| 研究実績の概要 |
Cognition is characterized by two (opposing) kinds of processes (dual-routes): fast versus slow, domain-specific versus domain-general, and so on. We proposed a category theory approach to understand this dualistic nature of cognition. Our theory says that underlying each dual-route is a categorical adjunction of some kind. Theoretically, we showed that adjoint (co)recursion provides a unifying framework for cognition (Phillips, 2017), and therefore this approach. Experimentally, we developed a novel split-screen paradigm to test an important aspect of the theory which says that routes are chosen on the basis of a cost/benefit assessment of the alternatives. Each cognitive task could be completed by attending to information on either the left or right side of the visual display. The task goal was the same for both sides, but difficulty in attaining the goal was contrasted (easy versus hard). For example, in one task (visual search), subjects searched for a target object that appeared on both sides. Response accuracy, time and eye movements showed that subjects were sensitive to relative task difficulty, consistently searching for the target in the easy side. Similar results were obtained for other cognitive tasks, including addition, mental rotation, among others. Hence, these results confirmed the effectiveness of our paradigm in measuring cost/benefits of dual routes, and so provide an experimental basis for testing the cost/benefit aspect of our category theory approach to cognition.
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| 今後の研究の推進方策 |
The experiments in 2016 showed that subjects were sensitive to relative task difficulty. These experiments tested easy versus hard version of each task. So the differences could simply reflect task difficulty (e.g., time on task), rather than different underlying processes. The categorical theory concerns dual-route processes that are related by adjunctions. Hence the proposed follow-up experiment is to employ the split-screen paradigm where the alternatives are indeed different processes. We propose to test this situation using a visual marking version of our split-screen paradigm. In masked search, some of the search items are displayed prior to displaying the entire search field. It is well-known that subjects flag these items, so as exclude them from subsequent (re)search, and so yields more efficient search. Thus, visual search using prior masked items is known to involve cognitive processes that differ from visual search without masking. So we propose testing subjects on masked versus unmasked visual search version of our split-screen paradigm. That is, one field contains masking, the other field does not. Although visual mask search is generally more efficient, we can independently vary cost by including a delay between onset of mask versus unmask search fields. Our theory predicts that subjects should search of the lower cost side relative to control (one-sided version), rather than simply search on the masked side ragardless of cost.
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