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Differentiating letter shapes accurately is an increasingly crucial competence. Are letters as distinctive as they could be? We used a unique dataset of crowdsourced letter descriptions across 43 writing systems to produce a comprehensive typology of letter shapes for these diverse scripts. We extracted from 19,591 letter classifications, contributed by 1,683 participants, enough features to provide a unique description of all letters in each system. We show that scripts, compared to phoneme inventories, are feature-extensive: they use additional features to do what could be done with a lower number of features, used more efficiently. Compared to 516 phoneme inventories from the P-base dataset, our 43 scripts have lower feature economy (fewer symbols for a given number of features) and lower feature informativeness (a less balanced distribution of feature values). Letter shapes, we argue, having more degrees of freedom than speech sounds, use features in a more wasteful way.

Cognition constrains and influences human cultural productions, among which are information technologies. Information technologies, because of and through their intensive use, can be expected to reflect human cognition particularly well. Cognitive approaches to information technologies have the potential of informing both cognitive science and historical disciplines. Beyond high ecological validity, we demonstrate the relevance of real-world data in testing and informing theories about how the mind works, through four different case studies and contexts: how we represent the world and space around us (Riggsby), how we represent more abstract -number- concepts (Chrisomalis), how we optimize written characters for our visual system (Miton), and coinage to minimize possible errors (Morin). Discussion and moderation will be assured by Valeria Giardino, aphilosopher whose main research topic is reasoning with diagrams and the role of cognitive artifacts in improving thought.

Across Eurasia, horse transport transformed ancient societies. Although evidence for chariotry is well dated, the origins of horse riding are less clear. Techniques to distinguish chariotry from riding in archaeological samples rely on elements not typically recovered from many steppe contexts. Here, the authors examine horse remains of Mongolia's Deer Stone-Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex, comparing them with ancient and modern East Asian horses used for both types of transport. DSK horses demonstrate unique dentition damage that could result from steppe chariotry, but may also indicate riding with a shallow rein angle at a fast gait. A key role for chariots in Late Bronze Age Mongolia helps explain the trajectory of horse use in early East Asia. Keywords: Eurasian Steppe, Mongolia, Bronze Age, horse domestication, chariots, horseback riding, Introduction Domestic horses (Equus caballus) facilitated the emergence of highly mobile pastoral lifeways and the transcontinental equestrian empires of the steppes of Mongolia and eastern Eurasia. Although historical documents trace [...]

Humans favor pictorial representations of agents with more space in front of them than behind them. This preference hasbeen evidenced in forced choice (Palmer, Gardner, & Wickens, 2008) and drag and drop tasks (Palmer & Langlois, 2017),and has been referred to as a forward bias in aesthetic preferences for spatial composition. It has also been documentedin depictions of animals and referred to as an anterior bias (Bode et al., 2011). We extend the study of this bias bylooking at the evolution of portrait painting in Europe (where classical rules demanded centering). For this we analyzeprofile-oriented portraits from two datasets: one Pan-European subset of the one used in Redies et al. (2007), and a secondone compiled from the London National Portrait Gallerys online collections. We confirm the bias and discuss links withunderlying mechanisms of animacy and agency perception.

Participants can adequately take into account several cues regarding the weight they should grant majority opinions,but that they do not consistently take into account cues regarding whether the members of the majority have formed theiropinions independently of each other. We suggest that these conflicting results can be explained by hypothesizing that somecues are evolutionarily valid (i.e. they were present and reliable during human evolution), and others not. Using this frameworkwe derive and test hypotheses about two facets of informational dependency. The first 3 experiments show that participantsadequately take into account cues to informational dependency when they are presented in a simple, evolutionarily valid way.Experiments 4 to 7 show that people consistently take into account shared motivation, but not shared cognitive traits, as a sourceof potential dependency, as predicted by the likely greater importance of differences in motivation during our evolutionaryhistory.