Introduction to Volume 10, Issue 4 of topiCS

Abstract

Two topics grace our journal this month. The first is a single paper in our occasional topic, Visions of Cognitive Science. This one asks, How Good Is Your Evidence and How Would You Know? Professor Ulrike Hahn (Birkbeck, University of London) and her co-authors, Doctors Christoph Merdes and Momme von Sydow (both of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in München, Germany), used simulations of optimal agents to show the costs of misjudging the quality of evidence. They also compare different strategies for estimating that quality. Although theirs is a technical argument, their detailed proofs are illustrated with technical but accessible plots and closely argued with accessible prose. For those readers who have a need to see their detailed proofs, those details are included in the Supplemental Materials that accompany this paper. This issue's multipaper topic is Sociolinguistic Variation and Cognitive Science, which is a collection of fine papers that has been brought together and edited by Professors Jean-Pierre Chevrot (Université Grenoble Alpes), Katie Drager (University of Hawaii at Manoa), and Paul Foulkes (University of York). These Topic Editors have brought together a distinguished group of researchers to provide us with an overview of the current state of the art and excitement in research on sociolinguistic variation. For those of us outside their field but interested in the expansion of cognitive science to new areas, they have written an accessible, incisive, and insightful discussion as to where and how this area of study fits into the overall enterprise of cognitive science. We also remind our readers that, as always, our publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, allows us to offer the Topic Editors’ introduction to their topics to all of our readers as a free download. In case you missed it … A brief mention of topics appearing in recent issues of topiCS. A year ago, in October 2017 (volume 9, issue 4), we featured the Sketching and Cognition topic put together by Topic Editors Professors Kenneth Forbus (Northwestern University) and Shaaron Ainsworth (University of Nottingham). In a field like ours, a year is not much time for new work to gather citations, which makes the 12 citations (as of 2018.09.01) to papers in Forbus and Ainsworth's topic very impressive. Two years ago, in October 2016 (volume 8, issue 4), Topic Editors Sarah Brown-Schmidt (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Melissa Duff (University of Iowa), and William Horton (Northwestern University) put together a topic on Memory and Common Ground Processes in Language Use. Since then, the papers in their topic have received nine citations while the Editors’ introduction to the topic has received an addition four citations. The citations to the Editors’ introduction reflect the careful introduction to their field of research, some of its history, where they see the field going, and how the new work presented in the other nine papers contributes to our understanding of the cognitive issues. (And, of course, the Editors’ introduction is free to all readers from our publisher's website.) To our readers, keep searching and reading topiCS for our high-quality, curated collections of papers on timely topics of interest to the broad cognitive science community. topiCS encourages letters and commentaries on all topics, as well as proposals for new topics. Letters are typically 400–1,000 words (maximum of two published pages) and will be published without abstract or references (possibly one to two but usually none). Commentaries are often solicited by Topic Editors prior to the publication of their topic. However, commentaries after publication are also considered and should range between 1,000 and 2,000 words. Most commentaries would not have an abstract and would not include many references. The Executive Editor and the Senior Editorial Board (SEB) members are constantly searching for new and exciting topics for topiCS. Feel free to open communications with a short note to the Executive Editor (grayw@rpi.edu) or an SEB member (SEB members are listed under the Editorial Board heading on the publisher's homepage for topiCS, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1756-8765/homepage/EditorialBoard.html).