No abstract

In this study, we investigate people’s ability to predict and adapt to the behavior of others in order to make plans of their own, a cornerstone of cooperative and competitive behavior. Participants played 300 rounds of rock, paper, scissors against another human player. We investigate the degree to which participants are able to identify patterns in their opponent’s behavior in order to exploit them in subsequent rounds. We find strong evidence that participants exploit their opponents over the course of 300 rounds, suggesting that people identify dependencies in their opponent’s move choices during the game. Nonetheless, analysis of dependencies across participant move choices reveals that people exhibit a number of regularities in their own moves. Based on these dependencies, we argue that participants are far from optimal in their exploiting, suggesting that there are substantial constraints on people’s ability to identify and adapt to patterned opponent behavior across repeated interactions.

Is cognitive science interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary? We contribute to this debate by examining the authorship structure and topic similarity of contributions to the Cognitive Science Society from 2000 to 2019. We compare findings from CogSci to abstracts from the Vision Science Society over the same time frame. Our analysis focuses on graph theoretic features of the co-authorship network—edge density, transitivity, and maximum subgraph size—as well as clustering within the topic space of CogSci contributions. We also combine structural and semantic information with an analysis of homophily. We validate this approach by predicting new collaborations in this year’s CogSci proceedings. Our results suggest that cognitive science has become increasingly interdisciplinary in the last 19 years. More broadly, we argue that a formal quantitative approach which combines structural co-authorship information and semantic topic analysis provides inroads to questions about the level of interdisciplinary collaboration in the cognitive science community.