Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

Ancient Roman "technical memory" is not (as much of the modern specialist literature would have it) a generative technology of association. Rather it is (as a literal reading of the texts would suggest) a specialized tool for precise serial recall. Modern experimental evidence both confirms the fitness for the purpose of the technique and shows why that purpose is not trivial, as some have suggested. While the mechanism(s) by which the technique operates are not fully understood, a review of the current literature suggests that it would have had the advantage over other mnemonic techniques by virtue of recruiting a variety of cognitive capacities. These likely include spatial/navigational mechanisms and possibly visual/imagery-based ones as well. Finally, small differences between the method as recorded in the ancient texts and similar methods that have been the subject of laboratory experiments are used to suggest possible directions for further experimentation.

There is a sense in which the symbols used in mathematical expressions and formulas are arbitrary. After all, arithmetic would be no different if we would replace the symbols ' $+$ ' or '8' by different symbols. Nevertheless, the shape of many mathematical symbols is in fact well motivated in practice. In the case of symbols that were introduced a long time ago, the original motivations remain mostly inaccessible to us. Accordingly, motivations that are discussed in the literature are only ascribed retrospectively and should be considered as post-hoc rationalizations. For more recent introductions of new symbols (e.g., in symbolic logic), however, we sometimes do have first-hand accounts by the authors that inform us of the reasons behind their notational choices. In this paper, I present a systematic overview of possible motivations for the design of mathematical symbols, which include practical (such as ease of writing and reuse of previously used symbols) as well as cognitive aspects (such as indicating relations to other symbols or to their intended meanings).

The Mesoamerican pre-Hispanic divinatory books, called codices, encode meaning through various semiotic mechanisms, that is, iconic, glottographic, semasiographic, and notational principles. The last one refers to the meaning encoded through the spatial arrangement of signs on the graphic surface; thus, it can also be called internal syntagmatics. As the divinatory codices are organized in the form of lists, tables, and diagrams, the internal syntagmatics is particularly important, and one of the essential semiotic tools within it is symmetry. As I demonstrate, in some diagrams, the information is encoded through different symmetries-or rather, antisymmetries-simultaneously. They are: translation, rotation, mirror symmetry, and-the most productive of them-the chiasmic symmetry. Being not only "a pattern of thought" but also "a pattern for thought", the X-form arrangement in divinatory codices turns out to be a cognitive tool that structures the Mesoamerican ontological conceptualization of the world.

Engraved portable objects from Upper Palaeolithic and earlier sites are argued to be cognitive tools designed to store information for the purposes of calculation, record-keeping, or communication. This paper reviews the surprisingly long intellectual history of comparisons between these ancient objects and message sticks: marked graphic devices traditionally used for long-distance communication in Indigenous Australia. I argue that, while such comparisons have often been misguided, more cautious applications of ethnographic analogy may yield useful insights. A systematic analysis of historical observations together with more recent fieldwork, indicate that Australian message sticks are primarily tools of social cognition, as opposed to cognition tout court, and rely on orality and other context to become meaningful. Further, the practice of message stick communication may help clarify ongoing problems in the interpretation of Upper Palaeolithic objects including their possible role in aggregation activities, the distinction between decoration and notation, and the interplay between graphic sequences and speech.

The foundation of ancient, invented writing systems lies in the predominant iconicity of their sign shapes. However, these shapes are often used not for their referential meaning but in a metaphorical way, whereby one entity stands for another. Metaphor, including its subcategories pars pro toto and metonymy, plays a crucial role in the formation of the earliest pristine invented scripts, yet this mechanism has been understudied from a cognitive, contextual, and comparative perspective. This article aims to address issues pertaining to the definition, development, and application of these mechanisms in the formation of the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Chinese scripts. We analyze the local cases of metaphor-in-action in primary inventions, focusing first on visual metaphors and, second, on the typical or idiosyncratic uses of metonyms.

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.

We examine the use of cognitive technologies in the acquisition and retention of botanical and medicinal knowledge. We focus on the Cruz-Badianus codex, a 16th-century Nahua (Aztec) herbarium which discusses the use of plants for a range of illnesses. We show how the codex reflects the Mesoamerican cosmovision, in particular, the association of the human body and cosmos, and the polarity and balance of hot and cold. We hypothesize that the cosmological and philosophical ideas that underlie the medicinal uses prescribed in the codex are not incidental, but rather help to scaffold knowledge, retain in memory successful remedies, and aid the transmission of information.

This paper explores the role of measurement as a cognitive technology across human history, emphasizing the coexistence of formal and informal measurement systems. While standardized systems dominate contemporary culture and are well documented across large-scale societies of the past, this manuscript highlights the less explored domain of informal measurement practices that have been integral to daily life from the past to the present. Through the examination of body-based measurement systems and proportional heuristics, we demonstrate how these informal strategies were not merely precursors to formal standards but essential adaptive tools for solving everyday problems. Often, these informal solutions come with practical advantages. This manuscript calls for a broader recognition of their significance in cultural and technological evolution.

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.

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.