Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-Cognitive Science最新文献

From birth, our visual system is sensitive to movement. Motion, as defined by any change in spatial position over time, is part of our daily lives and can refer to various visual information from elements of nature (like a tree swaying in the wind), objects (like a moving car), animals (like a running dog) or people (like two people dancing). Atypical motion processing, in particular for social and biological movement cues, could lead to difficulties in social interaction and communication, like those observed in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Extensive research has focused on coherent and biological motion processing in ASD, showing difficulties for both motion categories. Motion-related differences also emerge in several social contexts like emotion processing, joint attention, language acquisition, and body relationship with the environment. However, it remains unclear whether high-level difficulties stem from low-level processing issues or are specific to interpreting social cues. It appears that critical steps between low-level local cues processing and high-level biological/social contexts have not been studied. Adopting an approach encompassing a motion gradient from low to high levels could help identify when motion-related difficulties arise in ASD and which specific types or attributes of motion are most affected. This would offer a more comprehensive and integrated perspective on motion processing in ASD. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Cognition.

As longevity increases, cognitive decline in older adults has become a growing concern. Consequently, an increasing interest in the potential of digital tools (e.g., serious games (SG) and virtual reality (VR)) for early screening of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is emerging. Traditional cognitive assessments like the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) are widely used but have limitations related to cultural bias and manual scoring, while their digital adaptations, such as MOCA-CC, maintain diagnostic accuracy while offering remote administration and automated scoring. Innovative tools, such as the Virtual Super Market (VSM) test and Panoramix Suite, instead, assess cognitive domains like memory, attention, and executive function while promoting engagement and preserving ecological validity, making assessments more reflective of real-world tasks. Several studies show that these tools exhibit strong diagnostic performance, with sensitivity and specificity often exceeding 80%. However, although digital tools offer advantages in accessibility and user engagement, challenges remain concerning technological literacy, data privacy, and long-term validation. Future research should focus on validating these tools across diverse populations and exploring hybrid models that combine traditional and digital assessments, as digital tools show promise in transforming cognitive screening and enabling earlier interventions for cognitive decline. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Development and Aging Neuroscience > Cognition.

Contractualist moral theories view morality as a matter of mutually beneficial agreements among rational agents. Compared to its rivals in moral philosophy-consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics-contractualism has only recently started to attract attention in empirical work on the cognitive science of morality. Is it fruitful to adopt a contractualist lens to better understand how moral cognition works? After introducing the main contractualist theories in contemporary moral philosophy, I present five reasons to take inspiration from this family of normative theories to develop descriptive accounts of morality. Then, I review how the contractualist framework has been used to contribute to our understanding of moral cognition at three interrelated levels of analysis: Morality's evolutionary logic, its cognitive organization, and the specific cognitive processes and forms of reasoning involved in moral judgment and decision making. First, several evolutionary accounts of morality argue that its evolutionary logic must be understood in contractualist terms. Second, resource-rational contractualism proposes that the subcomponents of moral cognition-including well-studied rule- and outcome-based mechanisms, and much less studied agreement-based processes-are organized to efficiently approximate the outcome of explicit negotiation under resource constraints. Third, recent empirical developments suggest that three characteristically contractualist forms of reasoning-virtual bargaining, we-reasoning, and universalization-can be involved in producing moral judgments and decisions in a variety of contexts. Beyond the traditional distinction between rules and consequences, these various research programs open a third way for the cognitive science of morality, one based on agreement. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making Economics > Interactive Decision-Making Philosophy > Value.

How do theories of the functions of parts of the brain change? I argue that computational hypotheses help explain the nature of theorizing in cognitive neurobiology. I will focus on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a frontal region of the brain implicated in an array of cognitive functions. Different theories of OFC state different principles of OFC function and use different concepts to construct those principles. There are also differences in the patterns of use of evidence across different theories. I briefly survey several extant proposals for understanding theory change in science generally and cognitive neuroscience specifically, including paradigm shifts, tool innovation, mechanism discovery, conceptual innovation, exploratory experimentation, and changes in measurement techniques. While these extant approaches fall short at describing the nature of theory change illustrated by the case of OFC, they are compatible with my proposal that these theoretical changes and differences in the use of evidence result from different computational hypotheses about the region.

Category learning gives rise to category formation, which is a crucial ability in human cognition. Category learning is also one of the required learning abilities in language development. Understanding the evolution of category learning thus can shed light on the evolution of human cognition and language. The current paper emphasizes its foundational role in language evolution by reviewing behavioral and neurological studies on category learning across species. In doing so, we first review studies on the critical role of category learning in learning sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of language. Next, from a comparative perspective, we review studies on category learning conducted on different species of nonhuman animals, including invertebrates and vertebrates, suggesting that category learning displays evolutionary continuity. Then, from a neurological perspective, we focus on the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia. Reviewing the involvement of these structures in vertebrates and the proposed homologous brain structure to the basal ganglia in invertebrates in category learning, as well as in language processing in humans, suggests that the neural basis of category learning likely has an ancient origin dating back to invertebrates. With evidence from both behavioral and neurological levels in both nonhuman animals and humans, we conclude that category learning lays a crucial cognitive foundation for language evolution.

Analyzing looking times is among the most important behavioral approaches to studying problems such as infant cognition, perception, or language development. However, process-based approaches to the dynamics of infants' looking times are lacking. Here, we propose a new dynamical framework for modeling infant gaze behavior with full account of the microstructure (i.e., saccades and fixations). Our process-based model is illustrated by reproducing inter-individual differences in a developmental study of noun comprehension (Garrison et al. 2020). In our modeling framework, numerical values of model parameters map onto specific cognitive processes (e.g., attention or working memory) involved in gaze control. Because of the general architecture of the mathematical model and our robust procedures in model inference via Bayesian data assimilation, our framework may find applications in other fields of developmental and cognitive sciences.

Research on analogy-making agrees that mapping allows one to find structural similarities when comparing two situations. However, whether retrieval of past events from memory is guided by surface or structural similarities remains subject to empirical debate. The current contribution is aimed at dissolving this controversy by reviewing experimental evidence showing that the determinants of analogical retrieval primarily depend on the encoding of the situations, which is itself modulated by prior categories available to the participants. Based on this review, a conceptual model is introduced (ADAPTER, As Deep As Possible Target Encoding and Retrieval), in which available categories determine the level of abstraction characterizing encoding as well as the type of retrieval that can be implemented. The model also incorporates the impact of encoding contexts and characteristics of the target descriptions on the likelihood of a relational encoding, which in turn influence the determinants of retrieval. This framework elucidates prior findings within a unified account and provides avenues for advancing the debate on the determinants of analogical retrieval by generating empirical predictions. The model also provides novel insights into the developmental trajectory of structurally based retrievals and suggests promising educational interventions aimed at promoting spontaneous transfer.

This scoping review examines the use of eye movement tracking in personality research across various domains, including job interviews, education and training, human-robot interaction, and user interface design. Eye-tracking has proven effective in capturing behavioral cues linked to personality traits such as emotional responses, leadership potential, and learning preferences. To map existing research and identify prevailing use case scenarios, a systematic search was conducted in the ACM and IEEE digital libraries. From an initial pool of 170 studies, 21 met the inclusion criteria and were subjected to full-text analysis. The purpose of this review is to provide a structured overview of current research trends, methodological approaches, and application contexts. Its contribution lies in synthesizing key insights and highlighting opportunities for future research, particularly in the use of eye-tracking for advancing personalized technologies and behavior-based analytics in fields such as education, marketing, and psychological analysis.

The last two decades have seen major advances in cognitive control research. In this paper, I provide an overview of this research. I next make a case that it might benefit from more reflection on its theoretical foundation. I end by suggesting that action theory might be of use with this.

Conceptualization underlying language use is an unconscious and automatic process that interacts with the general human cognitive faculty. The main purpose of Mental Spaces Theory (MST), as one of the major frameworks in Cognitive Linguistics, is to shed light on this process and model it in cognitively motivated ways. This overview pursues two objectives: First, to introduce the basics of the theory, as it was originally proposed by Gilles Fauconnier, and second, to show how MST accounts for networks of mental spaces accommodating semantic contents and how it represents the many roles of cognizers in the construal process. The first part of this overview discusses the background of MST and summarizes its major contributions to the field. The second part follows up on how the theory has been evolving toward investigations of attested linguistic/multimodal data. Illustrating how multiple viewpoints are stacked up in modeling the construal of multimodal artifacts as well as linguistic ones, this overview demonstrates the full interpretive potential of the concept of a "mental space" in the processing of multilayered meaning construction.