Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

The relationship between humans and animals is complex and influenced by multiple variables. Humans display a remarkably flexible and rich array of social competencies, demonstrating the ability to interpret, predict, and react appropriately to the behavior of others, as well as to engage others in a variety of complex social interactions. Developing computational systems that have similar social abilities is a critical step in designing robots, animated characters, and other computer agents that appear intelligent and capable in their interactions with humans and each other. Further, it will improve their ability to cooperate with people as capable partners, learn from natural instruction, and provide intuitive and engaging interactions for human partners. Thus, human-animal team analogs can be one means through which to foster veridical mental models of robots that provide a more accurate representation of their near-future capabilities. Some digital twins of human-animal teams currently exist but are often incomplete. Therefore, this article focuses on issues within and surrounding the current models of human-animal teams, previous research surrounding this connection, and the challenges when using such an analogy for human-autonomy teams.

The necessity for introducing interactionist and parallelism approaches in different branches of cognitive science emerged as a reaction to classical sequential stage-based models. Functional psychological models that emphasized and explained how different components interact, dynamically producing cognitive and perceptual states, influenced multiple disciplines. Chiefly among them were experimental psycholinguistics and the many applied areas that dealt with humans' ability to process different types of information in different contexts. Understanding how bilinguals represent and process verbal and visual input, how their neural and psychological states facilitate such interactions, and how linguistic and nonlinguistic processing overlap, has now emerged as an important area of multidisciplinary research. In this article, we will review available evidence from different language-speaking groups of bilinguals in India with a focus on situational context. In the discussion, we will address models of language processing in bilinguals within a cognitive psychological approach with a focus on existent models of inhibitory control. The paper's stated goal will be to show that the parallel architecture framework can serve as a theoretical foundation for examining bilingual language processing and its interface with external factors such as social context.

Gesture and speech are tightly linked and form a single system in typical development. In this review, we ask whether and how the role of gesture and relations between speech and gesture vary in atypical development by focusing on two groups of children: those with peri- or prenatal unilateral brain injury (children with BI) and preterm born (PT) children. We describe the gestures of children with BI and PT children and the relations between gesture and speech, as well as highlight various cognitive and motor antecedents of the speech-gesture link observed in these populations. We then examine possible factors contributing to the variability in gesture production of these atypically developing children. Last, we discuss the potential role of seeing others' gestures, particularly those of parents, in mediating the predictive relationships between early gestures and upcoming changes in speech. We end the review by charting new areas for future research that will help us better understand the robust roles of gestures for typical and atypically-developing child populations.

Describing our visual environments is challenging because although an enormous amount of information is simultaneously available to the visual system, the language channel must impose a linear order on that information. Moreover, the production system is at least moderately incremental, meaning that it interleaves planning and speaking processes. Here, we address how the operations of these two cognitive systems are coordinated given their different characteristics. We propose the concept of a perceptual clause, defined as an interface representation that allows the visual and linguistic systems to exchange information. The perceptual clause serves as the input to the language formulator, which translates the representation into a linguistic sequence. Perceptual clauses capture speakers' ability to describe visual scenes coherently while at the same time taking advantage of the incremental abilities of the language production system.

As people age, there is a natural decline in cognitive functioning and brain structure. However, the relationship between brain function and cognition in older adults is neither straightforward nor uniform. Instead, it is complex, influenced by multiple factors, and can vary considerably from one person to another. Reserve, compensation, and maintenance mechanisms may help explain why some older adults can maintain high levels of performance while others struggle. These mechanisms are often studied concerning memory and executive functions that are particularly sensitive to the effects of aging. However, language abilities can also be affected by age, with changes in production fluency. The impact of brain changes on language abilities needs to be further investigated to understand the dynamics and patterns of aging, especially successful aging. We previously modeled several compensatory profiles of language production and lexical access/retrieval in aging within the Lexical Access and Retrieval in Aging (LARA) model. In the present paper, we propose an extended version of the LARA model, called LARA-Connectivity (LARA-C), incorporating recent evidence on brain connectivity. Finally, we discuss factors that may influence the strategies implemented with aging. The LARA-C model can serve as a framework to understand individual performance and open avenues for possible personalized interventions.

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.

Conspiratorial thinking has been with humanity for a long time but has recently grown as a source of societal concern and as a subject of research in the cognitive and social sciences. We propose a three-tiered framework for the study of conspiracy theories: (1) cognitive processes, (2) the individual, and (3) social processes and communities of knowledge. At the level of cognitive processes, we identify explanatory coherence and faulty belief updating as critical ideas. At the level of the community of knowledge, we explore how conspiracy communities facilitate false belief by promoting a contagious sense of understanding, and how community norms catalyze the biased assimilation of evidence. We review recent research on conspiracy theories and explain how conspiratorial thinking emerges from the interaction of individual and group processes. As a case study, we describe observations the first author made while attending the Flat Earth International Conference, a meeting of conspiracy theorists who believe the Earth is flat. Rather than treating conspiracy belief as pathological, we take the perspective that is an extreme outcome of common cognitive processes.