Related papers: Consciousness Self and Language
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…
The Free-Energy Principle (FEP) [1-3] has been adopted in a variety of ambitious proposals that aim to characterize all adaptive, sentient, and cognitive systems within a unifying framework. Judging by the amount of attention it has…
By capturing statistical patterns in large corpora, machine learning has enabled significant advances in natural language processing, including in machine translation, question answering, and sentiment analysis. However, for agents to…
Bayesian inference is often utilized for uncertainty quantification tasks. A recent analysis by Xu and Raginsky 2022 rigorously decomposed the predictive uncertainty in Bayesian inference into two uncertainties, called aleatoric and…
In this work, we propose an approach for assessing sensitivity to unobserved confounding in studies with multiple outcomes. We demonstrate how prior knowledge unique to the multi-outcome setting can be leveraged to strengthen causal…
Suspense is an affective response to narrative text that is believed to involve complex cognitive processes in humans. Several psychological models have been developed to describe this phenomenon and the circumstances under which text might…
A large body of work in psycholinguistics has focused on the idea that online language comprehension can be shallow or `good enough': given constraints on time or available computation, comprehenders may form interpretations of their input…
Complexity and limited ability have profound effect on how we learn and make decisions under uncertainty. Using the theory of finite automaton to model belief formation, this paper studies the characteristics of optimal learning behavior in…
As language models (LMs) become integral to fields like healthcare, law, and journalism, their ability to differentiate between fact, belief, and knowledge is essential for reliable decision-making. Failure to grasp these distinctions can…
There is a mismatch between psychological and computational studies on emotions. Psychological research aims at explaining and documenting internal mechanisms of these phenomena, while computational work often simplifies them into labels.…
Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and…
It is widely accepted that information derived from analyzing speech (the acoustic signal) and language production (words and sentences) serves as a useful window into the health of an individual's cognitive ability. In fact, most…
Contemporary theories model language processing as integrating both top-down expectations and bottom-up inputs. One major prediction of such models is that the quality of the bottom-up inputs modulates ease of processing -- noisy inputs…
Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…
Psychological and social systems provide us with a natural domain for the study of anticipations because these systems are based on and operate in terms of intentionality. Psychological systems can be expected to contain a model of…
Loneliness does not only have emotional implications on a person but also on his/her well-being. The study of loneliness has been challenging and largely inconclusive in findings because of the several factors that might correlate to the…
This paper presents a hypothesis that consciousness is a natural result of neurons that become connected recursively, and work synchronously between short and long term memories. Such neurons demonstrate qubit-like properties, each…
Metacognition, defined as the awareness and regulation of one's cognitive processes, is central to human adaptability in unknown situations. In contrast, current autonomous agents often struggle in novel environments due to their limited…
The possible consequences for the same context may vary depending on the situation we refer to. However, current studies in natural language processing do not focus on situated commonsense reasoning under multiple possible scenarios. This…
Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle…