The different paths to cultural convergence.

Morin envisions the adaptive landscape of graphic codes as an unfertile valley where writing rises as an isolated peak that humans managed to reach only on four occasions throughout all of history. By exploring the different paths to cultural convergence, we suggest an alternative landscape occupied by a mountain range of visual art systems. We conclude that graphic communication through visual art worked well enough to render writing contingent but not necessary in most cases.

Knowledge is belief - and shaped by culture.

Phillips and colleagues claim that the representation of knowledge is more basic than the representation of belief, presupposing them to be categorically distinct mental states with distinct evolutionary purposes. We argue that the relationship between the two is much more complex, is further shaped by culture and language, and leaves its mark on manifestations of theory of mind and teaching.

The perception of quantity ain't number: Missing the primacy of symbolic reference.

Clarke and Beck's defense of the theoretical construct "approximate number system" (ANS) is flawed in serious ways - from biological misconceptions to mathematical naïveté. The authors misunderstand behavioral/psychological technical concepts, such as numerosity and quantical cognition, which they disdain as "exotic." Additionally, their characterization of rational numbers is blind to the essential role of symbolic reference in the emergence of number.

The sense of obligation is culturally modulated.

Tomasello argues in the target article that, in generalizing the concrete obligations originating from interdependent collaboration to one's entire cultural group, humans become "ultra-cooperators." But are all human populations cooperative in similar ways? Based on cross-cultural studies and my own fieldwork in Polynesia, I argue that cooperation varies along several dimensions, and that the underlying sense of obligation is culturally modulated.

Mangarevan invention of binary steps for easier calculation.

When Leibniz demonstrated the advantages of the binary system for computations as early as 1703, he laid the foundation for computing machines. However, is a binary system also suitable for human cognition? One of two number systems traditionally used on Mangareva, a small island in French Polynesia, had three binary steps superposed onto a decimal structure. Here, we show how this system functions, how it facilitated arithmetic, and why it is unique. The Mangarevan invention of binary steps, centuries before their formal description by Leibniz, attests to the advancements possible in numeracy even in the absence of notation and thereby highlights the role of culture for the evolution of and diversity in numerical cognition.

Assessing the Relevance of Non-molecular Prognostic Systems for Myelodysplastic Syndrome in the Era of Next-Generation Sequencing.

Background: The Molecular International Prognostic Scoring System (IPSS-M) has improved the prediction of clinical outcomes for myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). The Artificial Intelligence Prognostic Scoring System for MDS (AIPSS-MDS), based on classical clinical parameters, has outperformed the IPSS, revised version (IPSS-R). For the first time, we validated the IPSS-M and other molecular prognostic models and compared them with the established IPSS-R and AIPSS-MDS models using data from South American patients. Methods: Molecular and clinical data from 145 patients with MDS and 37 patients with MDS/myeloproliferative neoplasms were retrospectively analyzed. Results: Prognostic power evaluation revealed that the IPSS-M (Harrell's concordance [C]-index: 0.75, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC]: 0.68) predicted overall survival better than the European MDS (EuroMDS; C-index: 0.72, AUC: 0.68) and Munich Leukemia Laboratory (MLL) (C-index: 0.70, AUC: 0.64) models. The IPSS-M prognostic discrimination was similar to that of the AIPSS-MDS model (C-index: 0.74, AUC: 0.66) and outperformed the IPSS-R model (C-index: 0.70, AUC: 0.61). Considering simplified low- and high-risk groups for clinical management, after restratifying from IPSS-R (57% and 32%, respectively, hazard ratio [HR]: 2.8; P=0.002) to IPSS-M, 12.6% of patients were upstaged, and 5% were downstaged (HR: 2.9; P=0.001). The AIPSS-MDS recategorized 51% of the low-risk cohort as high-risk, with no patients being downstaged (HR: 5.6; P<0.001), consistent with most patients requiring disease-modifying therapy. Conclusions: The IPSS-M and AIPSS-MDS models provide more accurate survival prognoses than the IPSS-R, EuroMDS, and MLL models. The AIPSS-MDS model is a valid option for assessing risks for all patients with MDS, especially in resource-limited centers where molecular testing is not currently a standard clinical practice.

The dual role of culture for reconstructing early sapiens cognition.

Questions on early sapiens cognition, the cognitive abilities of our ancestors, are intriguing but notoriously hard to tackle. Leaving no hard traces in the archeological record, these abilities need to be inferred from indirect evidence, informed by our understanding of present-day cognition. Most of such attempts acknowledge the role that culture, as a faculty, has played for human evolution, but they underrate or even disregard the role of distinct cultural traditions and the ensuing diversity, both in present-day humans and as a dimension of past cognition. We argue that culture has exerted a profound impact on human cognition from the start in a dual manner: It scaffolds cognition through both development and evolution, and it thereby continually diversifies the form and content of human thinking. To unveil early sapiens cognition and retrace its evolutionary trajectories, this cognitive diversity must be considered. We present two strategies to achieve this: large-scale extrapolation and phylogenetic comparison. The former aims at filtering out diversity to determine what is basic and universal versus culturally shaped (illustrated for theory of mind abilities). The latter capitalizes on the diversity to reconstruct evolutionary trajectories (illustrated for religious beliefs). The two methods, in combination, advance our understanding of the cognitive abilities of our early sapiens ancestors and of how these abilities emerged and evolved. To conclude, we discuss the implications of this approach for our insights into early cognition itself and its scientific investigation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Toward Greater Integration: Fellows Perspectives on Cognitive Science.

Cognitive science is a multidisciplinary field. Whereas debates on whether this is beneficial continue to spring up, this multidisciplinarity comes with at least one obvious challenge, namely, safeguarding an increasing integration across its subfields. The new and open-ended topic preluded here attempts to address this challenge by pursuing a multilayered agenda: to introduce the Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society and earn them the recognition and profile they deserve; to furnish a platform for reflection on cognitive science from a bird's eye view; and to present role models for younger generations. To achieve these goals, this topic provides all Fellows with an opportunity to showcase their scientific work, to outline what they consider to be its major contributions to cognitive science, and to elaborate on their visions for greater integration of the field.

A Scientific Marketplace.

Cognitive science thrives on the diversity of its (sub-)disciplines, and topiCS is the ideal journal for bringing the diversity to bear. In this welcome address as its incoming Executive Editor, I outline my view of the journal and my vision for how to sustain its inviting and integrative power.

What Early Sapiens Cognition Can Teach Us: Untangling Cultural Influences on Human Cognition Across Time.

Evidence of cultural influences on cognition is accumulating, but untangling these cultural influences from one another or from non-cultural influences has remained a challenging task. As between-group differences are neither a sufficient nor a necessary indicator of cultural impact, cross-cultural comparisons in isolation are unable to furnish any cogent conclusions. This shortfall can be compensated by taking a diachronic perspective that focuses on the role of culture for the emergence and evolution of our cognitive abilities. Three strategies for reconstructing early human cognition are presented: the chaîne opératoire approach and its extension to brain-imaging studies, large-scale extrapolations, and phylogenetic comparative methods. While these strategies are reliant on our understanding of present-day cognition, they conversely also have the potential to advance this understanding in fundamental ways.

The Role of Culture and Evolution for Human Cognition.

Since the emergence of our species at least, natural selection based on genetic variation has been replaced by culture as the major driving force in human evolution. It has made us what we are today, by ratcheting up cultural innovations, promoting new cognitive skills, rewiring brain networks, and even shifting gene distributions. Adopting an evolutionary perspective can therefore be highly informative for cognitive science in several ways: It encourages us to ask grand questions about the origins and ramifications of our cognitive abilities; it equips us with the means to investigate, explain, and understand key dimensions of cognition; and it allows us to recognize the continued and ubiquitous workings of culture and evolution in everyday instances of cognitive behavior. Taking advantage of this reorientation presupposes a shift in focus, though, from human cognition as a general, homogenous phenomenon to the appreciation of cultural diversity in cognition as an invaluable source of data.

What Is Causal Cognition?

While gaining an understanding of cause-effect relations is the key goal of causal cognition, its components are less clearly delineated. Standard approaches in the field focus on how individuals detect, learn, and reason from statistical regularities, thereby prioritizing cognitive processes over content and context. This article calls for a broadened perspective. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of what is going on when humans engage in causal cognition-including its application to machine cognition-it is argued, we also need to take into account the content that informs the processing, the means and mechanisms of knowledge accumulation and transmission, and the cultural context in which both accumulation and transmission take place.

Editors' Review and Introduction: The Cultural Evolution of Cognition.

This topic addresses a question of key interest to cognitive science, namely which factors may have triggered, constrained, or shaped the course of cognitive evolution. It highlights the relevance of culture as a driving force in this process, with a special focus on social learning and language, conceptual tools, and material culture. In so doing, the topic combines two goals: to provide an overview of current empirical and theoretical work leading this field, tailored for a wider cognitive science audience, and to investigate the potential for integrating multiple perspectives across several timescales and levels of analysis, from the microlevel of individual behavior to the macrolevel of cultural change and language diversification. One key purpose is to assess the extent to which the different research approaches can cross-fertilize each other, thereby also contributing to the advancement of cognitive science more broadly.

Being In Front Is Good-But Where Is In Front? Preferences for Spatial Referencing Affect Evaluation.

Speakers of English frequently associate location in space with valence, as in moving up and down the "social ladder." If such an association also holds for the sagittal axis, an object "in front of" another object would be evaluated more positively than the one "behind." Yet how people conceptualize relative locations depends on which frame of reference (FoR) they adopt-and hence on cross-linguistically diverging preferences. What is conceptualized as "in front" in one variant of the relative FoR (e.g., translation) is "behind" under another variant (reflection), and vice versa. Do such diverging conceptualizations of an object's location also lead to diverging evaluations? In two studies employing an implicit association test, we demonstrate, first, that speakers of German, Chinese, and Japanese indeed evaluate the object "in front of" another object more positively than the one "behind." Second, and crucially, the reversal of which object is conceptualized as "in front" involves a corresponding reversal of valence, suggesting an impact of linguistically imparted FoR preferences on evaluative processes.

The Value of Diversity in Cognitive Science.

A recent article (Núñez et al., 2019) claims that cognitive science, while starting off as a multidisciplinary enterprise, has "failed to transition to a mature inter-disciplinary coherent field." Two indicators reported in support of this claim target one of the two journals of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science, depicting cognitive science as an increasingly monodisciplinary subfield which is dominated by psychology. With a focus on the society's other journal, Topics in Cognitive Science, the present commentary reveals a greater degree of interdisciplinarity and discusses the relative values of diversity and integration for the field.

The Cultural Fabric of Human Causal Cognition.

Causal cognition emerges early in development and confers an important advantage for survival. But does this mean that it is universal in humans? Our cross-disciplinary review suggests a broad evolutionary basis for core components of causal cognition but also underlines the essential role of culturally transmitted content as being uniquely human. The multiple ways in which both content and the key mechanisms of cultural transmission generate cultural diversity suggest that causal cognition in humans is not only colored by their specific cultural background but also shaped more fundamentally by the very fact that humans are a cultural species.

Flexibility in adopting relative frames of reference in dorsal and lateral settings.

The relative frame of reference (FoR) is used to describe spatial relations between two objects from an observer's perspective. Standard, frontal referencing situations with objects located in the observer's visual field afford three well-established variants: translation, reflection, and rotation. Here, we focus on references in non-standard situations with objects located at the back or at the side of an observer (dorsal and lateral, respectively). We scrutinise the consistency assumption, which was introduced to infer the covert strategy used in dorsal tasks from an ambiguous overt response: that, when confronted with a non-standard situation, people adopt a strategy consistent with how they construct the relative FoR in frontal situations. Lateral tasks enable us to disentangle the ambiguous response. The results of a study in Norway and Germany support the consistency assumption in part: Nearly all participants with a preference for translation in frontal tasks applied translation in lateral tasks, and some participants with a preference for reflection in frontal tasks turned towards the objects before applying reflection in lateral tasks. Most other participants with a preference for reflection in frontal tasks, however, switched to translation in lateral tasks. The latter may be due to a specific affordance of the lateral arrangements, which invite translation as the easier strategy compared to the alternative derived from reflection. Our findings indicate that people do not apply their preferred variant of the relative FoR to all kinds of situations, but rather flexibly adapt their strategy when it is more convenient to do so.