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International audience; Infants come to learn several hundreds of word forms by two years of age, and it is possible this involves carving these forms out from continuous speech. It has been proposed that the task is facilitated by the presence of prosodic boundaries. We revisit this claim by running computational models of word segmentation, with and without prosodic information, on a corpus of infant-directed speech. We use five cognitively-based algorithms, which vary in whether they employ a sub-lexical or a lexical segmentation strategy and whether they are simple heuristics or embody an ideal learner. Results show that providing expert-annotated prosodic breaks does not uniformly help all segmentation models. The sub-lexical algorithms, which perform more poorly, benefit most, while the lexical ones show a very small gain. Moreover, when prosodic information is derived automatically from the acoustic cues infants are known to be sensitive to, errors in the detection of the boundaries lead to smaller positive effects, and even negative ones for some algorithms. This shows that even though infants could potentially use prosodic breaks, it does not necessarily follow that they should incorporate prosody into their segmentation strategies, when confronted with realistic signals.

This paper studies how audience members categorize and evaluate ambiguous offerings. Depending on whether audience members categorize ambiguous offerings based on prototypes or goals, they activate two distinct cognitive mechanisms and evaluate differently ambiguous offerings. We expect that when audiences engage in goal- versus prototype-based categorization, their evaluation of ambiguous products increases. We theorize that, under goal-based categorization, the perceived utility of unclear attributes increases for audiences, which leads them to evaluate more positively ambiguous product offerings. We test and find support for these direct and mediated relationships through a series of laboratory, online, and field experiments. Overall, this study offers important implications for research on product and market categories, optimal distinctiveness, and market agents’ cognitive ascription of value.

A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant-directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult-directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learning: hyperarticulation, which makes the categories more separable, and variability, which makes the generalization more robust. Here, we test the separability and robustness of vowel category learning on acoustic representations of speech uttered by Japanese adults in ADS, IDS (addressed to 18- to 24-month olds), or read speech (RS). Separability is determined by means of a distance measure computed between the five short vowel categories of Japanese, while robustness is assessed by testing the ability of six different machine learning algorithms trained to classify vowels to generalize on stimuli spoken by a novel speaker in ADS. Using two different speech representations, we find that hyperarticulated speech, in the case of RS, can yield better separability, and that increased between-speaker variability in ADS can yield, for some algorithms, more robust categories. However, these conclusions do not apply to IDS, which turned out to yield neither more separable nor more robust categories compared to ADS inputs. We discuss the usefulness of machine learning algorithms run on real data to test hypotheses about the functional role of IDS. © 2021 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).

Consumers often anthropomorphize non-human entities. In this research, we investigate a novel antecedent of anthropomorphism: language. Some languages (e.g., English) make a grammatical distinction between humans (he, she) and non-humans (it), whereas other languages (e.g., French) do not (all objects are gender-marked). We propose that such grammatical structures of languages influence the way individuals mentally represent non-human entities, and as a result, their generalized tendencies to anthropomorphize such entities. Across 10 studies, we provide evidence that speakers of languages that do not grammatically distinguish between humans and non-humans (it-less languages) anthropomorphize more than do speakers of languages that do make this distinction (non-it-less languages). We demonstrate the effects across natural languages (French, Turkish, English) and by manipulating grammatical gender. We show that the effects are observable in naturally occurring consumer contexts (e.g., secondary sales data), and that gender-marking in it-less languages influences consumers’ interactions with brands, even though the gender-markings are semantically arbitrary, and that these effects occur nonconsciously. Our findings have implications for the broader debate on the extent to which language influences thought, and also suggest ways in which managers can leverage nonconscious grammatical anthropomorphism to influence consumer perceptions, attitudes, and behavior.

Visual Abstract, Binaural beating is a perceptual auditory illusion occurring when presenting two neighboring frequencies to each ear separately. Several controversial claims have been attributed to binaural beats regarding their ability to entrain human brain activity and mood, in both the scientific literature and the marketing realm. Here, we sought to address those questions in a robust fashion using a single-blind, active-controlled protocol. To do so, we compared the effects of binaural beats with a control beat stimulation (monaural beats, known to entrain brain activity but not mood) across four distinct levels in the human auditory pathway: subcortical and cortical entrainment, scalp-level functional connectivity and self-reports. Both stimuli elicited standard subcortical responses at the pure tone frequencies of the stimulus [i.e., frequency following response (FFR)], and entrained the cortex at the beat frequency [i.e., auditory steady state response (ASSR)]. Furthermore, functional connectivity patterns were modulated differentially by both kinds of stimuli, with binaural beats being the only one eliciting cross-frequency activity. Despite this, we did not find any mood modulation related to our experimental manipulation. Our results provide evidence that binaural beats elicit cross frequency connectivity patterns, but weakly entrain the cortex when compared with monaural beat stimuli. Whether binaural beats have an impact on cognitive performance or other mood measurements remains to be seen and can be further investigated within the proposed methodological framework.

As medical crowdfunding becomes increasingly popular, many fundraising campaigns fail to collect enough donations for patients in need and therefore it is important to explore how to craft an effective fundraising campaign. In practice, a majority of fundraising campaigns are narrated from the third-person perspective without knowing whether narrating from the third-person perspective is the most effective approach or not. In this research, we draw upon multiple theories and propose that the relative effectiveness of the first- vs. third-person perspective depends on patient gender. To test the hypotheses, we conduct a randomized field experiment on a leading medical crowdfunding platform in China, involving more than 1.2 million potential donors. The empirical results show that the third-person perspective is more effective in motivating donation-related behaviors for male-patient fundraising campaigns, whereas the first-person perspective is more effective for female-patient fundraising campaigns. Furthermore, we find that the choice of the narrative perspectives matters more for potential donors who do not yet have many historical donations or have fewer friends with donations on the focal fundraising campaigns. The findings generate important theoretical and managerial implications for medical crowdfunding.

Decision theory offers a formal approach to decision making, which is often viewed and taught as the rational way to approach managerial decisions. Half a century ago it generated high hopes of capturing and perhaps replacing intuition, and providing the “right” answer in practically all managerial situations. Today it seems fair to say that decision theory has not lived up to these expectations. Behavioral science provides ample evidence that managers fail to follow the dicta of decision theory, even when these are explained to them. As a result, executives often find decision theory frustrating and useless and prefer to rely on their intuition. This paper suggests that this extreme conclusion is unwarranted and calls for a re-appraisal of decision theory. We propose that it should not always be regarded as a mathematical tool that produces the answer; rather, it can be viewed as a framework for a dialog between the decision maker and the decision theorist. In one extreme, the decision theorist studies the problem and provides the “correct’’ answer. But in another, the decision theorist only challenges the decision maker’s intuition and logic. In between, a whole gamut of possible dialogs exists, in which decision theory doesn’t replace intuition, but supports and refines it.

In incentive-alignment choice experiments, each decision is realized with some prob- ability prob < 1. Incentive alignment induces truth telling, i.e., respondents do not consciously lie, given the information they have processed. However, based on the psychological distance literature and the bounded rationality literature, we predict that prob < 1 is not necessarily enough to induce consumers to process information and choose as they would if choices were realized with certainty (prob = 1). In three eye tracking experiments, we vary the probability prob that choices will be realized, from 0 to 1, and study the impact on attention, information processing, and choice. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that as prob is increased from 0 to 1, consumers: process the choice-relevant information more carefully and in a way that is more consistent with a compensatory decision process; become less novelty seeking; become more price sensitive. These findings have implications for the ecological validity of incentive-aligned preference measurement surveys. While it is not feasible to systematically use questions with high prob in the eld, we further predict and find that placing a higher-probability question (such as an external validity task) at the beginning rather than the end of a questionnaire has a desirable carryover effect on attention, information processing and choice throughout the questionnaire.