Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

When and how do children come to understand various kinds of visual media (e.g., pictures, videos, scale models), and how does early experience contribute to variation in the development of visual media comprehension across global contexts? In this selective review, we show that while researchers have investigated how children from Western convenience samples understand visual media, less is known about how this comprehension varies across children in global contexts. Indeed, prior work investigating picture comprehension suggests that children in different contexts may understand pictures at different developmental time points, potentially due to variation in their early picture experiences. These findings demonstrate the need for more research investigating children's comprehension of additional kinds of visual media across contexts. The experience-dependence of visual media comprehension could provide important insight into these abilities' origins, as well as the appropriateness of cross-cultural use of visual media in early childhood measurement.

Post-cognitivist approaches recognize cognition as a phenomenon that involves not just brains but all the sensorimotor apparatus of organisms. This means that brains are not always required for the emergence of cognition and that every organism can, in principle, be cognitive, unlocking a theoretical framework to explain the complex adaptive behavior of even non-neural organisms. This construct blurs the boundaries of cognitive processes, leading to what is known as the Extended Cognition thesis, where objects in the environment could become integral parts of an individual's cognitive system. Here, we explore the possibility that some species of entomopathogenic fungi in the families Cordycipitaceae, Ophiocordycipitaceae, and Clavicipitaceae could extend their cognition to the insects and other arthropods they infect. In this parasitism, the fungus takes possession of the sensorimotor apparatus of its host and coerces it to find the best places for fungal dispersal. We examine case studies where Ophiocordyceps spp. fungi induce ants to seek bright places in the forest. In this case, the fungus may be using the ant's sensorial and motoric apparatus to locate the places appropriate for its reproduction. This could be a remarkable example of extended cognition of a non-neural organism through a neural organism. However, empirical testing using a solid demarcating criterion is required to confirm this hypothesis.

The appearance of colorful earth pigments-primarily red ochre-in the archaeological record dating back to at least 300,000 years ago has long been held by researchers to signal the emergence of symbolic behavior in humanity. Specifically, the deliberate selection and use of this material is connected to its bright color and its ability to transfer that color onto human skin, rock surfaces, and many other materials. Despite this recognition that colorants-and color selection-represent some of the earliest evidence for emerging symbolic capacities in our lineage, clear description and discussion of the visual qualities of "symbolic material culture" recovered from Pleistocene-aged sites is surprisingly minimal. In this paper, we present results of a quantitative review of the archaeological literature surrounding early symbolic behavior in relation to how color and other visual aspects are reported. As well as highlighting trends and gaps in research to date, we outline how a more nuanced treatment of the visual qualities of raw materials and/or artifacts created by hominins may provide new insights into the origin and development of symbolism in our genus.

Humans can make moral inferences from multiple sources of input. In contrast, computational moral inference in artificial intelligence typically relies on language models with textual input. However, morality is conveyed through modalities beyond language. We present a computational framework that supports moral inference from natural images, demonstrated in two related tasks: (1) inferring human moral judgment toward visual images and (2) analyzing patterns in moral content communicated via images from public news. We find that models based on text alone cannot capture the fine-grained human moral judgment toward visual stimuli, but language-vision fusion models offer better precision in visual moral inference. Furthermore, applications of our framework to news data reveal implicit biases in news categories and geopolitical discussions. Our work creates avenues for automating visual moral inference and discovering patterns of visual moral communication in public media.

It is well known that context-dependent decisions incur mental costs. While previous research has sought to formalize these costs at various levels of analysis, we still lack basic insight into the nature of mental costs, including the underlying cognitive resources being consumed. Moreover, many computational models assume that mental costs scale linearly with the cognitive resource being used, an assumption of convenience that has yet to be systematically tested. To address these gaps, we build on rate-distortion theory by formalizing an information-theoretic notion of mental costs. Specifically, we define the cost of policies-the mappings from states to actions-as a function of the mutual information between states and actions, the policy complexity. Across four decision-making experiments featuring diverse task manipulations, we find that this mental cost formulation offers a parsimonious description of how humans adaptively adjust their policy complexity across different tasks. Notably, a quadratic mental cost formulation, where increases in policy complexity incur supralinear costs, provides the best fit. These findings highlight the meta-cognitive ability of humans to account for mental costs when forming decision strategies, and pave the way toward a domain-general quantification of mental effort.

Predictive Processing has been proposed as the single unifying computation underlying all of cognition, and proponents argue that all psychological phenomena can be explained as consequences of this principle. This theoretical framework has inspired many cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, but it currently has no developmental mechanism that would explain how infants begin to perceive and learn about the world. Rather, it treats human cognition as if it exists in a fully developed adult with a history of observations and world knowledge. In its current formulation, Predictive Processing only allows for perception of incoming stimuli given the existence of expectations based on previous experiences and as such does not allow for an infant to ever make a first observation. In this paper, we propose a possible starting point from which the infant can begin to develop predictive models, as well as a toolkit necessary to allow the infant to perform the range of cognitive operations on predictive models necessary for learning. The starting point we propose is a set of low-precision, low level-of-detail predictions with little or no hierarchical structure, which is very rapidly updated to reflect the infant's early environment. The toolkit contains a range of operations referred to collectively as structure learning, which are applied to models in order to allow for building adult-like hierarchical models. These modifications are necessary for developmental scientists to be able to adopt the Predictive Processing framework and benefit from its advantages, but also for Predictive Processing to be able to explain all human cognition, which inherently must include development.

The suite of capacities constituting language involves diverse mental representations, from modality-specific information to levels of formal structure and meaning. In the cognitive science of language, a long-standing puzzle is how these representations "hang together" in an architecture that explains the widest possible range of facts about language. Parallelism is the general hypothesis that correlations exist between representations in the language system (e.g., between syntactic structure and compositional meaning) as well as within the mind (e.g., between word meaning and world knowledge). These correlations are mediated by systems of interfaces, but are always only partial and exhibit varying degrees of systematicity: each type of representation is functionally autonomous, that is, constructed according to specific principles, in addition to simple combinatorial mechanisms that apply across the system. This Topic explores new directions in developing or engaging with this hypothesis, in relation to open issues in several areas of current research in linguistics and cognitive brain science.

The evolution of human communication and culture is among the most significant-and challenging-questions we face in attempting to understand the evolution of our species. This article takes up two frameworks for theorizing about human communication and culture, namely, Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture of the human language faculty, and the cultural evolutionary framework of Memetics. The aim is to show that the two frameworks uniquely complement one another in some theoretically important ways. In particular, the Parallel Architecture's account of the lexicon significantly expands the range of linguistic phenomena that are plausibly covered by Memetics (e.g., from words to constructions and pure rules of syntax). At the same time, taking a "meme's-eye-view" of the lexicon retools the Parallel Architecture's treatment of the origins and subsequent cultural evolution of language.

What is the nature of lexical meanings such that they can both compose with others and also appear boundless? We investigate this question by examining the compositional properties of for-time adverbial as in "Ana jumped for an hour." At issue is the source of the associated iterative reading which lacks overt morphophonological support, yet, the iteration is not disconnected from the lexical meanings in the sentence. This suggests an analysis whereby the iterative reading is the result of the interaction between lexical meanings under a specific compositional configuration. We test the predictions of two competing accounts: Mismatch-and-Repair and Partition-Measure. They differ in their assumptions about lexical meanings: assumptions that have implications for the possible compositional mechanisms that each can invoke. Mismatch-and-Repair assumes that lexical meaning representations are discrete, separate from the conceptual system from which they originally emerged and brought into sentence meaning through syntactic composition. Partition-Measure assumes that lexical meanings are contextually salient conceptual structures substantially indistinguishable from the conceptual system that they inhabit. During comprehension, lexical meanings construe a conceptual representation, in parallel, morphosyntactic and morphophonological composition as determined by the lexical items involved in the sentence. Whereas both hypotheses capture the observed cost in the punctual predicate plus for-time adverbial composition (e.g., jump (vs. swim) for an hour), their predictions differ regarding iteration with durative predicates; for example, swim for a year (vs. for an hour). Mismatch-and-Repair predicts contrasting processing profiles and nonoverlapping activation patterns along punctuality differences. Partition-Measure predicts overlapping processing and cortical distribution profiles, along the presence of iterativity. Results from a self-paced reading and an functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies bear out the predictions of the Partition-Measure account, supporting a view of linguistic meaning composition in line with an architecture of language whereby combinatoriality and generativity are distributed, carried out in parallel across linguistic and nonlinguistic subsystems.

Diversion from the syntactic norm, as manifested in the absence of otherwise expected lexical and syntactic material, has been extensively studied in theoretical syntax. Such modifications are observed in headlines, telegrams, labels, and other specialized contexts, collectively referred to as "reduced" registers. Focusing on search queries, a type of reduced register, I propose that they are generated by a simpler grammar that lacks a full-fledged syntactic component. The analysis is couched in the Parallel Architecture framework, whose assumption of relative independence of linguistic components-their parallelism-and the rejection of syntactocentrism are essential to explain properties of queries.