Cognitive Ingredients Research Articles

Hidden hands: The failure of population-centric counterinsurgency in Afghanistan 2008-11

ABSTRACT The conflict in Afghanistan 2001–2021 pitched coalition forces into the midst of a civil war. Armed political rebellion of this sort presents practitioners with a deeply intricate problem; multiple, interdependent layers of conflict and competition creating an ever-shifting ecosystem of violent competition. But in their efforts to resolve the root-causes of political rebellion in Afghanistan, Western counterinsurgents unwittingly contributed a set of philosophical, constructionist and cognitive ingredients to the dynamics powering violence on the ground. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, this article explores aspects of the campaign in Helmand and Kandahar 2008–11 in order to better explore the intersection between COIN theory, COIN practice, and the layered complexities involved for stabilisation forces seeking to instrumentalise power and influence in another nation’s internal conflict.

Positionality of refugee business support and hospitality building under cognitive dissonance theory: an enterprising route of refugee entrepreneurship

PurposeFor the developed economies in Europe, to which refugees move, and as refugees’ enterprising expectations evolve, emerging cognitive factors have become closely intertwined with their post-arrival encounters. However, the link between refugees’ social cognition and entrepreneurship commitment tends to be overlooked. This paper aims to join the international debates regarding cognitions of refugee entrepreneurship and explain the bewildering effects of refugees’ social cognitive dissonance on refugee business support.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviews the extant knowledge of refugee entrepreneurship and refugee business support. It synthesizes the literature on cognitive dissonance, multiple embeddedness and hospitality to inform a conceptual model and explain the ramifications of refugees’ entrepreneurial cognition on refugee business support and how public attitudes in the destination transform accordingly.FindingsThis paper illustrates the prevalent imbalance between the provision of support and refugees’ anticipations in developed economies. A conceptual toolkit is framed to disclose the succeeding influence of cognitive dissonance on the performances of refugee business support. This framework indicates that the cognitive dissonance could elicit heterogeneous aftermath of refugee business support service, resulting in a deteriorated/ameliorated hospitality context.Originality/valueThis conceptual toolkit unfolds cognitive ingredients in the refugee entrepreneurship journey, providing a framework for understanding refugee business support and the formation of hospitality under cognitive dissonance. Practically, it is conducive to policymakers nurturing rational refugee anticipation, enacting inclusive business support and enhancing hospitality in the host country.

On the role of autobiographical knowledge in shaping belief in the future occurrence of imagined events.

Recent studies suggest that different forms of episodic simulation-mental representations of past, future, or atemporal events-recruit many of the same underlying cognitive and neural processes. This leads to the question whether there are distinctive hallmark characteristics of episodic future thinking: the subjective sense that imagined events belong to and will occur in the personal future. In this study, we aimed at shedding light on the cognitive ingredients that contribute to this sense of future occurrence by asking participants to imagine personal and experimenter-provided future events associated with high or low degrees of belief in future occurrence and then to reflect on the bases for their beliefs. Results showed that contextualising autobiographical knowledge (i.e., articulating links between items of information associated with imagined future events, goals, and personal characteristics) is a critical aspect of belief in future occurrence, and autobiographical knowledge can be flexibly used to either support or suppress belief in future occurrence. These findings indicate that episodic future thought not only depends on simulation processes (i.e., the construction of detailed mental representations for future events) but also requires that imagined events are meaningfully integrated within an autobiographical context.

Types of abduction in tool behavior

Tool-use behavior is currently one of the most intriguing and widely debated topics in cognitive neuroscience. Different accounts of our ability to use tools have been proposed. In the first part of the paper we review the most prominent interpretations and suggest that none of these accounts, considered in itself, is sufficient to explain tool use. In the second part of the paper we disentangle three different types of reasoning on tools, characterized by a different distribution of motor and cognitive ingredients. At the conceptual level, these types of reasoning reflect the distinction between three types of abductive inference as they are described in semiotic studies. At the functional level, we suggest that these types of reasoning on tools may correspond to different mental processes, possibly implemented in different regions of the left inferior parietal lobe. This proposal can account for the different interpretations commonly associated with the role of the left parietal cortex in tool use.

Recognizing signals of social attitude in interacting with Ambient Conversational Systems

Ambient Intelligence systems require a natural and personalized experience in interacting with services provided by the environment. In this view, the interaction may happen either in a pervasive way, through a combination of devices embedded in the environment, or using a conversational interface acting as an environment concierge. In the latter case, the interface can be embodied in a conversational agent able to involve users in a human-like conversation and to establish a social relation with them. Developing such an Ambient Conversational System (ACS) requires a model of the user that considers not only the cognitive ingredients of his mental state, but also extra-rational factors such as affect, engagement, attitudes. This paper describes a multimodal framework for recognizing the social attitude of users during the interaction with an embodied agent in a smart environment. In particular, we started from the analysis and annotation of advisory dialogs between humans and then we used the annotated corpus to build a framework for recognizing the social attitude in multimodal dialogs with an ACS. Results of the study show an acceptable performance of the framework in recognizing and monitoring the social attitude during the dialog with an ACS. We also compared results of the analysis of human-human interactions with respect to the human-ACS interaction and, even if the level of initiative of subjects during the dialog was lower in this latter modality, the difference in the average number of social moves was not significant, thus showing that subjects probably were keen to establish a social relation with the conversational agent.

Narrazione e conoscenza

Narrative meta-cognition is the device composed by formal model and structural ingredients typical of narrations, a device which is established in the mind of those who enter narrative universes and which enables those who have it to recognise and understand the narrative texts while organising knowledge in narrative form. Therefore, narrative meta-cognition is a device which connects: it connects symbolic and cognitive ingredients through story-telling; it connects each subject to real and imaginary words shaped through story-telling, it connects different subjects sharing these experiences. In contrast with other meta-cognitive devices, often limited to other and more specific epistemic domains, narrative meta-cognition enables the subjects who possess it structurally to store up and elaborate very different symbolic and cultural data; therefore, such data can become ingredients of the personal identity (autobiographic consciousness) and devices of representation and judgement (representations and visions of the world). For these reasons, the narrative meta-cognitive device appears to be a truly phenomenological paradigm: thanks to it, real events and symbolic constructions which could simply accumulate in an undifferentiated and incoherent cognitive universe, can instead develop potentialities for interconnection and meaning thanks to the narrative forms through which they get organised and ordered. As narrations, these levels of order and meaning are never established once and forever; instead, they are characterised by processing, dynamism and continuous re-negotiation.

Crying: discussing its basic reasons and uses

Crying can occur in a great variety of contexts, including fulfilment and happiness as well as failure, loss, and sadness or other negative feelings, such as anger and guilt. Despite such differences, we have tried to identify a unitary underlying psychological cause for crying: perceived helplessness. We explore the different crying situations, describing the basic cognitive ingredients and critical steps in the process leading to crying. We start from those situations which directly imply personal frustration and suffering, then we consider empathic crying, crying for joy, and “aesthetic” crying, i.e., crying elicited by aesthetic experiences. We try to show that all of them imply a common core: some frustration (anticipated, actual, or previous), one's attempt to resist, perceived helplessness, and surrender to frustration. Finally, we address both the psychological benefits and costs of crying, either expected or unexpected, showing their links with perceived helplessness.

How to construct a brain theory?

Philosophical, dynamical, neural, network-theoretical, and cognitive ingredients of Tsuda's brain theory are discussed and anayzed. The integrative approach emphasized by Tsuda would be a welcome one.

Pity and Compassion as Social Virtues

The altruistic emotions of pity and compassion are discussed in the context of Aristotle's treatment of the former in the Rhetoric, and Nussbaum's reconstruction of that treatment in a recent account of the latter. Aristotle's account of pity does not represent it as a virtue, the context of the Rhetoric rather rendering his account one of a peculiarly self-centred emotion. Nussbaum's reconstruction builds on the cognitive ingredients of Aristotle's account, and attempts to place the emotion of compassion more squarely in the moral sphere. It is argued that Nussbaum's reconstruction nevertheless falls short of capturing the altruism which is central to the virtue of compassion, and which therefore explains its role as a ‘basic social emotion’.

Cognitive coping and appraisal processes in the treatment of chronic headaches

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the active cognitive ingredients of change in psychological treatments for long-term chronic headache complaints. The primary questions this study addressed were: (1) Is a cognitive self-hypnosis training which explicitly attempts to change appraisal and cognitive coping processes more effective in producing these changes than a relaxation procedure, and (2) are changes in pain appraisal and cognitive coping related to changes in pain and adjustment in the short and long term? A total of 144 patients were assigned at random to a cognitive self-hypnosis (CSH) treatment or autogenic training (AT) with a duration of 7 weeks. Measures used were: Headache Index (HI), Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90), Coping Strategy Questionnaire (CSQ), Multidimensional Locus of Pain Control Questionnaire (MLPC) and treatment expectations. The results indicated that patients successfully changed their use of coping strategies and pain appraisals. Cognitive therapy was more effective than relaxation training in changing the use of cognitive coping strategies which were the direct targets of treatment. However, treatment effects were only related with changes in the use of coping strategies and appraisal processes to a limited extent and the mediational role of cognitive processes in pain reduction and better adjustment was inconclusive.