Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

{"title":"Can Childhood be Used as a Model to Understand the Effects of Psychedelics?","authors":"Ethan S Hurwitz, Jon G Dean, Caren M Walker","doi":"10.1111/tops.70058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70058","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Psychedelic drugs have shown promise as a novel therapeutic for a variety of health conditions, yet the mechanisms underlying their clinical benefits remain unclear. A leading hypothesis suggests that psychedelics may enhance cognitive flexibility, a trait impaired in many of these conditions. While existing data from self-report and qualitative-interview studies support this hypothesis, data from experimental studies are limited and inconsistent. Here, we propose a novel cognitive development model that allows us to more precisely define cognitive flexibility as a mechanism underlying the effects of psychedelics. Considering children-a population known to be more cognitively flexible than adults-as a proxy psychedelic group, we identify three specific behaviors that could be used to empirically test this account: (1) changing the strength of, or reliance on, one's priors; (2) changing one's search and sampling strategies; and/or (3) changing one's allocation of attentional resources. Finally, we highlight preliminary findings from a pilot study supporting this framework and providing guidance for future work.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70058"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148036401","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":"Conniving With Continuations: Representing Goals in a Domain-Specific Language of Thought.","authors":"Kartik Chandra, Rebecca R Saxe, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Joshua B Tenenbaum","doi":"10.1111/tops.70054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70054","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Wanting composes flexibly with knowing: we can want to know, want to know what someone wants, and so on. In this paper, we develop a goal representation that allows for this type of rich integration between goals and other theory-of-mind concepts. We extend the memo programming language, which is specialized for theory-of-mind reasoning, with a new syntactic construct called \"wants\" that represents goals. To implement \"wants,\" we borrow an idea from programming language theory: the notion of a \"continuation,\" which allows reasoning about possible future states of a program. We show that the new \"wants\" construct can be composed with other memo primitives to represent a wide variety of interesting goals, and we discuss what the design of this construct can teach us about the concept of desire more broadly.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70054"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147983835","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":"How to Match Cognitive Model Predictions With EEG Data.","authors":"Kai Preuss, Christopher Hilton, Klaus Gramann, Nele Russwinkel","doi":"10.1111/tops.70049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Reliably identifying relevant brain areas implicated by the simulated activity from cognitive models is still an unsolved problem for cognitive modeling, particularly when matching model output with human electroencephalography (EEG) data. We propose a new method involving postprocessing of ACT-R module activity and clustered EEG component activity, and performing generalized least squares analysis to find matching patterns between predicted and observed data, thereby inferring neural substrates of distinct cognitive processes. This approach holds several advantages over other methods by controlling for autocorrelation and unequal variances. To exemplify its application, we used a cognitive model and EEG data from a mental spatial transformation study to show how this method finds areas involved in representational and transformational spatial processing. Parietal areas involved with spatial activity were identified, in line with prior studies on spatial cognition. In addition, previously established associations between ACT-R and brain areas were confirmed. Finally, we discuss limitations and possibilities of the approach.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70049"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147844202","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":"Anxiety is Associated With Biases in Task Generalization.","authors":"Hadas Schiff, Paul B Sharp","doi":"10.1111/tops.70051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Adaptive behavior depends on generalizing learned task structures to novel situations. While anxiety is known to distort stimulus-based threat generalization, its effects on task generalization-the transfer of learned action-outcome structures to new planning contexts-remain poorly understood. We developed an online navigation paradigm where participants learned to control vehicles defined by latent task categories, each with unique transition dynamics. Critically, one task category was incidentally paired with a goal-relevant threat: potential negative social evaluation. Across two studies (N = 21, N = 30), participants successfully generalized latent task structure above chance. However, individuals high in trait worry exhibited systematic undergeneralization-that is, reduced use of actions used in threat contexts-despite easily avoiding threat-related obstacles during learning. This bias differentially impaired performance: worry predicted worse generalization in new threat contexts and better performance in safe tasks. Importantly, threat undergeneralization could not be explained by direct reinforcement history or general performance deficits. These findings provide preliminary evidence that anxiety distorts not only threat perception but also the task representations used to pursue goals. When actions coincidentally co-occur with a potential threat in goal-relevant domains, anxious individuals may exclude those behavioral strategies from future task models, a hypothesis that will require confirmation in larger, preregistered samples.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70051"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147785753","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":"Generative AI and the Future of Musical Diversity.","authors":"Dor Shilton","doi":"10.1111/tops.70048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70048"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147785828","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":"Marks and Meanings: New Perspectives on the Evolution of Human Visual Culture.","authors":"Izzy Wisher, Michelle C Langley, Kristian Tylén","doi":"10.1111/tops.70043","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70043"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146221542","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":"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":"e70023"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13102276/pdf/","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":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cross-Contextual Variability in Children's Early Understanding of Visual Media.","authors":"Rebecca Zhu, Tabitha Nduku Kilonzo, Lily Zihui Zhu, Judith E Fan, Michael C Frank","doi":"10.1111/tops.70034","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.70034","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>When and how do children come to understand various kinds of visual media (e.g., pictures, videos, scale models), and how does early experience contribute to variation in the development of visual media comprehension across global contexts? In this selective review, we show that while researchers have investigated how children from Western convenience samples understand visual media, less is known about how this comprehension varies across children in global contexts. Indeed, prior work investigating picture comprehension suggests that children in different contexts may understand pictures at different developmental time points, potentially due to variation in their early picture experiences. These findings demonstrate the need for more research investigating children's comprehension of additional kinds of visual media across contexts. The experience-dependence of visual media comprehension could provide important insight into these abilities' origins, as well as the appropriateness of cross-cultural use of visual media in early childhood measurement.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70034"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145745160","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":"Simulating Symbolic Evolution in the Lab: Potentials and Implications of Using Transmission Chains to Study Early Symbolic Behavior at the Emergence of Homo sapiens.","authors":"Murillo Pagnotta, Kristian Tylén, Aske Svane Qvist, Rebecca Foss Kjeldsen, Sergio Rojo, Katrin Heimann, Nicolas Fay, Niels N Johannsen, Felix Riede, Marlize Lombard, Riccardo Fusaroli","doi":"10.1111/tops.70036","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.70036","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Engraved ochres and ostrich eggshells from the South African Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter are among the earliest expressions of human symbolic behavior. They appear to document a continuous practice of mark-making across ∼40,000 years. During this time, the engraved markings change from simpler, unstructured patterns to more complex markings such as cross-hatchings. Previous work examining the cognitive implications of these changes concluded that the engravings were likely used as decorations and may have served as group identity markers, but not as denotational symbols. To inform discussions of the emergence of symbolic behavior, we conducted a two-part experimental study inspired by these engravings and based on the assumption that artifact use will motivate incremental adaptive refinements. Part 1 combined a delayed reproduction task with a transmission chain design to simulate an enduring mark-making practice. Eleven transmission chains were seeded with four drawings derived from the early Blombos and Diepkloof engravings and reproduced over eight generations. Transmission chain drawings showed a tendency to become increasingly regular, organized, and symmetric. Part 2 subjected a sample of the transmission chain drawings to a suite of psychophysical experiments to assess the cognitive implications of the accumulated structural changes. We found that the drawings became easier to discriminate, looked more like they had been intentionally made, and became easier to remember and reproduce, but there was no evidence of a systematic change in saliency or stylistic properties. Finally, we compared the results from the transmission chains with a similar analysis of the drawings derived from the original engravings. Although we observe interesting qualitative similarities between the original engravings and the experimental drawings, our findings suggest that cognitive biases and working memory constraints are not sufficient to generate the patterns observed in the archaeological record, highlighting the significance of social and functional contexts in shaping early symbolic artifacts. By integrating archaeological and experimental research, we can better inform inferences on sparse records of early symbolic behavior. Our study thus leads to a broader consideration of the role, strengths, and potential limitations of the transmission chain approach in analyzing trajectories of early symbolic behavior.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70036"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145776116","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":"AI-Enhanced Semantic Feature Norms for 786 Concepts.","authors":"Siddharth Suresh, Kushin Mukherjee, Tyler Giallanza, Xizheng Yu, Mia Patil, Jonathan D Cohen, Timothy T Rogers","doi":"10.1111/tops.70037","DOIUrl":"10.1111/tops.70037","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Semantic feature norms have been foundational in the study of human conceptual knowledge, yet traditional methods face trade-offs between concept/feature coverage and verifiability of quality due to the labor-intensive nature of norming studies. Here, we introduce a novel approach that augments a dataset of human-generated feature norms with responses from large language models (LLMs) while verifying the quality of norms against reliable human judgments. We find that our AI-enhanced feature norm dataset, NOVA: Norms Optimized Via AI, shows much higher feature density and overlap among concepts while outperforming a comparable human-only norm dataset and word-embedding models in predicting people's semantic similarity judgments. Taken together, we demonstrate that human conceptual knowledge is richer than captured in previous norm datasets and show that, with proper validation, LLMs can serve as powerful tools for cognitive science research.</p>","PeriodicalId":47822,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Cognitive Science","volume":" ","pages":"e70037"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13102279/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145858271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}