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The following topiCS are forthcoming in 2009/2010:
Inaugural Topic: Visions of
Cognitive Science
For the inaugural issue of topiCS
we have gathered a distinguished group of cognitive scientists
to reflect on the progress, pitfalls, current status, and
future direction of their area of expertise. Our cognitive
scientists reflect the diversity of our field. Topics covered
include Cognitive Engineering, Expertise (Micki
Chi), Animal Cognition (Nicky Clayton), Cognitive Heuristics
(Gerd Gigerenzer), Ontogeny, and Cognitive Science (Gary
Marcus), The Emergence of Computational Cognitive Modeling
(Jay McClelland), and the Productive Interaction between
Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience (Karalyn
Patterson and David
Plaut).
[ Further
details >
]
Topic on Joint Action – Social
and Cognitive Mechanisms
Topic Editors: Bruno Galantucci (Yeshiva
University
& Haskins Laboratories) & Natalie
Sebanz (University of Birmingham)
Although the study of joint action is
an established field in language research, it is not until
recent years that other disciplines have begun to investigate
how the perceptual, motor, and cognitive activities of two
or more individuals become organized into coherently coordinated
action. This new line of research is rapidly gaining momentum,
and progress has recently been made by studies of perception
and action links, of social cognition in animals and infants,
of the neural underpinnings of social cognition, as well
as by studies of human communication. These studies share
an important theoretical tenet: They all dispense with the
long-held assumption in cognitive science that perception,
action, and cognition can be fully understood by investigating
single individuals. Instead, students in this emerging field
assume that a comprehensive understanding of cognition can
only be achieved by studying how processes of perception,
action, and cognition shape one another via social interactions.
This topic will bring together
a diverse collection of researchers to offer a scientific
account of joint action that is grounded in the experimental
study of social phenomena at levels ranging from perception-action
couplings to interactions involving higher-level cognitive
processes. The papers of this topic will not only provide
readers from multiple disciplines with an overview of this
novel work, but will also provide a new theoretical perspective
on cognition.
Topic on Scientific and Technological Thinking
Topic Editor: Michael E. Gorman (University
of Virginia)
Science is one of the most sophisticated
expressions of human cognition. Technology is transforming
our planet and our cognitive capabilities. Therefore,
the kind of thinking that leads to scientific technological
breakthroughs ought to be a subject for cognitive science,
as should studies of omissions, errors and failures in these
areas.
There is a long tradition of cognitive
research on science, though it has not been a formally-recognized
sub-area. Herbert Simon has been the most famous advocate;
he and his students developed computational simulations of
scientific discoveries, and Herb was slated to participate
in an NSF-sponsored conference on Scientific and Technological
Thinking when he died (Gorman, Tweney, Gooding, & Kincannon,
2005). Other pioneers have included two former Chairs
of the Cognitive Science Society, Nancy Nersessian and Paul
Thagard. There is a long tradition of experimental research
on scientific reasoning, and also analysis of the cognitive
processes of both historical and present-day scientists,
including some working in teams. (The list of pioneers in
these areas is too numerous to list here, but several will
contribute to this topic). There has been
less cognitive research on the kind of thinking that goes
into technological innovation.
This section of topiCS will include some
of this history, but the bulk of the section will be concerned
with cutting-edge developments in scientific and technological
thinking, spanning historical, philosophical, and psychological
perspectives within cognitive science. Most of the articles
integrate science and technology, showing why, from a cognitive
science perspective, the divisions between science and technology
are artificial. Several of the articles in this topic
will carry on the long tradition of applying cognitive research
on science to education.
Gorman, M. E., Tweney, R. D., Gooding,
D. C., & Kincannon, A. (Eds.) (2005). Scientific
and technological thinking. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Topic on Formal Approaches to Group Behavior
Topic Editors: Robert
L. Goldstone (Indiana
University) and Todd M. Gureckis (New York University)
Cognitive Science tends to focus on the
behavior of single individuals thinking and perceiving on
their own. However, interacting groups of people also create
emergent organizations that are not intended by any individual.
People participate in collective behavior patterns that they
may not even be able to perceive, let alone understand. Social
phenomena such as rumors, the emergence of a standard currency,
transportation systems, the World Wide Web, resource harvesting,
crowding, and scientific establishments arise because of
individuals’ beliefs
and goals, but the eventual form that these phenomena take
is rarely the goal of any individual. This section of topiCS
will attempt to integrate three methods for exploring collective
behavior: 1) controlled experiments bridging individual and
group levels of behavior analysis, 2) analyses of naturally
occurring collective behavior patterns, and 3) formal mathematical
and computational models of the emergence of collective patterns.
Topic on Cognitive Science
— The Past 30 Years and the Next 30 Years
Topic Editor: Lawrence W. Barsalou (Emory
University)
In honor of the 30th anniversary
of the seminal Cognitive Science Conference in 1979, the
Society sponsored two symposia at its 2008 conference
that traced the trajectory of Cognitive Science from
its inception through the present into the future. A
special section of topiCS will contain articles based on
these presentations, as well as additional articles that
address the trajectories of other significant disciplines
and perspectives not covered in the symposia. We
hope that this special topic stimulates thought and discussion
about the future, and that it produces positive influence
on future research in the community. Further
details >
Topic on Philosophy in Cognitive Science and Cognitive
Neuroscience
Topic Editor: Andrew
Brook (Carleton
University)
Analytic philosophy of mind, language,
and science has always thought of itself as contributing
to cognitive science and cognitive science has always thought
of philosophy of these kinds as part of what makes it up.
Indeed, philosophers such as Putnam, Fodor and Dennett were
there at the beginning and are still much read and discussed
by the community. Yet philosophy's place in cognitive research
has never been stable or well understood. Philosophers do
not do experiments and if they build models, the models are
highly abstract and unspecific. Philosophers are often just
as keen to study an interesting possibility via a thought-experiment
as to find new facts by doing 'real' experiments. Sometimes
they are blithely indifferent to the facts. So what are these
people about and how could they make a contribution to hardheaded
science of the kind that cognitive science aspires to create?
Those are the topics of the papers in the Philosophy
in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience series.
Rather than being limited to one section of one issue of topiCS, the
papers in this series will be published as a subsection across
multiple issues of topiCS.
Topic on Computational Methods to Extract Meaning from
Text and Advance Theories of Human Cognition
Topic Editor: Danielle
S. McNamara (University of Memphis)
Over the past two decades, researchers
have made great advances in the area of computational methods
for extracting meaning from text. This research was largely
spurred by the development of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA),
a method for extracting and representing the meaning of words
using statistical computations applied to large corpora of
text. Since the advent of LSA, researchers have developed
and tested alternative statistical methods designed to detect
and analyze meaning in text corpora. This research exemplifies
how statistical models of semantics play an important role
in our understanding of the cognition, and contribute to
the field of cognitive science. Importantly, these models
afford large scale representations of human knowledge and
allow researchers to explore various questions regarding
knowledge, discourse processing, text comprehension, and
language. This topic includes the latest progress by the
leading researchers in the endeavor to go beyond LSA.
Topic on The Cognitive Science of Visual Displays: Implications
for Design
Topic Editor: Mary
Hegarty
(University of California, Santa Barbara)
Visual displays such
as diagrams, graphs, maps, and other information visualizations
are important in human communication and thinking, and our
ability to create these displays is developing rapidly with
advances in computer visualization. While there are several
prescriptions on how to design these displays, most of these
have not been empirically tested. For this topic,
researchers from different disciplines (Psychology, Computer
Science, Cartography and Design) will contribute papers that
report new empirical research or review empirical research
on comprehension of visual displays, and derive implications
for the design of these displays based on empirical research.
Some papers will focus more on presenting empirical research
and others will focus more on design, but all authors will
address design issues at some level and all proposed design
guidelines to be based to some extent on empirical research.
Topic on Cognitive Based Theories of Moral Decision Making
Topic Editor: Stan
Franklin (University of Memphis
Institute for Intelligent Systems)
and Wendell Wallach (Yale University Interdisciplinary Center
for Bioethics)
Commonly, ethics is understood as focusing
on the most intractable of social and personal challenges,
such as whether a war is just, whether life support for the
terminally ill should be discontinued, or which forms of
sexual behavior society will condone. Debate often centers
on how to prioritize duties, rules, or principles when they
conflict. But ethical factors influence a much broader array
of decisions then those we deliberate upon as individuals
or as a community. Values and ideals are instantiated in
habits, normative behavior, feelings, and attitudes. Some
forms of decision making concerning moral behavior, such
as care of the young and cooperating with the members of
one's community are, in all likelihood, rooted in our evolutionary
ancestry. Other forms of moral behavior are the result of
deliberations performed by our ancestors and our parents,
and passed on through cultural processes of socialization
and moral education.
For millennia issues of moral decision
making comprised a favorite playground for philosophers.
More recently, economists, evolutionary psychologists, game
theorists, and social psychologists have expanded appreciation
of the influences on the way humans make moral decisions.
Moral sentiments and intuitions, affective heuristics, and
the possibility of an innate moral grammar are all being
given considerable attention. This focus on moral psychology
has been accompanied by a reevaluation of the is/ought distinction
in ethics.
In addition, there has been a resurgence of interest
in general, comprehensive models of human cognition derived
from cognitive science. Such models aim to explain higher
order cognitive faculties, such as deliberation, planning,
and moral decision making. Given a computational representation,
the validity of these models can presumably be tested in
computer embodiments such as software agents or robots.
This
topic will bring together a diverse collection
of researchers to offer cognitive science based accounts
of moral decision-making that are grounded both in cognitive
theory and in the experimental study of moral decision making.
Such accounts may describe moral decision making at different
levels, including bottom up, for example perception-action
couplings, as well as moral decisions involving higher-level,
deliberative cognitive processes. The articles of this topic
should not only provide readers from multiple disciplines
with an overview of this novel work, but may also provide
new theoretical insights on moral decision making a la cognitive
science.
TOPIC on Cognitive Control
Topic Editor: Richard
P. Cooper (Birkbeck, University of London)
It is now commonly argued that the regulation of complex
cognition, particularly in situations involving the performance
of concurrent and/or non-routine tasks, involves a small
set of cognitive control functions, such as response inhibition,
task setting and memory updating. Despite broad interest
in such control functions from within many of the cognitive
sciences, some foundational issues concerning cognitive control
remain unresolved. Most critically:
- Is there a set of cognitive
control functions that operate across domains (i.e., are
they "componential"),
or are cognitive control functions more correctly understood
as emergent?
- If they are componential, what control
functions are there (or what are the criteria for proposing
a control function), and how do those functions interact
in the control of specific tasks?
- If they are emergent,
how are the empirical effects which have been argued to
support cognitive control functions (e.g., related to individual
differences, dual-task tradeoffs, language processing in
bilinguals, arbitrating between behaviors in cognitive
robotics, etc.) to be explained?
The topic will consist of several moderate-length target
articles that present different perspectives on executive
functions (behavioral, neuroscience, computational, linguistic,
robotics, anthropological and philosophical) followed by
a set of integrative commentaries.
TOPIC on Integrative Approaches to Perceptual
Learning
Topic Editor: Robert A. Jacobs (University
of Rochester)
The study of perceptual learning
has received renewed attention in a variety of disciplines
relevant to Cognitive Science. In Experimental Psychology,
perceptual learning is now studied in new ways, often due
to technological advances (e.g., high-quality graphics, virtual
reality environments) that allow researchers to place human
subjects in controlled, but realistic, sensory environments.
In Education, perceptual learning is now regarded as relevant
because there is a realization that perceptual and cognitive
factors interact in complex ways that are important to science
and mathematics education. In Artificial Intelligence, advances
in machine learning and data mining algorithms are now being
applied to computer vision applications with remarkable success.
In several instances, these applications hold important lessons
about perceptual learning for researchers interested in biological
intelligence, artificial intelligence, or both. In Neuroscience,
advances in brain imaging (fMRI, multi-cell recordings) are
allowing scientists to ask questions about the neural underpinnings
of perceptual learning that have never been experimentally
addressed before. These questions are often motivated by
recent theories in Experimental Psychology and/or Artificial
Intelligence.
This topic will attempt to integrate
behavioral, computational, and neurophysiological perspectives
on perceptual learning. While the focus will be on basic
scientific questions, some emphasis will also be placed on
potential applications such as the role of perceptual learning
in science education or the role of perceptual learning in
the treatment of individuals with sensory deficits.
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