Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-Cognitive Science最新文献

Surgical resection of lesions and closed-loop suppression are the two main treatment options for patients with refractory epilepsy whose symptoms cannot be managed with medicines. Unfortunately, failures in foci localization and seizure prediction are constraining these treatments. Electrical impedance tomography (EIT), sensitive to impedance changes caused by blood flow or cell swelling, is a potential new way to locate epileptic foci and predict seizures. Animal validation is a necessary research process before EIT can be used in clinical practice, but it is unclear which among the many animal epilepsy models is most suited to this task. The selection of an animal model of epilepsy that is similar to human seizures and can be adapted to EIT is important for the accuracy and reliability of EIT research results. This study provides an overview of the animal models of epilepsy that have been used in research on the use of EIT to locate the foci or predict seizures; discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these models regarding inducement by chemical convulsant and electrical stimulation; and finally proposes optimal animal models of epilepsy to obtain more convincing research results for foci localization and seizure prediction by EIT. The ultimate goal of this study is to facilitate the development of new treatments for patients with refractory epilepsy. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Clinical Neuroscience Psychology > Brain Function and Dysfunction.

Spoken language, as we have it, requires specific capacities-at its most basic advanced vocal control and complex social cognition. In humans, vocal control is the basis for speech, achieved through coordinated interactions of larynx activity and rapid changes in vocal tract configurations. Most likely, speech evolved in response to early humans perceiving reality in increasingly complex ways, to the effect that primate-like signaling became unsustainable as a sole communication device. However, in what ways did and do humans see the world in more complex ways compared to other species? Although animal signals can refer to external events, in contrast to humans, they usually refer to the agents only, sometimes in compositional ways, but never together with patients. It may be difficult for animals to comprehend events as part of larger social scripts, with antecedent causes and future consequences, which are more typically tie the patient into the event. Human brain enlargement over the last million years probably has provided the cognitive resources to represent social interactions as part of bigger social scripts, which enabled humans to go beyond an agent-focus to refer to agent-patient relations, the likely foundation for the evolution of grammar. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Linguistics > Evolution of Language Psychology > Comparative.

In the first years of life, infants rapidly acquire a series of new motor skills. They learn to sit independently, to walk with skill, and to engage in a wide variety of interactions with objects. Over these same years, infants also begin to develop language. These are not isolated events. In a complex developing system, even small changes in one domain can have far-reaching effects on development in other domains. This is the fundamental idea behind the rich framework known as the developmental cascades perspective. Here we employ this framework to show how early motor advances can exert downstream effects on the development of language. Focusing first on the emergence of independent sitting, then on the development of walking, and finally on changes in the ways in which infants act on and combine actions on objects, we describe how the nature and quality of infant actions change dramatically over the first few years and how this brings with it new possibilities for engaging the environment, more sophisticated ways of interacting with people, and significant alterations in communications directed by caregivers to the infant and coordinated with infant action in time and in meaning. The developmental cascades framework provides an approach for understanding how advances in motor skills influence communicative and language development, and more generally, for conceptualizing the constant, dynamic, and complex interplay between developing infants and their environments as it unfolds over time. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Motor Skill and Performance Psychology > Development and Aging.

We have a wide breadth of computational tools available today that enable a more ethical approach to the study of human cognition and behavior. We argue that the use of computer models to study evolving ecosystems provides a rich source of inspiration, as they enable the study of complex systems that change over time. Often employing a combination of genetic algorithms and agent-based models, these methods span theoretical approaches from games to complexification, nature-inspired methods from studies of self-replication to the evolution of eyes, and evolutionary ecosystems of humans, from entire economies to the effects of personalities in teamwork. The review of works provided here illustrates the power of evolutionary ecosystem simulations and how they enable new insights for researchers. They also demonstrate a novel methodology of hypothesis exploration: building a computational model that encapsulates a hypothesis of human cognition enables it to be tested under different conditions, with its predictions compared to real data to enable corroboration. Such computational models of human behavior provide us with virtual test labs in which unlimited experiments can be performed. This article is categorized under: Computer Science and Robotics > Artificial Intelligence.

Questions about measurement of individual differences in implicit attitudes, which have been the focus so far in this exchange, should be distinguished from more general questions about whether implicit attitudes exist and operate in our minds. Theorists frequently move too quickly from pessimistic results regarding the first set of questions to pessimistic conclusions about the second. That is, they take evidence that indirect measures such as the implicit association test (IAT) disappoint as individual difference measures and use it to (mistakenly) suggest that people do not in fact have implicit attitudes directed at stigmatized groups. In this commentary, I dissect this mistake in detail, drawing key lessons from a parallel debate that has unfolded in cognitive science about "conflict tasks" such as the Stroop task. I argue that the evidence overall supports a nuanced conclusion: Indirect measures such as the IAT measure individual differences in implicit attitudes poorly, but they-via distinct lines of evidence-still support the view that implicit attitudes exist. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Theory and Methods.

Meta-analyses show low correlations between implicit attitude measures and behavior measures, suggesting that these attitude measures are weak predictors of behavior. Researchers of implicit cognition have resorted to several rescue strategies. Their most important reply, based on a traditional dual-process theory of behavior causation, is that attitudes toward objects (positive/negative) automatically activate specific action tendencies (approach/avoidance), but that this stimulus-driven process can be overruled by a nonautomatic goal-directed process in which the expected utilities of action options are weighed up. According to such a theory, it makes sense to continue measuring attitudes with implicit measures, but research should also take into account the moderating role of goals and other factors. We propose an alternative dual-process theory in which goal-directed processes can also be automatic and count as the most important cause of behavior. According to this theory, the goal-directed process responsible for action selection is further preceded by the detection of a stimulus-goal discrepancy. Based on this alternative theory, we propose to no longer measure attitudes toward objects but rather to measure (a) the magnitude of stimulus-goal discrepancies as well as (b) the expected utility of the behavior at stake, understood as the product of the values of the outcomes of the behavior, and the behavior-outcome expectancies. Here too, implicit measures are needed because people may not always have conscious access to these constructs or be motivated to disclose them. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Theory and Methods Psychology > Emotion and Motivation Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making.

Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Bertram Gawronski articulate a careful defense of research on implicit bias. They argue that though there is room for improvement in various areas, when we set the bar appropriately and when we are comparing relevant events, the test-retest stability and predictive ability of implicit bias measures are respectable. Edouard Machery disagrees. He argues that theories of implicit bias have failed to answer four fundamental questions about measures of implicit bias, and this undermines their utility in further scientific research and policy making. In this article, I offer my perspective on this important debate. I argue that there is a theoretical mismatch in debating the merits of a research program on the terms of a specific theory within the research program. Nevertheless, the discussion allows us to see which questions are answered from within the perspective of a particular theory. I argue that the emphasis should be on whether implicit bias theories predict novel facts. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Theory and Methods Philosophy > Psychological Capacities.

The three human at-rest postures of sitting, standing, and lying are basic, recurring features of human behavior and may reasonably be called primary postures. The three postures share the property of being stable through time, but they are also differentiated in terms of their overall shape, their physiological properties, and typical associated behaviors such as the association of sitting with social interaction, and lying with sleeping. The experiential realities of the three postures underlie and motivate a range of cross-linguistic phenomena involving morphemes with meanings of "sit", "stand," and "lie". The relevant linguistic phenomena include higher frequencies of occurrence compared with other kinds of posture verbs and differential behavior with respect to some morphosyntactic patterns involving notions such as agentivity. The posture morphemes can also be the source for a variety of semantic extensions reflecting experiential realities of the postures, such as the extension of "lie" to mean "sleep" in some languages. Extensions also include grammaticalizations of the posture morphemes to locative and aspectual markers which reflect the temporal stability and spatial fixedness of the postures themselves. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Cognitive Linguistics Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain.

The recent exchange about implicit attitudes is an acute reminder of the need to pay research attention to the correlation between implicit attitudes and overt behavior. Current implicit measures are excellent to detect evaluatively relevant associations arising from specific and variable internal states and predict judgments when people lack the motivation and ability to control those judgments. However, there is no convincing evidence of a strong correlation between such implicit attitudes and overt behavior when people's ability and motivation to control the influence of these attitudes is low. Researchers should improve implicit measures by better integrating action, target, level, and context into the measurement procedures and then reexamine if these improved measures predict socially undesirable behaviors when ability and motivation to control behavior are low. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Theory and Methods Neuroscience > Behavior Neuroscience > Cognition.