Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

{"title":"Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Communication in Aging: A Review and Update.","authors":"Robert M McCann","doi":"10.1111/tops.70089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70089","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article reviews and updates the current state of communication, culture, and aging research. Although novel avenues of investigation within the discipline continue to evolve, extant research findings are categorized into three principal areas. First, and somewhat counterintuitively, evidence suggests individuals in many East Asian cultures report meaningfully greater negative attitudes toward older people than those in North American, Western European, and Australasian samples, a finding that requires contextual interpretation regarding cultural norms and the reporting of aging perceptions. Second, cultures may be becoming more similar in their perceptions of aging due to factors including modernization and cultural convergence, and third, there is considerable interregional variability (e.g., within Asia) in people's perceptions of communication and aging. Communication, whether mediated, face-to-face, or other, is central to how we relate to and interact with those of the same and different ages.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70089"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149138932","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":"Understanding Goal Selection Through Human Limitations.","authors":"J Branson Byers, Yael Niv","doi":"10.1111/tops.70085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70085","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>From climbing mountains to playing video games, people have a striking ability to make a goal out of just about anything. However, people do not choose their goals haphazardly. Instead, they often rely on previously chosen goals to inform the ones they choose in the future. If people can make a goal of anything, what then governs structure in human goal selection? We frame human goal selection as a balancing act between choosing novel, valuable goals and managing the limited time, cognitive resources, and experience used to identify those kinds of goals in the first place. We then identify three computational problems that people face when selecting goals, which are particularly difficult for novel goals. We hypothesize that structure in human goal selection can arise from a tradeoff between exploiting familiar (but possibly less valuable) goals and expending limited computational resources to come up with, evaluate, and plan for potentially better new goals. Overall, we advocate for an augmented perspective to study goal selection. Instead of viewing goal selection through the broad lens of reward maximization (e.g., characterizing goal selection in terms of the human reward function), or turning to evolutionary timescales as sculptors of our intrinsic reward functions, we view goal selection as special case of decision-making.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70085"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149138868","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":"Aging Language: Understanding How Human Cognition Changes As We Grow Old.","authors":"Olga Ivanova, Antonio Benítez-Burraco","doi":"10.1111/tops.70090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70090","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Language lies at the core of human nature. It is, therefore, not surprising that it has long been investigated as a privileged domain for understanding how human cognition is structured and organized. Because language is not monolithic across the lifespan, examining how it changes at different life stages has become a powerful means of advancing our understanding not only of language itself, but also of other cognitive functions-and of cognition as a whole-in light of the transformations it undergoes at specific developmental and aging phases.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70090"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149082456","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":"Generalization of Motor Learning in Psychological Space.","authors":"Eugene Poh, Naser Al-Fawakhiri, Rachel Tam, Samuel D McDougle, Jordan A Taylor","doi":"10.1111/tops.70086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70086","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The capacity to generate adaptive movements largely depends on how we generalize what we have previously learned to novel situations. The generalization of adapted movements has typically been framed as a consequence of neural tuning functions that overlap for similar movement kinematics-what might be considered bottom-up generalization. However, as is true in many domains of human behavior, generalization can also be framed as the result of goal-directed, deliberate decisions about how to act (top-down generalization). Here, we attempt to broaden the scope of theories about motor generalization, hypothesizing that part of the typical motor generalization function is associated with goal-directed decisions concerning the subjective similarity of different movement contexts. We tested this proposal by having participants make explicit similarity ratings over both traditional kinematic contextual dimensions (movement direction) and more abstract contextual dimensions (target shape) and perform a visuomotor adaptation generalization task where trials varied over those dimensions. Across five experiments, we measured the relationship between subjective similarity ratings and motor generalization. In some cases, this link was rather strong, though it was determined by the inferred goals of participants (e.g., task relevance, explicit instruction, etc.). These results support a broadening of current frameworks to explain the generalization of motor behaviors and support a more careful deployment of goal- and task-relevant instructions in generalization studies.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70086"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149065197","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":"Goal-Directed Latent Variable Inference: A Unified Active Inference Framework for Embodied Intelligence in Continuous Spatiotemporal Domains.","authors":"Takazumi Matsumoto, Prasanna Vijayaraghavan, Jun Tani","doi":"10.1111/tops.70081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70081","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This review presents goal-directed latent variable inference (GLean) as a unified active inference framework for embodied intelligence operating in continuous spatiotemporal domains. We address a central challenge in cognitive science: how agents generate, adapt, and understand goal-directed actions in noisy, high-dimensional sensorimotor environments while flexibly representing goals as static states, dynamic trajectories, or abstract linguistic constraints. GLean formulates planning as inference in a hierarchical latent space, enabling efficient real-time action generation without explicit policy sampling. We first introduce T-GLean, which integrates teleological goal representation with continuous latent-variable planning, demonstrating robust online plan adaptation to dynamically changing environments in humanoid robot experiments. We then review extensions incorporating compositional language grounding through multimodal generative modeling, enabling generalization to novel verb-noun combinations in goal representation. Together, this body of work bridges active inference, cognitive neuroscience, and embodied robotics, offering a scalable computational account of flexible, teleological action in continuous domains.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70081"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149031517","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":"Understanding and Predicting Change Points in Individual Learning: An Analysis With Real-World Data.","authors":"Michael G Collins, Florian Sense, Michael Krusmark, Tiffany Myers","doi":"10.1111/tops.70080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70080","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Different models of learning have been developed to account for human performance over time, often fitting aggregate rather than individual performance. Understanding performance at an individual level is often more difficult because multiple factors (e.g., motivation, strategy exploration, or changes in memory representation) vary across individuals and can lead to sudden changes in performance that cannot be accounted for by models used to account for aggregate behavior. One approach used to account for the sudden changes in individual performance is to integrate change detection algorithms (CDAs) with learning models. Indeed, past research has shown that performance at the individual level can be understood not as a single continuous process but instead as a sequence of different segments marked by change points, each accounted for by different or varying processes. Previous research has posited different explanations as to what features (e.g., individual, problem, problem-type) drive the inferences of these change points. Here, we compared these different explanations' ability to explain the variance in inferred change points across a single data set. To this end, we use a simple model of learning paired with a CDA to account for performance in a real-world data set with individuals performing multiple different games on the website Lumosity that tap into different task attributes (i.e., memory, attention, problem-solving, etc.). Our findings confirmed previous results about the nature of individual learning curves proposed from prior research. We found that change points were inferred across a majority of the users' game performance and that the inferred change points were associated with greater overall performance improvement over time. Finally, we found that the task features previously proposed to be associated with change points could both explain and predict inferred change points to varying degrees. The results clarify what features are driving the inferences of change points and show how psychological theory can be used to better understand and predict real-world behavior at the individual level.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70080"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149026228","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":"Exogenous Valuing: A Resource-Rational Account of Openness to Environmental Influence.","authors":"Alexander de Guzman, Sara Aronowitz","doi":"10.1111/tops.70084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70084","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Our environment can influence what we like. Advertisements may lead you to care about trendy foods, or a friend may push you toward a genre of music. Yet, the adoption of values from the world around us is not typically within the scope of theories of rationality in philosophy and cognitive science. In this paper, we take a first step in understanding how environmental influences on values fit into a picture of rationality. Leveraging work on persistent attentional biases, we argue that exogenous direction of attention can under some conditions drive value change through two connections: in-the-moment attention leading to the acquisition of longer-term attentional patterns and longer-term attentional patterns driving the agent's structuring of tasks. These changes are intimately related to values and on some accounts constitute value change. Crucially, we argue that openness to environmental influence on values is not an unfortunate flaw that we happen to suffer but an efficient, resource-rational solution to a constrained optimization problem.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70084"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149026265","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 Syntax and Semantics of Goals.","authors":"David M Abel, Mark K Ho","doi":"10.1111/tops.70082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70082","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In both cognitive science and computer science, goals are conceptualized as cognitive states that flexibly combine with world knowledge to organize and specify purposeful behavior. In this way, goals are compositional representations whose content relates to rational behavior. We here draw attention to goals as representations and their content because it highlights a parallel with other areas in cognitive science-in particular, the syntax-semantics interface in linguistics and logic-while also foregrounding foundational questions about the expressivity, design, and efficiency of different goal representations. For example, goals are typically taken as fixed and imposing constraints on desirable behaviors, but we can also identify constraints on goal representations themselves, such as whether a particular goal language is sufficiently expressive to capture behaviors of interest, or whether different goal representations capture the same behavior. Here, we synthesize work that aims to characterize the properties of different goal representations and suggest these are points of a broader design space. We close by discussing how distinguishing the form and meaning of goals can elucidate the implicit assumptions we make about goals, inform the study of interactions between higher-level cognition and motivation, and isolate axes of variation for different conceptions of goals.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70082"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148992054","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 Grammar of Perception: A Case Study of Guambiano (Namtrik) and Duna.","authors":"Elisabeth Norcliffe, Lila San Roque","doi":"10.1111/tops.70079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70079","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although the senses provide a common basis for our experience of the world, cross-linguistic research has revealed substantial diversity across languages in how perceptual experiences are encoded in words. Such variability is also present at the level of grammatical structure, though the project of charting the parameters and limits of cross-linguistic diversity at this level is still in its relative infancy. We contribute to this goal by presenting a comparative study of the grammar of perception in two understudied and endangered languages, Guambiano (a Barbacoan language spoken in southern Colombia), and Duna (a Duna-Bogaia language of the Papua New Guinean highlands). Our study is based on primary fieldwork and draws on spoken language data collected using the Grammar of Perception Questionnaire. We document the lexical and constructional resources available in the two languages for describing events of perception and examine how sensory meanings are packaged and distributed across different elements of these constructions. The results reveal previously undocumented patterns of perception event encoding, underscoring the multifaceted and complex relationship between language and perception.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70079"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148931337","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":"A Hierarchy of Crossmodal Odor Associations: Exploring the Role of Pleasantness and Edibility in Odor Crossmodal Associations Across the Senses.","authors":"Laura J Speed, Tabitha L James, Duncan A Carmichael","doi":"10.1111/tops.70072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70072","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Crossmodal associations with odors have the potential to aid in odor perception and language. In addition, identifying the dimensions that drive odor crossmodal associations may help understand the critical dimensions underlying odor perception more generally. In the present study, we test the role of odor valence and odor edibility in odor crossmodal associations with two approaches. We first asked participants to rate the strength of sensory associations across vision, audition, texture, and taste for a set of odors. We then asked them to elaborate on their modality-specific associations via an open response. We found that the strength of crossmodal associations with odors differs across sensory modalities, with audition the weakest, and vision the strongest. Associations were also influenced by odor pleasantness and edibility. Odor associations were stronger for pleasant compared to unpleasant odors, for all modalities except taste. Odor associations with audition and touch were also stronger for inedible than edible odors, whereas odor associations with taste were stronger for edible odors. The open responses again suggested that vision is most strongly linked to odor and audition the least. Our fine-grained methodological approach provides a nuanced view of the crossmodal associations with odor and what underlies them.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70072"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148621970","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}