Trends in Cognitive Sciences最新文献

Climate anxiety has both positive and negative potential. It can spur action or hinder it, while taxing mental health. The key lies in balance: a Goldilocks zone wherein anxiety motivates without overwhelming. Cognitive processes, including threat and coping appraisals and future-oriented thinking, may help sustain this adaptive equilibrium.

Executive functions (EFs) develop dramatically across childhood and predict important outcomes, including academic achievement. These links are often attributed to individual differences in EF capacities. However, individual difference accounts underemphasize contextual influences on EF. We propose a complementary perspective, the adaptive habits framework, which emphasizes how contextual factors support or hinder EF engagement in children. Contexts that support repeated EF engagement establish habits for engaging EF in similar contexts and in similar ways. Such habits, in turn, reduce the effort associated with engaging EF and thus increase the likelihood of deciding to engage EF in the future. We interpret empirical findings through the lens of adaptive habits, discuss the implications of this framework, and propose novel research approaches and interventions to support EF in children.

Progress in the scientific study of consciousness has been impeded by several fundamental controversies. One pertains to a major divide between theories: sensory versus cognitive. Here, we argue that the key to resolving this controversy is to reevaluate the conceptual distinction proposed by Block in 1995 between phenomenal consciousness (P) and access consciousness (A). We propose that P and A should not be understood as two different types of consciousness, but as two necessary conditions for consciousness. We illustrate how this conceptual shift allows making substantial progress in answering several unresolved questions, such as the neural mechanisms and functions of consciousness, and the relationship between consciousness and attention. Our proposal motivates a selective unification across these different classes of theories.

Brain and body are fundamentally intertwined. A recent study from Cazettes et al. reveals how latent decision variables in the mouse brain can be read out from facial expressions. This shows how covert cognitive computations 'leak' into the periphery, and opens new opportunities for tracking cognitive processes through bodily measurements.

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a hub for value-guided decision-making, linked reciprocally with both cortical and subcortical regions. While projections from sensory areas to the OFC - and vice versa - are known to support goal-directed learning, these projections have often been studied in isolation, and their joint effect remains poorly understood. Here, we revisit these circuits through a unifying computational framework. We propose that sensory cortices send compressed task knowledge to the OFC to build abstract task models, while OFC feedback provides teaching signals that reshape sensory representations within the cortical hierarchy. This bidirectional exchange equips sensory areas with cognitive functions that extend well beyond passive feature detection, with significant implications for our understanding of learning, cognitive models, and artificial neural networks.

Skin temperature and the ability to perceive warm and cold thermal stimuli (i.e., thermoception) are fundamental to human survival, influencing both our evolutionary history and early individual development. Interestingly, recent research has also started to uncover the role of these thermosensory signals in cognition. Such signals may contribute to the construction of our bodily self-awareness, and specifically the sense of body ownership, which is defined as the feeling that the body and its parts belong to us. This review examines how thermosensory signals travel from the skin to the brain and their impact on body ownership in both healthy and clinical populations. Furthermore, we propose mechanisms that may underlie this interaction and highlight potential clinical and societal applications.