Cooperativity and Selectivity in Conversation

Conversing with others is a mundane, daily activity of nearly all humans, yet it is an extraordinary feat of social collaboration that depends on cooperation, social learning, and collective coordination across an array of caring relationships. This article briefly considers the cooperative and selective nature of language and something of its contributions to the structural, social, and developmental character of human action and cognition. In doing so, it introduces 3 other articles that form a special section of this issue that is a continuation of an earlier special issue (Fowler & Hodges, 2015). The evidence reviewed here points to the possibility that the integrated, synergistic, cooperative character of language may prove to be a particular strength of ecological approaches to cognition and action rather than a liability.     

Bridging History and Social Psychology: What, How and Why

This special issue aims to bridge history and social psychology by bringing together historians and social psychologists in an exercise of reading and learning from each other??s work. This interdisciplinary exercise is not only timely but of great importance for both disciplines. Social psychologists can benefit from engaging with historical sources by being able to contextualise their findings and enrich their theoretical models. It is not only that all social and psychological phenomena have a history but this history is very much part of present-day and future developments. On the other hand historians can enhance their analysis of historical sources by drawing upon the conceptual tools developed in social psychology. They can ??test?? these tools and contribute to their validation and enrichment from completely different perspectives. Most important, as contributions to this special issue amply demonstrate, psychology??s ??historical turn?? has the potential to shed a new light on striking, yet underexplored, similarities between contemporary public spheres and their pre-modern counterparts. This issue thereby calls into question the dichotomy between traditional and de-traditionalized societies??a distinction that lies at the heart of many social psychology accounts of the world we live in. The present editorial will introduce and consider this act of bridging history and social psychology by focusing on three main questions: What is the bridge made of? How can the two disciplines be bridged? and Why we cross this interdisciplinary bridge? In the end a reflection on the future of this collaboration will be offered.     

Contributions of Functional Neuroimaging to the Study of Social Cognition

ABSTRACT— Increasingly, researchers have been applying the methods of cognitive neuroscience—especially functional neuroimaging—to address questions about how humans make inferences about the mental states of others. At the same time, a number of critics have warned against the use of these new techniques by suggesting that functional neuroimaging has been unable to provide novel insights into the nature of social cognition. Addressing these critiques, this article briefly describes some of the ways in which functional neuroimaging has indeed redirected the study of the social mind, reviewing not only the novel data these techniques have provided but also the ways in which cognitive neuroscience has prompted researchers to consider entirely new questions about the organization of human social cognition. Such questions include whether or not there are cognitive processes dedicated for social thought; what the constituent parts of our social-cognitive system might be; how social cognition overlaps with other mental processes in previously unanticipated ways; and whether social cognition might play a privileged role in the human cognitive repertoire.     

A socioecological perspective on primate cognition,past and present

The papers in this special issue examine the relationship between social and ecological cognition in primates. We refer to the intersection of these two domains as socioecological cognition. Examples of socioecological cognition include socially learned predator alarm calls and socially sensitive foraging decisions. In this review we consider how primate cognition may have been shaped by the interaction of social and ecological influences in their evolutionary history. The ability to remember distant, out-of-sight locations is an ancient one, shared by many mammals and widespread among primates. It seems some monkeys and apes have evolved the ability to form more complex representations of resources, integrating “what-where-how much” information. This ability allowed anthropoids to live in larger, more cohesive groups by minimizing competition for limited resources between group members. As group size increased, however, competition for resources also increased, selecting for enhanced social skills. Enhanced social skills in turn made a more sophisticated relationship to the environment possible. The interaction of social and ecological influences created a spiraling effect in the evolution of primate intelligence. In contrast, lemurs may not have evolved the ability to form complex representations which would allow them to consider the size and location of resources. This lack in lemur ecological cognition may restrict the size of frugivorous lemur social groups, thereby limiting the complexity of lemur social life. In this special issue, we have brought together two review papers, five field studies, and one laboratory study to investigate the interaction of social and ecological factors in relation to foraging. Our goal is to stimulate research that considers social and ecological factors acting together on cognitive evolution, rather than in isolation. Cross fertilization of experimental and observational studies from captivity and the field is important for increasing our understanding of this relationship. This contribution is part of the Special Issue “A Socioecological Perspective on Primate Cognition”.     

How Children and Adults Represent God's Mind

For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods. Research on religious cognition is spread across sub‐disciplines, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of how people reason about gods' minds. We integrate approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the origins of religious cognition. First, we show that although adults explicitly discriminate supernatural minds from human minds, their implicit responses reveal far less discrimination. Next, we demonstrate that children's religious cognition often matches adults' implicit responses, revealing anthropomorphic notions of God's mind. Together, data from children and adults suggest the intuitive nature of perceiving God's mind as human‐like. We then propose three complementary explanations for why anthropomorphism persists in adulthood, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be (a) an instance of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic; (b) a reflection of early testimony; and/or (c) an evolutionary byproduct.     

Uniquely primate,uniquely human

Two hypotheses about primate cognition are proposed. First, it is proposed that primates, but not other mammals, understand categories of relations among external entities. In the physical domain primates have special skills in tasks such as oddity, transitivity, and relation matching that require facility with relational categories; in the social domain primates have special skills in understanding the third-party social relationships that hold among other individuals in their groups. Second, it is proposed that humans, but not other primates, understand the causal and intentional relations that hold among external entities. In the physical domain only humans understand causal forces as mediating the connection between sequentially ordered events; in the social domain only humans understand the behavior of others as intentionally directed and controlled by desired outcomes. Both these uniquely primate and these uniquely human cognitive skills are hypothesized to have their origins in adaptations for negotiating complex social interactions.     

Primate Cognition: Introduction to the Issue

I introduce the special issue by: (1) outlining something of the relationship between mainstream cognitive science and the study of nonhuman primate cognition; (2) providing a brief overview of the scientific study of primate cognition and how the papers of this special issue fit into that scientific paradigm; and (3) explicating my own views about the relationship between nonhuman primate cognition and human cognition.     

Eliciting children’s and adults’ accounts of road accidents

Psychological knowledge from eye-witness research is applied here to the particular problem of reporting road accidents. Thereby the paper highlights some of the assumptions in eye-witness research. The interface between that research and the reporting of road accidents is examined by reference to existing social psychological notions. These are notions about questioning and about hypothesis testing. The paper makes special reference to the questioning of child witnesses because problems therein are particularly acute.     

Community Psychology at the Crossroads: Prospects for Interdisciplinary Research

Effective engagement in interdisciplinary work is critical if community psychology is to achieve its promise as a field of ecological inquiry and social action. The purpose of this paper and special issue is to help make the benefits of interdisciplinary community research clearer and to identify and begin to address its challenges. Although some areas of psychology (e.g., biological, cognitive and health) have made substantial interdisciplinary strides in recent decades, progress in community psychology (and related areas) is more modest. In this article we explore the prospects for expanding and improving interdisciplinary community research. Challenges include designs, measures, and analytical frameworks that integrate multiple levels of analysis from individuals through families, organizations, and communities to policy jurisdictions, and the complexities involved in simultaneously bringing together multiple disciplinary collaborators and community partners. Challenges to interdisciplinary collaboration common to all disciplines include the disciplinary nature of academic culture and reward structures, limited funding for interdisciplinary work and uncertainties related to professional identity and marketability. Overcoming these challenges requires a synergy among facilitative factors at the levels of the interdisciplinary project team (e.g., the framing question; embedded relationships; leadership), the investigators (e.g., commitment to new learning; time to invest), and the external context (e.g., physical, administrative, economic and intellectual resources and support for interdisciplinary work). We conclude by identifying several exemplars of effective interdisciplinary collaborations and concrete steps our field can take to enhance our development as a vibrant community-based, multilevel discipline increasingly devoted to interdisciplinary inquiry and action.     

Evolutionary developmental psychology: Current status and future directions

The field of developmental psychology is part of a continuum of disciplines, from cell biology to cultural anthropology, that are focused on understanding developing and potentially evolving phenotypes; the reciprocal interactions between genetics and experiences produce variation in developing phenotypes and this variation is the grist for evolutionary selection. The articles in this issue provide cutting edge and multidisciplinary analyses of developing and potentially evolving phenotypes in areas that are of central interest to developmental scientists, including mother–infant attachments, stress responses in children, social cognition, and life span development. The articles and other recent works signal the reemergence of developmental psychology as an evolutionarily informed, multidisciplinary field. In this view, it is not about nature versus nurture or biology versus psychology, it is about tackling difficult problems at multiple levels of analysis, each of which has something to contribute and none of which is sufficient in and of itself.     

Social cognition in the first year

Although the study of infancy has answered many important questions about the human capacity for social cognition, the relatively young field of developmental social cognition is far from reaching its adulthood. With the merging of developmental, behavioral and neurocognitive sciences, some growing pains are in store. New work demonstrates that research into early social cognitive development must integrate various research fields and methods in order to achieve a more robust understanding of the nature and parameters of human social cognition.     

Individual differences in music performance

Music cognition depends on the existence and deployment of processes for detecting, storing and organizing musical materials according to underlying structural features. Common cultural experiences develop these processes to a certain degree, but specifically designed and supported learning environments are required to achieve the levels of expertise required to perform western art music. Certain motivational and social factors are therefore implicated in the maintenance of activities that promote skill-acquisition, such as practice. Expert musical performance is not just a matter of technical motor skill, it also requires the ability to generate expressively different performances of the same piece of music according to the nature of intended structural and emotional communication. This review examines these abilities and describes how some of them have been shown to have lawful relationships to objective musical and extra-musical parameters. Psychological research is thus engaged in a process of demystifying musical expertise, a process that helps to improve upon culturally prevalent, but ultimately non-explanatory, notions of inborn 'talent'.     

On the Nature of Philosophy

This paper claims that what philosophy primarily does is interpret our notions, offer ways of understanding these notions that are not scientific in nature but not contrary to science either. The paper draws a distinction between conceptual analysis, a highly constrained enterprise that is supposed to bring to light what was in the concept all along, and the interpretation of notions, a creative enterprise that offers ways of understanding notions that were not already prefigured by the content of these notions—philosophy consists in the latter, not the former. It explains how these interpretations are justified and what the difference is between better and worse interpretations. The remainder of the paper is organized around three headings: philosophy and science, philosophy and language, and philosophy and progress. It claims that in philosophy there is no real progress, but that philosophy does move forward because the notions at issue are endlessly interpretable.     

Toward a Social Psychology of Aging

The articles in this special issue highlight how social psychology can further the understanding of aging. One goal of this special issue is to generate more interest in aging as an area of study for social psychologists. A second goal is to challenge readers to think about how their research interconnects with issues in aging. A third goal is to demonstrate how social psychological processes have direct applications to real-world issues that face people as they age. This introduction to the special issue provides additional examples of how social psychology can contribute to a better understanding of aging.     

Ethical Obligations of Special Services Personnel

Although there is increased lip-service paid to the need for educators to behave ethically, special services personnel are aware of many situations in which their colleagues or supervisors show little awareness of ethical principles. In this article, we address this issue from a variety of perspectives. First, we discuss the relationship between professional ethics and the broader concept of "professionalism." and discuss some of the reasons why education has not reached the level of commitment to ethics training and enforcement that is found in more mature vrofessions. Second, we present a list of ethical principles that appear to have universal applicability across professions and illustrate some of he ways in which special services personnel sometimes violate these principles. Third. we discuss some of the reasons why ethical violations occur and what might be done to address this problem. Particular explanatory attention is paid to the interdisciplinary and hierarchical/bureaucratic nature of school settings, and the tendency of administrators to emphasize the primacy of perceived organizational needs. Among the suggestions made is the call for educational agencies at all levels to develop their own detailed ethical codes and casebooks and to establish interdisciplinary ethics committees that will provide training, consultation and complaint resolution.     

Scattered naive theories:: why the human mind is isomorphic to the internet web

This paper constitutes an attempt to derive the epistemological consequences of what is known in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology on the nature of naive theories. The process of cognitive development and knowledge acquisition is such that uncoordinated knowledge must result. There is no process active in long-term memory to harmonize inconsistent parts. Coordination takes place in working memory (WM), and cognitive psychology has long established its extreme exiguity. Units of explanation and domains of coherence are therefore small. This is, indeed, a limitation of our cognition, but it is tenable pragmatically. Naive theories, on any one issue, do not form, psychologically, cognitively, a natural kind. These theses about how our knowledge is acquired, organized, accessed, and used help to bring out how one should think about naive theories.     

Concerning Gibson's ‘on the face of it’: Immediate perception and single-glance face recognition

The paper notes (1) that “thinking Gibsonian” is to be torn between two loves: cognition and reality, (2) that just because of this the cognitive scientist may beneficiently and more thoroughly rediscover that they are only two faces of his one true love: Meaning. This issue is elaborated as “the problem of intentionality” and culminates in the conclusion that Gibson's direct ecological approach to visual perception is not a theory about the constitution of perceptual meaning, which is the domain of the indirect cognitive approach. Therefore the constant Gibsonian attacks on indirect theories might be both misled and misleading. The second half of the paper begins with noting that this may be due to a confounding of the “direct” level of explanation of the perceiver with the “indirect” levels of phenomenologist and visual scientist. Next the scientist's process notions of direct and indirect theories are discussed with respect to single-glance face recognition. Within this second half of the paper about 20 different meanings of “direct” or “immediate” are presented (printed in italics). Most of these are generally acceptable and should, thus, not be invoked in support of entirely different notions, which are very problematic because these seem to eliminate the concept of mind-as-cognitive-process.     

Social learning in humans and nonhuman animals: theoretical and empirical dissections

The past decade has seen a resurgent, concerted interest in social learning research comparing human and nonhuman animals. In this special issue, we present a synthesis of work that consolidates what is currently known and provides a platform for future research. Consequently, we include both new empirical studies and novel theoretical proposals describing work with both human children and adults and a range of nonhuman animals. In this introduction, we describe the background of this special issue and provide a context for each of the eight articles it contains. We hope such introduction will not only help the reader synthesize the interdisciplinary views that characterize this broad field, but also stimulate development of new methods, concepts, and data.     

Personal and Social Factors in Achievement-Related Cognition: A Study of Attribution,Appraisal, and Emotion among University Students in Delhi

In recent years, achievement-related cognition and emotion have received a lot of attention from all sections of researchers. A number of researchers have tried to empirically study the determinants and consequences of achievement-related cognition. The explanations given range between individualistic explanations and sociocultural explanations. It is believed that both personal and social factors interact together in bringing about variations in achievement-related cognition and emotion. It is widely accepted that there are variations in human behavior, which are generally believed to be the result of generation-old cultural changes. Cultural factors are believed to exert influence on human behavior and psyche. When one talks about culture, it is mostly treated as a homogeneous entity. Variations within cultures and intra-cultural differences due to various social factors are largely ignored. Researchers world over have started believing in the fact that exposure not only to varying cultural conditions but also to different social factors affects individuals’ psychological functioning. Present research is directed towards exploring variations in achievement-related cognition and emotion due to personal and social factors. Eighty students from a university in Delhi participated in the research. The personal factor of self-construal and social factors like gender, social setting, perceived social class, and family were taken into account. Findings of the study corroborated the hypothesis that both personal and social factors have an impact on achievement-related cognition and emotion.