Attentional resource allocation and cultural modulation in a computational model of ritualized behavior

ABSTRACT

How do cultural and religious rituals influence human perception and cognition, and what separates the highly patterned behaviors of communal ceremonies from perceptually similar precautionary and compulsive behaviors? These are some of the questions that recent theoretical models and empirical studies have tried to answer by focusing on ritualized behavior instead of ritual. Ritualized behavior (i.e., a set of behavioral features embedded in rituals) increases attention to detail and induces cognitive resource depletion, which together support distinct modes of action categorization. While ritualized behaviors are perceptually similar across a range of behavioral domains, symbolically mediated experience-dependent information (so-called cultural priors) modulate perception such that communal ceremonies appear coherent and culturally meaningful, while compulsive behaviors remain incoherent and, in some cases, pathological.

In this study, we extend a qualitative model of human action perception and understanding to include ritualized behavior. Based on previous experimental and computational studies, the model was simulated using instrumental and ritualized representations of realistic motor patterns and the simulation data were subjected to linear and non-linear analysis. The results are used to exemplify how action perception of ritualized behavior (a) might influence allocation of attentional resources and (b) can be modulated by cultural priors. Further explorations of the model show why behavioral experiments might fail to capture modulation effects of cultural priors and that cultural priors in general reduce the chaoticity of time-dependent action processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Action understanding
• expectation modulation
• ritualized behavior
• rituals
• simulation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous version of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kristoffer L. Nielbo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5116-5070

Notes

1. By cultural priors we mean experience-dependent information that is socially distributed and which functions as a stable prediction resource in action perception.

2. The action parsing system tracks information on multiple levels. “Drinking coffee” can, for instance, be embedded in “becoming a barista” which then again can be embedded in “attaining a happy life” (Zacks & Tversky, 2001). For the sake of simplicity, only the basic level and the lower level are implemented in the current model.

3. A thorough description of artificial neural networks and Elman networks is beyond the scope of this article. For a conceptual or formal introduction, respectively, see Gurney (1997) and Hagan, Demuth, and Beale (2002).

4. We are most thankful to J.R. Reynolds, J.M. Zacks and T.S. Braver for making a coded motor library available and furthermore to J.M. Zacks for suggesting possible implementations. See http://dcl.wustl.edu/DCL/Stimuli.html (3 October 2011) (Reynolds et al., 2007).

5. We did not implement redundancy by repeating motor components in the ritualized actions for three reasons: (1) redundancy would increase the error signal in the ritualized condition because the network is sensitive to the total number of motor components; (2)the differing number of motor components between conditions would make the conditions less comparable; and (3) this would also make results less comparable to previous studies where insertion of additional motor components has been avoided for methodological reasons (Nielbo et al., 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation [UNIK grant MINDLab] and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [grant Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium].