Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

{"title":"Hunting for Paradoxes: A Research Strategy for Cognitive Science.","authors":"Nick Chater","doi":"10.1111/tops.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70004","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How should we identify interesting topics in cognitive science? This paper suggests that one useful research strategy is to hunt for, and attempt to resolve, paradoxes: that is, apparent or real contradictions in our understanding of the mind and of thought. The rationale for this strategy is the assumption that our current thinking, and our various partial theories, of any topic are typically ill-defined, inconsistent or both. Thus, contradictions and confusions abound. Isolating paradoxes helps us expose vagueness and contradictions and demands that we formulate our ideas more precisely. From this point of view, finding a robust and puzzling contradiction in our current thinking should be celebrated as an achievement in itself. Ideally, of course, we then make further progress by clarifying how the paradox may be resolved, by clarifying our theories or finding new data that may decide between inconsistent assumptions. This approach is illustrated through examples from the author's research over several decades, which seems in retrospect to involve a repeated, if largely unwitting, application of this strategy.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143755229","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":"Introduction to the Special Issue in Honor of Nick Chater Receiving the 2023 Rumelhart Prize.","authors":"Morten H Christiansen, Mike Oaksford","doi":"10.1111/tops.70007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70007","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This is an introduction to the special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science, honoring Nick Chater's award of the 2023 David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition. It provides a condensed overview of his contributions to cognitive science within which the articles to this special issue are situated, finishing off with two short personal recollections by the Editors.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143753744","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":"Introduction to topiCS Volume 17, Issue 2.","authors":"Andrea Bender","doi":"10.1111/tops.70006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143701769","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":"Shifting Between Models of Mind: New Insights Into How Human Minds Give Rise to Experiences of Spiritual Presence and Alternative Realities.","authors":"Kara Weisman, Tanya Marie Luhrmann","doi":"10.1111/tops.70002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70002","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Phenomenal experiences of immaterial spiritual beings-hearing the voice of God, seeing the spirit of an ancestor-are a valuable and largely untapped resource for the field of cognitive science. Such experiences, we argue, are experiences of the mind, tied to mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes about the mind, and thus provide a striking example of how, with the right combination of mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes, one's own thoughts and inner sensations can be experienced as coming from somewhere or someone else. In this paper, we present results from a large-scale study of U.S. adults (N = 1779) that provides new support for our theory that spiritual experiences are facilitated by a dynamic interaction between mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes: A person is more likely to hear God speak if they have the epistemic flexibility and cultural support to shift, temporarily, away from a mundane model of mind into a more \"porous\" way of thinking and being. This, in turn, lays the foundation for a meditation on how mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes might also interact to facilitate other phenomena of interest to cognitive science, such as fiction writing and scientific discovery.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143587711","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 Limited Place in Cognitive Space.","authors":"Carl J Hodgetts, Ulrike Hahn","doi":"10.1111/tops.70001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70001","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How we judge the similarity between stimuli in the world is connected ultimately to how we represent them. Because of this, decisions about how we model similarity, either in terms of human behavior or patterns of neural activity, can provide key insights into how representations are structured and organized. Despite this, psychology and cognitive neuroscience continue to be dominated by a narrow range of similarity models, particularly those that characterize similarity as distance within \"cognitive space.\" Despite the appeal of such models, their topological nature places fundamental constraints on their ability to capture relationships between objects and events in the world. To probe this, we created a stimulus set in which the predicted similarity relationships (based on an alternative model of similarity) could not be simply embedded within Euclidean space. This approach revealed that the spatial model distorts these predictions, and the perceived similarities of human observers. These findings indicate that cognitive spaces-that underlie much recent work probing both visual and conceptual representations in cognitive neuroscience-are limited in fundamental ways that restrict their theoretical and practical utility.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143587714","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":"Diagnosis at a Distance: The Challenges Involved in Mushroom Identification.","authors":"Bill Bakaitis","doi":"10.1111/tops.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article discusses the intricacies of species identification, using a real-life case of mushroom poisoning as a focal point. Two individuals had fallen seriously ill after having consumed mushrooms presumed to belong to the Leccinum group and the Boletus edulis complex. An interdisciplinary team of experts including the author attempted to diagnose the cause and to develop effective treatment. Leveraging expertise in psychology and mycology, the article highlights cognitive factors, such as the suggestibility of eyewitness memory, alongside biological factors, such as complexities of fungal taxonomy, that jointly hamper species identification. The case also sparked discussions among mycologists on the potential toxicity of ostensibly safe mushrooms. The article stresses the imperative for continual updates in mycological knowledge and emphasizes broader implications of cultural conceptions and the dynamic nature of species boundaries in the context of mushroom identification, with the tragic outcome of the incident underscoring the urgency of addressing these issues across both cognitive science and mycology.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143517084","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":"Where Mathematical Symbols Come From.","authors":"Dirk Schlimm","doi":"10.1111/tops.12786","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12786","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is a sense in which the symbols used in mathematical expressions and formulas are arbitrary. After all, arithmetic would be no different if we would replace the symbols ' <math><semantics><mo>+</mo> <annotation>$+$</annotation></semantics> </math> ' or '8' by different symbols. Nevertheless, the shape of many mathematical symbols is in fact well motivated in practice. In the case of symbols that were introduced a long time ago, the original motivations remain mostly inaccessible to us. Accordingly, motivations that are discussed in the literature are only ascribed retrospectively and should be considered as post-hoc rationalizations. For more recent introductions of new symbols (e.g., in symbolic logic), however, we sometimes do have first-hand accounts by the authors that inform us of the reasons behind their notational choices. In this paper, I present a systematic overview of possible motivations for the design of mathematical symbols, which include practical (such as ease of writing and reuse of previously used symbols) as well as cognitive aspects (such as indicating relations to other symbols or to their intended meanings).</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143450614","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 and the Division of Labor of Theory of Mind Skills in Metaphor Comprehension.","authors":"Irene Ceccato, Serena Lecce, Luca Bischetti, Veronica Mangiaterra, Chiara Barattieri di San Pietro, Elena Cavallini, Valentina Bambini","doi":"10.1111/tops.12785","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12785","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>While some aspects of pragmatic competence are known to decline with age, for metaphor skills the evidence is inconclusive, possibly due to heterogeneity in the assessment tools. Furthermore, the previous literature on age-related changes in pragmatic skills has rarely considered the role of Theory of Mind (ToM), which is described as one of the main factors affecting metaphor across theoretical and experimental studies in children and clinical populations. This study aimed at elucidating age-related differences in metaphor understanding and the interplay between metaphor skills and ToM in middle-aged and older adults with a fine-grained approach. Participants (n = 201, age range 54-93) completed tasks assessing ToM and metaphor understanding. On the one side, we used the Physical and Mental Metaphors task, to distinguish between different types of metaphor (physical, such as \"Lifeguards are lizards,\" meaning that they lie in the sun, vs. mental, such as \"Adolescents are pendulums,\" meaning that they are emotionally unstable) and different aspects of metaphor understanding, namely, accuracy in finding a link between topic and vehicle versus type of interpretation (from physical to psychological). On the other side, we analyzed two aspects of ToM skills: the accuracy in mental state understanding and the intentionality, defined as the degree of mental state attribution, assessed with the Strange Stories and the Animated Social Triangles task, respectively. Structural equation models indicated a decline in metaphor skills with advancing age. Furthermore, we found that ToM is involved in metaphor understanding in a specific fashion. While higher ToM accuracy explained better metaphor accuracy, higher ToM intentionality explained better performance in the interpretation of mental, but not physical, metaphors. These findings suggest that age-related differences in pragmatics extend to metaphor skills and that ToM plays a role in metaphor comprehension in older age, with a division of labor where the ability to understand what others think is key to spotting a metaphorical link, but the greater tendency to attribute mental states is what specifically helps when it comes to grasping the psychological nuances of a metaphor.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143442428","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":"Sign Languages in Healthy Aging Population: Review of Neurobehavioral Evidence.","authors":"Evie A Malaia, Julia Krebs","doi":"10.1111/tops.12790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12790","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This work provides an overview of research on sign language changes observed in healthy aging signers. We first consider the effects of age on cognition, and the changes to neural structures and organization during aging, as both can be viewed as the processes underlying age-related language changes in both sign and speech. We then review observational and experimental data on sign language processing in aging signers, where some of the more robust findings include reliance on the more canonic syntactic and lexical structures, as opposed to structures produced at the syntax-pragmatics or semantics-morphology interfaces. These findings are reviewed through the lens of several theories of brain aging, as we review the predictions that different frameworks make with respect to sign language, and discuss how sign language data can inform understanding of language change in healthy aging.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143410962","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 Career Dedicated to Gesture, Language, Learning, and Cognition: Susan Goldin-Meadow, 2021 Recipient of the Rumelhart Prize.","authors":"Martha Wagner Alibali, Susan Wagner Cook","doi":"10.1111/tops.12788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12788","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Susan Goldin-Meadow is the 2021 Recipient of the Rumelhart Prize. Goldin-Meadow's body of research addresses the roles of gesture in language creation, communication, learning, and cognition. In one major strand of her research, Goldin-Meadow has studied gestures in children who are not exposed to any structured language input, specifically, deaf children of hearing parents who do not expose their children to sign language. These children create a highly structured, language-like system with their hands-a homesign. In another major strand, Goldin-Meadow has focused on the gestures that people produce along with speech. She has examined how gestures contribute to producing and comprehending language at the moment of speaking or signing, how gestures contribute to learning language and to learning other concepts and skills, and how gestures may actually constitute and change people's thinking. This topic collection is made up of papers that represent and extend these strands of Goldin-Meadow's work. This introductory article provides a brief biography of Goldin-Meadow, and it highlights ways in which the contributions to the topic collection exemplify several notable characteristics of Goldin-Meadow's body of work, including (1) a focus on multiple timescales of behavior and behavior change; (2) use of diverse methods, approaches, and populations; and (3) considerations of equity and inclusion, both in research and in educational and clinical practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143400277","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}