Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.