Trails of meaning construction: Symbolic artifacts engage the social brain

Cognitive-Cultural Looping Mechanism of Urban Space Conceptualization

A crucial point for urban design is the acknowledgement that urban material structures are not only constituting a set of cognitive-cultural affordances that shapes people's behavior and experiential world, but likewise that the design process itself is an expression of cultural conceptualizations possibly evoked by ongoing cultural practices and perceptions, thus forming a dynamic loop. In this paper, we outline a framework for the study of material, cultural and social mechanisms interacting with human cognition, behavior and emotions. We attempt a conceptual model that integrates dynamic interactions between cognitive-cultural affordances and our conceptualization of the environment and provides a few illustrative case examples. The model proposes a set of dynamic relations between cognitive and cultural processes at shorter time scales modifying conceptualizations and environmental affordances on longer timescales, while these - in turn - come to guide and constrain processes at the shorter timescales. The model has important implications for our understanding of the role of environmental design, especially urban design, as bridging between aspects of human situated experience, behavior, social and cultural norms and material culture.

On the psychological origins of tool use

The ubiquity of tool use in human life has generated multiple lines of scientific and philosophical investigation to understand the development and expression of humans' engagement with tools and its relation to other dimensions of human experience. However, existing literature on tool use faces several epistemological challenges in which the same set of questions generate many different answers. At least four critical questions can be identified, which are intimately intertwined-(1) What constitutes tool use? (2) What psychological processes underlie tool use in humans and nonhuman animals? (3) Which of these psychological processes are exclusive to tool use? (4) Which psychological processes involved in tool use are exclusive to Homo sapiens? To help advance a multidisciplinary scientific understanding of tool use, six author groups representing different academic disciplines (e.g., anthropology, psychology, neuroscience) and different theoretical perspectives respond to each of these questions, and then point to the direction of future work on tool use. We find that while there are marked differences among the responses of the respective author groups to each question, there is a surprising degree of agreement about many essential concepts and questions. We believe that this interdisciplinary and intertheoretical discussion will foster a more comprehensive understanding of tool use than any one of these perspectives (or any one of these author groups) would (or could) on their own.

The Cognitive Science of Technology

Technology is central to human life but hard to define and study. This review synthesizes advances in fields from anthropology to evolutionary biology and neuroscience to propose an interdisciplinary cognitive science of technology. The foundation of this effort is an evolutionarily motivated definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and cultural reproduction. This broad scope respects the complexity of the subject but poses a challenge for theoretical unification. Addressing this challenge requires a comparative approach to reduce the diversity of real-world technological cognition to a smaller number of recurring processes and relationships. To this end, a synthetic perceptual-motor hypothesis (PMH) for the evolutionary-developmental-cultural construction of technological cognition is advanced as an initial target for investigation.

The right VLPFC and downregulation of social pain: A TMS study

Previous studies have demonstrated that the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC) is crucially involved in downregulating physical and social pain. However, it remains unclear whether the RVLPFC is more specific to either physical or social pain. The present study compares the role of RVLPFC in emotion regulation in physical‐ and social‐pain conditions using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). A total of 60 healthy participants underwent active (n = 30) or sham (n = 30) rTMS over the RVLPFC. Following each TMS session, participants performed a non‐reappraisal and then a reappraisal task to downregulate imagined physical or social pain evoked by pictures. Self‐reported negative emotional ratings and electroencephalogram data were recorded during the emotion regulation task. Participants were then required to rate the valence and arousal of those pictures 30 min after the task. It is found that rTMS‐activated RVLPFC led to reductions in subjective negative feelings and amplitudes of the late positive potential during reappraisal; however, these effects were found exclusively in the social‐pain condition. Participants also reported higher positive valence for socially, compared to physically, painful pictures after 30 min of the task. Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence both supported the functional specificity of RVLPFC in regulation of social pain. The prominent delayed effect of rTMS makes it possible to consider the potential application of rTMS‐VLPFC in clinical practice for social pain relief.

How Playfulness Motivates - Putative Looping Effects of Autonomy and Surprise Revealed by Micro-Phenomenological Investigations

Play and playfulness have repeatedly been suggested to promote learning and performance, also in environments traditionally not connotated with play. However, finding empirical evidence for these claims has been aggravated by the lack of a definition of play and playfulness fitting to this description. This paper proposes to consider playfulness as an attitude, mode or mental stance, that can be modulated independent of the activity pursued and of the general character of the person. It furthermore introduces the micro-phenomenological method to assess the process and outcome of such modulation. To explore this, we devised a simple building task in a controlled within-subject design, interviewing each participant on how they accomplished the task when asked to perform it so that it either felt playful or not playful. The outcomes of this data driven approach supported this notion of playfulness as a stance, and allowed for specific hypotheses about the temporal course and mechanisms of becoming playful. They suggest that an experience of autonomy and self-expression may be key to the success of the modulation. They furthermore indicate that the resulting playful state may allow for an exploratory engagement with materials that can lead to surprising results. Such unexpected results seem to enhance participants' feeling of competence which, in turn, may increase the motivation for the task. We discuss these results within the framework of Deci and Ryan's motivational theory and in relation to current research on gamification and learning.

Interacting Timescales in Perspective-Taking

Through theoretical discussion, literature review, and a computational model, this paper poses a challenge to the notion that perspective-taking involves a fixed architecture in which particular processes have priority. For example, some research suggests that egocentric perspectives can arise more quickly, with other perspectives (such as of task partners) emerging only secondarily. This theoretical dichotomy-between fast egocentric and slow other-centric processes-is challenged here. We propose a general view of perspective-taking as an emergent phenomenon governed by the interplay among cognitive mechanisms that accumulate information at different timescales. We first describe the pervasive relevance of perspective-taking to cognitive science. A dynamical systems model is then introduced that explicitly formulates the timescale interaction proposed. This model illustrates that, rather than having a rigid time course, perspective-taking can be fast or slow depending on factors such as task context. Implications are discussed, with ideas for future empirical research.

Interpretation of Social Interactions: Functional Imaging of Cognitive-Semiotic Categories During Naturalistic Viewing

Social interactions arise from patterns of communicative signs, whose perception and interpretation require a multitude of cognitive functions. The semiotic framework of Peirce's Universal Categories (UCs) laid ground for a novel cognitive-semiotic typology of social interactions. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 16 volunteers watched a movie narrative encompassing verbal and non-verbal social interactions. Three types of non-verbal interactions were coded ("unresolved," "non-habitual," and "habitual") based on a typology reflecting Peirce's UCs. As expected, the auditory cortex responded to verbal interactions, but non-verbal interactions modulated temporal areas as well. Conceivably, when speech was lacking, ambiguous visual information (unresolved interactions) primed auditory processing in contrast to learned behavioral patterns (habitual interactions). The latter recruited a parahippocampal-occipital network supporting conceptual processing and associative memory retrieval. Requesting semiotic contextualization, non-habitual interactions activated visuo-spatial and contextual rule-learning areas such as the temporo-parietal junction and right lateral prefrontal cortex. In summary, the cognitive-semiotic typology reflected distinct sensory and association networks underlying the interpretation of observed non-verbal social interactions.

Perceived Conventionality in Co-speech Gestures Involves the Fronto-Temporal Language Network

Face-to-face communication is multimodal; it encompasses spoken words, facial expressions, gaze, and co-speech gestures. In contrast to linguistic symbols (e.g., spoken words or signs in sign language) relying on mostly explicit conventions, gestures vary in their degree of conventionality. Bodily signs may have a general accepted or conventionalized meaning (e.g., a head shake) or less so (e.g., self-grooming). We hypothesized that subjective perception of conventionality in co-speech gestures relies on the classical language network, i.e., the left hemispheric inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, Broca's area) and the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG, Wernicke's area) and studied 36 subjects watching video-recorded story retellings during a behavioral and an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. It is well documented that neural correlates of such naturalistic videos emerge as intersubject covariance (ISC) in fMRI even without involving a stimulus (model-free analysis). The subjects attended either to perceived conventionality or to a control condition (any hand movements or gesture-speech relations). Such tasks modulate ISC in contributing neural structures and thus we studied ISC changes to task demands in language networks. Indeed, the conventionality task significantly increased covariance of the button press time series and neuronal synchronization in the left IFG over the comparison with other tasks. In the left IFG, synchronous activity was observed during the conventionality task only. In contrast, the left pSTG exhibited correlated activation patterns during all conditions with an increase in the conventionality task at the trend level only. Conceivably, the left IFG can be considered a core region for the processing of perceived conventionality in co-speech gestures similar to spoken language. In general, the interpretation of conventionalized signs may rely on neural mechanisms that engage during language comprehension.