Contextualising culture and social cognition.
Authors: Vogeley, K. - Roepstorff, A.
Journal: Trends Cogn Sci
Cognitive neurosciencists have recently begun to study self-consiousness and intersubjectivity but have not yet taken into account adequately the influence of culture on these phenomena. Here, we argue against the naive inclusion of 'culture' as an additional independent factor that can be empirically addressed adequately merely by considering mother tongue or nationality. Instead, we propose that culture needs to be considered as a dynamical system of individuals; that culture is in continous dialectic interaction and exchange with the individuals that constitute it; and that cultural classifications feed back into social practices and identity processes, hence exhibiting a 'looping effect'. These proposals have important implications for the development of cultural neuroscience.
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Outsourcing neuroimaging data analysis Implications for scientific accountability and issues in the public interest.
Authors: Dick, A. S. - Hasson, U.
Journal: Trends Cogn Sci
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The description-experience gap in risky choice.
Authors: Hertwig, R. - Erev, I.
Journal: Trends Cogn Sci
According to a common conception in behavioral decision research, two cognitive processes-overestimation and overweighting-operate to increase the impact of rare events on people's choices. Supportive findings stem primarily from investigations in which people learn about options via descriptions thereof. Recently, a number of researchers have begun to investigate risky choice in settings in which people learn about options by experiential sampling over time. This article reviews work across three experiential paradigms. Converging findings show that when people make decisions based on experience, rare events tend to have less impact than they deserve according to their objective probabilities. Striking similarities in human and animal experience-based choices, ways of modeling these choices, and their implications for risk and precautionary behavior are discussed.
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Modeling the auditory scene: predictive regularity representations and perceptual objects.
Authors: Winkler, I. - Denham, S. L. - Nelken, I.
Journal: Trends Cogn Sci
Predictive processing of information is essential for goal-directed behavior. We offer an account of auditory perception suggesting that representations of predictable patterns, or 'regularities', extracted from the incoming sounds serve as auditory perceptual objects. The auditory system continuously searches for regularities within the acoustic signal. Primitive regularities may be encoded by neurons adapting their response to specific sounds. Such neurons have been observed in many parts of the auditory system. Representations of the detected regularities produce predictions of upcoming sounds as well as alternative solutions for parsing the composite input into coherent sequences potentially emitted by putative sound sources. Accuracy of the predictions can be utilized for selecting the most likely interpretation of the auditory input. Thus in our view, perception generates hypotheses about the causal structure of the world.
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A cognitive neuroscience hypothesis of mood and depression.
Authors: Bar, M.
Journal: Trends Cogn Sci
Although mood has a direct impact on mental and physical health, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying mood regulation is limited. Here, I propose that there is a direct reciprocal relation between the cortical activation of associations and mood regulation, whereby positive mood promotes associative processing, and associative processing promotes positive mood. This relation might stem from an evolutionary pressure for learning and predicting. Along these lines, one can think of mood as a reward mechanism that guides individuals to use their brains in the most productive manner. The proposed framework has many implications, most notably for diagnosing and treating mood disorders such as depression; for elucidating the role of inhibition in the regulation of mood; for contextualizing adult hippocampal neurogenesis; and for a general, non-invasive improvement of well-being.
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From Wikipedia,
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrate underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes and their behavioral manifestations. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the neural circuitry. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both psychology and neuroscience, unifying and overlapping with several sub-disciplines such as cognitive psychology, psychobiology and neurobiology. Before the advent of fMRI, cognitive neuroscience was called cognitive psychophysiology. Cognitive neuroscientists have a background in experimental psychology or neurobiology, but may spring from disciplines such as psychiatry, neurology, physics, linguistics and mathematics.
Methods employed in cognitive neuroscience include experimental paradigms from psychophysics and cognitive psychology, functional neuroimaging, electrophysiological studies of neural systems and, increasingly, cognitive genomics and behavioral genetics. Clinical studies of patients with cognitive deficits constitute an important aspect of cognitive neuroscience. The main theoretical approaches are computational neuroscience and the more traditional, descriptive cognitive psychology theories such as psychometrics.
