scholarly journals Sense or non-sense? a critical discussion of a recent evolutionary–cognitive approach to “folk-economic beliefs”

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theiss Bendixen
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Dual Inheritance Theory ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Massive Modularity ◽  
Economic Beliefs ◽  
Environment Of Evolutionary Adaptedness ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Dual Inheritance

Laypeople hold beliefs about economics and policy issues—so-called folk-economic beliefs (FEBs)—that are often wrong or misleading according to professional economists. Here, I critically discuss a recent evolutionary–cognitive approach to understanding folk-economic beliefs. According to this approach (Boyer & Petersen 2018a), some economic beliefs are more prevalent than others, because such beliefs (i.e., folk-economic beliefs) resonate with evolved features of the human mind. I refer to this as the “FEB hypothesis”. A central challenge to the FEB hypothesis, with its heavy reliance on universal cognitive features, is to explain individual and cultural differences in economic beliefs and behavior. This challenge is the starting point for the discussion. Overall, the conclusion of this paper is that the FEB hypothesis relies on unnecessarily strong and controversial theoretical assumptions (e.g., “massive modularity” and the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness”), and that it overlooks important findings from adjacent fields, but that the FEB hypothesis, following some modifications inspired by Dual Inheritance Theory, can be integrated with robust findings from the rest of the evolutionary, cognitive, and anthropological sciences, as well as standard political psychology. Based on this discussion, the paper ends with brief reflections on how to correct inaccurate folk-economic beliefs.

The Painted Mind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfonso Troisi
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Clinical Findings ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Proximate Mechanisms ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Full Page ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Clinical Psychiatrist ◽  
Original Feature

The scientific focus of this book is on the human mind and behavior viewed from an evolutionary perspective. The author is a clinical psychiatrist but his research background ranges from primate ethology to neuroscience, behavioral biology to molecular genetics, and Darwinian psychiatry to evolutionary psychology. Discussion of emotions, cognitive capacities, and behaviors integrates a variety of research and clinical findings that, ultimately, can be reduced to the evolutionary distinction between proximate mechanisms and adaptive functions. An original feature of the book is that it combines science and art. Each chapter is inspired by a painting masterpiece, and a substantial portion of the text is devoted to introducing the reader to the artistic significance of the works and to biographical notes concerning the painters who made them. In addition, each painting is accurately reproduced in a full-page color plate. Description of the evolutionary theories that explain how the human mind works are intermixed with the critical discussion of the perspectives of humanistic disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, religion, or literature. In order to give the reader lively examples of psychological and behavioral patterns, the chapters are filled with stories of people—stories of literary characters, stories of historical characters, and clinical cases.

scholarly journals Semantic and Cognitive Communicative Aspects of Abbreviation in the Modern English Discourse Varieties

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Alla Petrovna Minyar-Beloroucheva ◽  
Polina Igorevna Sergienko ◽  
Elizaveta Alexandrovna Vishnyakova ◽  
Olga Dmitrievna Vishnyakova
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
English Language ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Communication Process ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Propositional Structures ◽  
Linguistic Units

The paper focuses on the integrated approach to investigation of abbreviations that are referred to the units of secondary nomination. Abbreviations facilitate the communication process due to the principle of economy in language. Abbreviation that goes back to ancient times is one of the most actively performed and intensive processes in the English language. The use of abbreviations is connected with both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that to a great extent determine a variety of discourse under consideration and ways of decoding certain linguistic units of abbreviated form, where context plays the most important role. There exists a number of structural types or models, according to which abbreviations are created in order to function as separate linguistic units used in the communicative process, where in the course of time they tend to acquire new independent and sometimes unique semantic properties. In socially determined professional registers certain regularities of abbreviations constructing and functioning are observed. In this paper most of the examples refer to such discursive varieties as politics, public relations, business and to a less extent medicine. Interdiscursivity that in this particular context means actualisation of the same abbreviated form within different discursive varieties seems to be one of the basic features of the abbreviation process under analysis. From the cognitive point of view, the study of abbreviated forms is based on the theory of propositional structures in the human mind manifestation. The cognitive approach correlates with linguistic semiotic and general semiotic issues, as at the iconic level of representation an abbreviation can be considered a starting point for creation of new entities and images, based on the results of perception, and the object for subsequent interpretation. This involves operation with fragments of reality, subject to reflection in the domain of human consciousness. Cognitive communicative approach takes into account different formats of knowledge that present the foundation for abbreviations active use and distribution. The Internet as a new medium for the language existence, as well as application and formation of human thought, plays an important role in optimizing messages as well as the communication process as a whole due to abbreviation techniques.

Social transmission bias and the cultural evolution of folk-economic beliefs

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hirshleifer ◽  
Siew Hong Teoh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Social Transmission ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Economic Attitudes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Beliefs ◽  
Over Time

AbstractEvolved dispositions influence, but do not determine, how people think about economic problems. The evolutionary cognitive approach offers important insights but underweights the social transmission of ideas as a level of explanation. The need for asocialexplanation for the evolution of economic attitudes is evidenced, for example, by immense variations in folk-economic beliefs over time and across individuals.

Using Macrotexture Map to Visualize Texture Heterogeneity in Polycrystalline Aggregate

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Dongsheng Li
Keyword(s):  
Length Scale ◽  
Polycrystalline Aggregate ◽  
Performance Simulation ◽  
Orientation Imaging ◽  
Behavior Simulation ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Different Color ◽  
Large Length Scale ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Texture Characterization

Abstract A new tool, macrotexture map, was developed to represent and visualize texture heterogeneity in polycrystalline aggregate. This is a critical tool for microstructure representation, useful in risk analysis, performance simulation, and hotspot identification. In contrast to orientation imaging microscope (OIM) map where each color represents a crystal orientation, each color in this macrotexture map represents a texture. Different color represent different texture and similar texture shall have similar color. Macrotexture map provide a unique function to quantitatively evaluate texture heterogeneity of large components, leading to a first-hand understanding of property heterogeneity and anisotropy. For an experienced user, these maps serve the same purpose in identifying high risk locations in the investigated component as medical imaging maps do for diagnosis purpose. This method will also serve as a starting point in mesoscale simulation with meshing sensitivity based on the texture heterogeneity. It will provide a bridge between texture characterization and behavior simulation of components with texture heterogeneity. Macrotexture map will offer a linkage between crystal plasticity simulation in small length scale and finite element/difference simulation in large length scale.

scholarly journals Metacognition: A new cognitive paradigm

Psihologija ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milos Kankaras
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Functioning ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Thinking Processes ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
And Control ◽  
Metacognitive Experiences

This article reviews concept of metacognition, defined as: (a) knowledge about ones own cognitive activity, (b) strategies to monitor and regulate cognitive activity and behavior, and (c) subjective or metacognitive experiences which comes from some changes or temporary difficulties in cognitive functioning. While describing different conceptualizations of metacognition, its development, fields of application, relation with intelligence, and its constrictions and ambiguity, we attempt to present new and emerging metacognitive paradigm, which is, for a relatively short period, succeeded to improve, expand, and redefine wide range of theoretical and practical fields in psychology, on new and original way. How do we become conscious of our own cognitive processes? What role and significance that consciousness has, what is the functional level above thinking processes and how that level, which monitor and control cognitive activity, works. Metacognition is concept that presents, as so far, the most important insight in those human mind areas, which, although very important, remained on the margin of psychological investigations until now.

scholarly journals Situating allostasis and interoception at the core of human brain function

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuta Katsumi ◽  
Karen Quigley ◽  
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Brain Function ◽  
Brain Evolution ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Biological Mechanisms ◽  
The Core ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Basic Functions ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
The Brain

It is now well known that brain evolution, development, and structure do not respect Western folk categories of mind – that is, the boundaries of those folk categories have never been identified in nature, despite decades of search. Categories for cognitions, emotions, perceptions, and so on, may be useful for describing the mental phenomena that constitute a human mind, but they make a poor starting point for understanding the interplay of mechanisms that create those mental events in the first place. In this paper, we integrate evolutionary, developmental, anatomical, and functional evidence and propose that predictive regulation of the body’s internal systems (allostasis) and modeling the sensory consequences of this regulation (interoception) may be basic functions of the brain that are embedded in coordinated structural and functional gradients. Our approach offers the basis for a coherent, neurobiologically-inspired research program that attempts to explain how a variety of psychological and physical phenomena may emerge from the same biological mechanisms, thus providing an opportunity to unify them under a common explanatory framework that can be used to develop shared vocabulary for theory building and knowledge accumulation.

Awe Without Wonder

2018 ◽  
pp. 315-322
Author(s):  
Kevin N. Laland
Keyword(s):  
Tool Use ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
And Control

This concluding chapter summarizes the major points achieved in the previous chapters and further reflects on this volume's findings about human culture. It considers why the evolution of culture proved difficult for researchers for the very same reasons as understanding the origins of the human mind has proved challenging to the broader scientific community. The human cultural capability did not evolve in isolation but in intricate coevolution with central aspects of cognition and behavior; including our language, teaching, intelligence, perspective-taking, powers of computation, cooperative tendencies, tool use, memory, and control of the environment. In struggling to understand the origins of culture, some light on the origins of the human mind, language, and intelligence might have been shed. Yet while all these efforts to better understand culture might have lessened the sense of wonderment one might feel at the scope of human achievement, this chapter notes that it still continues to inspire awe.

Conceptualizing Player-Side Emergence in Interactive Games

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Michael Yap ◽  
Youki Kadobayashi ◽  
Suguru Yamaguchi
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Interactive Video ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Design Consideration ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Interactive Games ◽  
Interactive Video Game ◽  
Emergent Design

The concept of emergence exists in many fields such as Philosophy, Information Science, and Biology. With respect to the modern video game, emergence can potentially manifest as emergent narrative and/or gameplay. In this paper, the authors engage in a critical discussion about what it means for an interactive video game to have emergence. The authors frame the discussion of emergence as a close critical look at the games Papers, Please and Gone Home. From these analyses, the authors propose a concept of “Player-side emergence in games,” in which emergence in the form of narrative is expressible and observable in games which rely not on the game software itself, but also upon the complex system of the human mind for reconstruction of the game experience and a subsequent expression of emergence. The authors contend that such an emergent design consideration is potentially useful for designers who are trying to address the trade-off of Ludo-Narrative Dissonance.

A Cognitive Approach to Scientific Data Mining for Syndrome Discovery

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Gagliardi
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Learning System ◽  
Prototype Theory ◽  
Clinical Practices ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Clinical Domain

The author introduces a machine learning system for cluster analysis to take on the problem of syndrome discovery in the clinical domain. A syndrome is a set of typical clinical features (a prototype) that appear together often enough to suggest they may represent a single, unknown, disease. The discovery of syndromes and relative taxonomy formation is therefore the critical early phase of the process of scientific discovery in the medical domain. The system proposed discovers syndromes following Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory on how the human mind categorizes and forms taxonomies, and thereby to understand how humans perform these activities and to automate or assist the process of scientific discovery. The system implemented can be considered a scientific discovery support system as it can discover unknown syndromes to the advantage of subsequent clinical practices and research activities.

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