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The Role of Uncertainty in Social Conceptual Combination
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Poster D61 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Frida Galaviz Huerta1,2, Sharon Thompson-Schill1, Adrianna Jenkins1, Nick Pothikamjorn1, Huang Ham1; 1University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology, 2University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine
When you think about coal, you know its size, shape, and color. Thinking about light coal, it might be different from what you originally imagined. This change results from the conceptual combination of the adjective light with the noun coal. Studies of conceptual combination reveal that our interpretation of combined concepts is influenced not only by our knowledge of these concepts but also by the certainty of that knowledge. For example, if you are asked to give the range of brightness of coal, the range would likely be smaller than if you were asked to provide the range of a shirt; this variation in uncertainty influences how the combined concept is interpreted and the brain systems that are recruited. Nearly all research on conceptual combination to date focuses on concrete concepts and their physical properties, as in the examples above. However, many concepts are abstract. The current project focuses on a subset of abstract concepts, namely social concepts (e.g. lawyers), which can be described by the properties of warmth and competence. People tend to agree on the warmth and competence ratings of these concepts, and these judgements affect behavior as well, as shown in decision making tasks that measure trust and cooperation. This experiment broadly aims to discern whether social conceptual combination is governed by similar principles as is concrete conceptual combination. More specifically, we aim to determine whether the shift in judgments of warmth and competence of combined social concepts (eg. friendly lawyers) is influenced by both the content and uncertainty of the concepts. To do so, we will collect fMRI data while participants play the Dictator Game, in which they decide how much money to share with members of various social categories. We will determine how brain activity is influenced by warmth and competence, which we will measure by asking a different set of participants to estimate the average and range of these properties for each concept. We will also collect familiarity ratings to determine uncertainty. Because there are no prior fMRI studies of social conceptual combination, we are conducting several pilot studies to determine which concepts we will use and the best ways to collect information about their properties. For example, the current pilot project compares different instructions for judgements of the range of warmth and competence. We will use the data to determine which set of instructions has the highest rating agreement among participants.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,