Topics in Cognitive Science最新文献

How do teachers' gestures influence students' learning? This article reviews research investigating the role of gestures in communication, focusing on teachers' communication with their students, primarily in mathematics and science instruction. We first briefly consider gesture's role in communication more generally as a backdrop for considering teaching as a special context for communication. We then describe teachers' spontaneous gesturing in teaching contexts, and we consider how teachers' spontaneous gestures might influence students' learning. We then consider experimental studies that provide causal support for the effects of teachers' gestures on students' learning. We conclude by discussing future directions and implications for educational practice.

Studies of the evolution of language rely heavily on comparisons to nonhuman primates, particularly the gestural communication of nonhuman apes. Differences between human and ape gestures are largely ones of degree rather than kind. For example, while human gestures are more flexible, ape gestures are not inflexible. In this piece, I closely consider two features of the gestural communication of apes and humans that might display differences in kind: iconicity and temporal alignment. Iconicity has long played a privileged role in theories of gestural language origins, the proposal being that it provided a steppingstone into language through a stage of pantomime. However, iconicity is not as easy as it seems. Evidence from co-speech gestures of hearing children and from homesign suggests that iconic reference is both cognitively complex and slow to develop in humans. There is no conclusive evidence that nonhuman apes understand or produce iconic gestures; some gestures may appear iconic to human observers but the apes themselves may not understand the similarity between form and meaning. Far from providing an easy pathway into the emergence of symbolic communication, iconicity relies on sophisticated capacities for analogy and abstraction, ones often lacking in apes and young children. Temporal alignment between gesture and vocalization is another area that may show sharp contrasts between adult humans and apes, though data here is sparser. I discuss the tight synchronization of gesture and speech that emerges over the first year of life in human children and contrast it with gesture and vocalization in apes, which typically are described as overlapping but not simultaneous. Human ancestors probably communicated in ways similar to other apes, but the dual emergence of the ability to use iconic reference and the alignment of hand and mouth may have set our ancestors down a unique evolutionary road toward language.

How we judge the similarity between stimuli in the world is connected ultimately to how we represent them. Because of this, decisions about how we model similarity, either in terms of human behavior or patterns of neural activity, can provide key insights into how representations are structured and organized. Despite this, psychology and cognitive neuroscience continue to be dominated by a narrow range of similarity models, particularly those that characterize similarity as distance within "cognitive space." Despite the appeal of such models, their topological nature places fundamental constraints on their ability to capture relationships between objects and events in the world. To probe this, we created a stimulus set in which the predicted similarity relationships (based on an alternative model of similarity) could not be simply embedded within Euclidean space. This approach revealed that the spatial model distorts these predictions, and the perceived similarities of human observers. These findings indicate that cognitive spaces-that underlie much recent work probing both visual and conceptual representations in cognitive neuroscience-are limited in fundamental ways that restrict their theoretical and practical utility.

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.

Mushrooms are a ubiquitous and essential component in our biological environment and have been of interest to humans around the globe for millennia. Knowledge about mushrooms represents a prime example of cumulative culture, one of the key processes in human evolution. Based on a review of available research, we argue that the cognitive mechanisms of cultural transmission impact this knowledge in a twofold manner. First and foremost, they secure the accumulation of (folk-)mycological knowledge, with the principal objective to capture reliable information on edibility and means for safe distinction. However, they also shape attitudes toward mushrooms, practices involved in foraging and consumption, and appraisals of edibility in distinct ways, with even regression and eventual loss of knowledge as one possible outcome. In using the domain of mushrooms as an example for expounding this dual role that culture plays during knowledge transmission, our paper contributes to theoretical debates around the cognitive and cultural mechanisms involved in human evolution.

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.

Peer-assisted learning has the potential to improve learning in academic settings and beyond. However, the cognitive and motivational mechanisms of learning through interaction with other learners are not fully understood. Here, we present an empirical study in which we compare a peer-assisted learning condition with two individual learning conditions. The empirical findings suggest that both positive and negative peer effects occurred. On the positive side, learners placed in a peer-assisted learning condition allocated more time to practice and they benefited from selectively interacting with the more knowledgeable peers. On the negative side, error exposure and increased cognitive load may have hindered learning in the peer-assisted learning condition. A computational cognitive model developed in the ACT-R cognitive architecture is presented and used to explain the mechanisms of knowledge spillover, trust, and error exposure. This research has implications for designing collaborative learning protocols to increase human collective intelligence and designing artificial intelligence systems that can support human-machine teaming.

This manuscript documents a systematic ethnomycological analysis of ethnographic archives. Focusing on texts describing human-fungi interactions, I conduct a global, cross-cultural review of mushroom use, covering 193 societies worldwide. The study reveals diverse mushroom-related cultural practices, emphasizing the significance of fungi beyond culinary value to include domains such as rituals, medicine, folklore, and fire-making. Special attention is given to exploring how mushrooms and their foraging involve human cognition. The findings also expose a lack of detail in descriptions of human-mushroom relations. Ethnomycology continues to receive limited attention, largely due to Western mycophobic biases. This highlights the need for expanded ethnomycological research to enrich our understanding of past and present human encounters with the fungal kingdom.

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.

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.