Introduction to Volume 13, Issue 1 of topiCS

Abstract

We tend to talk about events, sort them, reason about them, and learn from them as if they were natural entities, endowed with a beginning and an end, with content, structure, and coherence. Yet how exactly do we recognize events as such and determine their boundaries? What allows us to carve them out from the continuous stream of sensorimotor experiences and turn them into meaningful units of conceptual thinking? If these questions are intriguing you, then this month's issue will be the place for finding answers and inspiration. For their topic “Event-predictive cognition: From sensorimotor via conceptual to language-based structures and processes,” Martin V. Butz (University of Tübingen, Germany), David Bilkey, and Alistair Knott (both at University of Otago, New Zealand) assembled a highly interdisciplinary set of amazing papers on our event-predictive abilities, ranging from their phylogenetic roots and their actual unfolding to the downstream implications for higher cognition, communication, and social interaction. Enjoy the reading! As I am taking over the responsibilities as Executive Editor, this topic is the first of several that I will be introducing, while the honor for having recruited these topics and following them through is due to Wayne Gray. My view and vision of topiCS is outlined in a welcome address in this issue; for Wayne's closing statement, see Gray (2020). We remind our readers that our publisher, Wiley, allows us to offer the Topic Editors' introduction to their topic to all of our readers as a free download. topiCS encourages letters and commentaries on all topics, as well as proposals for new topics. Letters are not longer than two published pages (ca. 400–1,000 words). Commentaries (between 1,000 and 2,000 words) are often solicited by Topic Editors prior to the publication of their topic, but they may also be considered after publication. Letters and commentaries typically come without abstract and with few references, if any. The Executive Editor and the Senior Editorial Board (SEB) are constantly searching for new and exciting topics for topiCS. Feel free to open communications with a short note to the Executive Editor ([email protected]) or a member of the SEB (for a list, see the publisher's homepage for topiCS: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1756-8765/homepage/EditorialBoard.html).