Orientation in the environment like perceiving affordances? Andrzej Lewicki’s account of cognition

Transformation, communication, and engagement

Celebrating a decade of TiCS

Our ability to represent temporal, spatial, and numerical information is critical for understanding the world around us. Given the prominence of quantitative representations in the natural world, numerous cognitive, neurobiological, and developmental models have been proposed as a means of describing how we track quantity. One prominent theory posits that time, space, and number are represented by a common magnitude system, or a common neural locus (i.e., Bonn & Cantlon in Cognitive Neuropsychology, 29(1/2), 149-173, 2012; Cantlon, Platt, & Brannon in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(2), 83-91, 2009; Meck & Church in Animal Behavior Processes, 9(3), 320, 1983; Walsh in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(11), 483-488, 2003). Despite numerous similarities in representations of time, space, and number, an increasing body of literature reveals striking dissociations in how each quantity is processed, particularly later in development. These findings have led many researchers to consider the possibility that separate systems may be responsible for processing each quantity. This review will analyze evidence in favor of a common magnitude system, particularly in infancy, which will be tempered by counter evidence, the majority of which comes from experiments with children and adult participants. After reviewing the current data, we argue that although the common magnitude system may account for quantity representations in infancy, the data do not provide support for this system throughout the life span. We also identify future directions for the field and discuss the likelihood of the developmental divergence model of quantity representation, like that of Newcombe (Ecological Psychology, 2, 147-157, 2014), as a more plausible account of quantity development.

A core brain network has been proposed to underlie a number of different processes, including remembering, prospection, navigation, and theory of mind [Buckner, R. L., & Carroll, D. C. Self-projection and the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 49-57, 2007]. This purported network-medial prefrontal, medial-temporal, and medial and lateral parietal regions-is similar to that observed during default-mode processing and has been argued to represent self-projection [Buckner, R. L., & Carroll, D. C. Self-projection and the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 49-57, 2007] or scene-construction [Hassabis, D., & Maguire, E. A. Deconstructing episodic memory with construction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 299-306, 2007]. To date, no systematic and quantitative demonstration of evidence for this common network has been presented. Using the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach, we conducted four separate quantitative meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies on: (a) autobiographical memory, (b) navigation, (c) theory of mind, and (d) default mode. A conjunction analysis between these domains demonstrated a high degree of correspondence. We compared these findings to a separate ALE analysis of prospection studies and found additional correspondence. Across all domains, and consistent with the proposed network, correspondence was found within the medial-temporal lobe, precuneus, posterior cingulate, retrosplenial cortex, and the temporo-parietal junction. Additionally, this study revealed that the core network extends to lateral prefrontal and occipital cortices. Autobiographical memory, prospection, theory of mind, and default mode demonstrated further reliable involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex and lateral temporal cortices. Autobiographical memory and theory of mind, previously studied as distinct, exhibited extensive functional overlap. These findings represent quantitative evidence for a core network underlying a variety of cognitive domains.

Attention has often been considered to be a gateway to consciousness (Posner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 91(16), 7398-7403, 1994). However, its relationship with conscious perception (CP) remains highly controversial. While theoretical models and experimental data support the role of attention in CP (Chica, Lasaponara, Lupiáñez, Doricchi, & Bartolomeo, NeuroImage, 51, 1205-1212, 2010; Dehaene, Changeux, Naccache, Sackur, & Sergent, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 204-211, 2006; Mack & Rock, Inattentional blindness, 1998), recent studies have claimed that at least some forms of attention--endogenous or top-down spatial attention--are neither sufficient nor necessary for CP (Koch & Tsuchiya, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 16-22, 2007). In the present experiments, we demonstrate the importance of exogenously triggered attention for the modulation of CP. Weak or null effects were instead observed when attention was triggered endogenously. Our data are discussed in the framework of recent neuropsychological models (Dehaene et al., Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 204-211, 2006), postulating that activity within reverberating frontoparietal networks, as colocalized with spatial-orienting systems, is the brain correlate of consciously processed information.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

Comment on Luhrmann, Tanya. 2012. When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf.

In current trends in cognitive sciences, the discussion on body crosses the classical divide between the body and the self in terms of nature and function. Embodiment theories have helped to bring in the importance of the role of subjective experiences to understand cognition, and place the process of knowing in a cultural and social context. This article is a critique of the growing trend in cognitive sciences, particularly in affective neurosciences, and approaches, to reduce the experiential self to a nonentity. It is shown that though the apparent goal is to highlight the inner qualitative nature of experience, what is happening in the background is a role reversal. The outer body becomes the inner self. The inner self becomes the outer body. The nature and functions of the self are founded on the body by theorizing embodiment as an alternate to neural reductionism. This article argues that one of the negative consequences of embodiment theories is that age-old concepts of freewill, character and moral choices become flimsy and fleeting in the process of embodying cognition.

Contingencies of selection, be they phylogenetic or ontogenetic, merely set boundaries on units; they do not provide blueprints. Thus, variability is fundamental to all products of selection. Skinner, by characterizing the units of analysis in behavior as generic in nature, established his science squarely within the selectionist paradigm, thereby avoiding the tendency, common throughout psychology, to slip into essentialist analyses. The distinction between essentialism and selectionism is refined in this article, and prominent examples of essentialism in linguistics, theories of memory, theories of representation, associationism, and even in behavior analysis are identified. Recent trends in cognitive science--specifically, research on adaptive networks--is amenable to a selectionist interpretation, suggesting the possibility of future fruitful interactions with behavior analysis.

A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective impersonal laws. Asma (2017) argued that our contemporary imaginative cognition is evolutionarily conserved-it has structural and functional similarities to premodern Homo sapiens’s cognition. This article will (i) outline the essential features of mythopoetic cognition or adaptive imagination, (ii) delineate the adaptive sociocultural advantages of mythopoetic cognition, (iii) explain the phylogenetic and ontogenetic mechanisms that give rise to human mythopoetic mind (i.e., genetically endowed simulation and associational systems that underwrite diverse symbolic systems), (iv) show how mythopoetic cognition challeng­es contemporary trends in cognitive science and philosophy, and (v) recognize and outline empirical approaches for a new cognitive science of the imagination.

A New Factor in Evolution

Lawrence Shapiro’s Embodied Cognition is one of the first detailed book length attempts to introduce and develop the central themes of embodied cognition, an important trend in cognitive science. Embodied cognition is increasingly influential, but it would be a mistake to characterize it as a rigidly defined and unified theory. It emerged from a variety of fields (e.g., the phenomenological movement in philosophy, ecological, and developmental psychology, robotics, ethology, and dynamical systems theory) and therefore still suffers from internal disagreements over fundamental issues, such as its subject matter, its methodological commitments, the exact nature and definition of “embodiment,” and the extent to which embodiment matters in explaining cognition. Thus, the explanatory capacity and successes of the embodied cognition program depend upon further clarification of these issues. Providing this clarification, it seems, is the primary motivation behind Shapiro’s book. Instead of summarizing the book’s seven chapters individually, I will focus on the themes that Shapiro presents as being central to embodied cognition and to which the main parts of the book are devoted to discussing (the “Introduction” and from “Chapters 3–7”). In doing so, I will additionally be looking at what Shapiro calls the “meta-theme” of the book, namely, the need to understand both (1) what embodied cognition aims to explain, exactly, and (2) how it relates to, and important ways departs from, standard cognitive science (the focus of the “Introduction” and the “Concluding Thoughts”).

This study aimed to gauge the quality of behavioral science journals on account of selected bibliometric indicators, namely Journal Impact Factor, Eigenfactor Score, CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank; Source normalised impact per paper and H5-index. Also, to ascertain whether these indicators use as an alternative to each other for the assessment of the journals. 53 Journals from the behavioral science discipline have retrieved from Journals citation Report (JCR) of the Web of science. The JIF and ES metrics extracted from JCR, the metrics of CS, SJR and SNIP derived from Scopus and the metrics of H-Index managed from Google Scholar. The analysis has done by using IBM SPSS (21.0). Bivariate correlation coefficient has considered, a high Pearson's (r) found between JIF and SNIP (r = 0.928), while the lowest correlation recorded between JIF and H5 Value (r = 0.411). Spearman's (ρ) statistical correlation between JIF with CS shows maximum correlation, i.e. (ρ = 0.822), the minimum correlation recorded between JIF and H5-index ranks, i.e. (ρ= 0.664). The top five journals repeated in each indicator are "Trends in Cognitive Sciences", "Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews", "Behavioral and Brain Sciences", "Cortex" and "Appetite". The linear correlation observed in term of values and ranks of metrics of the indicators with the help of scatter plot hence concluded that the selected indicators could use as an alternative to each other.

Erratum: Gamma or no gamma, that is the question: [Trends in Cognitive Sciences, October 2014, 18 (10), 507–509

Response to Pickering et al.