Trends in Cognitive Sciences最新文献

Several cognitive functions of sleep, including a role in supporting memory consolidation, are conserved across the evolution of animal species. As outlined here, studies of insect behavior and neural circuits have identified key synaptic and circuit mechanisms through which sleep can influence long-term memories.

A core function of visual working memory (WM) is to sustain mental representations of recent visual inputs, thereby bridging moments of experience. This is thought to occur in part by recruiting early 'sensory' cortical regions, via flexible fronto-parietal mechanisms. The nature of visual cortex activity during WM has been elusive, but new evidence suggests that early WM representations can transform from a sensory-like code into a format that is shaped by task context and optimized for behavior. Here, we review evidence for transformations in visual cortical WM coding, the various forms they take, and their functional importance. Visual cortex may be an active workspace during WM, where flexible and 'good enough' WM representations serve to interface with perception and action.

All events unfold over time, and the temporal parameters of events matter for cognition. Yet it is common for scholars across disciplines to summarize events using atemporal statistics. Here, we underscore the urgency of illuminating the temporal structure of behavior streams and testing implications for learning. We review evidence on the importance of timing for cognition, drawing on our expertise in developmental science. We provide a framework for the quantification of single behavior streams, coordination between multiple streams, and the organization of streams across extended and multiple timescales. We highlight opportunities for methodological, analytic, and theoretical innovation to advance a temporal science of behavior. Parameterizing the temporal structure of events will accelerate scientific progress on human, animal, and artificial learning systems.

The statistical learning view of word reading and spelling is based on the ideas that writing systems have a rich statistical structure and that people implicitly pick up this structure as they learn to read and write. Whereas laboratory studies stress the speed and power of statistical learning, the evidence we review shows that adults with years of reading and writing experience do not always mirror the statistics of their writing system in their behavior. We consider possible reasons for these discrepancies, including the complexity of the statistical relationships, ease of production, and satisficing. The findings suggest that literacy instruction should address the probabilistic patterns in writing systems and the role of context in selecting appropriate pronunciations and spellings.

In an information-rich world the ability to choose not to know is an important cognitive tool. But what are the developmental origins of deliberate ignorance? We identify a selection of cognitive capacities and changes in children's information ecology that make deliberate ignorance increasingly possible - and desirable - across development.

Does including emotions improve reinforcement-learning models? A recent EEG study by Heffner and colleagues presents separate neural signatures for reward and emotion prediction errors. This advance invites questions about, and even holds clues to, which ingredients of emotion and prediction errors most improve reinforcement-learning models.

Decision-making and motor control are closely interdependent processes. It has been proposed that the vigor of decisions and the vigor of movements are jointly controlled to optimize behavior utility. However, recent studies indicate that decision and movement vigor are co-regulated by default, whether or not this benefits behavior utility, and that they can be decoupled if utility is compromised. We propose that the co-regulation of decision and movement vigor occurs through modulation of the signal-to-noise ratio in sensorimotor areas of the brain, while the decoupling of decision from movement vigor is enabled by inhibitory control involving frontal areas and the basal ganglia. This theory offers a unified explanation for the neural basis of flexible coordination of decision and movement vigor during goal-oriented actions.