The emergence of Cognitive Hearing Science

Cognitive Hearing Science or Auditory Cognitive Science is an emerging field of interdisciplinary research concerning the interactions between hearing and cognition. It follows a trend over the last half century for interdisciplinary fields to develop, beginning with Neuroscience, then Cognitive Science, then Cognitive Neuroscience, and then Cognitive Vision Science. A common theme is that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand complex human behaviors, to develop technologies incorporating knowledge of these behaviors, and to find solutions for individuals with impairments that undermine typical behaviors. Accordingly, researchers in traditional academic disciplines, such as Psychology, Physiology, Linguistics, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Sociology benefit from collaborations with each other, and with researchers in Computer Science and Engineering working on the design of technologies, and with health professionals working with individuals who have impairments. The factors that triggered the emergence of Cognitive Hearing Science include the maturation of the component disciplines of Hearing Science and Cognitive Science, new opportunities to use complex digital signal-processing to design technologies suited to performance in challenging everyday environments, and increasing social imperatives to help people whose communication problems span hearing and cognition. Cognitive Hearing Science is illustrated in research on three general topics: (1) language processing in challenging listening conditions; (2) use of auditory communication technologies or the visual modality to boost performance; (3) changes in performance with development, aging, and rehabilitative training. Future directions for modeling and the translation of research into practice are suggested.     

On the role of social interaction in social cognition: a mechanistic alternative to enactivism

Researchers in the enactivist tradition have recently argued that social interaction can constitute social cognition, rather than simply serve as the context for social cognition. They contend that a focus on social interaction corrects the overemphasis on mechanisms inside the individual in the explanation of social cognition. I critically assess enactivism??s claims about the explanatory role of social interaction in social cognition. After sketching the enactivist approach to cognition in general and social cognition in particular, I identify problems with an enactivist taxonomy of roles for social interaction in the explanation of social cognition (contextual, enabling, and constitutive). In particular, I show that this enactivist taxonomy does not clearly distinguish between enabling conditions and constitutive elements, which would make them in danger of committing the coupling-constitution fallacy found in some attempts to extend cognition. I explore resources enactivism has to more clearly demarcate constitutive parts of a cognitive system, but identify problems in applying them to some of the main cases of social cognition enactivists characterize as being constituted by social interaction. I offer the mechanistic approach to explanation as an alternative that captures much of what enactivists want to say about the relations between social and individual levels, but views social interactions from the perspective of embedded cognition rather than as being constitutive of social cognition.     

Background shifts affect explanatory style: how a pragmatic theory of explanation accounts for background effects in the generation of explanations

Cognitive scientists are interested in explanation because it provides a window into the cognition that underlies one’s understanding of the world. We argue that the study of explanation has tended to focus on what makes an explanation “bona fide” as opposed to the processes involved in how the explanation is generated. In the current study, we asked participants to respond to the request for an explanation within a novel domain after we manipulated their initial exposure to the domain, and thus the background of the request. In two experiments, we found evidence that the background shaped participants’ interpretations of the prompt for the explanation and that this, in turn, influenced whether they used a causal or functional style of explanation when responding to the prompt. We also asked participants to evaluate a number of explanations and found that the manipulation of the background did not have the same effect on the evaluative tasks. Our data support a pragmatic approach (e.g. The scientific image. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980) to the study of explanation generation, a philosophical approach which argues that the background influences the interpretation of the question, the development of a relevance relation which connects the question and explanation, and the identification of some set of candidate answers. We also suggest there is an important difference between the process of generating an explanation and evaluating an explanation, a difference that has escaped the attention of cognitive scientists thus far.     

Educational potentials of embodied art reflection

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - With reference to a standard work on embodied cognition – The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991) by Francisco Varela, Evan...     

预测加工：走出两代认知科学的历史僵局

表征-计算观与具身行动观对认知的本质几乎做了截然相反的强调。近年来,预测加工理论的发展为统一两代认知科学提供了契机。预测加工是层级预测加工与主动预测加工这两大理论部件的合称,前一部件主要继承了第一代认知科学中的层级计算加工进路,后一部件则发扬了第二代认知科学中与行动有关的理论,这两大理论部件被视为同一个统一整合理论的两个不同方面。在当代,预测加工被认为有望成为未来认知科学的新范式。     

Detecting Design: Fast and Frugal or All Things Considered?

Within the Cognitive Science of Religion, Justin Barrett has proposed that humans possess a hyperactive agency detection device that was selected for in our evolutionary past because ‘over detecting’ (as opposed to ‘under detecting’) the existence of a predator conferred a survival advantage. Within the Intelligent Design debate, William Dembski has proposed the law of small probability, which states that specified events of small probability do not occur by chance. Within the Fine-Tuning debate, John Leslie has asserted a tidiness principle such that, if we can think of a good explanation for some state of affairs, then an explanation is needed for that state of affairs. In this paper I examine similarities between these three proposals and suggest that they can all be explained with reference to the existence of an explanation attribution module in the human mind. The forgoing analysis is considered with reference to a contrast between classical rationality and what Gerd Gigerenzer and others have called ecological rationality.

Shanahan on Symbolization

In his article ‘A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain,’ Dan Shanahan claims that the post-war Cognitive Turn focused mainly on information processing and that little attention was paid to the dramatic role played by emotion in human cognition. One key argument in his defence of a more comprehensive view of human cognition rests upon the idea that the process of symbolization—a unique capacity only developed by humans—combines, right from the start, information processing and feelings. The author argues that any theory ignoring this fact would miss the whole point, just as mainstream cognitive science has done since Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, exactly 50 years ago.

A logic of intentions and beliefs

Intentions are an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We present a formal theory of intentions and beliefs based on Discourse Representation Theory that captures many of their important logical properties. Unlike possible worlds approaches, this theory does not assume that agents are perfect reasoners, and gives a realistic view of their internal architecture; unlike most representational approaches, it has anobjective semantics, and does not rely on anad hoc labeling of the internal states of agents. We describe a minimal logic for intentions and beliefs that is sound and complete relative to our semantics. We discuss several additional axioms, and the constraints on the models that validate them.     

Twelve issues for cognitive science

I am struck by how little is known about so much of cognition. One goal of this paper is to argue for the need to consider a rich set of interlocking issues in the study of cognition. Mainstream work in cognition—including my own—ignores many critical aspects of animate cognitive systems. Perhaps one reason that existing theories say so little relevant to real world activities is the neglect of social and cultural factors, of emotion, and of the major points that distinguish an animate cognitive system from an artificial one: the need to survive, to regulate its own operation, to maintain itself, to exist in the environment, to change from a small, uneducated, immature system to an adult, developed, knowledgeable one. Human cognition is not the same as artificial cognition, if only because the human organism must also be concerned with the problems of life, of development, of survival. There must be a regulatory system that interacts with the cognitive component. And it may well be that it is the cognitive component that is subservient, evolved primarily for the benefit of the regulatory system, working through the emotions, through affect. I argue that several concepts must become fundamental parts of the study of cognition, including the roles of culture, of social interaction, of emotions, and of motivation. I argue that there are at least 12 issues that should comprise the study of cognition, and thereby, the field of Cognitive Science. We need to study a wide variety of behavior before we can hope to understand a single class. Cognitive scientists as a whole ought to make more use of evidence from the neurosciences, from brain damage and mental illness, from cognitive sociology and anthropology, and from clinical studies of the human. These must be accompanied, of course, with the study of language, of the psychological aspects of human processing structures, and of artificially intelligent mechanisms. The study of Cognitive Science requires a complex interaction among different issues of concern, an interaction that will not be properly understood until all parts are understood, with no part independent of the others, the whole requiring the parts, and the parts the whole.     

The Growth of Multidisciplinarity in the Cognitive Science Society

In a case study of the growth of cognitive science, we analyzed the activities of the Cognitive Science Society with a particular emphasis on the multidisciplinary nature of the field. Analyses of departmental affiliations, training back-grounds, research methodology, and paper citations suggest that the journal Cognitive Science and the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society are dominated by cognitive psychology and computer science, rather than being an equal division among the constituent disciplines of cognitive science. However, at many levels, a growing percentage of work was found to involve a conjunction of multiple disciplines, such that approximately 30–50% of recent work in the Cognitive Science Society is multidisciplinary. In a questionnaire study of cognitive scientists involved in collaborative research, multidisciplinarity was found to shape the research process and affect the factors associated with successful research.     

High-level Enactive and Embodied Cognition in Expert Sport Performance

Abstract

Mental representation has long been central to standard accounts of action and cognition generally, and in the context of sport. We argue for an enactive and embodied account that rejects the idea that representation is necessary for cognition, and posit instead that cognition arises, or is enacted, in certain types of interactions between organisms and their environment. More specifically, we argue that enactive theories explain some kinds of high-level cognition, those that underlie some of the best performances in sport and similar practices (dance, martial arts), better than representational accounts. Flow and mushin (mindfully fluid awareness) are explained enactively to this end. This results in a mutually beneficial analysis where enactivism offers theoretical and practical advantages as an explanation of high performance in sports, while the latter validates enactivism.     

Neuroconstructivism

Neuroconstructivism is a theoretical framework focusing on the construction of representations in the developing brain. Cognitive development is explained as emerging from the experience-dependent development of neural structures supporting mental representations. Neural development occurs in the context of multiple interacting constraints acting on different levels, from the individual cell to the external environment of the developing child. Cognitive development can thus be understood as a trajectory originating from the constraints on the underlying neural structures. This perspective offers an integrated view of normal and abnormal development as well as of development and adult processing, and it stands apart from traditional cognitive approaches in taking seriously the constraints on cognition inherent to the substrate that delivers it.     

Make up your mind: octopus cognition and hybrid explanations

In order to argue that cognitive science should be more accepting of explanatory plurality, this paper presents the control of fetching movements in the octopus as an exemplar of a cognitive process that comprises distinct and non-redundant representation-using and non-representational elements. Fetching is a type of movement that representational analyses can normally account for completely—but not in the case of the octopus. Instead, a comprehensive account of octopus fetching requires the non-overlapping use of both representational and non-representational explanatory frameworks. What this need for a pluralistic or hybrid explanation implies is that cognitive science should be more open to using both representational and non-representational accounts of cognition, depending on their respective appropriateness to the type of cognition in question.

     

The role of cognitive architectures in general artificial intelligence

The term “Cognitive Architectures” indicates both abstract models of cognition, in natural and artificial agents, and the software instantiations of such models which are then employed in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The main role of Cognitive Architectures in AI is that one of enabling the realization of artificial systems able to exhibit intelligent behavior in a general setting through a detailed analogy with the constitutive and developmental functioning and mechanisms underlying human cognition. We provide a brief overview of the status quo and the potential role that Cognitive Architectures may serve in the fields of Computational Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research.     

Reassessing Conventional Approaches to Conversion: Toward a New Synthesis

What are the crucial factors that may cause people to become religiously active at a certain point of their lives? I give an overview of key analytic elements of the conventional approaches to conversion: Lofland and Stark's (1965) social networks model; (spoiled) identity and religious seekership; socialization; religious markets; recruitment; cultural factors; and convert role monitoring and mastering. Subsequent sections present a critique of the conventional approaches, with their biases and emphasis on the crisis factor, and a synthesis of their best elements in the conversion career approach (currently in development). The latter distinguishes five levels of religious participation: preaffiliation, affiliation, conversion, confession, and disaffiliation. These levels are, in turn, influenced by personality factors, social factors, institutional factors, cultural factors, and contingency factors. The conversion careers approach offers directions for future research by distinguishing five levels of religious participation, systematically listing the factors in religious participation, avoiding “crisis determinism,” developing a conceptualization of the individual with active and passive elements, being gender sensitive, and including a life‐cycle approach to avoid the “adolescent bias” of earlier literature.     

The Essential Elements of an Evolutionary Theory of Perception

ABSTRACT

Traditional theories of perception developed for centuries before Darwin conceived his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Although many areas of psychological theory and research now have mainstream approaches strongly influenced by evolutionary thinking, mainstream perceptual theory remains close to its pre-Darwinian roots. This paper draws on insights from ecological psychology, especially as represented in J. J. Gibson's The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), to identify 4 elements that any future evolutionary approach to perception should be expected to include: (a) an ecological analysis of ambient energy, (b) a comparative understanding of the perceptual abilities of different species, (c) a dynamic understanding of organism–environment interaction as essential for perception, and (d) an understanding of perceptual attunement based on the concept of affordances. Each of these elements serves an essential theoretical role while also pointing toward lines of research where much work remains to be done. The presence of these elements explains, in part, the affinity between ecological psychology and other evolutionarily grounded approaches to psychology, including the emerging fields of enactivism and embodied cognition.     

Explanations for cultural differences in thinking: Easterners’ dialectical thinking and Westerners’ linear thinking

ABSTRACT

Since Easterners’ naïve dialectical thinking, which is contrasted with Westerners’ linear thinking, was introduced, many cross-cultural studies on human thinking have been conducted, and explanations for the cultural differences have been proposed. First, after examining the robustness of these cultural differences, two existing explanations are discussed in this paper. The first is based on the discinction between Westerners' analytic cognition and Easterners' holistic cogntion. This is related to the distinction between Westerners’ independent self and Easterners’ interdependent self. The second is based on the philosophical tradition of China’s Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, which is contrasted with that of Ancient Greece. Second, we propose a new explanation based on the distinction between Westerners’ low-context culture and Easterners’ high-context culture (Beyond culture. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books/Doubleday.). Finally, we show that this distinction can be based on socioecological approaches, and it is expected to explain the cultural differences between the Chinese and Japanese.