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Virtual Hand with Ambiguous Movement between the Self and Other Origin: Sense of Ownership and 'Other-Produced' Agency
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Identity, causality, and pronoun ambiguity.

Eyal Sagi1, Lance J Rips

  • 1Psychology Department, Northwestern University.

Topics in Cognitive Science
|August 19, 2014
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

People determine pronoun antecedents by reasoning about causal connections between events. This study shows that judgments of identity, crucial for pronoun resolution, rely on the likelihood of causal links between actions and individuals.

Keywords:
Ambiguity resolutionAnaphoraCausal reasoningCausationIdentity over timePronoun resolutionSingular concepts

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Philosophy of Mind

Background:

  • Understanding pronoun resolution is key to deciphering language comprehension.
  • Previous research suggests identity reasoning influences antecedent assignment.
  • The causal-historical nature of identity over time is a critical factor.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how causal likelihood impacts pronoun antecedent determination.
  • To test the hypothesis that judgments of identity are central to pronoun resolution.
  • To model the role of causal connections in resolving ambiguous pronouns.

Main Methods:

  • Participants were presented with sentence pairs involving two individuals and a pronoun.
  • The likelihood of causal connections between the events described in the sentences was experimentally manipulated.
  • Participant choices for pronoun antecedents were recorded and analyzed.

Main Results:

  • Pronoun antecedent assignments significantly correlated with the manipulated causal likelihoods.
  • Decisions about who the pronoun referred to were guided by the perceived causal relationships between actions.
  • A mathematical model incorporating causal identity principles accurately predicted experimental data.

Conclusions:

  • Causal reasoning is a fundamental mechanism in determining pronoun antecedents.
  • Judgments of individual identity, grounded in causal history, are integral to pronoun resolution.
  • This research provides a causal framework for understanding pronoun reference.