Search

The experimental revolution in the social sciences is one of the most significant methodological shifts undergone by the field since the ‘quantitative revolution’ in the nineteenth century. One of the often valued features of social science experimentation is precisely the fact that there are (alleged) clear methodological rules regarding hypothesis testing that come from the methods of the natural sciences and from the methodology of RCTs in the biomedical sciences, and that allow for the adjudication among contentious causal claims. We examine critically this claim and argue that some current understandings of the practices that surround social science experimentation overestimate the degree to which experiments can actually fulfil this role as “objective” adjudicators, by neglecting the importance of shared background knowledge or assumptions and of consensus regarding the validity of the constructs involved in an experiment. We take issue with the way the distinction between internal and external validity is often used to comment on the inferential import of experiments, used both among practitioners and among philosophers of science. We describe the ways in which the more common (dichotomous) use of the internal/external distinction differs from Cook and Campbell’s original methodological project, in which construct validity and the four-fold validity typology were all important in assessing the inferential import of experiments. We argue that the current uses of the labels internal and external, as applied to experimental validity, help to encroach a simplistic view on the inferential import of experiments that, in turn, misrepresents their capacity to provide objective knowledge about the causal relations between variables.

Understanding the relationship between human cognition and linguistic structure is a central theme in language evolution research. Numerous studies have investigated this question using the silent gesture paradigm in which participants describe events using only gesture and no speech. Research using this paradigm has found that Agent–Patient–Action (APV) is the most commonly produced gesture order, regardless of the producer’s native language. However, studies have uncovered a range of factors that influence ordering preferences. One such factor is salience, which has been suggested as a key determiner of word order. Specifically, humans, who are typically agents, are more salient than inanimate objects, so tend to be mentioned first. In this study, we investigated the role of salience in more detail and asked whether manipulating the salience of a human agent would modulate the tendency to express humans before objects. We found, first, that APV was less common than expected based on previous literature. Secondly, salience influenced the relative ordering of the patient and action, but not the agent and patient. For events involving a non-salient agent, participants typically expressed the patient before the action and vice versa for salient agents. Thirdly, participants typically omitted non-salient agents from their descriptions. We present details of a novel computational solution that infers the orders participants would have produced had they expressed all three constituents on every trial. Our analysis showed that events involving salient agents tended to elicit AVP; those involving a non-salient agent were typically described with APV, modulated by a strong tendency to omit the agent. We argue that these findings provide evidence that the effect of salience is realized through its effect on the perspective from which a producer frames an event.

Considerable variability has been observed in sentence comprehension abilities in both native speakers and second language (L2) learner populations. While it has long been established that, in native speakers, this variability is closely linked to individual differences (IDs) in verbal working memory (vWM), previous research on the role of vWM in L2 sentence comprehension has produced mixed results. Moreover, there is an accumulating body of evidence demonstrating that the relationship between vWM and native language comprehension abilities is mediated by language experience. However, to our knowledge, until now, no attempt has been made to integrate language experience measures into the vWM-L2 sentence comprehension relationship. The goal of the present study is twofold: (1) to determine whether and to what extent vWM – as gauged by a reading span (RSPAN) task – correlates with IDs in two proxy estimates of L2 experience and (2) to investigate the effects of vWM on L2 comprehension of three different types of complex sentences. Thirty-four German advanced learners of English participated in this study. Significant positive correlations were found between the RSPAN scores and both proxy estimates of L2 experience. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that vWM exerted a significant effect on L2 sentence comprehension that was not modulated by sentence type. Taken together, these results provide additional evidence in support of the involvement of vWM in L2 sentence comprehension and, to our knowledge, first evidence for the contribution of L2 experience to RSPAN task performance.

Indicative conditionals—that is, sentences typically, though not exclusively, of the form “If p, (then) q,”—belong to the most puzzling phenomena of language. One of the puzzles that has recently attracted attention of psychologists of reasoning stems from the fact that on the majority of accounts of indicative conditionals, “If p, (then) q” can be true, or at least highly acceptable, even when there is no meaningful connection between p and q. Conditionals without such a connection, dubbed missing-link conditionals, however, often seem very odd. A standard pragmatic account of their oddity rests on an observation that, whenever missing-link conditionals come out as true, these are situations in which speakers are justified in asserting stronger, more informative statements. Asserting a less informative statement is odd because it is a violation of the Maxim of Quantity. This paper reports four experiments that present a challenge to the Gricean explanation of why missing-link conditionals are odd. At the same time, we will argue that these findings can be reconciled with general principles of Gricean pragmatics, if the connection is treated as a part of a conventional, “core” meaning of a conditional.

This theme issue assembles current studies that ask how and why precise synchronization and related forms of rhythm interaction are expressed in a wide range of behaviour. The studies cover human activity, with an emphasis on music, and social behaviour, reproduction and communication in non-human animals. In most cases, the temporally aligned rhythms have short—from several seconds down to a fraction of a second—periods and are regulated by central nervous system pacemakers, but interactions involving rhythms that are 24 h or longer and originate in biological clocks also occur. Across this spectrum of activities, species and time scales, empirical work and modelling suggest that synchrony arises from a limited number of coupled-oscillator mechanisms with which individuals mutually entrain. Phylogenetic distribution of these common mechanisms points towards convergent evolution. Studies of animal communication indicate that many synchronous interactions between the signals of neighbouring individuals are specifically favoured by selection. However, synchronous displays are often emergent properties of entrainment between signalling individuals, and in some situations, the very signallers who produce a display might not gain any benefit from the collective timing of their production. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology’.

This short note addresses the question whether Rietveld’s account of visual arts and adaptive behaviour be extended to literature.

The two target articles address the origins of music in complementary ways. However, both proposals focus on overt musical behaviour, largely ignoring the role of perception and cognition, and they blur the boundaries between the potential origins of language and music. To resolve this, an alternative research strategy is proposed that focuses on the core cognitive components of musicality.

This article provides a systematic and pluralistic theory of causation that fits the kind of reasoning commonly found in mixed methods research. It encompasses a variety of causal concepts, notions, approaches, and methods. Each instantiation of the theory is like a mosaic, where the image appears when the tiles are appropriately displayed. This means that researchers should carefully construct a causal mosaic for each research study, articulating what is causally relevant given their particular research questions, purposes, contexts, methods, methodologies, paradigms, and resources. Our theory includes 11 propositions that can guide researchers addressing causation.

In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, & Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by (a) a conversational implicature, (b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or (c) a con- ventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses, and the accumulating evidence from other studies as well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature. This finding indicates that the reason-relation reading is part of the semantic content of indicative conditionals, albeit not part of their primary truth-conditional content.

Author(s): Royka, Amanda L; Schouwstra, Marieke; Kirby, Simon; Jara-Ettinger, Julian | Abstract: For a gesture to be successful, observers must recognize its communicative purpose. Are communicators sensitive to this problem and do they try to ease their observer’s inferential burden? We propose that people shape their gestures to help observers easily infer that their movements are meant to communicate. Using computational models of recursive goal inference, we show that this hypothesis predicts that gestures ought to reveal that the movement is inconsistent with the space of non-communicative goals in the environment. In two gesture-design experiments, we find that people spontaneously shape communicative movements in response to the distribution of potential instrumental goals, ensuring that the movement can be easily differentiated from instrumental action. Our results show that people are sensitive to the inferential demands that observers face. As a result, people actively work to help ensure that the goal of their communicative movement is understood.

Conditionals and conditional reasoning have been a long-standing focus of research across a number of disciplines, ranging from psychology through linguistics to philosophy. But almost no work has concerned itself with the question of how hearing or reading a conditional changes our beliefs. Given that we acquire much-perhaps most-of what we believe through the testimony of others, the simple matter of acquiring conditionals via others' assertion of a conditional seems integral to any full understanding of the conditional and conditional reasoning. In this paper we detail a number of basic intuitions about how beliefs might change in response to a conditional being uttered, and show how these are backed by behavioral data. In the remainder of the paper, we then show how these deceptively simple phenomena pose a fundamental challenge to present theoretical accounts of the conditional and conditional reasoning - a challenge which no account presently fully meets.

In this paper we argue that for the (probabilistic) interpretation of generic sentences of the form “Gs are f,” three types of alternatives play a role: (i) alternative features of f, (ii) alternative groups, or kinds, of G, and (iii) alternative causal background factors. In the first part of this paper we argue for the relevance of these alternatives. In the second part, we describe the results of some experiments that empirically tested in particular the second use of alternatives.

Item does not contain fulltext The Speech-to-Song Illusion (STS) refers to a dramatic shift in our perception of short speech fragments which, when repeatedly presented, may start to sound-like song. Anecdotally, once it is perceived as a song, it is difficult to unhear the melody of a speech fragment, and such temporal dynamics of the STS illusion has theoretical implications. The goal of the current study is to capture this temporal effect. In our experiment, speech fragments that initially did not elicit the STS illusion were manipulated to have increasingly stable F0 contours to strengthen the perceived 'song-likeness' of a fragment. Over the course of trials, the speech fragments with manipulated contours were repeatedly presented within blocks of decreasing, increasing, or random orders of F0 manipulations. Results showed that a presentation order where participants first heard the sentence with the maximum amount of F0 manipulations (decreasing condition) resulted in participants continuously giving higher overall song-like ratings than other presentation orders (increasing or random conditions). Our results thus capture the commonly reported phenomenon that it is hard to 'unhear' the illusion once a speech segment has been perceived as song. 9 p.

Music and language have long been considered two distinct cognitive faculties governed by domain-specific cognitive and neural mechanisms. Recent work into the domain-specificity of pitch processing in both domains appears to suggest pitch processing to be governed by shared neural mechanisms. The current study aimed to explore the domain-specificity of pitch processing by simultaneously presenting pitch contours in speech and music to speakers of a tonal language, and measuring behavioral response and event-related potentials (ERPs). Native speakers of Mandarin were exposed to concurrent pitch contours in melody and speech. Contours in melody emulated those in speech were either congruent or incongruent with the pitch contour of the lexical tone (i.e., rising or falling). Component magnitudes of the N2b and N400 were used as indices of lexical processing. We found that the N2b was modulated by melodic pitch; incongruent item evoked significantly stronger amplitude. There was a trend of N400 to be modulated in the same way. Interestingly, these effects were present only on rising tones. Amplitude and time-course of the N2b and N400 may suggest an interference of melodic pitch contours with both early and late stages of phonological and semantic processing.

This article deals with the role of time in causal models in the social sciences. The aim is to underline the importance of time-sensitive causal models, in contrast to time-free models. The relation between time and causality is important, though a complex one, as the debates in the philosophy of science show. In particular, an outstanding issue is whether one can derive causal ordering from time ordering. The article examines how time is taken into account in demography and in economics as examples of social sciences in which considerations about time may diverge. We then present structural causal modeling as a modeling strategy that, while not essentially based on temporal information, can incorporate it in a more or less explicit way. In particular, we argue that temporal information is useful to the extent that it is placed in a correct causal structure, thus further corroborating the causal mechanism or generative process explaining the phenomenon under consideration. Despite the fact that the causal ordering of variables is more relevant than the temporal order for explanatory purposes, in establishing causal ordering the researcher should nevertheless take into account the time-patterns of causes and effects, as these are often episodes rather than single events. For this reason in particular, it is time to put time at the core of our causal models.

This paper studies the relation between persuasive argumentation and the speaker’s epistemic attitude. Dung-style abstract argumentation and dynamic epistemic logic provide the necessary tools to characterize the notion of persuasion. Within abstract argumentation, persuasive argumentation has been previously studied from a game-theoretic perspective. These approaches are blind to the fact that, in real-life situations, the epistemic attitude of the speaker determines which set of arguments will be disclosed by her in the context of a persuasive dialogue. This work is a first step to fill this gap. For this purpose we extend one of the logics of Schwarzentruber et al. with dynamic operators, designed to capture communicative phenomena. A complete axiomatization for the new logic via reduction axioms is provided. Within the new framework, a distinction between actual persuasion and persuasion from the speaker’s perspective is made. Finally, we explore the relationship between the two notions.

Multiple visual attention mechanisms are active already in infancy, most notably one supporting orienting towards stimuli and another, maintaining appropriate levels of alertness, when exploring the environment. They are thought to depend on separate brain networks, but their effects are difficult to isolate in existing behavioural paradigms. Better understanding of the contribution of each network to individual differences in visual orienting may help to explain their role in attention development. Here, we tested whether alerting and spatial cues differentially modulate pupil dilation in 8-month-old infants in a visual orienting paradigm. We found differential effects in the time course of these responses depending on the cue type. Moreover, using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) we identified two main components of pupillary response, which may reflect the alerting and orienting network activity. In a regression analysis, these components together explained nearly 40 % of variance in saccadic latencies in the spatial cueing condition of the task. These results likely demonstrate that both networks work together in 8-month-old infants and that their activity can be indexed with pupil dilation combined with PCA, but not with raw changes in pupil diameter.

BackgroundPrevious literature has shown a putative relationship between playing a musical instrument and a benefit in various cognitive domains. However, to date it still remains unknown whether the exposure to a musically-enriched environment instead of playing an instrument yourself might also increase cognitive domains such as language, mathematics or executive sub-functions such as for example planning or working memory in primary school children.DesignCross-sectionalMethodExposure to a musically-enriched environment like listening to music at home, during play or when attending concerts was assessed using a comprehensive intake questionnaire administered to a sample of 176 primary school children. Furthermore, participants completed the verbal intelligence section of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale (WISC III), performed executive sub-function tasks such as planning (Tower of London), working memory (Klingberg Matrix backward span) and inhibition (Go/no-Go task), and a short-term memory task (Klingberg Matrix forward span).ResultsLinear and multiple regression analyses showed no significant relationship between exposure to a musically-enriched environment, executive sub-functions (planning, inhibition and working memory), and short-term memory. The relationship between an enriched musical environment and verbal IQ has revealed trends.DiscussionExperiencing a musically enriched environment does not serve as predictor for higher performance on executive sub-functions, however, can influence verbal IQ.

In this paper we explore the relation between an agent's doxastic attitude and her arguments in support of a given claim. Our main contribution is the design of a logical setting that allows us reason about binary arguments which are either in favor or against a certain claim. This is a setting in which arguments and propositions are the basic building blocks so that the concept of argument-based belief emerges in a straightforward way. We work against the background of Dung's abstract argumentation framework, extending it to a new setting in which we can study the formal properties of binary arguments as well as the larger structures they establish. This paper introduces a formal `two-dimensional' language to talk about propositions and arguments, for which a sound and complete axiom system is provided.

Contains fulltext : 192370.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Objective: The current article set out to review all research conducted to date investigating prospective memory (PM) in autism. Method: All studies on PM in autism are first described, followed by a critical review and discussion of experimental findings within the multiprocess framework. PM in autism is then considered through an embodied predictive coding account of autism. Results: Overall, despite somewhat inconsistent methodologies, a general deficit in PM in autism is observed, with evidence mostly in line with the multiprocess framework. That is, for tasks that are high in cognitive and attentional demand (e.g. time-based tasks; event-based cues of non-focality or low salience) PM performance of autistic participants is impaired. Building upon previous work in predictive-coding, and the way in which expected precision modulates attention, we postulate mechanisms that underpin PM and the potential deficits seen in autism. Furthermore, a unifying predictive-coding account of autism is extended under embodied predictive-coding models, to show how a predictive-coding impairment accounts not only for characteristic autistic difficulties, but also for commonly found differences in autistic movement. Conclusions: We show how differences in perception and action, core to the development of autism, lead directly to problems seen in PM. Using this link between movement and PM, we then put forward a number of holistic, embodied interventions to support PM in autism. 35 p.

This paper adds to the philosophical literature on mechanistic explanation by elaborating two related explanatory functions of idealisation in mechanistic models. The first function involves explaining the presence of structural/organizational features of mechanisms by reference to their role as difference-makers for performance requirements. The second involves tracking counterfactual dependency relations between features of mechanisms and features of mechanistic explanandum phenomena. To make these functions salient, we relate our discussion to an exemplar from systems biological research on the mechanism for countering heat shock—the heat shock response (HSR) system—in Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. This research also reinforces a more general lesson: ontic constraint accounts in the literature on mechanistic explanation provide insufficiently informative normative appraisals of mechanistic models. We close by outlining an alternative view on the explanatory norms governing mechanistic representation.

A growing field of research has made use of a semiartificial language paradigm to investigate the role of awareness in L2 acquisition. A central and empirically still unresolved issue in this field concerns the possibility of learning implicitly, that is, without intention to learn and without awareness of what has been learned. Up until now, studies on implicit learning have mainly been conducted in laboratory settings under highly controlled conditions with university students as participants. The present study investigated whether and to what extent the results obtained in such settings can be extrapolated to the general population. Building on Williams (2005), we designed two crowdsourcing experiments that examined the learning of novel form-meaning mappings under incidental conditions in 163 participants. Our design allowed us to disentangle the effects of awareness at the level of noticing and understanding. The results of the two experiments demonstrated the implicit learning effect outside the lab in a more varied sample of participants and indicated that awareness at both levels appears to have a facilitative effect on learning outcomes.

This chapter shows that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) differ from neurotypicals in some of the logical inferences that they endorse or reject and explains that this fact is a fundamental feature of autistic cognition, rooted in homologies between language and motor planning, particularly action-goals and the synthesis of action sequences. A reconceptualization of the false-belief task as including a suppression task for modus ponens suggests that people with ASD will suppress modus ponens much less than neurotypical controls. This conjecture receives further support from an experiment designed to test the executive dysfunction theory of autism. There are several reasons why inhibition is compromised in ASD e.g., immature inhibitory interneurons, and a pruning process which selectively spares excitatory neurons. For neurotypicals the rate of endorsement drops from 67.1% to 35.7%, and for subjects with ASD there was a drop from 45% to 28%. After conditionalization that difference is not significant.

It is a common intuition that the antecedent of an indicative conditional should have something to do with its consequent, that they should be somehow connected. In fact, many conditionals sound unacceptable precisely because they seem to suggest a connection which is not there. Although the majority of semantic theories of conditionals treat this phenomenon as something pragmatic, for instance, something that is conversationally implicated, no one has offered a full-fledged pragmatic explanation of why missing-link, and, in particular, false-link conditionals strike us as odd. The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility that the link is an example of a conversational implicature. We discuss possible tests one can employ to identify conversational implicatures, and, ultimately, we show that the connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent fails them all.

This paper offers an account of the fact that certain verbs license wh-questions as their complement but not whether-questions. For instance, it is felicitous to say It is surprising who Bill had invited but not to say It is surprising whether Bill had invited his wife. We refer to this contrast as the *whether puzzle. We propose an account which crucially rests on the assumption that the relevant kind of verbs are sensitive to the semantic objects that their complement clause brings into salience, rather than just its truth/resolution conditions. It has been argued in previous work that the semantic objects that matrix questions bring into salience are important to understand the role of such questions in discourse. The present paper is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to argue that this aspect of meaning is also crucial for understanding the role of embedded questions in grammar.

How could the paradigm shift towards enactive embodied cognitive science have implications for society and politics? Translating insights form enactive embodied cognitive science into ways of dealing with real-life issues is an important challenge. This paper focuses of the urgent societal issue of social cohesion, which is crucial in our increasingly segregated and polarized Western societies. We use Rietveld’s (2016) philosophical Skilled Intentionality Framework and work by the multidisciplinary studio RAAAF to extend Lambros Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory (2013) to the social domain. How could a landscape of social affordances generate change in the behavioral patterns of people from different socio-cultural backgrounds? RAAAF is currently imagining and planning an ambitious intervention in the public domain that could really change existing socio-cultural practices and aims to contribute to social cohesion. An animation film it made introduces a landscape of social affordances. We will present and discuss this Trusted Strangers animation film, which is a thinking model for new public domain all over the world. Tha animation film visualizes how a well-designed landscape of social affordances could invite all sorts of interactions between people from different socio-cultural backgrounds.

It is widely agreed that social factors are related to health outcomes: much research has served to establish correlations between classes of social factors on the one hand and classes of disease on the other hand. However, why and how social factors are an active part in the aetiology of disease development is something that is gaining attention only recently in the health sciences and in the medical humanities. In this paper, we advance the view that, just as biomarkers help trace the causal continuum from exposure to disease development at the biological level, sociomarkers ought to be introduced and studied in order to trace the social continuum from exposure to disease development. We explain how sociomarkers differ from social indicators and how they can be used in combination with biomarkers in order to reconstruct the mixed mechanisms of health and disease, namely mechanisms in which both biological and social factors have an active causal role.

Avoiding a Cognitive MonsterAlthough expertise is usually considered as a positive outcome of education and practice in domains as varied as sports, science, music and politics, there are also concerns about negative effects of expertise. Since expertise is facilitated largely by implicit, automatic cognitive and brain processes, it can also lead to undesirable consequences in the form of stereotypical, discriminatory or inflexible responses. Indeed, such responses can at times even be inconsistent with the explicit and intentional choices of an expert. Explaining this phenomenon, it is argued that an expert’s performance can be considered as selecting in a given situation a preferred option for action from a ‘Sculpted Space of Actions’ (Keestra, 2014), which contains more, more complex and better differentiated action representations than a beginner’s space of actions. Integrating this account with the cognitive neuroscientific theory of Predictive Processing, it is argued how mitigating undesirable effects of expertise depends upon awareness and control of the processes involved. Education should therefore provide for insights in and techniques for controlling the cognitive and brain processes that constitute expertise.

Theory of Mind, the cognitive capacity to attribute internal mental states to oneself and others, is a crucial component of social skills. Its formal study has become important, witness recent research on reasoning and information update by intelligent agents, and some proposals for its formal modelling have put forward settings based on Epistemic Logic (EL). Still, due to intrinsic idealisations, it is questionable whether EL can be used to model the high-order cognition of ‘real’ agents. This manuscript proposes a mental attribution modelling logical framework that is more in-line with findings in cognitive science. We introduce the setting and some of its technical features, and argue why it does justice to empirical observations, using it for modelling well-known False-Belief Tasks.

Semantic universals are properties of meaning shared by the languages of the world. We offer an explanation of the presence of such universals by measuring simplicity in terms of ease of learning, showing that expressions satisfying universals are simpler than those that do not according to this criterion. We measure ease of learning using tools from machine learning and analyze universals in a domain of function words (quantifiers) and content words (color terms). Our results provide strong evidence that semantic universals across both function and content words reflect simplicity as measured by ease of learning.

According to virtually all major theories of conditionals, conditionals with a true antecedent and a true consequent are true. Yet conditionals whose antecedent and consequent have nothing to do with each other—so-called missing-link conditionals—strike us as odd, regardless of the truth values of their constituent clauses. Most theorists attribute this apparent oddness to pragmatics, but on a recent proposal, it rather betokens a semantic defect. Research in experimental pragmatics suggests that people can be more or less sensitive to pragmatic cues and may be inclined to differing degrees to evaluate a true sentence carrying a false implicature as false. We report the results of an empirical study that investigated whether people’s sensitivity to false implicatures is associated with how they tend to evaluate missing-link conditionals with true clauses. These results shed light on the question of whether missing-link conditionals are best seen as pragmatically infelicitous or rather as semantically defective.

Despite differences in their function and domain-specific elements, syntactic processing in music and language is believed to share cognitive resources. This study aims to investigate whether the simultaneous processing of language and music share the use of a common syntactic processor or more general attentional resources. To investigate this matter we tested musicians and non-musicians using visually presented sentences and aurally presented melodies containing syntactic local and long-distance dependencies. Accuracy rates and reaction times of participants’ responses were collected. In both sentences and melodies, unexpected syntactic anomalies were introduced. This is the first study to address the processing of local and long-distance dependencies in language and music combined while reducing the effect of sensory memory. Participants were instructed to focus on language (language session), music (music session), or both (dual session). In the language session, musicians and non-musicians performed comparably in terms of accuracy rates and reaction times. As expected, groups’ differences appeared in the music session, with musicians being more accurate in their responses than non-musicians and only the latter showing an interaction between the accuracy rates for music and language syntax. In the dual session musicians were overall more accurate than non-musicians. However, both groups showed comparable behavior, by displaying an interaction between the accuracy rates for language and music syntax responses. In our study, accuracy rates seem to better capture the interaction between language and music syntax; and this interaction seems to indicate the use of distinct, however, interacting mechanisms as part of decision making strategy. This interaction seems to be subject of an increase of attentional load and domain proficiency. Our study contributes to the long-lasting debate about the commonalities between language and music by providing evidence for their interaction at a more domain-general level.

While genomics has been founded on accurate tools that lead to a limited amount of classification error, exposure assessment in epidemiology is often affected by large error. The “environment” is in fact a complex construct that encompasses chemical exposures (e.g., to carcinogens); biological agents (viruses, or the “microbiome”); and social relationships. The “exposome” concept was then put forward to stress the relatively poor development of appropriate tools for exposure assessment when applied to the study of disease etiology. Three layers of the exposome have been proposed: “general external” (including social capital, stress and psychology); “specific external” (including chemicals, viruses, radiation, etc.); and “internal” (including for example metabolism and gut microflora). In addition, there are at least three properties of the exposome: (a) it is based on a refinement of tools to measure exposures (including internal measurements in the body); (b) it involves a broad definition of “exposure” or environment, including overarching concepts at a societal level; and (c) it involves a temporal component (i.e., exposure is analyzed in a life-course perspective). The conceptual and practical challenge is how the different layers (i.e., general, specific external, and internal) connect to each other in a causally meaningful sequence. The relevance of this question pertains to the translation of science into policy—for example, if experiences in early life impact on the adult risk of disease, and on the quality of aging, how is distant action to be incorporated in biological causal models and into policy interventions? A useful causal theory to address scientific and policy question about exposure is based on the concept of information transmission. Such a theory can explain how to connect the different layers of the exposome in a life-course temporal frame and helps identify the best level for intervention (molecular, individual, or population level). In this context epigenetics plays a key role, partly because it explains the long-distance persistence of epigenetic changes via the concept of “epigenetic memory.”

Contains fulltext : 192453.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) This study investigated the effect of handedness on pianists' abilities to adjust their keyboard performance skills to new spatial and motor mappings. Left- and right-handed pianists practiced simple melodies on a regular MIDI piano keyboard (practice) and were then asked to perform these with modified melodic contours (the same or reversed melodic contour causing a change of fingering) and on a reversed MIDI piano keyboard (test). The difference of performance duration between the practice and the test phase as well as the amount of errors played were used as test measures. Overall, a stronger effect for modified melodic contours than for the reversed keyboard was observed. Furthermore, we observed a trend of left-handed pianists to be quicker and more accurate in playing melodies when reversing their fingering with reversed contours in their left-hand performances. This suggests that handedness may influence pianists' skill to adjust to new spatial and motor mappings. 14 p.

Contains fulltext : 193071.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Establishing non-native phoneme categories can be a notoriously difficult endeavour - in both speech perception and speech production. This study asks how these two domains interact in the course of this learning process. It investigates the effect of perceptual learning and related production practice of a challenging non-native category on the perception and/or production of that category. A four-day perceptual training protocol on the British English /æ/-/ɛ/ vowel contrast was combined with either related or unrelated production practice. After feedback on perceptual categorisation of the contrast, native Dutch participants in the related production group (N = 19) pronounced the trial's correct answer, while participants in the unrelated production group (N = 19) pronounced similar but phonologically unrelated words. Comparison of pre- and post-tests showed significant improvement over the course of training in both perception and production, but no differences between the groups were found. The lack of an effect of production practice is discussed in the light of previous, competing results and models of second-language speech perception and production. This study confirms that, even in the context of related production practice, perceptual training boosts production learning. 12 p.

Why do people make deontological decisions, although they often lead to overall unfavorable outcomes? One account is receiving considerable attention: deontological judgments may signal commitment to prosociality and thus may increase people’s chances of being selected as social partners–which carries obvious long-term benefits. Here we test this framework by experimentally exploring whether people making deontological judgments are expected to be more prosocial than those making consequentialist judgments and whether they are actually so. In line with previous studies, we identified deontological choices using the Trapdoor dilemma. Using economic games, we take two measures of general prosociality towards strangers: trustworthiness and altruism. Our results procure converging evidence for a perception gap according to which Trapdoor-deontologists are believed to be more trustworthy and more altruistic towards strangers than Trapdoor-consequentialists, but actually they are not so. These results show that deontological judgments are not universal, reliable signals of prosociality.

Background: Research on the effects of music education on cognitive abilities has generated increasing interest across the scientific community. Nonetheless, longitudinal studies investigating the effects of structured music education on cognitive sub-functions are still rare. Prime candidates for investigating a relationship between academic achievement and music education appear to be executive functions such as planning, working memory, and inhibition.Methods: One hundred and forty-seven primary school children, Mage = 6.4 years, SD = 0.65 were followed for 2.5 years. Participants were randomized into four groups: two music intervention groups, one active visual arts group, and a no arts control group. Neuropsychological tests assessed verbal intelligence and executive functions. Additionally, a national pupil monitor provided data on academic performance.Results: Children in the visual arts group perform better on visuospatial memory tasks as compared to the three other conditions. However, the test scores on inhibition, planning and verbal intelligence increased significantly in the two music groups over time as compared to the visual art and no arts controls. Mediation analysis with executive functions and verbal IQ as mediator for academic performance have shown a possible far transfer effect from executive sub-function to academic performance scores.Discussion: The present results indicate a positive influence of long-term music education on cognitive abilities such as inhibition and planning. Of note, following a two-and-a-half year long visual arts program significantly improves scores on a visuospatial memory task. All results combined, this study supports a far transfer effect from music education to academic achievement mediated by executive sub-functions.

Perception of a regular beat in music is inferred from different types of accents. For example, increases in loudness cause intensity accents, and the grouping of time intervals in a rhythm creates temporal accents. Accents are expected to occur on the beat: when accents are “missing” on the beat, the beat is more difficult to find. However, it is unclear whether accents occurring off the beat alter beat perception similarly to missing accents on the beat. Moreover, no one has examined whether intensity accents influence beat perception more or less strongly than temporal accents, nor how musical expertise affects sensitivity to each type of accent. In two experiments, we obtained ratings of difficulty in finding the beat in rhythms with either temporal or intensity accents, and which varied in the number of accents on the beat as well as the number of accents off the beat. In both experiments, the occurrence of accents on the beat facilitated beat detection more in musical experts than in musical novices. In addition, the number of accents on the beat affected beat finding more in rhythms with temporal accents than in rhythms with intensity accents. The effect of accents off the beat was much weaker than the effect of accents on the beat and appeared to depend on musical expertise, as well as on the number of accents on the beat: when many accents on the beat are missing, beat perception is quite difficult, and adding accents off the beat may not reduce beat perception further. Overall, the different types of accents were processed qualitatively differently, depending on musical expertise. Therefore, these findings indicate the importance of designing ecologically valid stimuli when testing beat perception in musical novices, who may need different types of accent information than musical experts to be able to find a beat. Furthermore, our findings stress the importance of carefully designing rhythms for social and clinical applications of beat perception, as not all listeners treat all rhythms alike.

The direct perception theory of empathy claims that we can immediately experience a person’s state of mind. I can see for instance that my neighbour is angry with me in his bodily countenance. I develop a version of the direct perception theory of empathy which takes this perceptual capacity to depend upon recognising in what way the other person is responsive to the affordances the environment provides. By recognising which possibilities for action are relevant to a person, I can thereby understand something about the meaning they give to the world. I come to share something of their perspective on the world, and this allows me to grasp based on my perception of them something about their current state of mind. I argue that shared affect plays a central role in this perceptual capacity. Shared affect allows me to orient my attention to possibilities for action that matter to the other person. I end by briefly discuss the implications of this view of empathy for the disturbances in so-called “cognitive empathy” that are found in people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

In the field of early music, the urge to realize historically informed interpretations has led to new perspectives about our musical legacy from scholars and performers alike. Consequently, different schools of early music performance practice have been developed through the 20th and 21st centuries. Analysing the development of performance practice and aesthetics from the perspective of cognitive and computational musicology can potentially provide insights into interrelations between musicology, performance practice and cognition.In the field of performance analysis we may therefore aim to find out which aspects are involved in the categorization of performances or in the identification and understanding of possible performance trends that change over time. For instance, are sudden changes in tempo within the performance of a piece representative of certain musicologically informed interpretations? Is this approach communicated by the performance itself? Do perception and cognition play a role in the aesthetic choices involved in performance?This article concentrates on applying three state-of-the-art quantitative methodologies in expressive performance analysis to elucidate possible relations among musicological and cognitive interpretations. It is shown how a particular methodology may serve (or constrain) the ability to compare different interpretations and define ‘expressiveness’. For this purpose, an analysis and comparison is presented of seven performances of the Prelude from J. S. Bach’s Cello Suite no.1 in G major, BWV1007, played by three different performers.

Most high-level auditory functions require one to detect the onset and offset of sound sequences as well as registering the rate at which sounds are presented within the sound trains. By recording event-related brain potentials to onsets and offsets of tone trains as well as to changes in the presentation rate, we tested whether these fundamental auditory capabilities are functional at birth. Each of these events elicited significant event-related potential components in sleeping healthy neonates. The data thus demonstrate that the newborn brain is sensitive to these acoustic features suggesting that infants are geared towards the temporal aspects of segregating sound sources, speech and music perception already at birth.

Clinical outcome of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) shows robust effects in terms of a mean Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (YBOCS) reduction of 47.7 % and a mean response percentage (minimum 35 % YBOCS reduction) of 58.2 %. It appears that most patients regain a normal quality of life (QoL) after DBS. Reviewing the literature of the last 4 years, we argue that the mechanisms of action of DBS are a combination of excitatory and inhibitory as well as local and distal effects. Evidence from DBS animal models converges with human DBS EEG and imaging findings, in that DBS may be effective for OCD by reduction of hyperconnectivity between frontal and striatal areas. This is achieved through reduction of top-down-directed synchrony and reduction of frontal low-frequency oscillations. DBS appears to counteract striatal dysfunction through an increase in striatal dopamine and through improvement of reward processing. DBS affects anxiety levels through reduction of stress hormones and improvement of fear extinction.

This review article provides an overview of the neural correlates of second language (L2) morphosyntactic processing of the past 20 years. Morphosyntactic processing is of great relevance for our understanding of second language acquisition as it is believed to be more sensitive to age of acquisition (AoA) and maturational constraints than other linguistic sub-processes, i.e., lexical- and semantic processing.In this review we present the more general questions raised by the first neuroimaging studies, namely, whether L1 and L2 neural representation of morphosyntax is shared or segregated. Next, we present studies that addressed the impact of AoA, proficiency level, and language transfer on L2 morphosyntactic processing and representation and their findings. We then discuss these findings in light of the procedural/declarative and unified competition models. Finally, we suggest some future directions for studies investigating L2 morphosyntactic processing using neuroimaging techniques. With this article we aim to provide the reader with an overview of what is currently known in terms of L2 morphosyntactic representation and processing and emphasize aspects that have remained understudied.

Should the practice of the historic preservation of built and landscape heritage necessarily be based on conservation? Monuments, listed buildings, landscapes, and other forms of built heritage, are typically regarded as immutable and untouchable—objects to be “conserved”—and as a result tend to fade from public imagination and memory (Rietveld et al., 2017). Current conservative preservation practices tend to fixate built heritage into an arbitrary historical state (choosing for example the building's early seventeenth century state as the reference), which negates both the historical process that shaped it (and followed it), as well as any possibility for rendering it relevant for the present or to bring us further into the future. Instead of just halting decay, we argue that one should aim at generating meaning from the old for current and future generations. In order to achieve this, we need a radically new perspective on built cultural heritage, which can only be reached by approaching heritage in a different way: one that conceives of preservation as an effort toward imagination and activation, rather than conservation.This view has been the motivation behind RAAAF's radical interventions in the field of heritage. RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances] is a multidisciplinary studio operating at the intersection of architecture, visual art and philosophy. One example (Figure 1) of such a new perspective on cultural heritage is Bunker 599, where RAAAF|Atelier de Lyon cut through a bunker that is part of the UNESCO World Heritage-nominated New Dutch Waterline. In a radical way this intervention sheds new light on the Dutch and UNESCO policies on cultural heritage. At the same time, it makes people look at their surroundings in a new way. The bunker becomes the entrance to an 80 km long potential park of the twenty-first century, the New Dutch Waterline Park. A seemingly indestructible bunker with monumental status is sliced open. Paradoxically, after the intervention Bunker 599 became a Dutch national monument, so it “increased” in monumental value. The strategic intervention (Rietveld E. et al., 2014) offers a new perspective on the other 700 bunkers in the New Dutch Waterline.

We present a hypothesis-driven study on the variation of melody phrases in a collection of Dutch folk songs. We investigate the variation of phrases within the folk songs through a pattern matching method which detects occurrences of these phrases within folk song variants, and ask the question: do the phrases which show less variation have different properties than those which do? We hypothesize that theories on melody recall may predict variation, and as such, investigate phrase length, the position and number of repetitions of a given phrase in the melody in which it occurs, as well as expectancy and motif repetivity. We show that all of these predictors account for the observed variation to a moderate degree, and that, as hypothesized, those phrases vary less which are rather short, contain highly expected melodic material, occur relatively early in the melody, and contain small pitch intervals. A large portion of the variance is left unexplained by the current model, however, which leads us to a discussion of future approaches to study memorability of melodies.

In this article we move beyond the problematic distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ cognition by accounting for so-called ‘higher’ cognitive capacities in terms of skillful activities in practices, and in terms of the affordances exploited in those practices. Through ethnographic research we aim to further develop the new notion of skilled intentionality by turning to the phenomenon of the tendency towards an optimal grip on a situation in real-life situations in the field of architecture. Tending towards an optimal grip is an inherently affective and dynamic phenomenon. It has been under explored in philosophy, despite its central place in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. When the architects experience discontent, attention is typically solicited by the affordances through which possible ways of continuing the improvement of the design can be explored. In various ways this tension or disequilibrium - fueling a tendency towards an optimal grip - is encountered in the complex architectural design practices that we observed. Based on our field material we distinguish between: a) grip in visual perception, b) grip on the design, and c) grip on ‘how to design’. The move towards an optimal grip takes shape by joining forces with a landscape of affordances. This landscape includes, for instance, affordances for grasping a cup of coffee, affordances provided by a cardboard model to improve it, as well as for engaging with a person who is not physically present. Because they are skilled, the architects can be responsive to these different affordances in similar ways. Furthermore, in practice the architects are responsive to multiple affordances simultaneously. Through our analysis of the tendency towards an optimal grip we show that our surroundings contribute to skillful action and cognition in a far more complex way than is currently acknowledged in philosophy and cognitive science.

Enculturation is known to shape the perception of meter in music but this is not explicitly accounted for by current cognitive models of meter perception. We hypothesize that the induction of meter is a result of predictive coding: interpreting onsets in a rhythm relative to a periodic meter facilitates prediction of future onsets. Such prediction, we hypothesize, is based on previous exposure to rhythms. As such, predictive coding provides a possible explanation for the way meter perception is shaped by the cultural environment. Based on this hypothesis, we present a probabilistic model of meter perception that uses statistical properties of the relation between rhythm and meter to infer meter from quantized rhythms. We show that our model can successfully predict annotated time signatures from quantized rhythmic patterns derived from folk melodies. Furthermore, we show that by inferring meter, our model improves prediction of the onsets of future events compared to a similar probabilistic model that does not infer meter. Finally, as a proof of concept, we demonstrate how our model can be used in a simulation of enculturation. From the results of this simulation, we derive a class of rhythms that are likely to be interpreted differently by enculturated listeners with different histories of exposure to rhythms.

This paper studies the logical features of social group creation. We focus on the mechanisms which indicate when agents can form a team based on the correspondence in their set of features (behavior, opinions, etc.). Our basic approach uses a semi-metric on the set of agents, which is used to construct a network topology. Then it is extended with epistemic features to represent the agents’ epistemic states, allowing us to explore group-creation alternatives where what matters is not only the agent’s differences but also what they know about them. We use tools of dynamic epistemic logic to study the properties of different strategies to network formations.

There is an accumulating body of evidence that knowledge of the statistics of multiword phrases (MWP) facilitates native language learning and processing both in children and adults. However, less is known about whether adult second language (L2) learners are able to develop native-like sensitivity to the statistics of MWP, and more importantly up until now no attempt has been made to determine to what extent variation in this ability is related to individual differences (IDs) in cognitive and affective factors. Using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework, the aim of the present study was twofold: (1) to replicate the MWP frequency effect reported in Hernandez et al. [1] with another sample of L2 learners, and (2) to determine to what extent variation in online L2 processing of MWP can be accounted for by two IDs measures, working memory (WM) and personality. We could replicate the frequency effect for MWP from the high frequency band but not for MWP from the low frequency band. Our findings revealed that while there was no main effect of WM, the Openness personality trait had a statistically significant impact on online L2 processing of MWP. However, subsequent analyses yielded three significant two-way interactions indicating that the relationship between WM, personality and online L2 processing of MWP is a complex one. Taken together our findings underscore the importance of further investigation of L2 learners’ ability to keep track of and build up knowledge of the statistics of MWPs as well as the interrelationships between the cognitive and affective IDs that impact the development of such ability.