Trends in Cognitive Sciences最新文献

Considerable progress has been made in understanding early memory development. However, much of this research pre-dates contemporary theories of memory systems in the mature brain. This review provides a refresher on these conceptual frameworks and proposes a common theoretical foundation for reconciling adult and infant studies. This foundation enables a critical analysis of infant studies that have directly tested memory and suggests that they may not capture the full nature and extent of episodic memory abilities in infancy. The analysis is extended to infant studies that are ostensibly focused on cognitive domains other than memory and finds that many such tasks require episodic-like memory. Thus, there may be substantially more evidence for episodic-like memory in infants than previously recognized.

Difficulties are a common part of life, ranging from daily challenges to chronic adversity. While difficulties can undermine well-being, they can also promote growth and resilience. What determines whether difficulty harms or helps? A growing body of research points to the role of difficulty beliefs, that is, general beliefs about whether dealing with difficulty is harmful or beneficial. Prior work has examined these beliefs across domains such as task-level demand, life situation-level stress, and identity-level challenges, but these literatures remain disconnected. In this review, we synthesize these research streams, highlighting their shared principles. We propose a unifying mechanistic model and show how an integrative perspective can clarify how difficulty beliefs shape motivation, coping, and long-term outcomes across contexts.

Psychologists have long debated the relative benefits of a happy life versus a meaningful life, assuming these to be only two major dimensions of a good life. Here, we propose an alternative: a psychologically rich life, or a life filled with diverse, interesting experiences. Psychologically rich lives not only feel different from meaningful or happy lives, but also have different correlates. Unlike happiness and meaning in life, openness to experience is the strongest personality predictor of a psychologically rich life. While happy and meaningful lives are associated with conservative worldviews, psychologically rich lives are not. Instead, such lives are characterized by attributional complexity, holism, and unusual perspective-changing experiences. This psychologically rich life, we suggest, offers a third path to the good life.

Paper wasp societies use behaviors like individual face recognition, configural face processing, social eavesdropping, and transitive inference to manage social relationships. Despite their evolutionary distance, wasps and vertebrates share similarities in their social recognition behavior, indicating that these behaviors can be implemented in miniature brains without a neocortex.

Schone and colleagues reveal surprising stability in the brain's body map, challenging textbook notions of dramatic remapping. But why were the textbooks wrong? Because what was interpreted as plasticity was only half of the story. In fact, missing limb representations do persist, awaiting the right probe.

People build world models that simulate the dynamics of the real world. They do so in engineered systems for the purposes of scientific understanding or recreation, as well as in intuitive reasoning to predict and explain the environment. On the basis of a major split in the simulation of real-time dynamics in engineered systems, we argue that people's intuitive mental simulation includes a basic split between physical simulation and graphical rendering. We first show how the separation between physics and graphics relies on a natural division of labor in any cognitive system. We then use the physics/graphics distinction to tie together and explain a range of classic and recent findings across different domains in cognitive science and neuroscience, including aphantasia and imagery, different visual streams, and object tracking.