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Consistent with capacity theories of attention, attention can be sustained to the extent that spare mental resources remain available. The traditional lecture in higher education has received criticism for being too long to hold a student's attention. This is based on several author's claims that there is a measurable decrement in student attention after approximately 10-15 minutes of sustained content delivery. The present research aimed to investigate if providing small, separate units of an asynchronous lecture is able to enhance motivation for task engagement through perceived achievability of the learning outcomes, and consequently, enhance sustained attention amongst postgraduate university students. Utilising a quasiexperimental design, 51 postgraduate psychology students were recruited by opportunistic sampling from a cognitive psychology lecture on an MSc Psychology course, and given the option to watch either a long, single-video version of a lecture, or the same lecture delivered as smaller separate video chunks. Key findings indicate that presenting the material as smaller separate video units increased the perceived achievability of the learning outcomes and reduced the number of attention lapses experienced, but not the duration of those lapses, all measured via self-report single-item measures. The shorter separate videos condition also saw greater levels of break taking compliance. Looking at the sample as a whole using a hierarchical regression analysis, whilst controlling for student mind wandering tendencies as measured by the Mind Excessively Wandering Scale (MEWS), taking breaks was a significant negative predictor of attention lapses. Taken together, this suggests taking breaks is an integral part of sustained attention, and that chunking lectures into separate video units increases break taking compliance. Therefore, when designing online asynchronous learning material, lecturers should consider the value of chunking learning material for its potential direct and indirect effect on sustained attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psycholinguistic research over the past decade has suggested that children's linguistic knowledge includes dedicated representations for frequently‐encountered multiword sequences. Important evidence for this comes from studies of children's production: it has been repeatedly demonstrated that children's rate of speech errors is greater for word sequences that are infrequent and thus unfamiliar to them than for those that are frequent. In this study, we investigate whether children's knowledge of multiword sequences can explain a phenomenon that has long represented a key theoretical fault line in the study of language development: errors of subject‐auxiliary non‐inversion in question production (e.g., "why we can't go outside?*"). In doing so we consider a type of error that has been ignored in discussion of multiword sequences to date. Previous work has focused on errors of omission – an absence of accurate productions for infrequent phrases. However, if children make use of dedicated representations for frequent sequences of words in their productions, we might also expect to see errors of commission – the appearance of frequent phrases in children's speech even when such phrases are not appropriate. Through a series of corpus analyses, we provide the first evidence that the global input frequency of multiword sequences (e.g., "she is going" as it appears in declarative utterances) is a valuable predictor of their errorful appearance (e.g., the uninverted question "what she is going to do?*") in naturalistic speech. This finding, we argue, constitutes powerful evidence that multiword sequences can be represented as linguistic units in their own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals engaged in cooperative or mutualistic interactions can benefit from adjusting their strategic behaviour according to the bargaining positions of their partners. In interaction networks in which individuals cooperate with a variety of partners, assessing partners' options and expected interaction payoffs might be crucial for such behavioural optimization to occur. However, the cognitive challenges involved in this assessment and the constraints they may pose for strategic behaviour are currently poorly understood. Here, we investigated whether cleaner fish, Labroides dimidiatus , can learn to optimally prioritize partners, when faced with an ecologically relevant challenge that requires them to distinguish between interaction contexts. We expanded on a relatively well-studied problem that cleaners face in nature: choosing between client fish that simultaneously seek service. In such situations, cleaners should give priority to visitor client species as these tend to leave if not serviced immediately, while resident species will readily await inspection. In laboratory 'biological market' experiments simulating this choice using ephemeral and permanent food-offering plates, cleaners could learn to prefer visitors. However, the actual challenge cleaners face is more complex: interactions in the reef form a 'complex market' whereby clients appear in all possible configurations. In homogeneous configurations (visitor–visitor and resident–resident), the payoffs received from tending residents are higher which may slow down or even prevent learning to prioritize visitors. Adjusting the plate paradigm to this more complex scenario, we found that exposure to homogeneous configurations indeed posed a challenge to cleaners' strategic prioritization, diverting their preferences towards residents. Our results also revealed individual differences in performance, as some cleaners still learned to prefer visitors. This suggests that cleaners may not only learn about each client type separately, and that learning about cue configurations, a precursor of learning complex structures, may play a role in shaping their strategic behaviour in cooperative interactions. • Contextual information challenges cleaner fish's strategic partner prioritization. • Some cleaners can overcome this challenge and learn about cue configurations. • Configural learning may play a role in shaping cooperative interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of the dissertation being developed by Aline dos Santos Silva, which focuses on the NP+V+NPBARE construction in Brazilian Portuguese. The aim is to look into the constructs of this construction that form chunks in digital texts. To achieve this goal, we characterize the subschemas of this construction in terms of both the verbs that constitute them and the properties of schematicity, productivity and compositionality. We seek to demonstrate how the constructional patterns are distributed on a continuum according to the degree of weakening of the verb lexical meaning. We analyze the morphosyntax and the semantics of these chunks, as well as some of the discursive-pragmatic functions that they can perform. These functions, and the lexical gap that some of these chunks fill in, show the motivation for the existence and the use of these syntactic-semantic unities. The analysis follows the theoretical and methodological framework of Usage-based Functional Linguistics (FURTADO DA CUNHA; BISPO; SILVA, 2013) combined with Construction Grammar (TRAUGOTT; TROUSDALE, 2013; BYBEE, 2016 [2010]).

The last decades of research have gradually elucidated the complex functions of the dopamine system in the vertebrate brain. The multiple roles of dopamine in motor function, learning, attention, motivation, and the emotions have been difficult to reconcile. A broad and detailed understanding of the physiology of cerebral dopamine is of importance in understanding a range of human disorders. One of the core functions of dopamine involves the basal ganglia and the learning and execution of automatized sequences of movements. Speech is one of the most complex and highly automatized sequential motor behaviors, though the exact roles that the basal ganglia and dopamine play in speech have been difficult to determine. Stuttering is a speech disorder that has been hypothesized to be related to the functions of the basal ganglia and dopamine. The aim of this review was to provide an overview of the current understanding of the cerebral dopamine system, in particular the mechanisms related to motor learning and the execution of movement sequences. The primary aim was not to review research on speech and stuttering, but to provide a platform of neurophysiological mechanisms, which may be utilized for further research and theoretical development on speech, speech disorders, and other behavioral disorders. Stuttering and speech are discussed here only briefly. The review indicates that a primary mechanism for the automatization of movement sequences is the merging of isolated movements into chunks that can be executed as units. In turn, chunks can be utilized hierarchically, as building blocks of longer chunks. It is likely that these mechanisms apply also to speech, so that frequent syllables and words are produced as motor chunks. It is further indicated that the main learning principle for sequence learning is reinforcement learning, with the phasic release of dopamine as the primary teaching signal indicating successful sequences. It is proposed that the dynamics of the dopamine system constitute the main neural basis underlying the situational variability of stuttering.

This paper discusses the problem of shallow parsing of Polish, most specifically — chunking. We describe the linguistic work on annotation guidelines development, manual corpus annotation, and preparing the neural models used for chunking - the first one for the Polish language, and conducted the evaluation of these models. Finally, we describe conclusions and plans for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short-term memory and working memory are two distinctconcepts that have been measured in simple and complexspan tasks respectively. A new span task was designed tomanipulate a chunking factor while using a procedure similarto simple span tasks. This span task allowed studying theinteraction between storage and processing in workingmemory, when processing is fully dedicated to optimizingstorage. The main hypothesis was that the storage ×processing interaction that can be induced by the chunkingfactor is an excellent indicator of intelligence because bothworking memory and intelligence depend on optimizingstorage. Two experiments used an adaptation of the SIMON®game in which chunking opportunities were estimated usingan algorithmic complexity metric. The results show that themetric can be used to predict memory performance and thatintelligence is well predicted by the new chunking span taskin comparison to other simple and complex span tasks

We present evidence that successful chunk formation during astatistical learning task depends on how well the perceiver isable to parse the information that is presented betweensuccessive presentations of the to-be-learned chunk. First, weshow that learners acquire a chunk better when thesurrounding information is also chunk-able in a visualstatistical learning task. We tested three process models ofchunk formation, TRACX, PARSER, and MDLChunker, onour two different experimental conditions, and found that onlyPARSER and MDLChunker matched the observed result.These two models share the common principle of a memorycapacity that is expanded as a result of learning. Thoughimplemented in very different ways, both models effectivelyremember more individual items (the atomic components of asequence) as additional chunks are formed. The ability toremember more information directly impacts learning in themodels, suggesting that there is a positive-feedback loop inchunk learning.

There are considerable differences in language processingskill among the normal population. A key question forcognitive science is whether these differences can be ascribedto variations in domain-general cognitive abilities,hypothesized to play a role in language, such as workingmemory and statistical learning. In this paper, we presentexperimental evidence pointing to a fundamental memoryskill—chunking—as an important predictor of crossindividualvariation in complex language processing.Specifically, we demonstrate that chunking ability reflectsexperience with language, as measured by a standard serialrecall task involving consonant combinations drawn fromnaturally occurring text. Our results reveal considerableindividual differences in participants’ ability to use chunkfrequency information to facilitate sequence recall. Strikingly,these differences predict variations across participants in theon-line processing of complex sentences involving relativeclauses. Our study thus presents the first evidence tying thefundamental ability for chunking to sentence processing skill,providing empirical support for construction-basedapproaches to language.

Much research has documented learners’ ability to segment auditory and visual input into its component units. Two types of models have been designed to account for this phenomena: statistical models, in which learners represent statistical relations between elements, and chunking models, in which learners represent statistically coherent units of information. In a series of three experiments, we investigated how adults’ performance on a visual sequence-learning task aligned with the predictions of these two types of models. Experiments 1 and 2 examined learning of embedded items and Experiment 3 examined learning of illusory items. The pattern of results obtained was most consistent with the competitive chunking model of Servan-Schreiber and Anderson (1990). Implications for theories and models of statistical learning are discussed.

Word-order asymmetry between source language and target language has been recognized as a major obstacle in interpreting. Regarding whether the original word order is changed in target production, two strategies for asymmetrical structures are identified: chunking and reordering. This study primarily examined the cognitive mechanism involved in applying these two strategies during English to Chinese sight translation. The cognitive load associated with chunking and reordering was measured by eye movement and the resulting data were analysed. A group of interpreting trainees sight-translated asymmetrical sentences in two contexts: sentence and text. Their eye-movement measures, including total dwell time, fixation count and rereading rate, were recorded. The results demonstrate that chunking was the primary strategy used to render word-order asymmetry in both task conditions. A greater cognitive load was found in the reordered sentences. More contextual information did not contribute to an execution of the strategies that required less effort. This research is one of the first attempts to explore the cognitive process associated with interpreting strategies for word-order asymmetry. It provides a new perspective with which to deepen our understanding of the cognitive mechanism underlying the use of a strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language-specific features necessitate certain processes and skills in reading. The visually unmarked between-word boundaries in written Chinese render it critical that readers be able to segment words in the continuous texts. It may pose challenges for second language (L2) readers whose first language (L1) is word-spaced. In light of the lack of understanding of Chinese L2 readers' word segmentation, the present study investigated 100 L2 learners' word segmentation performance, the relationships between word segmentation and reading fluency and comprehension, and the differences in the aforementioned relationships among learners with different context-free word recognition abilities. Results demonstrated that L2 learners generally conducted word segmentation well and word segmentation contributed to reading fluency and comprehension beyond context-free word recognition. Word segmentation was the major predictor of reading fluency and comprehension among weak wordlist readers, whereas context-free word recognition made a larger contribution when learners have achieved stronger context-free word recognition ability. The findings suggested the importance of developing word segmentation skills and establishing high quality word representations in Chinese L2 reading instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience spatial working memory deficits and show different encoding mechanisms from typical developing (TD) peers. To effectively describe the encoding strategies of those with ASD and highlight their characteristics in cognitive processing, we adopted improved change detection tasks and added eye‐movement indicators to investigate the chunking function and reference preference of children with and without ASD. The current study included 20 participants with ASD aged 8–16 and 20 TD children matched for age, gender, and intelligence. Experiment 1 used high/low‐structured change detection tasks, and eye‐movement indexes were recorded as they memorized the locations of the items to investigate spatial chunking strategies. In Experiment 2, changes in eye movement patterns were observed by adding a frame of reference. The results suggested different encoding strategies in ASD and TD individuals. The ASD group showed local processing bias and had difficulty adopting chunking strategies in spatial working memory. Eye‐movement analysis suggested that they rarely showed integrated information processing tendency observed in TD children. Moreover, as a compensatory processing, they were more likely to use the frame of reference. In this study, we compared the spatial chunking strategies and reference preference of children with and without ASD, and eye‐movement analysis was used to investigate the processing mechanism. These findings are significant for research on cognitive characteristics of ASD and provide a new focus for working memory training in children with ASD. Lay Summary The current study suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder are poorer at organizing items into chunks in spatial working memory, but rely more on reference frames. If the purpose of location memory is to strengthen the adaptability of children with autism, it should provide them with more clues or references. If it is for the purpose of intervention such as cognitive training, it should guide them to integrate information to improve the basic cognitive processing efficiency. Autism Res 2021, 14: 897–910. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a new architecture for addressing sequence labeling, termed Dual Adversarial Transfer Network (DATNet). Specifically, the proposed DATNet includes two variants, i.e., DATNet-F and DATNet-P, which are proposed to explore effective feature fusion between high and low resource. To address the noisy and imbalanced training data, we propose a novel Generalized Resource-Adversarial Discriminator (GRAD) and adopt adversarial training to boost model generalization. We investigate the effects of different components of DATNet across different domains and languages, and show that significant improvement can be obtained especially for low-resource data. Without augmenting any additional hand-crafted features, we achieve state-of-the-art performances on CoNLL, Twitter, PTB-WSJ, OntoNotes and Universal Dependencies with three popular sequence labeling tasks, i.e., Named entity recognition (NER), Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging and Chunking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current university student population mainly consists of students born between the years 1995 – 2012. This cohort has grown up in a world of technological stimulation and many expect their learning and teaching environment to reflect this (Chaudhuri, 2020). In response to this shift in student expectation there has been an increased focus on flipped learning where classrooms provide active learning activities to engage students. This article investigated student motivation and engagement in an active-learning, flipped classroom which implemented elements of gamification while supporting students’ psychological needs of autonomy, relatedness and connection. A mixed-methods approach utilising student perception surveys and focus groups was used to assess student motivation and engagement. The data revealed a significant number of students were motivated and engaged in the learning process throughout the course. Students commented positively on the variety of gamification techniques used to enhance engagement. Students indicated their writing, presentation and comprehension improved throughout the course. In addition to focusing on non-technical gamification elements, the learning and teaching process included chunking pre and in-class materials which may have assisted with student engagement and comprehension. It is concluded the learning and teaching approach implemented contributes to motivating and engaging our current GenZ students in the learning and teaching process.

Musical performance is a multimodal experience, for performers and listeners alike. This paper reports on a pilot study which constitutes the first step toward a comprehensive approach to the experience of music as performed. We aim at bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches, by combining methods for data collection. The purpose is to build a data corpus containing multimodal measures linked to high-level subjective observations. This will allow for a systematic inclusion of the knowledge of music professionals in an analytic framework, which synthesizes methods across established research disciplines. We outline the methods we are currently developing for the creation of a multimodal data corpus dedicated to the analysis and exploration of instrumental music performance from the perspective of embodied music cognition. This will enable the study of the multiple facets of instrumental music performance in great detail, as well as lead to the development of music creation techniques that take advantage of the cross-modal relationships and higher-level qualities emerging from the analysis of this multi-layered, multimodal corpus. The results of the pilot project suggest that qualitative analysis through stimulated recall is an efficient method for generating higher-level understandings of musical performance. Furthermore, the results indicate several directions for further development, regarding observational movement analysis, and computational analysis of coarticulation, chunking, and movement qualities in musical performance. We argue that the development of methods for combining qualitative and quantitative data are required to fully understand expressive musical performance, especially in a broader scenario in which arts, humanities, and science are increasingly entangled. The future work in the project will therefore entail an increasingly multimodal analysis, aiming to become as holistic as is music in performance.

The paper notes that while grammars and other linguistic works assume that not precedes the in- finitive marker to in English, one can quite often encounter the reverse ordering, to not. The second section provides an overview of the relevant literature. The third section compares spoken data from the British National Corpus and the Spoken BNC2014, and analyzes the written data from the Corpus of Historical American English, concluding that the frequency of to not (relative to not to) has indeed been rising significantly in recent decades. The fourth section attempts to identify some factors underlying this change, most importantly chunking and potential semantic differentiation. It is suggested that chunking might be an especially important factor affecting the change, but further analysis is needed, relying on more advanced statistical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Repetitive thoughts and motor programs including perseveration are bridge symptoms characteristic of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia and in the co-morbid overlap of these conditions. The above pathologies are sensitive to altered activation and kinetics of dopamine D 1 and D 2 receptors that differently influence sequence learning and recall. Recognizing start and stop elements of motor and cognitive behaviors has crucial importance. During chunking, frequent components of temporal strings are concatenated into single units. We extended a published computational model (Asabuki et al. 2018), where two populations of neurons are connected and simulated in a reservoir computing framework. These neural pools were adopted to represent D 1  and D 2 striatal neuronal populations. We investigated how specific neural and striatal circuit parameters can influence start/stop signaling and found that asymmetric intra-network connection probabilities, synaptic weights and differential time constants may contribute to signaling of start/stop elements within learned sequences. Asymmetric coupling between the striatal D 1 and D 2 neural populations was also demonstrated to be beneficial. Our modeling results predict that dynamical differences between the two dopaminergic striatal populations and the interaction between them may play complementary roles in chunk boundary signaling. Start and stop dichotomies can arise from the larger circuit dynamics as well, since neural and intra-striatal connections only partially support a clear division of labor., (© The Author(s) 2023.)

Univerbation is the syntagmatic condensation of a sequence of words recurrent in discourse into one word, as when the Spanish combination a tras (to back) becomes atrás 'behind'. It affects both lexemes and grammatical formatives. Unlike processes of word formation, including conversion of a syntactic construction into a word, as in forget-me-not, and compounding, as in Spanish lavaplatos 'dishwasher', univerbation is a spontaneous process. There are two main types of univerbation: phrasal univerbation downgrades a phrase to a word, as when Latin terrae motus 'earth's movement' becomes Spanish terremoto 'earthquake'. Transgressive univerbation coalesces a string of words which do not form a syntagma into a word, as when French par ce que becomes parce que. A set of univerbations may share structural features and may therefore evolve into a pattern of compounding. Thus, blackbird originated by univerbation, but may now provide a pattern of compounding. As a consequence, univerbation and compounding are not always easily distinguishable. The discussion uses empirical evidence adduced in earlier work, mostly from Romance and Germanic languages. Its aim is not to present novel phenomena but to provide a theoretical background for the phenomenology and improve on available analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musical performance is a multimodal experience, for performers and listeners alike. This paper reports on a pilot study which constitutes the first step toward a comprehensive approach to the experience of music as performed. We aim at bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches, by combining methods for data collection. The purpose is to build a data corpus containing multimodal measures linked to high-level subjective observations. This will allow for a systematic inclusion of the knowledge of music professionals in an analytic framework, which synthesizes methods across established research disciplines. We outline the methods we are currently developing for the creation of a multimodal data corpus dedicated to the analysis and exploration of instrumental music performance from the perspective of embodied music cognition. This will enable the study of the multiple facets of instrumental music performance in great detail, as well as lead to the development of music creation techniques that take advantage of the cross-modal relationships and higher-level qualities emerging from the analysis of this multi-layered, multimodal corpus. The results of the pilot project suggest that qualitative analysis through stimulated recall is an efficient method for generating higher-level understandings of musical performance. Furthermore, the results indicate several directions for further development, regarding observational movement analysis, and computational analysis of coarticulation, chunking, and movement qualities in musical performance. We argue that the development of methods for combining qualitative and quantitative data are required to fully understand expressive musical performance, especially in a broader scenario in which arts, humanities, and science are increasingly entangled. The future work in the project will therefore entail an increasingly multimodal analysis, aiming to become as holistic as is music in performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses creativity as inhibition of repetitive behaviour. We argue that entrenchment and constructional change can be in competition with large-scale creative attempts of recomposition of constructions' internal constituency. After undergoing chunking, the recurrent usage of a construction may be significantly counterbalanced with new attempts of entrenchment inhibition (viz. inhibition of entrenchment). These are cases where speakers opt for more compositional and less predictable ways to express a similar meaning of a conventionalised form. We focus on the constructionalisation of noun–participle compounds (e.g. snow-covered) in the Historical Corpus of American English. During the second part of the twentieth century, speakers increasingly inhibit the usage of conventionalised noun phrase–past participle forms in favour of more compositional strategies involving the same internal constituents. This entails that constructional change not only affects the meaning of the chunk that undergoes constructionalisation but also the way speakers creatively rediscover its internal constituency. These results additionally aim to inform research in cognitive architectures and artificial intelligence, where creativity is often merely considered as a problem-solving mechanism rather than a potential process of inhibition of automatised behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many motor skills are learned with the help of instructions. In the context of complex motor sequences, instructions often break down the movement into chunks that can then be practiced in isolation. Thus, instructions shape an initial cognitive representation of the skill, which in turn guides practice. Are there ways of breaking up a motor sequence that are better than others? If participants are instructed in a way that hinders performance, how much practice does it take to overcome the influence of the instruction? To answer these questions, we used a paradigm in which participants were asked to perform finger sequences as fast and accurately as possible on a keyboard-like device. In the initial phases of training, participants had to explicitly remember and practice two- or three-digit chunks. These chunks were then combined to form seven 11-digit sequences that participants practiced for the remainder of the study. Each sequence was broken up into chunks in a way such that the instruction was either aligned or misaligned with the basic execution level constraints. We found that misaligned chunk instruction led to an initial performance deficit compared with the aligned chunk instruction. Overall, instructions still influenced the temporal pattern of performance after 10 days of subsequent training, with shorter interpress intervals within a chunk compared with between chunks. However, for the misaligned instructed sequences, this temporal pattern was altered more rapidly, such that participants could overcome the induced performance deficit in the last week. At the end of training, participants found idiosyncratic, but interindividually stable, ways of performing each sequence. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Instructions often break down motor sequences into smaller parts, such that they can be more easily remembered. Here, we show that different ways of breaking down a finger sequence can subsequently lead to better or worse performance. The initial instruction still influenced the temporal performance pattern after 10 days of practice. The results demonstrate that the initial cognitive representation of a motor skill strongly influences how a skill is learned and performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chunking is a key mechanism for sequence processing. Studies on speech sequences have suggested low-frequency cortical activity tracks spoken phrases, that is, chunks of words defined by tacit linguistic knowledge. Here, we investigate whether low-frequency cortical activity reflects a general mechanism for sequence chunking and can track chunks defined by temporarily learned artificial rules. The experiment records magnetoencephalographic (MEG) responses to a sequence of spoken words. To dissociate word properties from the chunk structures, two tasks separately require listeners to group pairs of semantically similar or semantically dissimilar words into chunks. In the MEG spectrum, a clear response is observed at the chunk rate. More importantly, the chunk-rate response is task-dependent. It is phase locked to chunk boundaries, instead of the semantic relatedness between words. The results strongly suggest that cortical activity can track chunks constructed based on task-related rules and potentially reflects a general mechanism for chunk-level representations.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the primary motor cortex (M1) can facilitate motor learning, but it has not been established how stimulation to other brain regions impacts online and offline motor sequence learning, as well as long-term retention. Here, we completed three experiments comparing the effects of tDCS and sham stimulation to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), M1, and the supplementary motor area complex to understand the contributions of these brain regions to motor sequence learning. In Experiment 1, we found that both left and right PFC tDCS groups displayed a slowing in learning in both reaction time and number of chunks, whereas stimulation over M1 improved both metrics over the course of three sessions. To better understand the sequence learning impairment of left PFC anodal stimulation, we tested a left PFC cathodal tDCS group in Experiment 2. The cathodal group demonstrated learning impairments similar to the left PFC anodal stimulation group. In Experiment 3, a subset of participants from the left PFC, M1, and sham tDCS groups of Experiment 1 returned to complete a single session without tDCS on the same sequences assigned to them 1 year previously. We found that the M1 tDCS group reduced reaction time at a faster rate relative to the sham and left PFC groups, demonstrating faster relearning after a one-year delay. Thus, our findings suggest that, regardless of the polarity of stimulation, tDCS to PFC impairs sequence learning, whereas stimulation to M1 facilitates learning and relearning, especially in terms of chunk formation.

To better understand the benefits of using analogy and explicit instructions, the underlying cognitive mechanism remains to be explored. The concept of chunking provides a promising approach to the cognitive mechanism of instructions and can be approximated by analyzing athletes’ mental representations. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of analogy and explicit instructions on performance and the cognitive representations of the tennis serve in intermediate participants over the course of a 5-week training period. Junior tennis players (N = 44; M = 11.5 years) were tested on their tennis serve and, based on their initial performance and their individual error patterns, assigned to one of three groups: an analogy group (N = 15), an explicit group (N = 15), or a control group (N = 14). Their performance and their mental representation structures were assessed prior to and after the 5-week training period and again after a retention period of 14 days. Independent of group, findings demonstrated higher velocity from pretest to posttest. Participants in both the analogy and the explicit group showed enhanced accuracy over time and more functional mental representation structures. Thus, both analogy instruction and explicit instruction helped to structure mental representations in their long-term memory.

It is now commonly accepted that instrumental actions can reflect goal-directed control; i.e., they can show sensitivity to changes in the relationship to and the value of their consequences. With overtraining, stress, neurodegeneration, psychiatric conditions, or after exposure to various drugs of abuse, goal-directed control declines and instrumental actions are performed independently of their consequences. Although this latter insensitivity has been argued to reflect the development of habitual control, the lack of a positive definition of habits has rendered this conclusion controversial. Here we consider various alternative definitions of habit, including recent suggestions they reflect chunked action sequences, to derive criteria with which to categorize responses as habitual. We consider various theories regarding the interaction between goal-directed and habitual controllers and propose a collaborative model based on their hierarchical integration. We argue that this model is consistent with the available data, can be instantiated both at an associative level and computationally and generates interesting predictions regarding the influence of this collaborative integration on behavior.

This paper describes implementation details for a 3-level cognitive model, described in the paper series. The whole architecture is now modular, with different levels using different types of information. The ensemble-hierarchy relationship is maintained and placed in the bottom optimising and middle aggregating levels, to store memory objects and their relations. There is a geometric progression from overlapping to contained/fuzzy pattern sets. The top-level cognitive layer has been re-designed to model the Cognitive Process Language (CPL) of an earlier paper, by refactoring it into a network structure with a light scheduler. The cortex brain region is thought to be hierarchical - clustering from simple to more complex features. The refactored network might therefore challenge conventional thinking on that brain region, by making it more horizontal and type-based. It is also argued that the function and structure in particular, of the new top level, is similar to the psychology theory of chunking. The model is still only a framework and does not have enough information for real intelligence. But a framework is now implemented over the whole design and so can give a more complete picture about the potential for results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas a growing bulk of work has demonstrated that both adults and children are sensitive to frequently occurring word sequences, little is known about the potential role of meaning in the processing of such multiword chunks. Here, we take a first step toward assessing the contribution of meaningfulness in the processing of multiword sequences, using items that varied in chunk meaningfulness. In a phrasal‐decision study, we compared reaction times for triads of three‐word sequences, corresponding to idiomatic expressions, compositional phrases, and phrasal fragments, while controlling for phrase and substring frequencies. Chunk meaningfulness, as assessed by a separate subjective rating study, was found to speed up decision times for all three types of strings: The more meaningful a multiword sequence was judged to be, the faster it was processed, independently of whether it was idiomatic, compositional in nature, or a phrasal fragment. These results highlight the importance of taking meaning into account when considering the processing of multiword chunks, consistent with predictions of construction‐based approaches to language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The computations involved in statistical learning have long been debated. Here, we build on work suggesting that a basic memory process, chunking, may account for the processing of statistical regularities into larger units. Drawing on methods from the memory literature, we developed a novel paradigm to test statistical learning by leveraging a robust phenomenon observed in serial recall tasks: that short‐term memory is fundamentally shaped by long‐term distributional learning. In the statistically induced chunking recall (SICR) task, participants are exposed to an artificial language, using a standard statistical learning exposure phase. Afterward, they recall strings of syllables that either follow the statistics of the artificial language or comprise the same syllables presented in a random order. We hypothesized that if individuals had chunked the artificial language into word‐like units, then the statistically structured items would be more accurately recalled relative to the random controls. Our results demonstrate that SICR effectively captures learning in both the auditory and visual modalities, with participants displaying significantly improved recall of the statistically structured items, and even recall specific trigram chunks from the input. SICR also exhibits greater test–retest reliability in the auditory modality and sensitivity to individual differences in both modalities than the standard two‐alternative forced‐choice task. These results thereby provide key empirical support to the chunking account of statistical learning and contribute a valuable new tool to the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a -web-based matrix organizer that houses multi-media course content, including videos and infographics, for an undergraduate business statistics course. Content is "chunked" into microlessons explaining the "When, What and How " of several statistical techniques. An observational study was conducted to evaluate satisfaction with the tool and how the tool influenced learning. Results show that students felt the tool was easy to use and helped them organize and learn information. Some evidence suggests users have higher perceived learning and grades than non-users. The structure can be used for other courses; recommendations for implementing similar systems are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory for verbal material improves when words form familiar chunks. But how does the improvement due to chunking come about? Two possible explanations are that the input might be actively recoded into chunks, each of which takes up less memory capacity than items not forming part of a chunk (a form of data compression), or that chunking is based on redintegration. If chunking is achieved by redintegration, representations of chunks exist only in long-term memory (LTM) and help to reconstructing degraded traces in short-term memory (STM). In 6 experiments using 2-alternative forced choice recognition and immediate serial recall we find that when chunks are small (2 words) they display a pattern suggestive of redintegration, whereas larger chunks (3 words), show a pattern consistent with data compression. This concurs with previous data showing that there is a cost involved in recoding material into chunks in STM. With smaller chunks this cost seems to outweigh the benefits of recoding words into chunks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fields of linguistics and cognitive science, considerable attention has been devoted to the question of how linguistic structure emerged over evolutionary time. Here, we highlight the contribution of a fundamental constraint on processing, the Now‐or‐Never bottleneck. Language takes place in the here and now, with the transience of acoustic speech signals and our exceedingly limited memory for sound sequences requiring immediate processing. To overcome this bottleneck, the cognitive system employs basic chunking mechanisms to rapidly compress and recode incoming linguistic input into increasingly abstract levels of representation, thereby prolonging its retention in memory. Our suggestion is that these chunk‐based memory processes influence linguistic structure across multiple time scales. Chunk‐based memory constraints govern language acquisition and processing on the level of the individual. Through usage, linguistic structures that are more easily chunked will tend to proliferate, thus shaping the cultural evolution of language across generations of language users. This results in a selection of learnable structures, from individual words to multiword sequences that are optimally "chunkable," so as to better squeeze through the Now‐or‐Never bottleneck. From this perspective, language can be thought of as an adaptive system that culturally evolves to fit learners' cognitive capabilities, thereby resulting in the structure it bears today. How linguistic structures evolve so as to become easier to process is addressed by Isbilen and Christiansen for the Now‐or‐Never bottleneck. The authors suggest that this fundamental challenge in language processing is coped with by rapid compression of the transient linguistic input into chunks then to be passed on. As linguistic structures that can be chunked more easily tend to stabilize and proliferate, language evolves to fit learners' cognitive capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the primary motor cortex (M1) can facilitate motor learning, but it has not been established how stimulation to other brain regions impacts online and offline motor sequence learning, as well as long-term retention. Here, we completed three experiments comparing the effects of tDCS and sham stimulation to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), M1, and the supplementary motor area complex to understand the contributions of these brain regions to motor sequence learning. In Experiment 1, we found that both left and right PFC tDCS groups displayed a slowing in learning in both reaction time and number of chunks, whereas stimulation over M1 improved both metrics over the course of three sessions. To better understand the sequence learning impairment of left PFC anodal stimulation, we tested a left PFC cathodal tDCS group in Experiment 2. The cathodal group demonstrated learning impairments similar to the left PFC anodal stimulation group. In Experiment 3, a subset of participants from the left PFC, M1, and sham tDCS groups of Experiment 1 returned to complete a single session without tDCS on the same sequences assigned to them 1 year previously. We found that the M1 tDCS group reduced reaction time at a faster rate relative to the sham and left PFC groups, demonstrating faster relearning after a one-year delay. Thus, our findings suggest that, regardless of the polarity of stimulation, tDCS to PFC impairs sequence learning, whereas stimulation to M1 facilitates learning and relearning, especially in terms of chunk formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chunking is a mnemonic strategy that involves organizing information into appropriate units. Our article examined the use of this strategy on forward and backward span performance in Korsakoff's syndrome. Fifteen patients with Korsakoff's syndrome and 17 age-and-education matched healthy controls participated to the study. Digit span performance (both forward and backward) was tested before and after chunking training. Results demonstrated an increased performance on the forward spans after chunking training in the patients with Korsakoff's syndrome, but no beneficial effect was observed on the backward spans in these participants. Controls demonstrated a chunking effect on both forward and backward span performance. Our findings suggest that a simple training in chunking may be useful as part of a cognitive strategy training for improving working memory performance in patients with Korsakoff's syndrome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their seminal study of chess expertise, Simon and Chase (Chase & Simon, 1973; Simon & Chase, 1973) proposed that perceptual learning was a necessary component of skill acquisition. In their view, acquisition of skill results from the strategic use of learning at multiple levels to adaptively overcome inherent limitations. The knowledge acquired by way of perceptual learning that supported increasingly sophisticated perceptual discrimination processes, according to Simon and Chase, was referred to as a chunk. The chunk was conceptualized as a meaningful complex set of features that abstracted the notion of a perceptual object. Simon and Chase further suggested that meaningful combinations of chunks could be combined to form configurations (Simon & Chase, 1973, p. 399). The present study addresses this idea by framing the notion of a chunk in terms of two formal metatheories, one that addresses representation (Ashby & Townsend, 1986) and one that addresses processing (Townsend & Nozawa, 1995), and tests the prediction that perceptual learning produces organized perceptual objects (chunks). Two experiments combine behavioral and electroencephelographic (EEG) measures to show that perceptual learning produces (a) a shift from perceptual independence and separability to violations of separability, and (b) shifts from limited-capacity serial processing to supercapacity parallel processing. The evidence from both experiments is strong and consistent: perceptual learning does indeed induce chunking—the production of perceptual objects, and the foundation of perceptual expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better understand the benefits of using analogy and explicit instructions, the underlying cognitive mechanism remains to be explored. The concept of chunking provides a promising approach to the cognitive mechanism of instructions and can be approximated by analyzing athletes' mental representations. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of analogy and explicit instructions on performance and the cognitive representations of the tennis serve in intermediate participants over the course of a 5-week training period. Junior tennis players (N = 44; M = 11.5 years) were tested on their tennis serve and, based on their initial performance and their individual error patterns, assigned to one of three groups: an analogy group (N = 15), an explicit group (N = 15), or a control group (N = 14). Their performance and their mental representation structures were assessed prior to and after the 5-week training period and again after a retention period of 14 days. Independent of group, findings demonstrated higher velocity from pretest to posttest. Participants in both the analogy and the explicit group showed enhanced accuracy over time and more functional mental representation structures. Thus, both analogy instruction and explicit instruction helped to structure mental representations in their long-term memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how the brain forms representations of structured information distributed in time is a challenging endeavour for the neuroscientific community, requiring computationally and neurobiologically informed approaches. The neural mechanisms for segmenting continuous streams of sensory input and establishing representations of dependencies remain largely unknown, as do the transformations and computations occurring between the brain regions involved in these aspects of sequence processing. We propose a blueprint for a neurobiologically informed and informing computational model of sequence processing (entitled: Vector-symbolic Sequencing of Binding INstantiating Dependencies, or VS-BIND). This model is designed to support the transformation of serially ordered elements in sensory sequences into structured representations of bound dependencies, readily operates on multiple timescales, and encodes or decodes sequences with respect to chunked items wherever dependencies occur in time. The model integrates established vector symbolic additive and conjunctive binding operators with neurobiologically plausible oscillatory dynamics, and is compatible with modern spiking neural network simulation methods. We show that the model is capable of simulating previous findings from structured sequence processing tasks that engage fronto-temporal regions, specifying mechanistic roles for regions such as prefrontal areas 44/45 and the frontal operculum during interactions with sensory representations in temporal cortex. Finally, we are able to make predictions based on the configuration of the model alone that underscore the importance of serial position information, which requires input from time-sensitive cells, known to reside in the hippocampus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web-data has seen an exponential rise in the past few years. With the increase in the data on the web, the process of associating entities with required knowledge becomes extremely difficult. Linking entities not only becomes a tedious task but also requires the right association of knowledge with the right techniques. With the development of the Semantic Web in recent times, semantic strategies are required to represent, reason and link entities. In this paper, an entity linking approach that rightly associates personalities has been proposed. The proposed algorithm encompasses role-based chunking along with a fragmented parse tree generation. The proposed strategy performs Entity Linking by JSON fragmented parse tree generation and recommends the entities based on the semantic score generated by computing the concept similarity. The knowledge is supplied by a role-based Ontology modeled for various famous personalities. An accuracy of 89.77% is achieved for role-based entity linking which is much better and reliable than the existing strategies, especially when a large number of trials were conducted for the Indian Context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expressions and emotions are the most common way of communication in day-to-day life. In the age of Artificial Intelligence and technological advancements, the entire human race finds itself amidst many software driven voice-assistants. The only reason AI cannot excel and spread its limits is that humans can interpret, understand and express in the form of emotions and these AI-driven systems cannot. Hence, there is a need for a proper methodology for the interpretation of emotions based on both text and speech. In order to accomplish this task, a light weight computational linguistic semantic approach has been proposed for detecting emotions and generating response incorporating NPMI and NAVA words, bridging the gap between Semantics and Natural Language Processing. Experimentations are conducted for the real-word TDIL dataset for emotions such as joy, sorrow, anger, disgust, and fear. The proposed approach yields an accuracy of 96.155% for the emotion joy and 82.44 % for fear which definitely is the best-in-class accuracy for such systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present here an ethnographic study of asylum court interpreting with remote participants and video links. First, we describe the multimodal resources interpreters have at their disposal to manage turn-taking and begin interpreting while an asylum seeker's answer to a question has not come yet to a recognizable completion point. We distinguish between 'implicit' configurations, in which a collaborative turn transition is apparently achieved through reorientations of body and gaze, the use of discourse markers, or other conversational strategies, like overlaps and cases where a turn transition is achieved through the use of 'explicit' resources such as instructions to stop and requests to give brief answers. We show that the collaborative production of such long answers is affected by the remote placement of the interpreter, and that recurrent trouble in the management of turn transitions between the asylum seeker and the interpreter during extended narratives may be detrimental to the asylum seeker's case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]