Maria Kon, Andrew Lovett, and I have been investigating the way people perceive and comprehend the notion of a “chase”, and we recently published our explorations in the proceedings of CogSci 2024. In one project, the three of us examined how people interpret a chase relation between dynamically moving objects (circles) on a screen. We developed a computational cognitive model using the ARCADIA cognitive architecture, and report on how the model mimics human data and captures routine errors in chase detection. You can read more about that work here:
Although we are generally good at observing a busy scene and determining whether it contains one agent pursuing another, we are not immune to making errors and may identify a pursuit when there is none. Further, we may have difficulty articulating exactly what information allowed us to determine whether there was a pursuit. To gain a better measure of when people correctly or erroneously detect pursuit, we designed a
novel pursuit detection task. To compare performance given different strategies, we developed a cognitive model that can perform this task. The results of our pursuit detection experiment indicate that, indeed, people typically identify pursuit events correctly, but they make infrequent yet systematic errors for particular scenes. When the model implements specific strategies, simulation results are well correlated with empirical results. Moreover, the model makes the same errors as human participants. We show how the empirical results can be accounted for in terms of decision criteria indicated by high performing model strategies.
and you can download that paper here.
In another line of work, Maria and I explored the semantic differences in how people interpret and reason about “tracking” verbs such as: chase, pursue, and follow. We show behavioral traces of different mental simulations for chase and follow, because people tend to infer faster movement for chase than follow. That work is summarized in this abstract:
We describe the verbs pursue, chase, and follow as “tracking” verbs because they share conceptual similarities: they are all motion verbs that describe a dynamic spatial relation between two entities, as in “the cat chased the mouse”. What distinguishes them from one another? If, as some cognitive scientists argue, mental simulations underlie the way the mind processes all motion verbs — including those that describe static scenarios, such as run in “the road runs through the desert” — then those simulations may explain the differences between tracking verbs. For instance, chase and pursue may describe conceptually faster motion than follow . We tested this hypothesis in two experiments. The studies presented participants with imagery of one car chasing another along a straight road. In Experiment 1, participants estimated the distance that the pursued car would travel 3 seconds into the future by dragging a slider to an appropriate point on the road. In Experiment 2, participants estimated the distance by selecting from several distance options on a logarithmic scale. Both studies validated the hypothesis that chase and pursue describe faster motion, i.e., participants reliably estimated longer distances for descriptions that included those verbs. We place the results in the context of broader theories of pursuit perception and verb comprehension.
Leave a Reply