Our previous work interpreted single-lognormal fits to inter-gaze distance (i.e., "gaze steps") histograms as evidence of multiplicativity and hence interactions across scales in visual cognition. Bogartz and Staub (2012) proposed that gaze steps are additively decomposable into fixations and saccades, matching the histograms better and…

Word frequencies in natural language follow a highly skewed Zipfian distribution, but the consequences of this distribution for language acquisition are only beginning to be understood. Typically, learning experiments that are meant to simulate language acquisition use uniform word frequency distributions. We examine the effects of Zipfian…

Generativist models of grammatical development assume that children have adult-like grammatical categories from the earliest observable stages, whereas constructivist models assume that children's early categories are more limited in scope. In the present paper, we test these assumptions with respect to one particular syntactic category, the…

Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences--learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership--influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then…

The regularization of linguistic structures by learners has played a key role in arguments for strong innate constraints on language acquisition, and has important implications for language evolution. However, relating the inductive biases of learners to regularization behavior in laboratory tasks can be challenging without a formal model. In this…

The paper reports the results from 16 versions of a simple probability estimation task, where probability estimates derived from base-rate information have to be modified by case knowledge. In the bus problem [adapted from Falk, R., Lipson, A., & Konold, C. (1994), the ups and downs of the hope function in a fruitless search. In G. Wright & P.…

Previous research has shown that infants match vowel sounds to facial displays of vowel articulation [Kuhl, P. K., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1982). The bimodal perception of speech in infancy. "Science, 218", 1138-1141; Patterson, M. L., & Werker, J. F. (1999). Matching phonetic information in lips and voice is robust in 4.5-month-old infants. "Infant…

Eight experiments examined whether certain human problem-solving mechanisms should be expected to represent probability information in terms of frequency. Findings are consistent with literature indicating that frequentist representations eliminate various cognitive biases, including overconfidence, the conjunction fallacy, and base rate neglect.…