Intuitive (in)coherence judgments are guided by processing fluency, mood and affect (original) (raw)
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The analysis of intuition: Processing fluency and affect in judgements of semantic coherence
Cognition & Emotion, 2009
In semantic coherence judgements individuals are able to intuitively discriminate whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or not (incoherent) without consciously retrieving the common associate. A processing-fluency account for these intuitions is proposed, which assumes that (a) coherent triads are processed more fluently than incoherent triads, (b) this high fluency triggers a subtle positive affect, and (c) this affect may be experienced as a cognitive feeling and used in explicit judgement. In line with this account, it was shown that coherent triads (a) are processed faster than incoherent triads (Study 1), (b) serve as positive affective primes (Study 2), and (c) are liked more than incoherent triads (Study 3). When participants were provided with an irrelevant source of their affective reactions, they lost the ability to intuitively discriminate between coherent and incoherent triads (Study 4). Finally, an item-based analysis found that triads that are processed faster are liked more and are more likely to be judged coherent, irrespective of their actual coherence (Study 5).
Where there’s a will—there’s no intuition. The unintentional basis of semantic coherence judgments
Journal of Memory and Language, 2008
It is broadly agreed that the processing of a word triad with a common remote associate (coherent triad) leads to its partial activation, which is the process underlying intuitive coherence judgments. The present studies demonstrate that this process not only is independent of the intention to find the common associate (CA), but rather may be impaired by it. In Experiment 1, incidentally reading a triad did automatically activate the CA without participants being aware of the underlying semantic structure of triads. However, intentionally searching for the CA did not. Memorizing the triad even inhibited the activation of the CA. Also, it was found that coherent triads are memorized better than incoherent triads, irrespective of mindset. Experiment 2 ruled out task-switching costs and anxiety as alternative explanations. In Experiment 3, intentionally searching for the CA decreased the accuracy of intuitive coherence judgments compared to merely reading the triad.
Consciousness and Cognition, 2009
In intuitions concerning semantic coherence participants are able to discriminate above chance whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent triad) or not (incoherent triad). These intuitions are driven by increased fluency in processing coherent triads compared to incoherent triads, which in turn triggers a brief and short positive affect. The present work investigates which of these internal cues, fluency or positive affect, is the actual cue underlying coherence intuitions. In Experiment 1, participants liked coherent word triads more than incoherent triads, but did not rate them as being more fluent in processing. In Experiment 2, participants could intuitively detect coherence when they misattributed fluency to an external source, but lost this intuitive ability when they misattributed affect. It is concluded that the coherence-induced fluency by itself is not consciously experienced and not used in the coherence intuitions, but the fluency-triggered affective consequences.
Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2009
People can intuitively detect whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or does not have one (incoherent) before and independently of actually retrieving the common associate. The authors argue that semantic coherence increases the processing fluency for coherent triads and that this increased fluency triggers a brief and subtle positive affect, which is the experiential basis of these intuitions. In a series of 11 experiments with 3 different fluency manipulations (figure-ground contrast, repeated exposure, and subliminal visual priming) and 3 different affect inductions (short-timed facial feedback, subliminal facial priming, and affect-laden word triads), high fluency and positive affect independently and additively increased the probability that triads would be judged as coherent, irrespective of actual coherence. The authors could equalize and even reverse coherence judgments (i.e., incoherent triads were judged to be coherent more frequently than were coher...
The social functions of explicit coherence evaluation
Mind & Society, 2012
Coherence plays an important role in psychology. In this article, I suggest that coherence takes two main forms in humans' cognitive system. The first belong to 'system 1'. It relies on the degree of coherence between different representations to regulate them, without coherence being represented. By contrast other mechanisms, belonging to system 2, allow humans to represent the degree of coherence between different representations and to draw inferences from it. It is suggested that the mechanisms of explicit coherence evaluation have social functions. They are used as means of epistemic vigilance-to evaluate what other people tell us. They can also be turned inwards to examine the coherence of our own beliefs. Their function is then to minimize the chances that we are perceived as being incoherent. Evidence from different domains of psychology is briefly reviewed in support of these hypotheses.
Coherence – a Built-In Cognitive Mechanism ?
2011
The paper presents a proposal for correlating human’s performance in discourse coherence with a linear model of immediate memory. We begin by estimating experimentally the discourse coherence as produced by humans, using for that a measure based on Centering transitions. Then we introduce a parametrised model of immediate memory, and we propose a simple access cost model, which mimics cognitive effort during discourse processing. We show that an agent, equipped with the most economical model of immediate memory and manifesting a greedy behaviour in choosing the focus at each step, produces discourses having similar qualities as those produced by humans.
Establishing coherence across sentence boundaries: an individual differences approach
The aim of this study was to investigate the cognitive abilities that underlie coherence building. A coherence judgement task was used for this purpose. The task was comprised of four conditions that resulted from crossing coherence and cohesion (the presence of a connective), a manipulation that elicited two-way interactions in both judgement accuracy and reading times. Hierarchical Linear Modelling was then used to assess the influence of individual difference variables (vocabulary, working memory, and decoding) on target sentence reading times across the four conditions. Two of these variables, working memory and vocabulary, shared cross-level interactions with the coherent-incohesive conditionthe only condition in which coherence had to be established with an un-cued bridging inference. Vocabulary acted to decrease reading times associated with the condition whereas working memory acted to increase them. These effects are interpreted with reference to lexical quality and retrieval-based knowledge access.
Marklund Sikstrom Baath Nilsson 2009 Age effects on semantic coherence semapro 2009
We investigated age-related changes in the semantic distance between successively generated words in two letter fluency tasks differing with respect to demands placed on executive control. The semantic distance was measured by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). The results show that older people have a larger semantic distance between successively generated items than young people, and that this effect is particularly pronounced in the more demanding fluency task. Taken together, our findings support the idea that elderly have a less distinct semantic network compared to young people while also demonstrating the feasibility of LSA as a powerful tool for delineating multifaceted aspects of semantic organization inherent in behavioural data from language production tasks.
The Psychological Reality of Local Coherences in Sentence Processing
2000
Dynamical systems of language processing predict that sentence processing complexity is not only a function of the globally coherent structure ranging from the beginning of the sentence to its current point of processing, but also a function of locally coherent sub-parses. This paper presents an experiment that tests whether locally coherent, yet globally false continuations affect on-line anomaly detection times.