Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

In various cultures, across history and at many different spatial scales, humans produce a rich variety of geometric shapes. Recent work has put forward a concrete proposition for a Language of Thought (LoT) underlying the mental representation of geometric shapes in contemporary humans. Initial experiments, based on a comparison of baboon and human performance in an intruder task, suggested that this ability could be unique to humans. Here, to deepen our understanding of the evolutionary origins of geometric representations, we compared humans and baboons (Papio papio) in a delayed geometric match-to-sample task with a broad array of shapes. Crucially, the presentation speed was manipulated so that, on slow-paced trials, animals were given more time to understand the shapes. The shapes were sampled from our proposed LoT and spanned a range of predicted geometric complexity under that model. Although the overall pattern of behavior was still strikingly different in humans and baboons, when presentations were slower, we did find a small contribution of the LoT representations in baboons, though weaker than in humans. In both species, longer looking time increased the effect of the LoT-based predictor. While humans used the ability to self-pace to modulate their looking time, thus benefiting from longer exposure times for more complex shapes and rendering this geometric complexity effect visible, baboons did not.

Cognitive technologies are socially shared and culturally evolved systems whose function is principally cognitive. Throughout human history and prehistory, they have aided in classifying, organizing, or managing information and knowledge, including ideas, language, and material culture. They range in scope from the highly artifactual (e.g., maps, scientific instruments, weights and measures) to the more abstract and conceptual (e.g., taxonomies, linguistic frameworks). Cognitive technologies thus scaffold many of the complex activities common to all human societies. Because they are both dynamic and culturally embedded, cognitive technologies, therefore, have histories, and are thus amenable not only to contemporary experimental methods, but also a range of historical and evolutionary approaches, including those from outside disciplines traditionally considered parts of cognitive science, such as classics and other humanistic disciplines. While the study of cognitive technologies is hardly new, many pre-existing studies can now be brought together under this framework in recognition that the field has been insufficiently integrated. This issue brings together a disciplinarily diverse range of scholars whose work employs the methods and concepts of specific disciplines while orienting itself around contemporary cognitive-scientific frameworks. The value of this integrative approach is to form a nexus around which a broader range of future interdisciplinary cognitive scholarship can coalesce, in which humanists and scientists have much to learn from one another through collaboration and shared concepts.

Language-learning materials are cognitive technologies that aim to facilitate the complex cognitive task of acquiring the means for effective communication in a second language. Blackfoot and Plains Cree are two closely related Indigenous languages spoken in Canada and the United States. Both languages are now rarely learned by children, but both have growing language teaching traditions. As polysynthetic agglutinating languages, Blackfoot and Plains Cree pose a challenge for speakers of English, due to the typological distance between Germanic and Algonquian languages. Developing language-learning materials to overcome this challenge constitutes an important step in ensuring language sustainability. Cognitive Anthropology and Cognitive Linguistics offer theoretical frameworks for the study of language-learning materials as cognitive technologies. This study examines the Plains Cree Syllabary chart as a cognitive tool for acquiring a new writing system. On this basis, a new chart is developed that supports the learning of Blackfoot grammatical structure.

Many core human activities require an understanding of time. To coordinate rituals, plan harvests and hunts, recall histories, keep appointments, and follow recipes, we need to grapple with invisible temporal structures like durations, sequences, and cycles. No other species seems to do this. But it is not a capacity we humans have because we developed special neural equipment over biological evolution. We have it because we developed concepts, practices, and artifacts to help us-in short, because we developed time tools. The overarching function of such tools is that they render time more concrete: they identify structure in the flow of experience and make that structure available to the senses. By concretizing time in this way, these tools serve a range of practical purposes, from tallying and measuring, to coordinating and predicting, to remembering and reasoning. Beyond their practical utility, time tools have further consequences, too: they reverberate through cognition and culture, and ultimately reshape our understanding of what time is.

Numerical notation found on multiple slates from Early Medieval Visigothic Iberia remains undeciphered. Previous studies have proposed that they simply represent Roman numerals. However, the comparative study of the numbers on the written and numerical slates suggests that they do not in fact represent the same graphic code. This paper analyzes the use of the numbers on these slates through the lens of human cognitive architecture and cognitive extension. The results of the study suggest that the Roman numerals on the written slates coexist alongside the notational system used on the numerical slates rather than that both types belonging to the same system. Whereas written slates worked as asynchronous code to facilitate dual communication, numerical slates could be used as a memory aid to assist with individual cognition. These results shed important light on who was using numerals in early medieval Iberia and for what purposes.

Efficiency principles are increasingly called upon to study features of human language and communication. Zipf's law of abbreviation is widely seen as a classic instance of a linguistic pattern brought about by language users' search for efficient communication. The "law"-a recurrent correlation between the frequency of words and their brevity-is a near-universal principle of communication, having been found in all of the hundreds of human languages where it has been tested, and a few nonhuman communication systems as well. The standard explanation for the law of abbreviation derives from pressures for efficiency: speakers minimize their cumulative effort by using shorter words for frequent occurrences. This explanation, we argue here, fails to explain why long words exist at all. It also fails to explain why the law of abbreviation, despite being robust, is systematically weakened by many short and rare words. We propose an alternative account of the law of abbreviation, based on a simple cultural evolutionary model. Our model does not require any pressure for efficiency. Instead, it derives the law of abbreviation from a general pressure for brevity applying to all words regardless of their frequency. This model makes two accurate predictions that the standard model misses: the correlation between frequency and brevity is consistently weak, and it is characterized by heteroskedasticity, with many short and rare words. We argue on this basis that efficiency considerations are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the law.

The cumulative evolution of technology has proven central to our species' ecological success, allowing for cultural rather than biological adaptation to environmental challenges. While cumulative improvement explains how specific technological traditions can get increasingly better at solving pre-existing adaptive problems, it remains fundamentally an optimization process, one which halts when an optimal solution is found. Yet, humans are also capable of open-ended or evolvable technological change, that is, we have the capacity for generating novel and useful technological solutions for an ever-expanding set of increasingly complex problems. How novel problems of increasing complexity are accessed, however, remains an open issue. Here, I argue that human open-ended technological evolution emerges from the cultural evolutionary bootstrapping of our inventive capabilities through cognitive technologies. By inventing technologies that enhance our cognitive capabilities, we become able to invent technologies that would have been impossible to design using only our core (noncultural) cognitive abilities. These inventions include further empowering cognitive technologies, creating a feedback loop through which inventors become increasingly capable of making themselves even more capable inventors. I propose a model for how the cultural evolution of increasingly sophisticated cognitive technologies enables access to previously unreachable invention problems, driving open-ended technological change. This process differs from cumulative optimization as it involves expanding the range of problems that can be solved (evolvability) rather than optimizing solutions to existing problems (adaptation). This paper contributes to our understanding of human technological uniqueness by identifying a mechanism enabling open-ended cultural evolution.

All of the world's spoken languages make consistent use of a relatively narrow set of contrastive speech sounds-phonemes. Here, we argue that phonemes constitute cognitive tools, supporting, guiding, and extending speaker cognitive capacities. We outline commonalities between phonemes and other cognitive tools, which include tendencies in their usage based on biological constraints, their extensive variation across cultural lineages, their criticality to the efficient transmission of information, and their importance in the scaffolding of various cognitive capacities. Studies of the commonalities of phonological systems reveal the physical and biological underpinnings upon which the tools of phonemes are necessarily predicated, and the constraints on their cross-cultural refinement. Our view complements cognitive linguistic perspectives on other cognitive tools, and on human perception and consciousness more broadly, by emphasizing the sounds of speech themselves.

Throughout the long history of Classic Maya hieroglyphs, a logosyllabic writing system used from the late first millennium BCE through the mid-second millennium CE in southern Mesoamerica, the most commonly recorded phonetic value was the syllable u (/ʔu/). With over a dozen different u hieroglyphs, Classic Maya scribes had more options for recording /ʔu/ than any other syllable or logograph. Cognitive approaches to writing systems typically attribute graphemic variation (i.e., alternation between signs with equivalent linguistic value) to semantic differences like animacy or to non-linguistic factors like identity. Distribution of Classic Maya u hieroglyphs, however, suggests that morphosyntactic context influenced which grapheme scribes wrote and when. This case suggests that scribal knowledge of Classic Maya hieroglyphs included ideas about writing's relationship to language. It also highlights the cognitive relevance of morphosyntax for a writing system's users as they differentiate among graphic signs with identical linguistic denotation.