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Attempts to explain the evolutionary basis of anxiety as a reasonable reaction or valuable over-reaction to actual physical danger do not do justice to the robustness, intensity and resiliency of anxiety as a ubiquitous dimension of human existence. This essay proposes an alternative explanation based upon a clearer distinction between fear and anxiety. A comprehensive theory about the evolutionary adaptive value of fear and anxiety must address both primal fear reactions and cognitively more complex, socially based experiences of anxiety. This paper is telling a story about the blossoming of fear into anxiety, an almost universal human experience that was no longer simply a reaction to immediate physical danger. Previous stories have focused on basic fear reactions and the adaptive value of a hyper vigilant arousal response to real physical dangers in the environment. This paper focuses on the time period, 30 to 70 thousand years ago, when human consciousness expanded to include significant room for complex social relatedness. Within this context, a socially based anxiety with more complex cognition had significant adaptive value. More specifically, fear morphed into a multifaceted anxiety that was moldable, flexible, interpersonal and capable of shaping cognition. This anxiety contributed to group cohesion, group loyalty and a deep commitment to the group's narrative. Fear as a reaction to actual physical dangers continued to exist. But now, Homo sapiens also experienced this more complex secondary emotion, anxiety, which had additional adaptive value in the survival and expansion of the population.

Neurological research has made amazing strides in recent years. Enough is now known about what specific brain areas do to make it possible to start examining how various parts of the brain interact. What is missing is a general theory of cognition to tie all of this information together. Back in the 1980s, a cognitive theory was developed that began with a system of cognitive styles and was expanded through an in-depth study of biographies. It was discovered at that time that this theory mapped in a general way onto the brain. This cognitive theory, known as the theory of mental symmetry, has recently been tested as a meta-theory by using it to analyze a number of fields and theories dealing with human thought and behavior. This paper shows that personality traits that were discovered by mental symmetry correspond in detail to the functioning of brain regions described in current neurological papers. In brief, the cognitive model suggests that there are seven cognitive styles: There are four simple styles, and there are three composite styles that combine the thinking of the simple styles. Two of the simple styles use emotions and emphasize a circuit composed of orbitofrontal cortex, inferior frontal cortex, temporal lobe, and amygdala, with one in the left hemisphere and the other in the right hemisphere. The other two simple styles use confidence and emphasize a circuit consisting of dorsolateral frontal cortex, frontopolar cortex, parietal cortex, and hippocampus, again with one in the left hemisphere and the other in the right hemisphere. The three composite styles form a processing chain. The first composite style combines the two simple emotional styles and emphasizes the ventral striatum, and dopamine. This leads to the second composite style, which combines the two simple confidence styles and emphasizes the anterior cingulate, the dorsal striatum, and serotonin. This is followed by the third composite style which balances the functioning of the mind and emphasizes the thalamus and noradrenaline.

This paper investigates experimentally the relationship between inequality in endowment and deception. Our basic design is adopted from Gneezy (2005): two players interact in a deception game. It is common knowledge that player 1 has private information about the payoffs for both players of two alternative actions. Player 1 sends a message to player 2, indicating which alternative putatively will end up in a higher payoff for player 2. The message, which can either be true or false, does not affect the payoffs of the players. Player 2 has no information about the payoffs. However, player 2 selects one of the two alternatives A or B, which is payoff-relevant for both players. Our paper adds value to the literature by extending Gneezy (2005) in two ways. First, we systematically vary the initial endowment of players 1 and 2 (common knowledge to both of them). Second, we do not limit ourselves to the standard population of university students but also recruit chess players that are not enrolled in any degree program. Doing so, we want to find out if our results remain robust over a non-standard subject population which is known to be experienced to some extent in strategic interactions. Our main findings are: (i) non-students behave more honestly than students, (ii) students are more likely to trust the opponent’s message, and (iii) students and non-students behave differently to variation in initial endowment.

Twenty years after Povinelli’s “Folk Physics for Apes”, this paper assesses how researchers have made claims about animal physical cognition, and the statistical inferences that have been used to support them. These data are relevant in light of the current replicability issues facing science. We surveyed 116 published experiments from 63 papers on physical cognition, which included data from 43 different species of animals. Across these experiments most sample sizes were small, with often fewer than 10 animals being tested. However, in contrast to related psychological disciplines, we found that only 62% of our sample of physical cognition research made positive claims. This suggests that animal physical cognition does not have a strong publication bias towards positive results. Furthermore, we found evidence that researchers are making many true statistical inferences at the individual level, i.e. whether individual animals pass certain tests of physical cognition or not. In contrast, the strength of evidence of statistical effects at the group level was weaker and consistent with many effect sizes being overestimated. Overall, our analysis provides a cautiously optimistic analysis of reliability and bias in animal physical cognition research, however it is nevertheless likely that a non-negligible proportion of results will be difficult to replicate.

The visualization community has seen a rise in the adoption of user studies. Empirical user studies systematically test the assumptions that we make about how visualizations can help or hinder viewers' performance of tasks. Although the increase in user studies is encouraging, it is vital that research on human reasoning with visualizations be grounded in an understanding of how the mind functions. Previously, there were no sufficient models that illustrate the process of decision-making with visualizations. However, Padilla et al., 2018 recently proposed an integrative model for decision-making with visualizations, which expands on modern theories of visualization cognition and decision-making. In this paper, we provide insights into how cognitive models can accelerate innovation, improve validity, and facilitate replication efforts, which have yet to be thoroughly discussed in the visualization community. To do this, we offer a compact overview of the cognitive science of decision-making with visualizations for the visualization community, using the Padilla et al., 2018 cognitive model as a guiding framework. By detailing examples of visualization research that illustrate each component of the model, this paper offers novel insights into how visualization researchers can utilize a cognitive framework to guide their user studies. We provide practical examples of each component of the model from empirical studies of visualizations, along with visualization implications of each cognitive process, which have not been directly addressed in prior work. Finally, this work offers a case study in utilizing an understanding of human cognition to generate a novel solution to a visualization reasoning bias in the context of hurricane forecast track visualizations.

A social engineering aims to elicit sensitive information by using various manipulation approach to exploit the victim. The increasing of social communication platform such as email, messenger, facebook, linkedin, researchgate, combined with the social psychology and cognitive linguistics become a new weapon to attack either personal or even institutional targets. This paper explores the language used by the attacker to expose psychological threat to elicit sensitive information and to direct the victim to execute the certain action. The data are taken from emails which contain threat language. This paper illustrates how an attacker uses threat language to perform social engineering. The analysis is based on social engineering attack classification (Mouton, 2016) and cognitive pragmatics (Bara, 2010). The result shows rather than using persuasive approach, the attacker uses the threat to exploit cognitive process in thinking and decision making. Moreover the research also found pattern of a social engineer email: warning, threat, and enhancement.

Over the last decade, there have been many suggestions to improve how scientists answer their questions, but far fewer attempt to improve the questions scientists are asking in the first place. The goal of the paper is then to examine and summarize synthesize the evidence on how to ask the best questions possible. First is a brief review of the philosophical and empirical literature on how the best science is done, which implicitly but not explicitly mentions the role of psychology and especially cognitive conflict. Then we more closely focus on the psychology of the scientist, finding that they are humans, engaged in a meaning making process, and that cognitive conflict is a necessary input for any learning or change in the system. The scientific method is, of course, a specialized meaning making process. We present evidence for this central role of cognitive conflict in science by examining the most discussed scientific papers between 2013 and 2017, which are, in general, controversial and about big problems (e.g., whether vaccines cause autism, how often doctors kill us with their mistakes). Toward the end we discuss the role of science in society, suggesting science itself is an uncertainty reducing and problem solving enterprise. From this basis we encourage scientists to take riskier stances on bigger topics, for the good of themselves and society generally.

Why do languages have the words they have, and not some other set of words? While certainly there is some arbitrariness in the lexicon (English ‘frog’ vs. Spanish ‘rana’), there is just as surely some systematicity or functionality in it as well. What exactly might the nature of this systematicity or functionality be? For example, might the lexicon be efficiently adapted for communication, learning, memory storage, retrieval, or other cognitive functions? This paper critically reviews evidence that natural language lexicons efficiently carve up semantic fields (e.g., color, space, kinship) and have phonological forms that are similarly efficient when the aggregate lexicon is considered. The paper also suggests additional ways functionalism in lexicons might be assessed, and speculates on how functional lexicons may have arisen.

Drawing on the dual process framework from social and cognitive psychology, this paper reconciles two distinct conceptualizations of trust prevalent in the literature: “rational” calculative and irrational “affective” or normative. After critically reviewing previous attempts at reconciliation between these distinctions, we argue that the notion of trust as “reliance” is the higher order category of which “deliberate trust” and “intuitive faith” are subtypes. Our revised approach problematizes the conflation of epistemic uncertainty with phenomenological uncertainty while providing sound footing for a key sociological insight: that reliance on the routine social order is both the cognitive default and based on substantial practical evidence. We develop two broad suggestions for future research from these implications: (1) sociological research should examine the role of intuitive faith—as opposed to deliberate trust—in late modern societies, and (2) analysts should challenge the role of deliberate trust as the “modal” form of reliance in contemporary research.

An important finding in the cognitive effort literature has been that sensitivity to the costs of effort varies between individuals, suggesting that some people find effort more aversive than others. It has been suggested this may explain individual differences in other aspects of cognition; in particular that greater effort sensitivity may underlie some of the symptoms of conditions such as depression and schizophrenia. In this paper, we highlight a major problem with existing measures of cognitive effort that hampers this line of research, specifically the confounding of effort and difficulty. This means that behaviour thought to reveal effort costs could equally be explained by cognitive capacity, which influences the frequency of success and thereby the chance of obtaining reward. To address this shortcoming, we introduce a new test, the Number Switching Task (NST), specially designed such that difficulty will be unaffected by the effort manipulation and can easily be standardised across participants. In a large, online sample, we show that these criteria are met successfully and reproduce classic effort discounting results with the NST. We also demonstrate the use of Bayesian modelling with this task, producing behavioural parameters which can be associated with other measures, and report a preliminary association with the Need for Cognition scale.

As the largest longitudinal study of adolescent brain development and behavior to date, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study® has provided immense opportunities for researchers across disciplines since its first data release in 2018. The size and scope of the study also present a number of hurdles, which range from becoming familiar with the study design and data structure to employing rigorous and reproducible analyses. The current paper is intended as a guide for researchers and reviewers working with ABCD data, highlighting the features of the data (and the strengths and limitations therein) as well as relevant analytical and methodological considerations. Additionally, we explore justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts as they pertain to the ABCD Study and other large-scale datasets. In doing so, we hope to increase both accessibility of the ABCD Study and transparency within the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience.

Author(s): Cedegao, Zhang; Ham, Huang; Holliday, Wesley H. | Abstract: Reasoning about what other people know is an important cognitive ability, known as epistemic reasoning, which has fascinated psychologists, economists, and logicians. In this paper, we propose a computational model of humans’ epistemic reasoning, including higher-order epistemic reasoning—reasoning about what one person knows about another person’s knowledge—that we test in an experiment using a deductive card game called “Aces and Eights”. Our starting point is the model of perfect higher-order epistemic reasoners given by the framework of dynamic epistemic logic. We modify this idealized model with bounds on the level of feasible epistemic reasoning and stochastic update of a player’s space of possibilities in response to new information. These modifications are crucial for explaining the variation in human performance across different participants and different games in the experiment. Our results demonstrate how research on epistemic logic and cognitive models can inform each other.

Why did people across the world and throughout history believe that dreams can foretell what will occur in the future? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question within a cultural evolutionary framework by emphasizing the cognitive aspect of dream interpretation; namely, the fact that dreams were often viewed as significant and interpretable has to do with various psychological and social factors that influence how people obtain and process information regarding the validity of dream interpretation as a technique. Through a comprehensive analysis of a large dataset of dream occurrences in the official Chinese historical records, I argue that the ubiquity and persistence of dream interpretation have both a theoretical component (supernatural worldview) and an empirical component (predictively accurate dream cases) which is particularly vulnerable to transmission errors and biases. The overwhelmingly successful records of dream prediction in transmitted texts, I suggest, is largely due to the fabrication and retrospective inference of past dreams, as well as the under-reporting of predictive failures. These “positive data” then reinforce individuals’ confidence in the predictive power of dreams. I finally show a potential decline of the popularity of dream interpretation in traditional China and offer a few suggestive explanations drawing on the unique characteristics of oneiromancy compared to other divination techniques.

Decades of psycholinguistic research have attempted to determine whether a “bilingualadvantage” exists for cognitive abilities (e.g., Bialystok & Craik, 2010; Cummins, 1977; for a metaanalysis,see Grundy & Timmer, 2017). More recent work has shifted away from investigating thebroader matter of cognition and working memory to focus on specific domains within those capacities(e.g., Linck et al., 2014). Despite countless studies, however, the existence of thisphenomenon remains unconfirmed. This paper examines evidence for and against the presence of a“bilingual advantage” in multiple tasks of working memory and cognitive control, reviewing studies thatcompare monolingual and bilingual performance. It further looks at populations that are understudied inrelation to these questions (i.e., L2 learners and heritage speakers). Finally, the topic of L2 attrition isdiscussed, alongside a novel perspective that may explain the inconsistencies in bilingual-monolingualcomparisons of performance on cognitive tasks.

This paper discusses the role of interactional and cognitive mechanisms in the emergence of (proto-)linguistic structures and the evolution of (proto)language(s) from the perspective of usage-based and constructionist approaches. Both the social, interactive nature of human communication and the enchronic, interactional timescale have received increasing attention in investigations of how structure emerges in the complex adaptive system of language, which operates across multiple timescales and is shaped by multiple different factors. This has also led to an increasing focus on the mechanisms involved in the dialogic co-construction of structure and meaning in interaction. These include ad hoc constructionalization, interactive alignment, conceptual pacts, reuse and modification, and local forms of entrenchment, routinisation and schematisation. Interactional and cognitive mechanisms like these not only play a crucial role in the emergence of structure in modern languages. They can also help explain how the first (proto)constructions came into being in hominin interaction. Frequently re-occuring, temporary, local (proto)constructions acquired increasing degrees of entrenchment, which led to their subsequent diffusion throughout hominin communities. They were then subject to processes of conventionalisation and cumulative cultural evolution. This process is hypothesised to eventually have led to the gradual transition from protolanguage to language.

Dohmen et al. (2010) find in their paper (‘Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability?'), which has been published in the American Economic Review, that risk aversion and impatience are negatively related to cognitive ability. This topic is important because controlling for cognitive ability might be necessary if someone is interested in the link of risk preferences or time preferences to real-world outcomes. We re-examine their key results by conducting an experimental study using two subject pools (agricultural students and farmers) and three levels of monetary incentives. Similar to Dohmen et al. (2010), our study finds the above-described negative correlations. However, the strength of the association is relatively small in the realm of risk aversion and negligible with impatience.

In a thought-provoking article, Guy (2013:63) claims that “lectal coherence ... [implies] that variables are correlated; if they are not, the cognitive and social reality of the ‘sociolect’ is problematic.” Considerable linguistic research has established that, for structural reasons, variables are correlated; however, structural correlation does not imply sociolectal coherence. Thus the question arises: do multiple variables cluster or correlate, loosely, tightly, or not at all, based on social factors, such as age, gender, community belonging, salience, prestige/stigma, or other external factors (Guy and Hinskens 2016)? This paper explores the unresolved question of cognitive sociolectal coherence by investigating a panel of 20 speakers of Swabian, a dialect spoken in southwestern Germany, across a 35-year lifespan. The corpus consists of Labovian-style sociolinguistic interviews, and the data comprise 20 phonological and morphosyntactic linguistic features, coded for a binary distinction between the dialect and standard variant. In concurrence with Guy (2013), the findings support the notion that sociolectal coherence is more multi-dimensional than previously believed. However, clear patterns have emerged, indicating that sociolectal coherence may lie in more cognitive constructs such as the type, status, and stigmatisation of the variable itself.

Criticisms about psychometric paradigms currently used in healthcare professions education include claims of reductionism, objectification, and poor compliance with assumptions. Nevertheless, perhaps the most crucial criticism comes from learners' difficulty in interpreting and making meaningful use of summative scores and the potentially detrimental impact these scores have on learners. The term "post-psychometric era" has become popular, despite persisting calls for the sensible use of modern psychometrics. In recent years, cognitive diagnostic modelling has emerged as a new psychometric paradigm capable of providing meaningful diagnostic feedback. Cognitive diagnostic modelling allows the classification of examinees in multiple cognitive attributes. This measurement is obtained by modelling these attributes as categorical, discrete latent variables. Furthermore, items can reflect more than one latent variable simultaneously. The interactions between latent variables can be modelled with flexibility, allowing a unique perspective on complex cognitive processes. These characteristic features of cognitive diagnostic modelling enable diagnostic classification over a large number of constructs of interest, preventing the necessity of providing numerical scores as feedback to test takers. This paper provides an overview of cognitive diagnostic modelling, including an introduction to its foundations and illustrating potential applications, to help teachers be involved in developing and evaluating assessment tools used in healthcare professions education. Cognitive diagnosis may represent a revolutionary new psychometric paradigm, overcoming the known limitations found in frequently used psychometric approaches, offering the possibility of robust qualitative feedback and better alignment with competency-based curricula and modern programmatic assessment frameworks.

In the first year of life, infants' word learning is slow, laborious, and requires repeated exposure to word-referent co-occurrences. In contrast, by 14-18 months, infants learn words from just a few labeling events, use joint attention and eye gaze to decipher word meaning, and begin to use speech to communicate about absent things. We propose that this remarkable advancement in word learning results from attaining a referential understanding of words-that words are linked to mental representations and used intentionally to communicate about real-world entities. We suggest that verbal reference is supported by codeveloping conceptual, social, representational, and statistical learning capacities. We also propose that infants' recognition of this tri-directional link between words, referents, and mental representations is enabled by their experience participating in and observing socially contingent interactions. Understanding verbal reference signals a qualitative shift in infants' word learning. This shift enables infants to bootstrap word meanings from syntax and semantics, learn novel words and facts from nonostensive communication, and make inferences about speakers' epistemic competence based on their language production. In this paper, we review empirical findings across multiple facets of infant cognition and propose a novel developmental theory of verbal reference. Finally, we suggest new directions of empirical research that may provide stronger and more direct evidence for our theory and contribute to our understanding of the development of verbal reference and language-mediated learning in infancy and beyond. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Given that aesthetic experiences typically involve extracting meaning from environment, we believe that semantic cognition research has much to offer the field of neuroaesthetics. In the current paper, we propose a generalised framework that is inspired by the semantic cognition literature and that treats aesthetic experience as just one example of how meaning accumulates. According to our framework, aesthetic experiences are underpinned by the same cognitive and brain systems that are involved in deriving meaning from the environment in general, such as modality-specific conceptual representations and controlled processes for retrieving the appropriate type of information. Our generalised semantic cognition view of aesthetic experience has substantial implications for theory development: it leads to novel, falsifiable predictions and it reconfigures foundational assumptions regarding the structure of the cognitive and brain systems that may be involved in aesthetic experiences.

Background: Socioeconomic differences in health-related behaviors are a major cause ofhealth inequalities. However, the mechanisms (mediation / moderation) by which socioeconomic status (SES) affects health behavior are a topic of ongoing debate.Purpose: Current research on SES as moderator of the health cognitions - health behavior relation is inconsistent. Previous studies are limited by diverse operationalizations of SES and health behaviors, demographically narrow samples, and between-person designs addressing within-person processes. This paper presents two studies addressing these shortcomings in a within-person multi-behavior framework using hierarchical linear models.Methods: Two online studies, one cross-sectional and one 4-week longitudinal, assessed 1,005 (Study 1; Amazon MTurk; US only) and 1,273 participants (Study 2; Prolific; international). Self-reports of multiple SES indicators (education, income, occupation status; ZIP code in Study 1), health cognitions (from the Theory of Planned Behavior) and measures of 6 health behaviors were taken. Multilevel models with cross-level interactions tested wither the within-person relationships between health cognitions and behaviors differed by between-person SES .Results: Education significantly moderated intention-behavior and attitude-behavior relationships in both studies, with more educated individuals showing stronger positive relationships. In addition, ZIP-level SES (Study 1) moderated attitude-behavior effects such that these relationships were stronger in participants living in areas with higher SES. Conclusions: Education appears to be an important resource for the translation of intentions and attitudes into behavior. Other SES indicators showed less consistent effects. This has implications for interventions aiming at increasing intentions to change health behaviors, as some interventions might inadvertently increase health inequalities.

Who is most likely to join and engage in extreme political action? While traditional theories have focused on situational factors or group identity attributes, an emerging science illustrates that tendencies for extreme political action may also be rooted in individuals’ idiosyncratic cognitive and affective dispositions. This paper synthesizes cutting-edge evidence demonstrating that an individual’s cognitive and affective architecture shape their willingness to support ideological violence. From a cognitive perspective, traits such as cognitive rigidity, slower perceptual strategies, and poorer executive functions are linked to heightened endorsement for ideological violence. From an emotional standpoint, characteristics associated with emotional reactivity and impaired emotional regulation, such as sensation-seeking and impulsivity, can facilitate readiness for extreme political action. The review hones in on the roles of cognitive rigidity and sensation-seeking as traits heightening proclivities for extreme pro-group behavior, and recommends that future research should aim to assess cognition-emotion interactions to reveal different sub-profiles of political actors. A theoretical framework focused on cognitive and affective information-processing traits – and their interactions – opens up tractable empirical questions and a future research agenda. Identifying subsets of ideologues is an endeavor with potential to inform the design of evidence-based interventions aimed at reducing ideological extremism and fostering social understanding.

The epidemiology of cognitive development is an approach essentially based on large observational studies, which examines individual differences in cognitive abilities throughout childhood and their determinants. Although different in terms of methodology and main interests from developmental psychology, cognitive epidemiology offers complementary viewpoints on cognitive development and addresses fundamental research questions of interest to developmental psychologists. The present paper depicts the contributions of the epidemiological approach to the field of cognitive development and highlights the methodological advances that have made such contributions possible. We discuss the stability and developmental trajectories of cognitive functions, their main predictors, the complex interplay between environmental and genetic predictors, and the relationships between the different domains of cognition from birth to adulthood.

Social networks data as naturally occurring data, are nowadays freely available toresearchers, and can constitute a unique source for exploring many theories in psychology andcognitive sciences. This paper investigates an effect known as cognitive sequential dependencein decision making, using five-point rating in term of review polarity index (RPI) of each user'sreviews by natural language processing about a services or businesses in YELP. In the presentstudy, the criteria for cognitive dependency in decisions is the degree of deviation of the presentRPI from the average of each user's RPIs. The statistical population consists of all user's reviewspublished by the YELP site, which contains over 6 million reviews. After some initialpreprocessing and filtering on textual reviews by Stanford CoreNLP tools in java, the linearregression analysis was performed on the reviews. Regression coefficients between deviationfrom mean of RPIs, with the RPI corresponded to different distances from current review up to 7distances against baseline, represented a statistically significant and strong relationships as wellas they revealed by going farther from current user decision, a subtle change from contrast effectto assimilation effect in users' decisions. While there are not usually a subtle matches betweenpolarity of explicit ratings (stars) and provided textual data in business websites , The promisingresults of this study suggest utilizing textual content of reviews as implicit ratings to trackcognitive sequential dependencies in the wild data and application of it for debasing algorithmand designing efficient online recommendation systems.

Impairments in executive functioning are common following Acquired Brain Injury, though there is a lack of screening tools which present both a time efficient and ecologically valid approach to assessing the consequences of executive impairments. We present the Oxford Digital Multiple Errands Test (OxMET), a novel and simplified computer-tablet version of a Multiple Errands Test. We recruited 124 neurologically healthy controls and 105 stroke survivors to complete the OxMET task. Normative data and internal consistency were established from the healthy control data. Convergent and divergent validation was assessed in a mixed subset of 158 participants who completed the OxMET and the OCS-Plus. Test-retest reliability was examined across a mixed subset of 39 participants. Finally, we investigated the known-group discriminability of the OxMET. The OxMET demonstrated very high internal consistency, and stable group level test-retest performance as well as good convergent and divergent validity. The OxMET demonstrated high sensitivity and good specificity in overall differentiation of stroke survivors from controls. Stroke survivors made significantly more errors than healthy controls, as well as being less accurate and slower to complete the task. This paper presents the Oxford Digital Multiple Errands Test as a brief, easy to administer tool, designed to quickly screen for potential consequences of executive impairments in a virtual environment shopping task on a computer tablet. Initial normative data and validation within a chronic stroke cohort is presented.

Cognitive presence is the ability of the learners to project their mental and perceptual presence. This paper aims to investigate cognitive presence when using a Blended Learning environment. The article also aims at exploring university students' attitudes towards using a BL environment in language learning, since BL perception, as a computer learning environment, has become a requirement to enhance language learning. The sample for the study consists of 100 students studying the English Language Skills course at Al-Balqa Applied University (BAU) in Jordan, who responded to a questionnaire on cognitive presence issues. The findings of the study reveal that Blended Learning (BL) can create a vibrant cognitive presence, which enables to support active language learning. The results share some positive attitudes towards a cognitive presence in a BL environment. The study recommends that more research on the part of the online instructors to create and enhance cognitive presence is necessary to benefit learning English language skills.

How does cognitive diversity in a group affect its performance? Prior research suggests that group cognitive diversity poses a performance tradeoff: Diverse groups excel at creativity and innovation, but struggle to take coordinated action. Building on the insight that group cognition is not static, but is instead dynamically and interactively produced, we introduce the construct of discursive diversity, a manifestation of group cognitive diversity, which reflects the degree to which the meanings conveyed by group members in a given set of interactions diverge from one another. We propose that high-performing teams are ones that have a collective capacity to modulate shared cognition to match changing task requirements: They exhibit higher discursive diversity when engaged in ideational tasks and lower discursive diversity when performing coordination tasks. We further argue that teams exhibiting congruent modulation—that is, those with low group-level variance in members’ within-person semantic shifts to changing task requirements—are more likely to experience success than teams characterized by incongruent modulation. Using the tools of computational linguistics to derive a measure of discursive diversity and drawing on a novel longitudinal data set of intragroup electronic communications and performance outcomes for 117 remote software development teams on an online platform ( www.gigster.com ), we find support for our theory. Our findings suggest that the performance tradeoff of group cognitive diversity is not inescapable: Groups can navigate it by aligning their levels of discursive diversity to match their task requirements and by having members stay aligned with one another as they make these adjustments. This paper was accepted by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, organizations. Funding: Financial support fromthe NSF-CAREER [Grant 1847091] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4274 .

Imagining future events is a crucial cognitive process in adaptation, but impairments have been identified in a range of mental disorders. Taking a functional approach to future thinking, this paper reports on the development and deployment of a scale to assess the frequency of self-reported functions of future thinking: The Functions of Future Thinking Scale (FoFTS). In Study 1 (N = 565) items were developed and subjected to exploratory factor analysis. Ten factors were extracted representing distinct purposes of future thinking: Boredom Reduction, Death Preparation, Identity Contrasting, Negative Emotion Regulation, Social Bonding, Goal Setting, Planning, Problem-Solving, Decision-Making, and Positive Emotion Regulation. Construct, convergent and divergent validity were established. The FoFTS predicted unique variance in transdiagnostic variables even after accounting for frequency, attitudes, and clarity of future thought. In Study 2 (N = 467), confirmatory factor analysis showed the 10-factor FoFTS model was an excellent fit to the data. In Study 3 (N = 106) it was shown that participants with probable major depression, relative to non-depressed participants, reported a significantly different profile of future thinking for different purposes. In conclusion, the FoFTS can be used to examine future thinking from a functional perspective and may help enrich models of psychopathology.

Using sensor data from devices such as smart-watches or mobile phones is very popular in both computer science and medical research. Such movement data can predict certain health states or performance outcomes. However, in order to increase reliability and replication of the research, it is important to share data and results openly. In medicine, this is often difficult due to legal restrictions or to the fact that data collected from clinical trials is seen as very valuable and something that should be kept "in-house". In this paper, we therefore present PSYKOSE, a publicly shared dataset consisting of motor activity data collected from body sensors. The dataset contains data collected from patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder characterized by psychotic symptoms like hallucinations and delusions, as well as symptoms of cognitive dysfunction and diminished motivation. In total, we have data from 22 patients with schizophrenia and 32 healthy control persons. For each person in the dataset, we provide sensor data collected over several days in a row. In addition to the sensor data, we also provide some demographic data and medical assessments during the observation period. The patients were assessed by medical experts from Haukeland University hospital. In addition to the data, we provide a baseline analysis and possible use-cases of the dataset.

The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) is the archetypal modernist, with the paintings of his uncompromisingly austere mature period, comprised of a white background, black vertical and horizontal lines and occasional, areas of red, yellow or blue, being icons of modern design. His paintings also represent a rare opportunity to experiment on aesthetic composition, the paintings being simulated relatively easily on a computer screen, with participants manipulating them interactively.The founding father of experimental aesthetics, Gustav Theodor Fechner, described three research methods in his Vorschule der Aesthetik of 1876, the Method of Choice, the Method of Production and the Method of Use. Most empirical work has used the Method of Choice, whereby participants are shown two or more similar images and choose between them. Our first studies of Mondrian used the Method of Choice. A set of 25 original (‘O’) Mondrian paintings were synthesised on a screen, as also were two pseudo-Mondrians, (P1 and P2). The pseudo-Mondrians were created by randomly moving all of the horizontal and vertical lines in the painting by a small amount (for P1) or by a slightly larger amount (for P2). P1 and P2 therefore had the same broad structure as O, containing the same ‘words’ (components), using the same ‘deep structure’ or ‘syntax’, but with the composition varied only by altering the relative positioning of the lines (equivalent in linguistic terms to a different pattern of stress or emphasis – prosodics). For each of the 25 paintings we created O, P1 and P2, and participants compared O with P1, O with P2, and P1 with P2, making 75 paired comparison judgements overall.In five separate studies, totalling 277 participants, it was clear that original Mondrians could reliably be distinguished from pseudo-Mondrians, with some participants being more sensitive than others. Fechner’s Method of Production allows participants to manipulate the content of an aesthetic object, altering it until they feel that it is most satisfactory. We adapted this method so that participants were presented with a single Mondrian painting on a computer screen. By moving the computer mouse a vertical, a horizontal or both a vertical and a horizontal line in the Mondrian were moved up and down or sideways. The images were constrained so that the moving lines were yoked to other lines of the same directionality, so that several moved at the same time, and lines could never cross over each other (i.e. the syntax remained fixed, with only proportional arrangements being altered). The original Mondrian was always a possible outcome of moving the cursor.The Production studies manipulated 39 original Mondrian paintings, none of which were included in the set of 25 used in the Choice experiments. All of the 84 participants could therefore carry out both the Method of Choice and the Method of Production, the order of the two Methods being chosen at Random (and order having no effect upon the results).The most striking result was that although the 84 participants, as expected, had clear preferences in the Method of Choice for Mondrians over pseudo-Mondrians, using the Method of Production there was no evidence that participants produced images which showed any overall similarity to the original Mondrians.A detailed study of what participants were doing when they were using the Method of Production suggested that the complexity of the task, despite its relative simplicity, was too great for them. Despite only manipulating in a two-dimensional space (or sometimes a one-dimensional space), participants seemed to find the task difficult. The program always started with the cursor at one of the four corners indicating the maximum dynamic range of the cursor, and in many cases participants ended up either on one of the edges of the space or even in a corner. In most cases only a small proportion of the possible design space was sampled before a decision was made.Our paper will consider how people can and cannot make complex aesthetic choices across a range of possible stimuli. In particular we will suggest that much of the problem with the Method of Production is a problem of visual working memory, participants not being able to hold in their heads a range of previous images to compare with the current one which is shown on screen. The Method of Choice, in contrast, makes no demands at all upon visual working memory. Although computer design in principle allows an almost infinite space of possibilities to be explored, in practice the ability to do so usefully seems to be heavily constrained by the cognitive limits of human processing, meaning that design systems need careful ergonomic organisation to prevent such problems.

This article argues that existing approaches to programming ethical AI fail to resolve a serious moral-semantic trilemma, generating interpretations of ethical requirements that are either too semantically strict, too semantically flexible, or overly unpredictable. This paper then illustrates the trilemma utilizing a recently proposed 'general ethical dilemma analyzer', GenEth. Finally, it uses empirical evidence to argue that human beings resolve the semantic trilemma using general cognitive and motivational processes involving ‘mental time-travel’, whereby we simulate different possible pasts and futures. I demonstrate how mental time-travel psychology leads us to resolve the semantic trilemma through a six-step process of interpersonal negotiation and renegotiation, and then conclude by showing how comparative advantages in processing power would plausibly cause AI to use similar processes to solve the semantic trilemma more reliably than we do, leading AI to make better moral semantic choices than humans do by our very own lights.

Research on artificial intelligence and research on human intelligence rely on similar conceptual foundations and have long inspired each other [ 1 , 2• ]. However, achieving concrete synergy has been difficult, with one obstacle being a lack of alignment of the tasks used in both fields. Artificial intelligence research has traditionally focused on tasks that are challenging to solve, often using human performance as a benchmark to surpass [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. By contrast, cognitive science and psychology have moved towards tasks that are simple enough to allow for detailed computational modeling of people’s choices. These divergent objectives have led to a divide in the complexity of tasks studied, both in perception and cognition. The purpose of this paper is to explore the middle ground: are there tasks that are reasonably attractive to both fields and could provide fertile ground for synergy?

The Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) is a longitudinal twin study that recruited over 16,000 twin-pairs born between 1994 and 1996 in England and Wales through national birth records. More than 10,000 of these families are still engaged in the study. TEDS was and still is a representative sample of the population in England and Wales. Rich cognitive and emotional/behavioral data have been collected from the twins from infancy to emerging adulthood, with data collection at first contact and at ages 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 and 21, enabling longitudinal genetically sensitive analyses. Data have been collected from the twins themselves, from their parents and teachers, and from the UK National Pupil Database. Genotyped DNA data are available for 10,346 individuals (who are unrelated except for 3320 dizygotic co-twins). TEDS data have contributed to over 400 scientific papers involving more than 140 researchers in 50 research institutions. TEDS offers an outstanding resource for investigating cognitive and behavioral development across childhood and early adulthood and actively fosters scientific collaborations.

This paper presents a framework for how the multifaceted nature of “gender” (human and linguistic) interacts with grammatical operations such as coreference dependency formation. It frames the question through the lens of English, in which it focuses on how personal names and referents who identify as nonbinary can provide insight into the conceptual representations of gender. Additional data from a variety of modern languages supports a model of how gender might be cognitively represented such that the observed linguistic patterns are available. I propose a three-tiered model of gender that unites grammatical, cognitive, social, and biological aspects and describes how implications of this model might be tested in future work.

Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. The Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension and provides a good framework to guide the classification of reading disorders. This paper discusses how weaknesses in either or both of components of the Simple View are implicated in children’s reading comprehension difficulties. It concludes with reflections on the strengths and limitations of the Simple View as a theoretical and practical framework to guide our understanding of reading comprehension and its development.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective treatment for improving mental health problems among university students. However, intervention components have different effects on mental health problems. This paper is a meta-analysis of the data concerning the relationship between cognitive behavioral variables and mental health status among university students. A total of 4 electronic databases were reviewed, and 1,227 articles met the initial selection criteria. Reviewers applied standardized coding schemes to extract the correlational relationship between cognitive behavioral variables and mental health status. A total of 54 articles were included in the meta-analysis. Correlations were found for three cognitive behavioral variables (attention, thought, and behavior) across nine mental health domains (negative affect, positive affect, happiness, social function, stress response, psychological symptom, quality of life, well-being, and general health). Across each cognitive behavioral process and all mental health domains, the estimated mean correlation is modest (.29 - .41), and the correlation depended on the domain of mental health.

Two primary goals of psychological science should be to understand what aspects of human psychology are universal and the way that context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way that we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample. However, most research published in our leading journals has relied on sampling WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. One might expect that our scholarly work and editorial choices would by now reflect the knowledge that Western populations may not be representative of humans generally with respect to any given psychological phenomenon. However, as we show here, almost all research published by one of our leading journals, Psychological Science , relies on Western samples and uses these data in an unreflective way to make inferences about humans in general. To take us forward, we offer a set of concrete proposals for authors, journal editors, and reviewers that may lead to a psychological science that is more representative of the human condition.

Despite the prevalence of real-world and laboratory tasks where people select among many options, cognitive models have traditionally focused on choices among small sets of alternatives. This has resulted in theoretical and empirical gaps in understanding the decision processes that go into selections among many alternatives or responses that fall along a continuum. This paper addresses these issues by modeling decisions in a perceptual study where participants produce continuous orientation judgments. The experiments showed that manipulations of stimulus difficulty and time pressure have parallel effects to binary choice, with greater stimulus difficulty yielding slower and less accurate responses and time pressure resulting in faster responses at the expense of accuracy. These effects were well accounted for by the circular diffusion model developed by Smith (2016), with drift magnitude parameters shifting with difficulty and threshold parameters shifting with time pressure. However, a manipulation of bias using a predecision cue resulted in bimodal distributions of responses that cannot be explained by the model in its original formulation. To account for this result, I developed a theory of bias based on split attention and racing 2D diffusion processes. This model suggests that responses are determined by both cue-driven and stimulus-driven evidence accumulation processes, such that the winning process determines responses and response times (RTs). As a result, it predicts critical features of responses and response times in the conditions with predecision cues, including bimodal distributions of responses and the longer RTs observed when there was a discrepancy between cue and stimulus orientations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

This paper proposes a mechanism by which exposure to forms of culture “in the world” activates individuals’ cognitive associations beneath conscious awareness, making certain behaviors more likely. A survey experiment illustrates part of the proposed mechanism, testing whether cues that make salient a shared cultural representation affect the activation of individuals’ associations with childbearing. Drawing on cultural beliefs regarding the ostensible contradiction between close relations and monetary exchange, we expect that making one of these spheres salient would inhibit activation of associations with the other sphere. As predicted, respondents randomly assigned to a cue regarding family have fewer associations between childbearing and finances. We demonstrate the relevance of these findings to respondents’ fertility desires, a measure connected to behavior. We discuss the conditions under which this mechanism may exert the most influence on behavior and outline key future research questions that the proposed model introduces.

Human cognition and behaviour is dominated by symbol use. This paper examines the social learning strategies that give rise to symbolic communication. Experiment 1 contrasts an individual-level account, based on observational learning and cognitive bias, with an inter-individual account, based on social coordinative learning. Participants played a referential communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of recurring meanings to a partner by drawing, but without using their conventional language. Individual-level learning, via observation and cognitive bias, was sufficient to produce communication systems that became increasingly effective, efficient and shared over games. However, breaking a referential precedent eliminated these benefits. The most effective, most efficient and most shared signs arose when participants could directly interact with their partner, indicating that social coordinative learning is important to the creation of shared symbols. Experiment 2 investigated the contribution of two distinct aspects of social interaction: behaviour alignment and concurrent partner feedback. Each played a complementary role in the creation of shared symbols: behaviour alignment primarily drove communication effectiveness, and partner feedback primarily drove the efficiency of the evolved signs. In conclusion, inter-individual social coordinative learning is important to the evolution of effective, efficient and shared symbols.

Novel design methodologies are often evaluated through studies involving human designers, but such studies can incur a high personnel cost. It can also be difficult to isolate the effects of specific team or individual characteristics. This work introduces the Cognitively-Inspired Simulated Annealing Teams (CISAT) modeling framework, a platform for efficiently simulating and analyzing human design teams. The framework models a number of empirically demonstrated cognitive phenomena, thus balancing simplicity and direct applicability. This paper discusses the model's composition, and demonstrates its utility through simulating human design teams in a cognitive study. Simulation results are compared directly to the results from human designers. The CISAT model is also used to identify the most beneficial characteristics in the cognitive study.

Two recent studies have reported that incongruent selective attention items are better remembered than congruent items on a surprise recognition memory test (Krebs, Boehler, De Belder, & Egner, 2013; Rosner, D’Angelo, MacLellan, & Milliken, 2014). These findings suggest that an increased need for cognitive control may trigger encoding mechanisms at the time of study that result in better recognition of those items at test, a form of the desirable difficulty effect (Bjork, 1994). The experiments in the present paper demonstrate that this effect can depend on whether differences in selective attention difficulty are blocked or intermixed at the time of encoding. These results suggest that additional encoding time itself does not invariably result in better recognition for more difficult selective attention items. Instead, the dependence of recognition memory on encoding difficulty appears to reflect a context-sensitive control response to encoding difficulty.