{"title":"Medical Recipes in Early Medieval English: A Cultural Linguistic Perspective on the Cognition of Health and Illness.","authors":"Penelope Scott","doi":"10.1111/tops.70015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70015","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Old English medical text, Bald's Leechbook, represents the most comprehensive medical treatise written in the vernacular. Book 1 is arranged broadly in the order of head to foot, presenting herbal recipes alongside occasional comments on their efficacy, details of the symptoms and etiology of illnesses. Though in a minority, several recipes involving magic, religion, and symbolism appear. This text provides evidence of cultural views on health and illness, such as the humoral theory of disease etiology, as well as ideas reflecting common human cognitive tendencies, such as the belief in the power of words. The recipes also reveal herbal knowledge, as well as schemas for recipe preparation. This article brings a novel perspective to the text by examining the construction of medical recipes in terms of cognition and culture. It considers how language reflects and directs attentional focus and what this shows about the structure of medical knowledge, including what is considered to be valuable knowledge as well as assumed information. As the text reflects the medical practice of Early Medieval English physicians, this Cultural Linguistic analysis demonstrates how an understanding of language and cognition in historical texts can shine some light on knowledge structures in distinct historical periods.</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":"144643837","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":"Validating Silent Gesture Lab Studies in a Naturally Emerging Sign Language: How Order is Used to Describe Intensional Versus Extensional Events in Nicaraguan Sign Language.","authors":"Molly Flaherty, Marieke Schouwstra","doi":"10.1111/tops.12751","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12751","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Languages are neither designed in classrooms nor drawn from dictionaries-they are products of human minds and human interactions. However, it is challenging to understand how structure grows in these circumstances because generations of use and transmission shape and reshape the structure of the languages themselves. Laboratory studies on language emergence investigate the origins of language structure by requiring participants, prevented from using their own natural language(s), to create a novel communication system and then transmit it to others. Because the participants in these lab studies are already speakers of a language, it is easy to question the relevance of lab-based findings to the creation of natural language systems. Here, we take the findings from a lab-based language emergence paradigm and test whether the same pattern is also found in a new natural language: Nicaraguan Sign Language. We find evidence that signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language may show the same biases seen in lab-based language emergence studies: (1) they appear to condition word order based on the semantic dimension of intensionality and extensionality, and (2) they adjust this conditioning to satisfy language-internal order constraints. Our study adds to the small, but growing literature testing the relevance of lab-based studies to natural language birth, and provides convincing evidence that the biases seen in the lab play a role in shaping a brand new language.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"609-624"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142082188","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 Mind Hidden in Our Hands.","authors":"Susan Goldin-Meadow","doi":"10.1111/tops.12756","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12756","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Our hands are always with us and are used for communication all over the world. When children do not have an established language model to learn from, they use their hands to gesture, and these gestures take on the forms of language. In this role, the hands reveal the fundamental properties of the mind that give shape to language. When children do learn an established language, they again use their hands to gesture. These gestures do not look like language but form an integrated system with language. In this role, the hands can convey ideas not found in the language they accompany. In both contexts, gesture provides a clear view of the mind hidden in our hands.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"443-468"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142406947","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}
Diego Trujillo, Mindy Zhang, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Joshua B Tenenbaum, Sydney Levine
{"title":"Resource-Rational Virtual Bargaining for Moral Judgment: Toward a Probabilistic Cognitive Model.","authors":"Diego Trujillo, Mindy Zhang, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Joshua B Tenenbaum, Sydney Levine","doi":"10.1111/tops.12781","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12781","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Recent theoretical work has argued that moral psychology can be understood through the lens of \"resource rational contractualism.\" The view posits that the best way of making a decision that affects other people is to get everyone together to negotiate under idealized conditions. The outcome of that negotiation is an arrangement (or \"contract\") that would lead to mutual benefit. However, this ideal is seldom (if ever) practical given the resource demands (time, information, computational processing power) that are required. Instead, the theory proposes that moral psychology is organized around a series of resource-rational approximations of the contractualist ideal, efficiently trading off between more resource-intensive, accurate mechanisms and less. This paper presents empirical evidence and a cognitive model that test a central claim of this view: when the stakes of the situation are high, then more resource-intensive processes are engaged over more approximate ones. We present subjects with a case that can be judged using virtual bargaining-a resource-intensive process that involves simulating what two people would agree to-or by simply following a standard rule. We find that about a third of our participants use the resource-rational approach, flexibly switching to virtual bargaining in high-stakes situations, but deploying the simple rule when stakes are low. A third of the participants are best modeled as consistently using the strict rule-based approach and the remaining third as consistently using virtual bargaining. A model positing the reverse resource-rational hypothesis (that participants use more resource-intensive mechanisms in lower stakes situations) fails to capture the data.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"713-738"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143013986","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}
Eliza L Congdon, Miriam A Novack, Elizabeth M Wakefield
{"title":"Exploring Individual Differences: A Case for Measuring Children's Spontaneous Gesture Production as a Predictor of Learning From Gesture Instruction.","authors":"Eliza L Congdon, Miriam A Novack, Elizabeth M Wakefield","doi":"10.1111/tops.12722","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12722","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Decades of research have established that learners benefit when instruction includes hand gestures. This benefit is seen when learners watch an instructor gesture, as well as when they are taught or encouraged to gesture themselves. However, there is substantial individual variability with respect to this phenomenon-not all individuals benefit equally from gesture instruction. In the current paper, we explore the sources of this variability. First, we review the existing research on individual differences that do or do not predict learning from gesture instruction, including differences that are either context-dependent (linked to the particular task at hand) or context-independent (linked to the learner across multiple tasks). Next, we focus on one understudied measure of individual difference: the learner's own spontaneous gesture rate. We present data showing rates of \"non-gesturers\" across a number of studies and we provide theoretical motivation for why this is a fruitful area for future research. We end by suggesting ways in which research on individual differences will help gesture researchers to further refine existing theories and develop specific predictions about targeted gesture intervention for all kinds of learners.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"569-585"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139571625","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":"Distributional Semantics: Meaning Through Culture and Interaction.","authors":"Pablo Contreras Kallens, Morten H Christiansen","doi":"10.1111/tops.12771","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12771","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Mastering how to convey meanings using language is perhaps the main challenge facing any language learner. However, satisfactory accounts of how this is achieved, and even of what it is for a linguistic item to have meaning, are hard to come by. Nick Chater was one of the pioneers involved in the early development of one of the most successful methodologies within the cognitive science of language for discovering meaning: distributional semantics. In this article, we review this approach and discuss its successes and shortcomings in capturing semantic phenomena. In particular, we discuss what we dub the \"distributional paradox:\" how can models that do not implement essential dimensions of human semantic processing, such as sensorimotor grounding, capture so many meaning-related phenomena? We conclude by providing a preliminary answer, arguing that distributional models capture the statistical scaffolding of human language acquisition that allows for communication, which, in line with Nick Chater's more recent ideas, has been shaped by the features of human cognition on the timescale of cultural evolution.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"739-769"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142717509","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":"Reflections on David E. Rumelhart and the Rumelhart Prize.","authors":"James L McClelland","doi":"10.1111/tops.70016","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.70016","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The 25th anniversary of the Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science and a special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science celebrating the achievements of two recent Rumelhart Prize recipients provides an opportunity to reflect on the prize, the scientists that it honors, and the scientific values it seeks to promote. I offer my perspective on these topics as a long-time member of the Cognitive Science Society, a collaborator and friend of David Rumelhart, and as the first chair of the Rumelhart Prize selection committee. I see the prize as celebrating several aspects of what I believe many cognitive scientists aspire to achieve. We seek to make contributions to our understanding of our unique human ability to make sense of the world and of each other. We seek to employ a wide range of tools and methods, as well as insights from a wide range of perspectives. We seek to engage with our colleagues and our students, to create community, and even to have fun while we pursue our scientific goals. The careers of Dave Rumelhart and of the two Rumelhart Prize Winners celebrated in this special issue all richly exemplify these traits.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"418-429"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144643838","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":"Exploring the Emotional Functions of Co-Speech Hand Gesture in Language and Communication.","authors":"Spencer D Kelly, Quang-Anh Ngo Tran","doi":"10.1111/tops.12657","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12657","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research over the past four decades has built a convincing case that co-speech hand gestures play a powerful role in human cognition . However, this recent focus on the cognitive function of gesture has, to a large extent, overlooked its emotional role-a role that was once central to research on bodily expression. In the present review, we first give a brief summary of the wealth of research demonstrating the cognitive function of co-speech gestures in language acquisition, learning, and thinking. Building on this foundation, we revisit the emotional function of gesture across a wide range of communicative contexts, from clinical to artistic to educational, and spanning diverse fields, from cognitive neuroscience to linguistics to affective science. Bridging the cognitive and emotional functions of gesture highlights promising avenues of research that have varied practical and theoretical implications for human-machine interactions, therapeutic interventions, language evolution, embodied cognition, and more.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"586-608"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9357017","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 Role of Gesture in Language Development for Neurotypical Children and Children With or at Increased Likelihood of Autism.","authors":"Boin Choi, Meredith L Rowe","doi":"10.1111/tops.12723","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.12723","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>For young children, gesture is found to precede and predict language development. However, we are still building a knowledge base about the specific nature of the relationship between gesture and speech. While much of the research on this topic has been conducted with neurotypical children, there is a growing body of work with children who have or are at increased likelihood of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we summarize the literature on relations between gesture and speech, including the role of child gesture production as well as that of gesture exposure (caregiver gesture). We include literature on both neurotypical children and children with or at likelihood of ASD, highlight the similarities and differences across populations, and offer implications for research as well as early identification and intervention.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"527-544"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139913764","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}