Where there’s a will—there’s no intuition. The unintentional basis of semantic coherence judgments (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).
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.
Intuitive (in)coherence judgments are guided by processing fluency, mood and affect
in press Psychological Research
Recently proposed accounts of intuitive judgments of semantic coherence assume that processing fluency results in a positive affective response leading to successful assessment of semantic coherence. The present paper investigates whether processing fluency may indicate semantic incoherence as well. In two studies, we employ a new paradigm in which participants have to detect an incoherent item among semantically coherent words. In Study 1, we show participants accurately indicating an incoherent item despite not being able to provide an accurate solution to coherent words. Further, this effect is modified by affective valence of solution words that are not retrieved from memory. Study 2 replicates those results and extend them by showing that mood moderates incoherence judgments independently of affective valence of solutions. The results support processing fluency account of intuitive semantic coherence judgments and show that it is not fluency per se but fluency variations that drive judgments.
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 processing of underspecified coherence relations
Discourse Processes, 1997
One reason discourse coheres is because coherence relations such as Cause-Consequence can be inferred between the sentences that function as the building blocks of the discourse. This article discusses cases in which the coherence relation remains underspecified: A connective is used that does not "literally" express the intended coherence relation. Underspecification has been dealt with in pragmatics and psycholinguistics. The purpose of this artice is to give an analysis of the phenomenon in pragmatic terms, as well as different strategies of how language users deal with these issues, phrased in terms of Horn's (1984) Q-and R-principle. Apart from that, data from the psycholinguistic literature on the interpretation of underspecified relations and data from language acquisition research are presented that suggest that both speakers and hearers tend to be cooperative in using underspecified relations.
NeuroImage, 2007
Daily-life decisions and judgments are often made "intuitively", i.e., without an explicit explanation or verbal justification. We conceive of intuition as the capacity for an effortless evaluation of complex situations on the basis of information being activated, but at the moment of decision not being consciously retrieved. Little is known about which neural processes mediate intuitive judgments and whether these are distinct from those neural processes underlying explicit judgments. Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we show that intuitive compared to explicit judgments in a semantic coherence judgment task are associated with increased neural activity in heteromodal association areas in bilateral inferior parietal and right superior temporal cortex. These results indicate that intuitive coherence judgments activate neural systems that are involved in the integration of remote associates into a coherent representation and, thus, support the assumption that intuitive judgments are based on an activation of widespread semantic networks sparing a conscious representation.
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.