Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

{"title":"Material Anchors in Language Learning.","authors":"Conor Snoek","doi":"10.1111/tops.70026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70026","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Language-learning materials are cognitive technologies that aim to facilitate the complex cognitive task of acquiring the means for effective communication in a second language. Blackfoot and Plains Cree are two closely related Indigenous languages spoken in Canada and the United States. Both languages are now rarely learned by children, but both have growing language teaching traditions. As polysynthetic agglutinating languages, Blackfoot and Plains Cree pose a challenge for speakers of English, due to the typological distance between Germanic and Algonquian languages. Developing language-learning materials to overcome this challenge constitutes an important step in ensuring language sustainability. Cognitive Anthropology and Cognitive Linguistics offer theoretical frameworks for the study of language-learning materials as cognitive technologies. This study examines the Plains Cree Syllabary chart as a cognitive tool for acquiring a new writing system. On this basis, a new chart is developed that supports the learning of Blackfoot grammatical structure.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145114588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Symmetry as a Cognitive Tool in Mesoamerican Divinatory Books.","authors":"Katarzyna Mikulska","doi":"10.1111/tops.70025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Mesoamerican pre-Hispanic divinatory books, called codices, encode meaning through various semiotic mechanisms, that is, iconic, glottographic, semasiographic, and notational principles. The last one refers to the meaning encoded through the spatial arrangement of signs on the graphic surface; thus, it can also be called internal syntagmatics. As the divinatory codices are organized in the form of lists, tables, and diagrams, the internal syntagmatics is particularly important, and one of the essential semiotic tools within it is symmetry. As I demonstrate, in some diagrams, the information is encoded through different symmetries-or rather, antisymmetries-simultaneously. They are: translation, rotation, mirror symmetry, and-the most productive of them-the chiasmic symmetry. Being not only \"a pattern of thought\" but also \"a pattern for thought\", the X-form arrangement in divinatory codices turns out to be a cognitive tool that structures the Mesoamerican ontological conceptualization of the world.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145126347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cultural Transmission and Evolution of Mushroom Knowledge: Insights From Mycophobic Norway.","authors":"Aliki Papa","doi":"10.1111/tops.70027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70027","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study investigates the cultural transmission of mushroom knowledge through an iterated learning paradigm, focusing on how content-based and model-based biases shape transmission across generations. Norwegian participants, predominantly mycophobic, were arranged in seven linear transmission chains of eight generations each, interacting in dyads. A trained confederate provided initial information about 24 mushrooms regarding edibility (poisonous/edible/inedible), accompanying facts (death/survival/neutral), and the information source's familiarity (familiar/unfamiliar). Results revealed a strong bias toward labeling mushrooms as poisonous, reflecting cultural caution. Model-based biases (familiarity) did not significantly influence transmission, while content-based biases (fact type) affected early fidelity, especially survival-related facts. Over generations, details beyond edibility were progressively lost, with transmission converging on simplified edibility judgments. This suggests cumulative cultural simplification prioritizing survival-relevant information. These findings imply that cultural attitudes influence the transmission of high-risk content, amplifying caution across generations. Despite limitations, this study offers novel empirical data on mushroom knowledge transmission in a mycophobic context and lays the groundwork for cross-cultural comparisons with mycophilic societies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145092745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Drawing Animals in the Paleolithic: The Effect of Perspective and Abbreviation on Animal Recognition and Aesthetic Appreciation.","authors":"Murillo Pagnotta, Mateusz Psujek, Larissa M Straffon, Riccardo Fusaroli, Kristian Tylén","doi":"10.1111/tops.70023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70023","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145066119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cognitive Symbionts. Expanding the Scope of Cognitive Science With Fungi.","authors":"Matteo Colombo","doi":"10.1111/tops.70024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70024","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145030830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Traces of Intentionality: Balance, Complexity, and Organization in Artworks by Humans and Apes.","authors":"Larissa M Straffon, Juan O Perea-García, Tijmen den Blaauwen, Mariska E Kret","doi":"10.1111/tops.70022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70022","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144974276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Phoneme as a Cognitive Tool.","authors":"Axel G Ekström, Claudio Tennie, Steven Moran, Caleb Everett","doi":"10.1111/tops.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>All of the world's spoken languages make consistent use of a relatively narrow set of contrastive speech sounds-phonemes. Here, we argue that phonemes constitute cognitive tools, supporting, guiding, and extending speaker cognitive capacities. We outline commonalities between phonemes and other cognitive tools, which include tendencies in their usage based on biological constraints, their extensive variation across cultural lineages, their criticality to the efficient transmission of information, and their importance in the scaffolding of various cognitive capacities. Studies of the commonalities of phonological systems reveal the physical and biological underpinnings upon which the tools of phonemes are necessarily predicated, and the constraints on their cross-cultural refinement. Our view complements cognitive linguistic perspectives on other cognitive tools, and on human perception and consciousness more broadly, by emphasizing the sounds of speech themselves.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144974282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Present and Future of Parallel Architectures of Language and Cognition.","authors":"Giosuè Baggio, Neil Cohn, Eva Wittenberg","doi":"10.1111/tops.70020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70020","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The suite of capacities constituting language involves diverse mental representations, from modality-specific information to levels of formal structure and meaning. In the cognitive science of language, a long-standing puzzle is how these representations \"hang together\" in an architecture that explains the widest possible range of facts about language. Parallelism is the general hypothesis that correlations exist between representations in the language system (e.g., between syntactic structure and compositional meaning) as well as within the mind (e.g., between word meaning and world knowledge). These correlations are mediated by systems of interfaces, but are always only partial and exhibit varying degrees of systematicity: each type of representation is functionally autonomous, that is, constructed according to specific principles, in addition to simple combinatorial mechanisms that apply across the system. This Topic explores new directions in developing or engaging with this hypothesis, in relation to open issues in several areas of current research in linguistics and cognitive brain science.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Perceptual Priors Update Contextual Feedback Processing in V1.","authors":"Yulia Y Lazarova, Yingying Huang, Lars F Muckli, Lucy S Petro","doi":"10.1111/tops.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70018","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144683405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Time Slows Down in the Future: Aging and the Brain Rhythms of Language.","authors":"Elliot Murphy","doi":"10.1111/tops.70019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70019","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144643839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}