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Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been interested in humans’ and animals’ ability to respond to abstract relations. Cross-species research has used relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which participants try to find stimulus pairs that “match” because they express the same abstract relation (same or different). Researchers seek to understand the cognitive processes that underlie successful matching, and the cognitive constraints that create species differences in these tasks. Here we describe a dissociative framework drawn from cognitive neuroscience. It has strong potential to illuminate the area of same-different conceptualization. It has already influenced comparative research on categorization and metacognition. This dissociative framework also shows that species differences in same-different conceptualization have resonance with species differences in other comparative domains.

To explain animal learning, researchers invoke a dominant associative construct. In contrast, researchers freely acknowledge humans' explicit-declarative learning capacity. Here, we stretched animals' learning performance toward the explicit pole of cognition. We tested four macaques (Macaca mulatta) in new discrimination-learning paradigms. Monkeys learned a series of two-choice discrimination tasks. But immediate reinforcement was denied. Instead, reinforcement was lagged-monkeys received feedback for trial N only after seeing and responding to the N + 1-trial stimulus. Theory suggests that lagged reinforcement will eliminate a dominant form of implicit discrimination learning. Yet monkeys still learned successfully. Thus, monkeys may have alternative learning algorithms usable when reinforcement is displaced and reinforcement learning undermined. This learning may, as in humans, take a more explicit form. This and related methods that disable associative learning-fostering a possible transition to explicit cognition-could have empirical utility and theoretical significance within comparative psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Problematic and disruptive behaviours continue to be a pervasive problem in elementary school classrooms across the globe, with recent reports indicating rising trends. The present study seeks to d...

Privacy breaches are one of the biggest concerns on Online Social Networks (OSNs), especially with an introduction of automated attacks by socialbots, which can automatically extract victims' private content by exploiting social behavior to befriend them. The key insight of this attack is that by intelligently sending friend requests to a small subset of users, called the Critical Friending Set (CFS), such a bot can evade current defense mechanisms. We study the vulnerability of OSNs to socialbot attacks. Specifically, we introduce a new optimization problem, Min-Friending, which identifies a minimum CFS to friend in order to obtain at least Q benefit, which quantifies the amount of private information the bot obtains. The two main challenges of this problem are how to cope with incomplete knowledge of network topology and how to model users' responses to friend requests. In this paper, we show that Min-Friending is inapproximable within a factor of (1-o(1)) ln Q and present an adaptive approximation algorithm using adaptive stochastic optimization. The key feature of our solution lies in the adaptive method, where partial network topology is revealed after each successful friend request. Thus the decision of whom to send a friend request to next is made with the outcomes of past decisions taken into account. Traditional tools break down when attempting to place a bound on the performance of this technique with realistic user models. Therefore, we additionally introduce a novel curvature-based technique to construct an approximation ratio of ln Q for a model of user behavior learned from empirical measurements on Facebook.

Previous research indicates that victimized youth are reluctant to address their friends’ victimizing behaviors and are likely to remain in a victimizing friendship despite experiencing significant distress. Research investigating the complex factors underlying this commitment to victimizing friendships is required. To this end, a qualitative research design was used as previously victimized youth asynchronously contributed to an anonymous online discussion forum for 2 months. Guided by two theories used to understand staying/leaving processes in intimate partner violence and a social-ecological systems perspective, the data were captured into descriptive categories. The results demonstrate that adolescents ( N = 25) were reluctant to address their friends’ victimizing behaviors and many persisted in their victimizing friendships. The factors underlying this reluctance were categorized as cognitive, relational, and contextual. The results indicate that persisting in a friendship despite feeling victimized can seem paradoxical to outsiders but there are clear reasons underlying adolescents’ choices.

The introduction of Smart Grid systems has raised many new security concerns. If an attacker can compromise components of the Smart Grid communication network, they can fabricate malicious messages to interfere with the grid and ultimately cause outages. One method to address this concern is to conduct network audits by logging network traffic into dedicated servers in order to detect malicious messages. This may be done by using switches’ or routers’ ability to duplicate packets they receive with minimal overhead. The question of how many and which switches/routers to select for this task naturally follows. This paper considers the problem of finding minimal set of routers/switches in a Smart Grid communication network to use for auditing traffic. Accordingly, we devise three algorithms: the first one is highly effective with an approximation ratio of $(2+\theta)(\ln |V| + 1)$ . The second method is a highly scalable algorithm with a constant performance ratio. And the last one is a dynamic algorithm which can efficiently update its solution in response to changes to critical traffic. We experimentally evaluate our solutions and compare them to an optimal Integer Programming formulation, finding that they perform near-optimally and significantly outperform a simple heuristic in all cases.

In rule-based (RB) category-learning tasks, the optimal strategy is a simple explicit rule, whereas in information-integration (II) tasks, the optimal strategy is impossible to describe verbally. Many studies have reported qualitative dissociations between training and performance in RB and II tasks. Virtually all of these studies were testing predictions of the dual-systems model of category learning called COVIS. The most prominent alternative account to COVIS is that humans have one learning system that is used in all tasks, and that the observed dissociations occur because the II task is more difficult than the RB task. This article describes the first attempt to test this difficulty hypothesis against anything more than a single set of data. First, two novel predictions are derived that discriminate between the difficulty and multiple-systems hypotheses. Next, these predictions are tested against a wide variety of published categorization data. Overall, the results overwhelmingly reject the difficulty hypothesis and instead strongly favor the multiple-systems account of the many RB versus II dissociations.

A growing body of literature has documented the contribution of teacher-student relationship quality to both persistence and reduction in peer aggression incidents in the school context. The research literature indicates that students who are involved in peer aggression also tend to experience lower levels of closeness in their relationships with their teachers. However, these study results have not yet been aggregated, and the size and direction of effects remains unclear. In the present study we quantitatively synthesized 66 individual studies (Nstudents = 352,376) in two meta-analyses by aggregating cross-sectional associations between peer aggression involvement and teacher-student relationship closeness that have been reported in the literature over the last 20 years. A small, negative, and significant association was found between perpetration and victimization and teacher-student relationship closeness, indicating that students who experience greater involvement in peer aggression also have relationships with their teachers that are lacking in closeness. Three moderator analyses were also conducted. No moderating effect was found for school level or measure type; however, a significant moderating effect was found for informant type. The results from the meta-analyses lead to direct recommendations for practice regarding how we can best support students’ psychosocial development in the school context.

Early animal-metacognition researchers singled out simultaneous metacognition paradigms for theoretical criticism, because these paradigms presented concretely rewarded perceptual responses and the metacognitive response simultaneously. This method potentially introduced associative cues into the situation that could confound the interpretation of the metacognitive response. Evaluating this possibility, we compared humans' metacognitive performances in simultaneous and nonsimultaneous (prospective, retrospective) paradigms that were otherwise identical. Results show that the metacognition response in these tasks is not prompted by associative cues arising from the simultaneous task format. To the contrary, the metacognitive response is used more robustly and accurately when it is removed from direct competition with the primary perceptual responses. Thus, early researchers were correct to judge that the nonsimultaneous paradigms tap metacognition more robustly and sensitively. However, this is probably true because the simultaneous paradigm mingles responses adjudicated on two different cognitive-processing levels. And, in that case, the metacognitive response can be outcompeted and suppressed by the salient presence of primary, concretely rewarded perceptual responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Categorization is an essential cognitive process useful for transferring knowledge from previous experience to novel situations. The mechanisms by which trained categorization behavior extends to novel stimuli, especially in animals, are insufficiently understood. To understand how pigeons learn and transfer category membership, seven pigeons were trained to classify controlled, bi-dimensional stimuli in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Following either dimensional, rule-based (RB) or information integration (II) training, tests were conducted focusing on the "analogical" extension of the learned discrimination to novel regions of the stimulus space (Casale, Roeder, & Ashby, 2012). The pigeons' results mirrored those from human and non-human primates evaluated using the same analogical task structure, training and testing: the pigeons transferred their discriminative behavior to the new extended values following RB training, but not after II training. Further experiments evaluating rule-based models and association-based models suggested the pigeons use dimensions and associations to learn the task and mediate transfer to stimuli within the novel region of the parametric stimulus space.

Categorization researchers have long debated the possibility of multiple category-learning systems. The need persists for paradigms that dissociate explicit-declarative category-learning processes (featuring verbalizable category rules) from implicit-procedural processes (featuring stimulus-response associations lying beneath declarative cognition). The authors contribute a new paradigm, using perfectly matched exclusive-or (XOR) category tasks differing only in the availability or absence of easily verbalizable conceptual content. This manipulation transformed learning. The conceptual task alone was learned suddenly, by insightful rule discovery, producing explicit-declarative XOR knowledge. The perceptual task was learned more gradually, consistent with associative-learning processes, producing impoverished declarative knowledge. We also tested participants under regimens of immediate and deferred reinforcement. The conceptual task alone was learned through processes that survive the loss of trial-by-trial reinforcement. All results support the idea that humans have perceptual-associative processes for implicit learning, but also an overlain conceptual system that under the right circumstances constitutes a parallel explicit-declarative category-learning system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Self-agency is a crucial aspect of self-awareness. It is underresearched given the phenomenon's subjectivity and difficulty of study. It is particularly underresearched comparatively, given that animals cannot receive agency instructions or make agency declarations. Accordingly, we developed a distinctively new self-agency paradigm. Humans and rhesus macaques learned event categories differentiated by whether the participant's volitional response controlled a screen launch. They learned by trial and error after minimal instructions with no agency orientation (humans) or no instructions (monkeys). After learning, humans' verbalized category descriptions were coded for self-agency attributions. Across three experiments, humans' agency attributions qualitatively improved discrimination performance-participants not invoking self-agency rarely exceeded chance performance. It also produced a diagnostic latency profile: classification accuracy depended heavily on the temporal relationship between the button-press and the launch, but only for those invoking agency. In our last experiment, monkeys performed the launch task. Their performance and latency profiles mirrored that of humans. Thus, self-agency can be self-discovered as a frame organizing discrimination. And it may be used as a discrimination cue by some nonhuman animals as well. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The authors consider theory in the animal-metacognition literature. Theoretical interpretation was long dominated by associative interpretations, a conservative approach well illustrated in the 2009 special issue of animal metacognition in Comparative Cognition and Behavioral Reviews. We suggest, though, that this approach risks a self-limiting understanding of animal minds, and an imprecise understanding of the cognitive requirements inherent in metacognition tasks. In fact, some tasks self-entail the need for higher-level decision-making processes, processes that—in humans—we would call explicit, declarative, and conscious. These points are illustrated using the inaugural study on dolphin metacognition. We urge researchers to turn more toward illuminating the cognitive architecture of capacities like metacognition, including illuminating the depth, and structure, the learning/memory systems, the cognitive levels, and the declarative awareness possibly present in animals’ minds. The empirical development of this literature demonstrates that researchers are now prepared to do so. This study can produce strong synergies across the allied fields of biopsychology, comparative and cognitive psychology, and neuroscience.

The study of nonhumans' metacognitive judgments about trial difficulty has grown into an important comparative literature. However, the potential for associative-learning confounds in this area has left room for behaviorist interpretations that are strongly asserted and hotly debated. This article considers how researchers may be able to observe animals' strategic cognitive processes more clearly by creating temporally extended problems within which associative cues are not always immediately available. We asked humans and rhesus macaques to commit to completing spatially extended mazes or to decline completing them through a trial-decline response. The mazes could sometimes be completed successfully, but other times had a constriction that blocked completion. A deliberate, systematic scanning process could preevaluate a maze and determine the appropriate response. Latency analyses charted the time course of the evaluative process. Both humans and macaques appeared, from the pattern of their latencies, to scan the mazes through before committing to completing them. Thus monkeys, too, can base trial-decline responses on temporally extended evaluation processes, confirming that those responses have strategic cognitive-processing bases in addition to behavioral-reactive bases. The results also show the value of temporally and spatially extended problems to let researchers study the trajectory of animals' online cognitive processes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Research suggests that about a quarter of bullying incidences occur within friendships. Yet little attention is given to the underlying social processes and wider macro-system forces that shape fri...

Metacognition encompasses the processes of monitoring representational and perceptual states and controlling information-gathering behaviors. Metacognition is considered one of humans’ most sophisticated abilities, and it has been a growing area of focus in comparative cognition research. Despite the successes of some species such as the great apes and some Old World monkeys, there has been a fairly consistent lack of metacognitive responding in the New World primate species, capuchin monkeys. These failures are meaningful for what they highlight about the phylogenetic breadth of metacognition, and for what they offer to ongoing debates about the proper interpretation of data from other species that do succeed in various tests of comparative metacognition. We summarize these meaningful failures and place them in a broader context of comparative metacognition research, with a specific focus on explaining what it might mean that some monkeys seemingly do not know what they know.

Celebrating the life of Professor James (Jim) Ralph Hanson.

While adaptive cruise control (ACC) systems have been broadly few studies have investigated the user experience characteristics of recent production systems. The present study was designed for the express purpose of testing one such system. Nineteen participants drove a 2014 BMW X-5 M, equipped with adaptive cruise control, in two scenarios designed to be representative of the usage scenarios described by the vehicle manufacturer. During testing, user interactions with the system were recorded while opinions regarding the usability and operation of the system were elicited through a series of interviews and questionnaires. While participants responded favorably to the system conceptually, participants expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the ACC’s braking behavior and with specific aspects of the system’s user interface. These findings add to a growing body of research that suggests that mode confusion or insufficient awareness of system status may be a significant impediment to the use of ACC systems generally.