Framework Of Cognitive Science Research Articles

Building a resources-modulable approach as appropriate strategy to reduce and rehabilitate spontaneous housing area (SHA) in developing countries cities: the case of Mokolo in Yaoundé, Cameroon city

ABSTRACT Cities in developing countries are facing a critical housing deficiency, seen, for example, in Cameroon by an estimated deficit about two million units. Despite real estate programmes in response, supply remains very low compared to demand. It favours the growth of anarchical housing production so-called spontaneous housing area (SHA) or slums. High concentration of poor households in these informal areas coupled with their expansion (about 5.5% per year) is a real headache for population, government authorities who fight for the common good. A major challenge has been how to ensure access to land certificates, basic urban services and decent housing while fighting against urban sprawl and SHA growth. Within the framework of cognitive science, our study provides a multidisciplinary tool for calibrating rehabilitation of SHA based on eight technical criteria, and on profitability. It enables decision-makers not only to assess the degree of precariousness, but also to know in advance whether the intervention will be profitable. This determines whether rehabilitation is bankable for government or whether total destruction is better. Upon application on Mokolo, the case study region in Yaoundé, it revealed how it can be made affordable while reducing the slum rate from 54%–20%.

Imagination vs. routines: festive time, weekly time, and the predictive brain.

This paper examines the relationship between societal structures shaped by traditions, norms, laws, and customs, and creative expressions in arts and media through the lens of the predictive coding framework in cognitive science. The article proposes that both dimensions of culture can be viewed as adaptations designed to enhance and train the brain's predictive abilities in the social domain. Traditions, norms, laws, and customs foster shared predictions and expectations among individuals, thereby reducing uncertainty in social environments. On the other hand, arts and media expose us to simulated experiences that explore alternative social realities, allowing the predictive machinery of the brain to hone its skills through exposure to a wider array of potentially relevant social circumstances and scenarios. We first review key principles of predictive coding and active inference, and then explore the rationale of cultural traditions and artistic culture in this perspective. Finally, we draw parallels between institutionalized normative habits that stabilize social worlds and creative and imaginative acts that temporarily subvert established conventions to inject variability.

Critical cognitive science: A systematic review towards a critical science

AbstractMany leading scholars have highlighted the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in approaching research and practice in psychology. Critical Race Theory allows for cognitive science to take a more intersectional perspective rather than perpetuate the exclusionary and universal limitations associated with traditional cognitive science. This review and commentary apply CRT to cognitive science to address three main goals. The first is describing the history of cognitive science and how CRT tenets can help understand the need for a critical race perspective. Second is applying the CRT tenet of recognizing racism in cognitive science through a rigorous systematic review. The third is highlighting the tenet of whitewashing psychological phenomenon to explain epistemic exclusion and provide recommendations to combat it. CRT is an important framework in cognitive science as it can help combat the harmful methodologies and implications that have been perpetuated for decades (e.g., racist assumption of intelligence, exclusion of participants because of hair texture).

Order and change in art: towards an active inference account of aesthetic experience.

How to account for the power that art holds over us? Why do artworks touch us deeply, consoling, transforming or invigorating us in the process? In this paper, we argue that an answer to this question might emerge from a fecund framework in cognitive science known as predictive processing (a.k.a. active inference). We unpack how this approach connects sense-making and aesthetic experiences through the idea of an 'epistemic arc', consisting of three parts (curiosity, epistemic action and aha experiences), which we cast as aspects of active inference. We then show how epistemic arcs are built and sustained by artworks to provide us with those satisfying experiences that we tend to call 'aesthetic'. Next, we defuse two key objections to this approach; namely, that it places undue emphasis on the cognitive component of our aesthetic encounters-at the expense of affective aspects-and on closure and uncertainty minimization (order)-at the expense of openness and lingering uncertainty (change). We show that the approach offers crucial resources to account for the open-ended, free and playful behaviour inherent in aesthetic experiences. The upshot is a promising but deflationary approach, both philosophically informed and psychologically sound, that opens new empirical avenues for understanding our aesthetic encounters. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.

On the Proper Treatment of Dynamics in Cognitive Science.

This essay examines the relevance of dynamical ideas for cognitive science. On its own, the mere mathematical idea of a dynamical system is too weak to serve as a scientific theory of anything, and dynamical approaches within cognitive science are too rich and varied to be subsumed under a single "dynamical hypothesis." Instead, after first attempting to dissect the different notions of "dynamics" and "cognition" at play, a more specific theoretical framework for cognitive science broadly construed is sketched. This framework draws upon not only dynamical ideas, but also such contemporaneous perspectives as situatedness, embodiment, ecological psychology, enaction, neuroethology/neuroscience, artificial life, and biogenic approaches. The paper ends with some methodological suggestions for pursuing this theoretical framework.

Perception-action integration during inhibitory control is reflected in a concomitant multi-region processing of specific codes in the neurophysiological signal.

The integration of perception and action has long been studied in psychological science using overarching cognitive frameworks. Despite these being very successful in explaining perception-action integration, little is known about its neurophysiological and especially the functional neuroanatomical foundations. It is unknown whether distinct brain structures are simultaneously involved in the processing of perception-action integration codes and also to what extent demands on perception-action integration modulate activities in these structures. We investigate these questions in an EEG study integrating temporal and ICA-based EEG signal decomposition with source localization. For this purpose, we used data from 32 healthy participants who performed a 'TEC Go/Nogo' task. We show that the EEG signal can be decomposed into components carrying different informational aspects or processing codes relevant for perception-action integration. Importantly, these specific codes are processed independently in different brain structures, and their specific roles during the processing of perception-action integration differ. Some regions (i.e., the anterior cingulate and insular cortex) take a 'default role' because these are not modulated in their activity by demands or the complexity of event file coding processes. In contrast, regions in the motor cortex, middle frontal, temporal, and superior parietal cortices were not activated by 'default' but revealed modulations depending on the complexity of perception-action integration (i.e., whether an event file has to be reconfigured). Perception-action integration thus reflects a multi-region processing of specific fractions of information in the neurophysiological signal. This needs to be taken into account when further developing a cognitive science framework detailing perception-action integration.

Maturing the narrative sense through mixed reality games

This article explores the human ability to see meaningful narratives in the world and to invent fictional narratives as a sense. The senses allow us to pick up on patterns in the world and to coordinate our behaviour in relationship with those patterns. Sensing narratives plays an important role in situational appraisals and provides important context for what we see, hear, touch, etc. Drawing upon the predictive processing framework in cognitive science, this article will defend this thesis and explore how virtual and mixed reality technologies can contribute to new ways of making sense of the world. These new tools of situational appraisal will be understood in the context of a cultural and cognitive condition that media theories Douglas Rushkoff calls ‘present shock’.

Knowing the Knowing. Non-dual Meditative Practice From an Enactive Perspective.

Within a variety of contemplative traditions, non-dual-oriented practices were developed to evoke an experiential shift into a mode of experiencing in which the cognitive structures of self-other and subject–object subside. These practices serve to de-reify the enactment of an observing witness which is usually experienced as separate from the objects of awareness. While several contemplative traditions, such as Zen, Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta emphasize the importance of such a non-dual insight for the cultivation of genuine wellbeing, only very few attempts in contemplative science have turned toward the study of non-dual-oriented practices. This article starts from a recently developed theoretical cognitive science framework that models the requirements of a temporary experiential shift into a mode of experiencing free from cognitive subject–object structure. This model inspired by the enactive approach contributes theoretically grounded hypotheses for the much-needed rigorous study of non-dual practices and non-dual experiences. To do so, three steps are taken: first, common elements of non-dual-oriented practices are outlined. Second, the main ideas of enactive cognitive science are presented including a principled theoretical model of what is required for a shift to a pure non-dual experience, that is, an experiential mode that is unbound by subject–object duality. Third, this synthesized theoretical model of the requirements for the recognition of the non-dual is then compared with a specific non-dual style of meditation practice, namely, Mahāmudrā practice from Tibetan Buddhism. This third step represents a heuristic for evaluating the external coherence of the presented model. With this, the aim is to point toward a principled enactive view of non-dual meditative practice. In drawing the implications of the presented model, this article ends with an outlook toward next steps for further developing a research agenda that may fully address the concrete elements of non-dual practices.

A micro-phenomenological and semiotic approach to cognition in practice: a path toward an integrative approach to studying cognition-in-the-world and from within

The article presents the course-of-experience framework and how it contributes to studying cognition in practice. The aim is twofold: (a) to argue for a phenomenologically and semiotically inspired enactivist approach to practice and cognition in practice and (b) to describe research methods that provide rigorous first-person data in relation to practice—in other words, a view “from within” of practice. Practice is considered to be a relevant unit of analysis for studying cognition-in-the-world and is defined as enacted, lived, situated, embodied, and enculturated. Practice is not viewed as a “context for” but as “constitutive” of the cognitive process itself. This article describes (a) the epistemological foundation and general assumptions of the course-of-experience framework, (b) the associated way of looking at pre-reflective self-consciousness and its relation to practice, (c) the analytical hypothesis derived from Peirce’s semeiotic, and (d) some methodological considerations related to data collection, data processing, and analysis. In the concluding section, we outline the added value of the course-of-experience framework for cognitive science, and we indicate possible directions for further research.

Music Psychology of the Piano-Playing Hands in Historical Discourse

Music-making hands have drawn considerable scholarly attention, featuring prominently in recent investigations in biomechanics, paleoanthropology, and cognitive sciences. Yet already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, piano pedagogy theories were evolving not only in response to changing musical styles but also to scientific conceptualizations of the human body. Taking piano-playing hands as a platform for human/machine interaction, this article analyzes the historical discourse on piano-playing hands in relation to the contemporary scientific context and via the framework of cognitive science. In this process, these scientific and pedagogical writings, which have been previously discussed only dispersedly and marginally, emerge as more than didactic instruction. This historical discourse on music psychology of piano-playing hands points to music cognition that is extended beyond the body, situated in activity, and distributed beyond the individual.

COGNITIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF INCONGRUENT L2/C2 PEDAGOGIES IN TERTIARY EDUCATION. TEACHING ENGLISH LITERATURE TO SPANISH UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN SPAIN HOSTING L2 CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS

Enactive knowledge is knowledge acquired when an organism acts in an environment. Enactivating for the first time any experimental literary text is an awkward cognitive task in a first language/culture L1/C1 environment, but situated in a L2/C2 teaching/learning context it constitutes a real cognitive Gordian knot. This complex sociocognitive situation is framed in a view of language as a central aspect of human socio-cultural situatedness. From a general view of cognition as action, in this paper we are concerned with the organization of a method that facilitates this challenging teaching/learning situation: a culture-specific L1 Spanish learning process of a L2 experimental English literary text in Tertiary Education in Gran Canaria (Spain). The case study described here explores the crosslinguistic and crosscultural conditions in which Spanish undergraduates understand the way English experimental writers think, during tasks of reading 17th or 20th c. English texts from the Enlightenment, Modernism, and Postmodernism. So far, related Spanish academic practices have mostly relied on unidirectional conduit and transmission metaphors, thus breaking the conceptual, linguistic, and cultural organization of original texts that further artfully break the organization of ordinary English language to enhance the reader’s perception of other living minds and experiences. Both Cognitive Poetics and its more dynamicist extension Biopoetics seem to be a true-to-life methodological framework for a unifying reading of texts from different cultures, times and genres. Moreover, Cognitive Semantics resumes 17th c. foundational inquiries related to thought, language and culture, as altered by human perception, in the most advanced transversal framework of Cognitive Sciences. This paper is initially framed within a contrastive Conceptual Metaphor dynamics of meaning and knowledge of the World constructions in search of a congruent first immersion by L1/C1 Spanish students into the cultural differences of these innovative L2/C2 English texts.

Worlds Apart? Reassessing von Uexküll’s Umwelt in Embodied Cognition with Canguilhem, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze

Jakob von Uexküll’s (1864-1944) account of Umwelt has been proposed as a mediating concept to bridge the gap between ecological psychology’s realism about environmental information and enactivism’s emphasis on the organism’s active role in constructing the meaningful world it inhabits. If successful, this move would constitute a significant step towards establishing a single ecological-enactive framework for cognitive science. However, Uexküll’s thought itself contains different perspectives that are in tension with each other, and the concept of Umwelt is developed in representationalist terms that conflict with the commitments of both enactivism and ecological psychology. One central issue shared by all these approaches is the problem of how a living being experiences its environment. In this paper, we will look at Uexküll’s reception in French philosophy and highlight the different ways in which the concept of Umwelt functions in the work of Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis helps clarify different aspects of Uexküll’s thought and the deeper philosophical implications of importing his concepts into embodied cognitive science. This paper is part of a recent trend in which enactivism engages with continental philosophy in a way that both deepens and transcends the traditional links to phenomenology, including most recently the thought of Georg W. F. Hegel and Gilbert Simondon. However, no more than a brief outline and introduction to the potentials and challenges of this complex conceptual intersection can be given here. Our hope is that it serves to make more explicit the philosophical issues that are at stake for cognitive science in the question of experienced environments, while charting a useful course for future research.

Towards an Evolutionary Account of Human Kinship Systems

Kinship plays a foundational role in organizing human social behavior on both local and more global scales. Hence, any adequate account of the evolution of human sociality must include an account of the evolution of human kinship. This article aims to make progress on the latter task by providing a few key pieces of an evolutionary model of kinship systems. The article is especially focused on the connection between primate social cognition and the origins of kinship systems. I argue that early conceptions of kinship in our line were very likely scaffolded by preexisting forms of primate social cognition. It was only later, as linguistic resources increased in our line, and as human social life grew more complex, that these conceptions came to resemble kin categories as we now know them. I conclude by situating “kin cognition” within a broader cognitive science framework for studying capacities that reflect both innate knowledge and human cultural learning.

On the Complex Interaction between Collective Learning and Social Dynamics

This paper is motivated by the perspective ideas proposed in our previous studies, where some challenging problems, for instance qualitative analysis of the solution to nonlinear problems and micro-macro asymptotic analysis, where posed. Our work focuses on the study of the interactions between learning dynamics and other types of dynamics which can be modeled by kinetic theory methods. The contents are presented in three parts. First, a general description of different theories of learning dynamics within the framework of cognitive sciences is critically analyzed with the aim of capturing the main features of the system towards modeling. Subsequently, the class of systems which are the object of the modeling approach is defined by showing how the previous structure can be developed, thanks to new conceptual ideas, including the concept of symmetric and asymmetric learning, towards modeling. Finally, some applications are selected to show how the approach can be methodologically applied.

Why reason? Hugo Mercier's and Dan Sperber's The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding

The standard view of the function of reason is that it emerged to enable individuals to make better judgements and choices. Once individuals could think better, and once we had suitable communicative tools, individual reasoning acquired a public face; we reasoned together as well as privately, in our own mind. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that this gets the story the wrong way around: reasoning evolved for public purposes: to persuade, negotiate, assess. Once it was established publically, perhaps it acquired a private function too. With the exception of a few minor complaints, this evolutionary case is well made. However, Mercier and Sperber embed their evolutionary case within a modular view of the mind and suggest a modular view of public reasoning itself. While I find the evolutionary case persuasive, I am sceptical of the cognitive science framework.

Introduction. Language acquisition and cognitive science at the crossroads

AbstractThe articles compiled in this volume provide an account of current research in “core” areas in the field of language acquisition (primary, secondary and bilingual) and suggest new avenues of research and ways of approaching the relationship between the theories and methodologies. Within the framework of cognitive sciences, specifically linguistics and psycholinguistics, the articles investigate language acquisition from four different dimensions: processing and lexical access, the prosody–pragmatics interface, the discourse–syntax interface and language impairment (so-called specific language impairment). Using data from four Romance languages – Catalan, French, Portuguese and Spanish – these articles address state-of-the-art issues pertaining to the relationship between language acquisition and other cognitive modules.

Bayesian Cognitive Science, Unification, and Explanation

It is often claimed that the greatest value of the Bayesian framework in cognitive science consists in its unifying power. Several Bayesian cognitive scientists assume that unification is obviously linked to explanatory power. But this link is not obvious, as unification in science is a heterogeneous notion, which may have little to do with explanation. While a crucial feature of most adequate explanations in cognitive science is that they reveal aspects of the causal mechanism that produces the phenomenon to be explained, the kind of unification afforded by the Bayesian framework to cognitive science does not necessarily reveal aspects of a mechanism. Bayesian unification, nonetheless, can place fruitful constraints on causal-mechanical explanation.

Distributed Bayesian Computation and Self-Organized Learning in Sheets of Spiking Neurons with Local Lateral Inhibition.

During the last decade, Bayesian probability theory has emerged as a framework in cognitive science and neuroscience for describing perception, reasoning and learning of mammals. However, our understanding of how probabilistic computations could be organized in the brain, and how the observed connectivity structure of cortical microcircuits supports these calculations, is rudimentary at best. In this study, we investigate statistical inference and self-organized learning in a spatially extended spiking network model, that accommodates both local competitive and large-scale associative aspects of neural information processing, under a unified Bayesian account. Specifically, we show how the spiking dynamics of a recurrent network with lateral excitation and local inhibition in response to distributed spiking input, can be understood as sampling from a variational posterior distribution of a well-defined implicit probabilistic model. This interpretation further permits a rigorous analytical treatment of experience-dependent plasticity on the network level. Using machine learning theory, we derive update rules for neuron and synapse parameters which equate with Hebbian synaptic and homeostatic intrinsic plasticity rules in a neural implementation. In computer simulations, we demonstrate that the interplay of these plasticity rules leads to the emergence of probabilistic local experts that form distributed assemblies of similarly tuned cells communicating through lateral excitatory connections. The resulting sparse distributed spike code of a well-adapted network carries compressed information on salient input features combined with prior experience on correlations among them. Our theory predicts that the emergence of such efficient representations benefits from network architectures in which the range of local inhibition matches the spatial extent of pyramidal cells that share common afferent input.

Where is the understanding?

Recent work in epistemology and philosophy of science has argued that understanding is an important cognitive state that philosophers should seek to analyse. This paper offers a new perspective on understanding by looking to work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Understanding is normally taken to be inside the head. I argue that this view is mistaken. Often, understanding is a state that criss-crosses brain, body and world. To support this claim, I draw on extended cognition, a burgeoning framework in cognitive science that stresses the crucial role played by tools, material representations and the wider environment in our cognitive processes. I defend an extended view of understanding against likely objections and argue that it has important consequences for questions concerning the nature of understanding and its relationship to explanation.

The pragmatic foundations of communication: An action-oriented model of the origin of language

In this paper we propose an action-oriented model of language origins that is compatible with the embodied perspective of mind. Specifically, we maintain that a crucial issue for the investigation of the origin of human communication is how language is grounded in the context. In support of such a proposal, we maintain that: a) the grounding of language is tied to a specific aspect of the embodied mind, namely the aspect that emphasizes the embedded character of cognition; b) the emphasis posed on this particular character fits well with a model of language origins founded on gesture. The connection of embedded cognition and the gestural model allows us to propose an explanation of language origin capable of overcoming the problems in the classical symbolic framework of cognitive sciences.