Effects of Loss Incentives on Motivation and Metacognition in Younger and Older Adults.

Incentives are usually expected to increase motivation and cognitive control and to thereby improve performance. A small but growing number of studies have begun to investigate whether the effects of incentive on cognitive performance differ for younger vs. older adults. Most have used attention and cognitive control paradigms, trial-wise implementation of incentive condition, and gain incentives (reward), with only a very few investigating the effects of loss incentives. The present study takes a complementary approach: We tested younger and older adults in a working memory paradigm with loss incentives implemented session-wide (between subjects). We also included self-report measures to ask how loss incentive affected participants' perceptions of the mental demand of the task, as well as their perceived effort, frustration, motivation, distraction, and metacognitive judgments of how well they had performed. This allowed us to test the disparate predictions of different theoretical views: the intuitive hypothesis that incentive should increase motivation and performance, the motivational shift proposal that older adults are especially motivated to avoid losses (Freund and Ebner, 2005), a heuristic "positivity effect" perspective that older adults ignore losses (Brassen et al., 2012; Williams et al., 2017), and a more nuanced view that suggests that when negative information is unavoidable and increases perceived costs, older adults may instead disengage from the situation (Charles, 2010; Hess, 2014). The results seemed most consistent with the more nuanced view of the positivity effect. While neither group showed incentive-related performance differences, both younger and older adults reported greater perceived demand and frustration under loss incentive, especially in the most challenging conditions. Loss incentive increased the accuracy of immediate metacognitive judgments, but reduced the accuracy of later, more global judgments of competency for older adults. Self-report measures suggested that the loss incentive manipulation was distracting to young adults and demotivating for older adults. The results suggest a need for caution in generalizing from existing studies to everyday life, and that additional studies parameterizing critical aspects of task design and incentive manipulation are needed to fully understand how incentives affect cognition and motivation in younger and older adults.

Asymmetrical learning and memory for acquired gain versus loss associations.

Neutral stimuli can acquire value when people learn to associate them with positive or negative outcomes (i.e., gain versus loss associations). Acquired value has been shown to affect how gain and loss associated stimuli are attended, remembered, and acted upon. Here we investigate a potential and previously unreported learning asymmetry in the acquisition of gain and loss associations that may have consequences for subsequent cognitive processing. In our first study, we provide meta-analytic evidence that in probabilistic learning tasks that pair neutral stimuli with intermixed win, loss, and no-change outcomes, people learn win-associations better than loss-associations despite the symmetrical task structure and symmetrical outcome probabilities. Then in two empirical studies, we demonstrate that this learning asymmetry is evident when acquiring gain versus loss associations to gray-scale landscape images whether participants earn points or money (Study 2), and whether or not they receive explicit instructions about the outcome contingencies (Study 3). Furthermore, performance on a post-learning source recognition task was also asymmetrical: explicit knowledge of associated outcomes was superior for optimal gain than optimal loss scenes. These findings indicate the acquisition of gain and loss associations need not be equivalent, despite symmetrical outcome probabilities, equivalent numbers of learning trials, and a constant learning criterion. Consequently, learning asymmetries could contribute to valence and optimality differences in subsequent cognitive processing.

Shared and distinct factors driving attention and temporal processing across modalities.

In addition to the classic finding that "sounds are judged longer than lights," the timing of auditory stimuli is often more precise and accurate than is the timing of visual stimuli. In cognitive models of temporal processing, these modality differences are explained by positing that auditory stimuli more automatically capture and hold attention, more efficiently closing an attentional switch that allows the accumulation of pulses marking the passage of time (Penney, Gibbon, & Meck, 2000). However, attention is a multifaceted construct, and there has been little attempt to determine which aspects of attention may be related to modality effects. We used visual and auditory versions of the Continuous Temporal Expectancy Task (CTET; O'Connell et al., 2009) a timing task previously linked to behavioral and electrophysiological measures of mind-wandering and attention lapses, and tested participants with or without the presence of a video distractor. Performance in the auditory condition was generally superior to that in the visual condition, replicating standard results in the timing literature. The auditory modality was also less affected by declines in sustained attention indexed by declines in performance over time. In contrast, distraction had an equivalent impact on performance in the two modalities. Analysis of individual differences in performance revealed further differences between the two modalities: Poor performance in the auditory condition was primarily related to boredom whereas poor performance in the visual condition was primarily related to distractibility. These results suggest that: 1) challenges to different aspects of attention reveal both modality-specific and nonspecific effects on temporal processing, and 2) different factors drive individual differences when testing across modalities.

A cross-cultural examination of the positivity effect in memory: United States vs. China.

Many studies conducted in the United States (U.S.) have documented a positivity effect in aging-a tendency for older adults to remember more positive than negative information in comparison to young adults. Despite this cognitive emotional benefit, U.S. adults still hold a more negative view of aging compared to adults in Asia. We hypothesized that these aging stereotypes may contribute to different patterns of age-related emotional memory processing in the two cultures. In the present study, we tested young and older adults in the U.S. and China on a View of Aging task and an emotional picture memory task. Chinese older adults hold a significantly more positive view of aging compared to all other groups of participants. Older adults in both countries demonstrated an age-related positivity effect, but Chinese older adults showed a trend in remembering fewer negative pictures than their American counterparts. These findings suggest that aging stereotypes might significantly influence older adults' cognitive abilities.