搜索结果：Topics in cognitive science

Cognitive Science and its allied disciplines have now accepted diversity as a core requirement for understanding human nature in its true essence. We propose here two types of diversity mindsets that reflect distinct individual-difference attributes or personality types specifically linked to bilingualism and its adaptability. We conceptualize diversity as one's past and current "immersive" strategies in any society, both as an individual and a member of a collective, with distinct practices, cognitive strategies, language behavior, and even consciousness. The two types are "broad" and "narrow," defined by a person's adaptive competence in linguistic, social, cognitive, emotional, and cultural life. In our framework, variables such as language proficiency, educational background, occupational and socioeconomic status, and ethnocultural background interact to modulate diversity mindsets. The framework predicts experimental outcomes in a wide range of tasks for individuals identified as either "broad" or "narrow" in their diversity mindset type. We draw from evolutionary psychology, cultural neuroscience, current theories of psycholinguistics, and cognitive science to argue that it is not enough to include the non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations into research designs, but it is critical to study how individuals in different cultures adapt to diversity given their own cognitive, linguistic, and social constraints. Our framework explains how people with these diversity mindsets automatically stratify themselves into distinct groups and engage in distinct cognitive processes that influences bi-multilingualism in any context.

This topic revisits and elucidates the impact of dynamical systems theory (DST) since the "dynamical hypothesis" was presented in the 1990s as an alternative to the information-processing approaches central to orthodox cognitive science. The dynamical hypothesis does not investigate cognition as necessitating explanations in computational or representational terms. Instead, DST is leveraged to approach cognition in temporal terms (e.g., continuous, self-organizing) that often encompass brain-body-environment systems. The contributions collected here examine DST's experimental, methodological, and theoretical roles across such areas as informatics, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. They explore how DST reshapes debates about computation, representation, and embodiment, extending from individual cognition to artificial and social systems. Papers address advances in fractality, multiscale modeling, and nonlinear methods; applications to behavioral and neural coordination; and theoretical syntheses linking dynamics with cultural and symbolic processes. Together, they assess DST's growing influence in a "dynamical renaissance" within the cognitive and brain sciences, highlighting both its promise as a unifying framework and its conceptual challenges. Thus, this provides a comprehensive and critical overview of how the dynamical hypothesis continues to expand, guide, and refine the understanding of cognition as an emergent, temporally extended, and interactive process across biological, social, and artificial domains.

Research on language and olfaction presents a paradox. Language appears to support the formation of odor categories, yet it can also hinder odor recognition through verbal interference, highlighting that different olfactory processes get affected in distinct ways. The question, then, is not about whether language and odor processing in humans are inevitably linked, but about understanding the circumstances under which language either promotes or hinders olfactory processing, particularly in the domains of odor categorization and memory. To unmask the nature of this delicate balance, this article reviews empirical studies that point to a verbal enhancement of forming new odor categories and contextualizes it alongside experimental outcomes showing how odor memories can get verbally skewed. Findings from both angles are nested within prominent theories, including attribute differentiation, dual coding, ad hoc cognition and attentional tuning. The research reviewed here sits at the crossroads of language and olfaction. It offers fresh insights into how language scaffolds the organization of the mind, and it also outlines promising directions for future research. The main aim is to bring together two contrasting strands of research to investigate how language both facilitates and disrupts olfactory processing. The designs of studies in this article were inspired by Asifa Majid's outstanding contributions to cognitive science and honor her dedication to community building, particularly in exploring how diverse linguistic and cultural contexts affect olfactory cognition.

Are people able to tell apart a random configuration of lines and dots from a work of art? Previous studies have shown that untrained viewers can distinguish between abstract art made by professional artists, children, or apes. Pieces made by artists were perceived as more intentionally made and organized than the rest. However, these studies used paintings by prominent abstract artists (e.g., Mark Rothko) as stimuli, which in any case showed that people were able to recognize high-quality paintings made by trained artists, not "any" human. In this study, we presented participants with artworks by untrained human artists versus artworks made by captive chimpanzees in a visual discrimination task. In Study 1, participants viewed sets of human- and non-human-made paintings and were asked to identify the artist as human or ape. In Study 2, they rated the paintings on several criteria: intentionality, organization, balance, and complexity. We found that participants: (1) successfully distinguished between human-made and non-human-made paintings; (2) reported perceiving more balance, organization, and intentionality in human-made paintings; (3) preferred stimuli, which ranked higher in intentionality. We also identified balance, complexity, and organization as key features that influence preference for abstract artworks. Overall, our results show that even non-figurative paintings made by adults untrained in the visual arts are perceived as intentionally made, suggesting people spontaneously produce and perceive cues of intentionality, generating an implicit human signature in visual art.

Language and perception are intimately linked in human cognition, yet the precise nature of their interaction remains unclear. In the domain of auditory pitch, languages often use metaphors by borrowing terminology from other domains. However, studies examining children's understanding of pitch metaphors have produced notably conflicting results. To address this issue, we investigated how German-speaking children comprehend familiar pitch metaphors from their native language and unfamiliar pitch terminology not used in German. While children were able to understand all the pitch metaphors tested, they displayed better comprehension of familiar than unfamiliar terminology, suggesting that linguistic experience boosts metaphor comprehension. In a cross-cultural comparison, we found that German-speaking children differed from Turkish-speaking children in line with differences in language. Critically, however, German-speaking children also differed from Dutch-speaking children. This was true although a height-pitch metaphor is used in both languages, suggesting that the mere presence of a metaphor in language is unlikely to account for the observed differences. We also found that pitch distance influenced children's metaphor comprehension, but differently for height-pitch versus thickness-pitch metaphors. In sum, our findings suggest that children's understanding of pitch metaphors is shaped by an intricate interplay of linguistic exposure, perceptual experiences, and experimental considerations.

It has been argued that fungi have cognitive capacities, and even conscious experiences. While these arguments risk ushering in unproductive disputes about how words like "mind," "cognitive," "sentient," and "conscious" should be used, paying close attention to key properties of fungal life can also be uncontroversially productive for cognitive science. Attention to fungal life can, for example, inspire new, potentially fruitful directions of research in cognitive science. Here, I introduce a concept of cognitive symbiosis whose significance for cognitive science becomes salient when we consider the centrality of symbioses in the life of fungi. Like fungi, virtually all cognitive systems live in close association with other kinds of cognitive systems, and this living together can have substantive psychological consequences. Expanding the scope of cognitive science to study a wide variety of cognitive symbioses underwrites the importance of biology and evolution in understanding minds.

Hunter-gatherers faced the survival threat of confusing edible mushrooms with their poisonous twins, imposing selection pressure on those who failed to detect subtle visual differences. Grounded in the ancestral priorities framework, which posits that the human mind is adapted to handle prehistoric challenges, we investigated whether humans spontaneously engage in learning strategies that allow a reliable discrimination to cope with the confusion threat-such as contrasting. We manipulated the labels of two mushroom types between subjects-poisonous and edible (survival threat) versus growing on acidic and alkaline to neutral soil (control)-and engaged them in confusion imagery. We traced learners' spontaneous use of contrasting switches between mushroom twins during learning. Our findings align with the ancestral priorities view: Learners in the survival threat condition imagined the dangerous consequences of confusion more vividly. With the exception of the die-hard blockers (who fully refrained from using contrasting switches), this deep engagement in survival processing led learners to shift their study efforts toward finding differences by switching between mushroom twins-these contrasting switches led to better discrimination. Accordingly, raising awareness of confusion risks can shift learning behaviors toward more effective strategies, offering educational value for settings where accurate discrimination is crucial.

Language is perhaps the most complex and sophisticated of cognitive faculties in humans. The neurobiological basis of language in the healthy, aging brain remains a relatively neglected topic, in particular with respect to basic aspects of grammar and meaning. In the face of major changes to the physiological infrastructure underpinning perception and higher cognition, core language functions are frequently retained in the elderly. Meanwhile, neurolinguistic models of language are often tested and refined with reference to system abnormalities (as in cases of language deficits or aphasias), but rarely with reference to the aging brain. This article outlines some major developmental stages in the neural architecture of language, and reviews the current state-of-the-art in research concerning how aging can result in distinct neural signatures of language. Certain differences in basic phrase and sentence processing strategies between children, young adults, and older adults can partly be explained by neurophysiological differences, and also divergences in core components of brain rhythms. Particular focus is placed here on spatiotemporal dynamics and neural oscillations, inter-brain coupling, 1/f neural noise, and neural entrainment. Exploring how language function changes with age can ultimately provide insights into the maturation and decay of basic properties of cortical computation.

Contextual information and prior knowledge facilitate perceptual processing, improving our recognition of even distorted or obstructed visual inputs. As a result, neuronal processing elicited by identical sensory inputs varies depending on the context in which we encounter those inputs. This modulation is in line with predictive processing accounts of vision, which suggest that higher brain areas use internal models of the world to interpret sensory inputs. Cortical feedback signals encoding predictions about those inputs are propagated back down to sensory areas. As such, acquiring knowledge should enhance the internal models that we use to resolve sensory ambiguities, and feedback signals should encode more accurate estimates of sensory inputs. We investigated how knowledge updates contextual feedback processing in V1 by first generating Mooney images, ambiguous two-tone images which are difficult to recognize without prior knowledge of the image content. Across two behavioral experiments and one 3T functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, participants acquired knowledge either related to the general Mooney image category or Mooney image-specific information. During fMRI, we used partially occluded Mooney images to investigate if contextual feedback signals in early visual areas are modulated after acquiring a high-level interpretation of the images. We show that general information about image categories is sufficient to improve recognition of ambiguous images. We also show that perceptual priors containing image-specific information modulate contextual feedback processing in the early visual areas, in response to previously ambiguous images.

The space of human goals is tremendously vast; and yet, from just a few moments of watching a scene or reading a story, we seem to spontaneously infer a range of plausible motivations for the people and characters involved. What explains this remarkable capacity for intuiting other agents' goals, despite the infinitude of ends they might pursue? And how does this cohere with our understanding of other people as approximately rational agents? In this paper, we introduce open-ended sequential inverse plan search (SIPS), a sequential Monte Carlo model of open-ended goal inference. Open-ended SIPS combines top-down Bayesian inverse planning with bottom-up sampling based on the statistics of co-occurring subgoals. By proposing goal hypotheses related to the subgoals achieved by an agent, our model rapidly generates plausible goals without exhaustive search, then filters out goals that would be irrational given the actions taken so far. We validate this model in a goal inference task called Block Words, where participants try to guess the word that someone is stacking out of lettered blocks. In comparison to both heuristic bottom-up guessing and exact Bayesian inference over hundreds of goals, our model better predicts the mean, variance, efficiency, and resource rationality of human goal inferences, achieving similar accuracy to the exact model at a fraction of the cognitive cost, while exhibiting rational pruning of irrational goal hypotheses that cannot be captured by bottom-up sampling alone. Our experiments thus highlight the importance of uniting top-down and bottom-up models for explaining the speed, accuracy, and generality of human theory of mind.

Cognitive technologies are socially shared and culturally evolved systems whose function is principally cognitive. Throughout human history and prehistory, they have aided in classifying, organizing, or managing information and knowledge, including ideas, language, and material culture. They range in scope from the highly artifactual (e.g., maps, scientific instruments, weights and measures) to the more abstract and conceptual (e.g., taxonomies, linguistic frameworks). Cognitive technologies thus scaffold many of the complex activities common to all human societies. Because they are both dynamic and culturally embedded, cognitive technologies, therefore, have histories, and are thus amenable not only to contemporary experimental methods, but also a range of historical and evolutionary approaches, including those from outside disciplines traditionally considered parts of cognitive science, such as classics and other humanistic disciplines. While the study of cognitive technologies is hardly new, many pre-existing studies can now be brought together under this framework in recognition that the field has been insufficiently integrated. This issue brings together a disciplinarily diverse range of scholars whose work employs the methods and concepts of specific disciplines while orienting itself around contemporary cognitive-scientific frameworks. The value of this integrative approach is to form a nexus around which a broader range of future interdisciplinary cognitive scholarship can coalesce, in which humanists and scientists have much to learn from one another through collaboration and shared concepts.

The majority of Pleistocene figurative cave art in Western Europe consists of line drawings depicting large herbivores from the side view, and outlines were sometimes abbreviated to the head-neck-dorsal line. It is often assumed that the side view was used because it facilitates animal recognition compared to other views, and that abbreviated outlines were used as an economic mode of representation compared to complete outlines. To investigate these claims, we present an ecological approach to picture perception and discuss its implications for the study of cave art. We then report an experiment conducted to examine the roles of perspective and abbreviation in cave art in relation to two roles: communicating about specific animals and inducing aesthetic appreciation. Participants were shown outlines of animals (bison, horse, hind, and ibex), which varied in terms of perspective (frontal, fronto-oblique, side, rear-oblique, or rear view) and abbreviation (complete or abbreviated). They were instructed to quickly identify them and to rate their aesthetic value. We found that side and oblique views provide equivalent information, equally facilitating recognition and inducing aesthetic appreciation; and that the information from the side and oblique views is richer than the frontal and rear views. We also found that complete outlines facilitate recognition and induce more aesthetic appreciation compared to abbreviated outlines. Contrary to common assumptions, side views are not simply motivated by ease of recognition. Facts of ecological optics, production effort, and available drawing techniques must also be considered. Abbreviation may also be contingent on participation in a shared history of communicative practices and on production effort, as its possible prevalence further from cave entrances might partly be motivated by the need to draw quickly, as the light was scarce. Our experimental results point to a complex interplay of perceptual, technical, and cultural factors in the development of early figurative art and show how an ecological approach to (picture) perception can bring new insights to inform these discussions.

The Chana Research Station for Language Sciences and Interculturality is a scientific initiative dedicated to exploring the linguistic, cultural, and cognitive diversity of the Peruvian Amazon. Building on long-standing local partnerships and collaborations, Chana facilitates research on cognition that extends beyond populations from industrialized democracies, traditionally overrepresented in behavioral sciences. Other populations-such as those in Amazonia-exhibit remarkable diversity. With this in mind, current Chana projects and collaborations encompass research on how Amazonian unique linguistic structures and culturally significant practices shape language processing and acquisition, as well as nonlinguistic cognition; studies on cognition focused on quantification practices in cultures with limited or unconventional numeral systems; and cross-cultural investigations of perception, building on prior research in other regions of the Amazon and the world. Beyond human cognition, the station has also supported experimental research on the relationship between domesticated dogs and their owners. Chana prioritizes inclusive and ethical research that benefits and includes local communities and their perspectives by engaging local and Indigenous researchers, and leading social and educational projects focused on cultural revitalization. Chana welcomes collaboration with researchers who are interested in advancing the understanding of Amazonian societies, languages, and knowledge systems.

Symbolic behavior is a unique and defining capability of our species. The emergence and subsequent evolution of this behavior-particularly with regard to visual culture-has been a topic that has historically attracted a breadth of different disciplinary perspectives, from archaeology and anthropology to linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology. Each discipline provides unique insights into the early evidence, mechanisms, processes, social role, and evolutionary trajectory of symbolic behavior. Yet, there are rare occurrences where these disciplines directly interact. The question of how our species began engaging in symbolic behavior, and the role it played within our evolutionary story, is one that cannot be answered by any one discipline alone. This thematic topic brings together new methodological and theoretical research on the evolution of human visual culture and symbolic behavior. The contributions within this topic span from archaeological investigations of early symbolic behavior, empirical interdisciplinary approaches that integrate multiple strands of evidence, to cutting-edge insights about the cognitive processes and mechanisms that may have given rise to meaning-making in relation to visual media. In drawing together these diverse, yet complementary, approaches to understanding marks and meaning, this topic intends to broaden the interdisciplinary horizons of research into the evolution of symbolic behavior.

Predictive Processing has been proposed as the single unifying computation underlying all of cognition, and proponents argue that all psychological phenomena can be explained as consequences of this principle. This theoretical framework has inspired many cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, but it currently has no developmental mechanism that would explain how infants begin to perceive and learn about the world. Rather, it treats human cognition as if it exists in a fully developed adult with a history of observations and world knowledge. In its current formulation, Predictive Processing only allows for perception of incoming stimuli given the existence of expectations based on previous experiences and as such does not allow for an infant to ever make a first observation. In this paper, we propose a possible starting point from which the infant can begin to develop predictive models, as well as a toolkit necessary to allow the infant to perform the range of cognitive operations on predictive models necessary for learning. The starting point we propose is a set of low-precision, low level-of-detail predictions with little or no hierarchical structure, which is very rapidly updated to reflect the infant's early environment. The toolkit contains a range of operations referred to collectively as structure learning, which are applied to models in order to allow for building adult-like hierarchical models. These modifications are necessary for developmental scientists to be able to adopt the Predictive Processing framework and benefit from its advantages, but also for Predictive Processing to be able to explain all human cognition, which inherently must include development.

Kin terms appear among infants' earliest words, yet a full mastery of kin concepts typically emerges only in late childhood. This prolonged developmental trajectory reflects not only children's acquisition of an abstract relational system of words, but also their growing understanding of social relationships and interactional norms. In this paper, we review research on kin term acquisition from three perspectives: word learning, language socialization, and social learning. We then outline the problem space for a contemporary study of kin term acquisition, highlighting the most urgent barriers to understanding the nature of kin representations and their development. We close by introducing findings from two pilot studies that shed light on how social, cultural, and linguistic experience shapes kin term acquisition. By bringing together insights from psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and infant social cognition, we aim to capture the richness of kin concepts in development and to offer a framework that can inspire future research across these fields.

Iconicity is inherently grounded in sensory experience, yet few studies investigate how sensory information is packaged in iconic words. We present perceptual strength ratings for Japanese ideophones, to ask how sensory information is encoded in this word class. While previous studies employ a five- or six-sense model, we expanded the visual and interoceptive domains to incorporate a total of 13 perceptual dimensions. Extra dimensions were drawn from asymmetries in the cross-linguistic attestation of ideophones, to explore whether these reflect underlying structural differences in the encoding of these perceptual domains. We replicate previous findings regarding visual dominance, but show that this is primarily driven by the dimension movement, with other visual dimensions receiving comparatively lower ratings. As to relations between the senses, we find that these can differ even within a single modality. For example, within vision, movement was most connected to sound and interoception; shape to texture; and color to taste and smell. The results speak to the value of an expanded model of the senses for perceptual norming studies, with an expanded set of linguistic signs as its object.

Humans can flexibly adjust how they make decisions to arbitrary goals. However, most theories in decision-making focus on predicting one specific choice type (i.e., choosing the best option). Here, we link decision-making and cognitive-control research to test a theory that accounts for flexible adjustments of choice mechanisms to different goals and demands. Our biologically inspired model specifies how different features translate into evidence for the current goal, and how evidence is mapped onto different output structures. We tested the model in an eye-tracking study in which participants were asked to choose one out of four consumer products or to appraise the entire set, each with respect to positive or negative value. The results confirmed our preregistered hypotheses that response time (RT) should decrease with the overall value of a set of options in choose-best but increase in choose-worst trials. As predicted, this interaction was absent in appraisal RT, which instead exhibited an inverted-U-shaped pattern. Furthermore, the amount of attention devoted to an option was positively related to its value in choose-best, negatively related in choose-worst trials, and unrelated when participants appraised entire sets of products. Time-resolved analyses of eye movements revealed strategic goal-dependent search processes, as attention is increasingly focused on goal-congruent options in choice but remains more uniformly distributed in appraisal. Our findings suggest that cognitive control shapes choice and search dynamics by flexibly adjusting them to current goals and demands.

I argue that the current proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) represents a new stage in a longer historical process of distancing humans from their unique individual psyches and of reducing participation and cultural diversity in music. The argument consists of six parts: (1) reiterating the uniqueness of individual psyches, which are often obscured by cultural norms, but are in the fact a vital source of cultural variation, and require for their proliferation that humans commune with their own psyches and enter into meaningful interaction with others; (2) presenting the presentational/participatory axes of music-making and music ontology, and arguing that the underlying psychology of music is participatory; (3) introducing a new rhetorical device, PECULIAR, which like WEIRD points at presentational forms of music-making as the outlier rather than the norm; (4) describing in brief the historical process through which music-making became less participatory, initially through elitist institutions and later through trade and commerce, and how mass media endangers musical diversity; (5) considering how generative AI technologies detach humans from their individual psyches and lead to the loss of cultural diversity; (6) arguing that AI will accelerate the reduction in musical participation and diversity, and suggesting ways for researchers to investigate the effects of these new technologies on cultures and minds. Finally, I suggest we should be mindful of the substantial social and spiritual benefits of musical participation, and find creative ways to encourage it.