doi: 10.1002/wcs.61pmid: 26272831
For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
doi: 10.1002/wcs.2pmid: 26272832
The idea that language evolved from manual gestures rather than primate calls dates back at least to the 18th century, and was revived in modern form by the anthropologist, Gordon W. Hewes, in 1973. The main sources of current evidence are: (1) Signed languages invented by deaf communities share with speech the essential characteristics of language, including such properties as reference, generativity, grammar, and prosody; (2) Great apes in captivity are much better able to learn intentional communication systems based on manual gestures than to acquire speech; (3) The manual gestures of chimpanzees in the wild are more flexible and context‐independent than their vocalizations; (4) The mirror system in the primate brain provides a natural platform for the evolution of language; it represents manual gestures and some nonvocal oral movements, but not vocalizations. Vocal gestures were probably incorporated into the mirror system late in hominin evolution, perhaps only with the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
doi: 10.1002/wcs.20pmid: 26272833
This article begins with an account of logic, and of how logicians formulate formal rules of inference for the sentential calculus, which hinges on analogs of negation and the connectives if, or, and and. It considers the various ways in which computer scientists have written programs to prove the validity of inferences in this and other domains. Finally, it outlines the principal psychological theories of how human reasoners carry out deductions. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
Belcher, Annabelle; Sinnott‐Armstrong, Walter
doi: 10.1002/wcs.8pmid: 26272834
Less than three decades ago, the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience joined forces to form cognitive neuroscience. More recently, neuroscience has combined with social psychology and with economics to produce social neuroscience and neuroeconomics. Each of these amalgamations has been revolutionary in its own way. Neurolaw extends this trend. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
Price, Elizabeth E.; Caldwell, Christine A.; Whiten, Andrew
doi: 10.1002/wcs.14pmid: 26272835
Cultural learning is an adaptive mechanism which can lead to changes in behavior and cognition much faster than naturally selected genetic change. Although social learning is prevalent in many species, the capacity for significant cumulative culture remains restricted to humans. This capacity has been a driving force behind the evolution of complexity in our technologies and societies, and has allowed us to become the most widespread mammal on earth. The comparative study of cultural cognition assesses where important differences lie between species. A combination of observational studies in the wild, experimental studies in captivity, and field experiments together provide the most comprehensive methods with which to tackle the question. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
doi: 10.1002/wcs.31pmid: 26272836
The concept of representation plays a central role in philosophical and scientific theorizing about the mind, and according to the representational theory of mind (RTM), a wide variety of cognitive and perceptual capacities are best explained in terms of the occurrence and processing of mental representations. The concept of representation remains elusive, however, and there is no widespread agreement among philosophers or cognitive scientists over what it is for one thing to represent another. One reason for the lack of consensus is that philosophers and scientists deploy the concept in many different ways for many different purposes. Another reason for the lack of consensus is that, while it is generally agreed that a scientifically useful notion of representation should be informed and constrained by what we know about brains, there is disagreement over what contemporary neuroscience does or does not suggest about the nature of representation. This article discusses some of the key issues involved in developing a general theory of mental representation, in light of these divergent purposes and conflicting views. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
Lasnik, Howard; Lohndal, Terje
doi: 10.1002/wcs.35pmid: 26272837
Principles and Parameters Theory is an approach to the study of the human language capacity based on an abstract underlying representation and operations called ‘transformations’ successively altering that structure. It has gradually evolved from the Government and Binding Theory to the Minimalist Program. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
De Brigard, Felipe; Prinz, Jesse
doi: 10.1002/wcs.27pmid: 26272838
For the past three decades there has been a substantial amount of scientific evidence supporting the view that attention is necessary and sufficient for perceptual representations to become conscious (i.e., for there to be something that it is like to experience a representational perceptual state). This view, however, has been recently questioned on the basis of some alleged counterevidence. In this paper we survey some of the most important recent findings. In doing so, we have two primary goals. The first is descriptive: we provide a literature review for those seeking an understanding of the present debate. The second is editorial: we suggest that the evidence alleging dissociations between consciousness and attention is not decisive. Thus, this is an opinionated overview of the debate. By presenting our assessment, we hope to bring out both sides in the debate and to underscore that the issues here remain matters of intense controversy and ongoing investigation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
Norman, Greg J.; Cacioppo, John T.; Berntson, Gary G.
doi: 10.1002/wcs.29pmid: 26272839
Social species, by definition, create emergent organizations beyond the individual that range in humans from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and cultures. These emergent structures evolved hand‐in‐hand with neural, hormonal, and genetic mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce. Social neuroscience is concerned with investigating these emergent structures and the underlying neural, hormonal, and genetic mechanisms that make them possible. As such, it represents an interdisciplinary approach devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
Goldstone, Robert L.; Hendrickson, Andrew T.
doi: 10.1002/wcs.26pmid: 26272840
Categorical perception (CP) is the phenomenon by which the categories possessed by an observer influences the observers' perception. Experimentally, CP is revealed when an observer's ability to make perceptual discriminations between things is better when those things belong to different categories rather than the same category, controlling for the physical difference between the things. We consider several core questions related to CP: Is it caused by innate and/or learned categories, how early in the information processing stream do categories influence perception, and what is the relation between ongoing linguistic processing and CP? CP for both speech and visual entities are surveyed, as are computational and mathematical models of CP. CP is an important phenomenon in cognitive science because it represents an essential adaptation of perception to support categorizations that an organism needs to make. Sensory signals that could be linearly related to physical qualities are warped in a nonlinear manner, transforming analog inputs into quasi‐digital, quasi‐symbolic encodings. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
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