About
97
Publications
20,522
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,316
Citations
Publications
Publications (97)
Children’s agential behaviours in the archaeological record have often been overlooked. Despite efforts to centre children in the past through ‘an archaeology of childhood’, there remains a fundamental challenge of rigorously distinguishing children’s behaviours from those of adults. In Upper Palaeolithic art, this has been addressed through the an...
In recent years, discussions on the origins of language have been reinvigorated through new kinds of controlled experiments that attempt to uncover the mechanisms by which communication systems such as natural languages evolve. These new approaches can test the plausibility of different theories and have been integral, for instance, in challenging...
OPEN ACCESS.
This is a registered report. The full study will be published later. The report is open access, to read just follow the link. No need to request the full paper!
The emergence of symbolic behavior is often considered a hallmark development in hominin evolution, ultimately giving rise to the complex communicative practices, abstract reasoning patterns, aesthetic discourses and religious institutions surrounding us today. In recent years, archaeologists have provided substantial evidence for the remarkable ti...
Cognitive search, commonly conceptualized as information foraging through mental spaces, is the foundation of many daily tasks. Cognitive search in real-world contexts is often performed jointly. Yet, the way social interaction impacts cognitive search mechanisms and outcomes is understudied. Over three agent-based simulations, we investigated how...
Establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in everyday conversations is crucial. To do so, people employ a variety of conversational devices, such as backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Here, we explore whether the use of conversational devices might be influenced by cross‐linguistic differences in the speakers’ native language...
Despite obvious advantages, no generalised ideographic codes have evolved through cultural evolution to rely on iconicity. Morin suggests that this is because of missing means of standardisation, which glottographic codes get from natural languages. Although we agree, we also point to the important role of the available media, which might support s...
Capacities for abstract thinking and problem solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and brains, they may in fac...
Symbolic cognition—the ability to produce and use symbols, including (but not limited to) linguistic symbols—has often been considered a hallmark of human achievement. Given its importance, symbolic cognition has been a major topic of interest in many academic disciplines including anthropology, archeology, and the cognitive sciences.1–6 Paleolithi...
In conversation, individuals work together to achieve communicative goals, complementing and aligning language and body with each other. An important emerging question is whether interlocutors entrain with one another equally across linguistic levels (e.g., lexical, syntactic, and semantic) and modalities (i.e., speech and gesture), or whether ther...
For decades, researchers have struggled with measurement problems related to the construct validity of divergent and convergent thinking in creativity assessments. In response, some have called for battery-based approaches. Recently, digital games have emerged as a potential alternative, offering increased scalability and improved ecological validi...
Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, a...
The human capacity for abstraction is remarkable. We effortlessly form abstract representations from varied experiences, generalizing and flexibly transferring experiences and knowledge between contexts, which can facilitate reasoning, problem solving and learning across many domains. The cognitive process of abstraction, however, is often portraye...
Humans readily engage in idle chat and heated discussions and negotiate tough joint decisions without ever having to think twice about how to keep the conversation grounded in mutual understanding. However, current attempts at identifying and assessing the conversational devices that make this possible are fragmented across disciplines and investig...
In conversation, individuals work together to achieve communicative goals, complementing and aligning language and body with each other. However, there is no consensus as to whether interlocutors entrain with one another equally across levels (e.g., lexical, syntactic, semantic) and modalities (i.e., speech, gesture), or whether there are complemen...
Teaching is widely understood to have an important role in cultural transmission. But cultural transmission experiments typically do not document or analyse what happens during teaching. Here, we examine the content of teaching during skill transmission under two conditions: in the presence of the artefact (no-displacement condition) and in the abs...
The human capacity for abstraction is remarkable. We effortlessly form abstract representations from varied experiences, generalising and flexibly transferring experiences and knowledge between contexts, which can facilitate reasoning, problem-solving, and learning across many domains. The cognitive process of abstraction, however, is often portray...
Establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in everyday conversations is crucial. To do so people employ a variety of conversational devices, such as backchannels, repair and linguistic entrainment. Here we explore whether speakers of different languages use conversational devices in the same way, or whether their use might be modulated by di...
What are the underlying mechanisms driving linguistic politeness? While opposing theoretical positions have argued for either strategic or socio-normative motivations for politeness, we propose to approach these as complementary components in an adaptive communicative process, in which individual strategic choices and collective requirements for so...
Social interaction plays an important role in many contexts of human reasoning and problem solving, and groups are often found to outperform individuals. We suggest that this benefit is associated with the dialogical sharing and integration of diverse perspectives and strategies. Here, we investigated whether diversity in prior experience affects g...
A crucial point for urban design is the acknowledgement that urban material structures are not only constituting a set of cognitive-cultural affordances that shapes people’s behavior and experiential world, but likewise that the design process itself is an expression of cultural conceptualizations possibly evoked by ongoing cultural practices and p...
It is often assumed that all languages are fundamentally the same. This assumption has been challenged by research in linguistic typology and language evolution, but questions of language learning and use have largely been left aside. Here we review recent work on Danish that provides new insights into these questions. Unlike closely related langua...
Humans readily engage in idle chat, heated discussions, and negotiate tough joint decisions without ever having to think twice about the different mechanisms they use to keep the conversation grounded in mutual understanding. However, current attempts at identifying and assessing the grounding mechanisms that make this possible are fragmented acros...
Capacities for abstract thinking, category-formation and problem solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and bra...
We present a pilot study on crea.blender, a novel co-creative game designed for large-scale, systematic assessment of distinct constructs of human creativity. Co-creative systems are systems in which humans and computers (often with Machine Learning) collaborate on a creative task. This human-computer collaboration raises questions about the releva...
Are all languages processed in the same way, or might typological variation cause systematic differences between languages? We explore this question through a cross-linguistic comparison of categorical perception in two closely related languages, Danish and Norwegian. We employ drift diffusion models to reveal cross-linguistic differences in the ro...
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
What causes cultural groups to favour specific conventions over others? Recently, it has been suggested that cross-linguistic variation can be motivated by factors of the wider non-linguistic environment. Large-scale cross-sectional studies have found statistical differences among languages that pattern with environmental variables such as topograp...
How did human symbolic behavior evolve? Dating up to about 100,000 y ago, the engraved ochre and ostrich eggshell fragments from the South African Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter provide a unique window into presumed early symbolic traditions of Homo sapiens and how they evolved over a period of more than 30,000 y. Using the engravings as s...
Linguistic processing has been suggested to involve rich perceptual representations grounded in non-linguistic experiential content often straddling multiple modal cognitive systems. This distributed approach implies that the processing of words signifying perceptual content can interfere with other aspects of perceptual experience through cross-mo...
Human spatial representations are shaped by affordances for action offered by the environment. A prototypical example is the organization of space into peripersonal (within reach) and extrapersonal (outside reach) regions, mirrored by proximal (this/here) and distal (that/there) linguistic expressions. The peri-/extrapersonal distinction has been w...
What causes cultural groups to favour specific conventions over others? Recently, it has been suggested that cross-linguistic variation can be motivated by factors of the non-linguistic environment. Large-scale cross-sectional studies have found statistical differences among languages that pattern with environmental variables such as topography or...
Spatial demonstratives are powerful linguistic tools used to establish joint attention. Identifying the meaning of semantically underspecified expressions like “this one” hinges on the integration of linguistic and visual cues, attentional orienting and pragmatic inference. This synergy between language and extralinguistic cognition is pivotal to l...
Human spatial representations are shaped by affordances for action offered by the environment. A prototypical example is the organization of space into peripersonal (within reach) and extrapersonal (outside reach) regions, mirrored by proximal (this/here) and distal (that/there) linguistic expressions. The peri-/extrapersonal distinction has been w...
Spatial demonstratives are powerful linguistic tools used to establish joint attention. Identifying the meaning of semantically underspecified expressions like “this one” hinges on the integration of linguistic and visual cues, attentional orienting and pragmatic inference. This synergy between language and extralinguistic cognition is pivotal to l...
Speech input is often noisy and ambiguous. Yet listenersusually do not have difficulties understanding it. A keyhypothesis is that in speech processing acoustic-phoneticbottom-up processing is complemented by top-downcontextual information. This context effect is larger when theambiguous word is only separated from a disambiguating word by a few sy...
Do people adjust their conversational strategies to the specific contextual demands of a given situation? Prior studies have yielded conflicting results, making it unclear how strategies vary with demands. We combine insights from qualitative and quantitative approaches in a within-participant experimental design involving two different contexts: s...
Language processing depends on the integration of bottom-up information with top-down cues from several different sources—primarily our knowledge of the real world, of discourse contexts, and of how language works. Previous studies have shown that factors pertaining to both the sender and the receiver of the message affect the relative weighting of...
Demonstrative reference is central to human communication. But what influences our choice of demonstrative forms such as “this” and “that” in discourse? Previous literature has mapped the use of such “proximal” and “distal” demonstratives onto spatial properties of referents, such as their distance from the speaker. We investigated whether object s...
Stimulus list for Experiment 1, all languages.
(DOCX)
Manipulability scores as a function of size, animacy and harmfulness, model summary.
(DOCX)
Overview of statistical model for Italian data from Experiment 1 including Soundness regressor.
(DOCX)
Manipulability scores for Experiment 2 as a function of size, harmfulness and animacy.
(TIF)
Stimulus list for Experiment 2, Italian and Danish.
(DOCX)
Distribution of word frequencies from Experiment 2.
Lemma occurrences per million words for each stimulus word in (A) Danish; (B) Italian.
(TIF)
Demonstrative use as a function of experimental variables and manipulability scores for Danish data in Experiment 2.
(DOCX)
Overview of statistical model for Italian data from Experiment 1 without Soundness regressor.
(DOCX)
Overview of Italian data from Experiment 1.
(TIF)
Analysis of Italian data from Experiment 1.
(DOCX)
Overview of statistical model for parametric analysis.
(DOCX)
Word frequencies for Experiment 1.
Lemma occurrences per million words for each stimulus word in (A) Danish; (B) English; (C) Italian.
(TIF)
Where does linguistic structure come from? We suggest that systematicity in language evolves adaptively in response to environmental and contextual affordances associated with the practice of communication itself. In two experiments, we used a silent gesture referential game paradigm to investigate environmental and social factors promoting the pro...
Material artefacts evolve by cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), the accumulation of adaptive modifications over time. We present a large-scale experiment investigating the CCE of a social artefact in transmission chains, each containing 8 adult human participants (N=408). The social artefact is what Wittgenstein calls a ‘language game’, the subse...
Where does linguistic structure come from? We suggest that systematicity in language evolves adaptively in response to environmental and contextual affordances associated with the practice of communication itself. In two experiments, we used a silent gesture referential game paradigm to investigate environmental and social factors promoting the pro...
Material artefacts evolve by cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), the accumulation of adaptive modifications over time. We present a large-scale experiment investigating the CCE of a social artefact in transmission chains, each containing 8 adult human participants (N = 408). The social artefact is what Wittgenstein calls a 'language game', the sub...
Convergent Cross-Mapping (CCM) has shown high potential to perform causal inference in the absence of detailed models. This has implications for the understanding of complex information systems, as well as complex systems more generally. This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the CCM algorithm by varying coupling strength and noise l...
We present the results of an empirical study that measured the contribution of a conspicuous eye-gaze (as a function of scleral de-pigmentation) of humans in conveying multimodal referentiality by combining visual and auditory cues in a naturalistic setting. We made participants interact in a cooperative task in which they had to convey referential...
Most of our perceptions of and engagements with the world are shaped by our immersion in social interactions, cultural traditions, tools and linguistic categories. In this study we experimentally investigate the impact of two types of language-based coordination on the recognition and description of complex sensory stimuli: that of red wine. Partic...
Are our capacities for abstract thinking and category-formation critically facilitated by social interaction? We hypothesize interacting dyads to have an advantage compared to individuals, especially when presented to problems of increasing complexity, because: i) cognitive diversity leads to broader search and more abstract representations ii) soc...
Interpersonal physiological entrainment is increasingly argued to underlie
rapport, empathy and even team performance. Inspired by the model of
interpersonal synergy, we investigate the presence, temporal development,
possible mechanisms and impact of interpersonal heart rate entrainment during
individual and collective creative LEGO construction t...
Convergent Cross-Mapping (CCM) has shown high potential to perform causal inference in the absence of models. We assess the strengths and weaknesses of the method by varying coupling strength and noise levels in coupled logistic maps. We find that CCM fails to infer accurate coupling strength and even causality direction in synchronized time-series...
Collaborative interaction pervades many everyday practices: work meetings, innovation and product design, education and arts. Previous studies have pointed to the central role of acknowledgement and acceptance for the success of joint action, by creating affiliation and signaling understanding. We argue that various forms of explicit miscommunicati...
In the exploratory study reported here, we tested the efficacy of an intervention designed to train teenagers with Möbius syndrome (MS) to increase the use of alternative communication strategies (e.g., gestures) to compensate for their lack of facial expressivity. Specifically, we expected the intervention to increase the level of rapport experien...
Where does linguistic structure come from? Recent gesture elicitation studies have indicated that constituent order (corresponding to for instance subject–verb–object, or SVO in English) may be heavily influenced by human cognitive biases constraining gesture production and transmission. Here we explore the alternative hypothesis that syntactic pat...
This study investigates interpersonal processes underlying dialog by comparing two approaches, interactive alignment and interpersonal synergy, and assesses how they predict collective performance in a joint task. While the interactive alignment approach highlights imitative patterns between interlocutors, the synergy approach points to structural...
Many types of everyday and specialized reasoning depend on diagrams: we use maps to find our way, we draw graphs and sketches to communicate concepts and prove geometrical theorems, and we manipulate diagrams to explore new creative solutions to problems. The active involvement and manipulation of representational artifacts for purposes of thinking...
Th is thematic issue explores aspects of sign emergence, development and change. Rather than static entities, signs are approached as dynamic relations that grow, develop and change over time in response to various environmental, cognitive, social or biological factors.
Recent experiments in semiotics and linguistics demonstrate that groups tend to converge on a common set of signs or terms in response to presented problems, experiments which potentially bear on the emergence and establishment of institutional interactions. Taken together, these studies indicate a spectrum, ranging from the spontaneous convergence...
If mind is investigated as the set of interactions that accomplish a cognitive task, that is, if mind is more than that which occurs inside the head, then how does the interplay of biological and environmental resources produce human cognition? Informed by active externalism, joint action, and distributed cognition, we review and classify a set of...
In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the 'confidence heuristic'. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective per...
How do material representations such as models, diagrams, and drawings come to shape and aid collective, epistemic processes? This study investigated how groups of participants spontaneously recruited material objects (in this case, LEGO blocks) to support collective creative processes in the context of an experiment. Qualitative microanalyses of t...
Traditionally different approaches to the study of cognition have been viewed as competing explanatory frameworks. An alternative view, explanatory pluralism, regards different approaches to the study of cognition as complementary ways of studying the same phenomenon, at specific temporal and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools....
Lately, growing attention in the health sciences has been paid to the dynamics of heart rate as indicator of impending failures and for prognoses. Likewise, in social and cognitive sciences, heart rate is increasingly employed as a measure of arousal, emotional engagement and as a marker of interpersonal coordination. However, there is no consensus...
What are the underlying motivations for the conceptualization of events? Recent studies show that when people are asked to use nonverbal gestures to describe transitive events they prefer the semantic order Agent-Patient-Act, analogous to SOV in grammatical terms. The original explanation has been that this pattern reflects a cognitively "natural o...
How is linguistic communication possible? How do we come to share the same meanings of words and utterances? One classical position holds that human beings share a transcendental “platonic” ideality independent of individual cognition and language use (Frege 1948). Another stresses immanent linguistic relations (Saussure 1959), and yet another basi...
In this issue of New Ideas in Psychology we sketch a novel framework for the study of the language and psy-cholinguistic processes based on the idea of language as coordination dynamics. Traditionally, language has been approached as a static, closed system: either in terms of self-referential structures of arbitrary symbols and rules (Hauser, Chom...
Recent advances in social cognition and joint action reveal the social and the mutual, rather than the individual and the dichotomous aspects of cognition (Hasson, Ghazanfar, Galantucci, Garrod, & Keysers, 2012). A widespread and powerful model of socially interactive behavior is 'synchrony' (Jirsa & Kelso, 2004): Numerous studies have thus recentl...
Human cognition has usually been approached on the level of individual minds and brains, but social interaction is a challenging case. Is it best thought of as a self-contained individual cognitive process aiming at an “understanding of the other,” or should it rather be approached as an collective, inter-personal process where individual cognitive...
Sharing a public language facilitates particularly efficient forms of joint perception and action by giving interlocutors refined tools for directing attention and aligning conceptual models and action. We hypothesized that interlocutors who flexibly align their linguistic practices and converge on a shared language will improve their cooperative p...
Human social coordination is often mediated by language. Through verbal dialogue, people direct each other’s attention to properties of their shared environment, they discuss how to jointly solve problems, share their introspections, and distribute roles and assignments. In this article, we propose a dynamical framework for the study of the coordin...