No evidence for future planning in Canada jays ( Perisoreus canadensis )

In the past 20 years, research in animal cognition has challenged the belief that complex cognitive processes are uniquely human. At the forefront of these challenges has been research on mental time travel and future planning in jays. We tested whether Canada jays ( Perisoreus canadensis ) demonstrated future planning, using a procedure that has produced evidence of future planning in California scrub-jays. Future planning in this procedure is caching in locations where the bird will predictably experience a lack of food in the future. Canada jays showed no evidence of future planning in this sense and instead cached in the location where food was usually available, opposite to the behaviour described for California scrub-jays. We provide potential explanations for these differing results adding to the recent debates about the role of complex cognition in corvid caching strategies.

Distinct Contributions of the Cerebellum and Basal Ganglia to Arithmetic Procedures

Humans exhibit complex mathematical skills, often attributed to the exceptionally large neocortex. Using a neuropsychological approach, we report that degeneration within two subcortical structures, the basal ganglia and cerebellum, impairs performance in symbolic arithmetic. Moreover, we identify distinct computational impairments in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) or cerebellar degeneration (CD). The CD group exhibited a disproportionate cost when arithmetic sum increased, suggesting that the cerebellum is critical for iterative procedures required for calculations. The PD group exhibited a disproportionate cost for equations with an increasing number of addends, suggesting that the basal ganglia are critical for the coordination of multiple cognitive operations. In Experiment 2, the two patient groups exhibited intact practice gains for repeated equations at odds with an alternative hypothesis that these impairments were related to memory retrieval. Overall, the results provide a novel demonstration of the contribution of subcortical structures to the computations required for complex cognition.

Individual differences in frontoparietal plasticity in humans

Neuroplasticity, defined as the brain's ability to change in response to its environment, has been extensively studied at the cellular and molecular levels. Work in animal models suggests that stimulation to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) enhances plasticity, and that myelination constrains plasticity. Little is known, however, about whether proxy measures of these properties in the human brain are associated with learning. Here we investigated the plasticity of the frontoparietal system (FPS), which supports complex cognition. We asked whether VTA resting-state functional connectivity and myelin map (T1-w/T2-w ratio) values predicted learning after short-term training on a FPS-dependent task: the adaptive n-back (n = 46, ages 18-25). We found that stronger connectivity between VTA and lateral prefrontal cortex at baseline predicted greater improvements in accuracy. Lower myelin map values predicted improvement in response times, but not accuracy. Our findings suggest that proxy markers of neural plasticity can predict learning in humans.

Humans, machines, and language: A deep alignment in underlying computational styles?

The emergence of AI systems that emulate the remarkable human capacity for language has raised fundamental questions about complex cognition in humans and machines. This lively debate has largely taken place, however, in the absence of specific empirical evidence about how the internal operations of artificial neural networks (ANNs) relate to processes in the human brain as listeners speak and understand language. To directly evaluate these parallels, we extracted multi-level measures of word-by-word sentence interpretation from ANNs, and used Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) to test these against the representational geometries of real-time brain activity for the same sentences heard by human listeners. These uniquely spatiotemporally specific comparisons reveal deep commonalities in the use of multi-dimensional probabilistic constraints to drive incremental interpretation processes in both humans and machines. But at the same time they demonstrate profound differences in the underlying functional architectures that implement this shared algorithmic alignment.

Behavioral modernity, evolutionary synergies, and the symbolic species

Many of the hallmarks of “what makes us human”—complex cognition and language, self-consciousness, and symbolic and artistic behaviors—are commonly subsumed under the term “behavioral modernity.” Several models have been proposed to account for its emergence and different ways of understanding the term itself exist. However, the concept of behavioral modernity remains elusive and difficult to define in a consistent manner. It is vulnerable to critique from a number of perspectives, both theoretically and methodologically, especially on how to recognize its expression in the archaeological record. Overview of the proposed behavioral traits and archaeological features indicate: (1) that highlighting assumptions implicit in those traits and features may allow us to avoid inconsistencies when identifying behaviorally modern populations in the archaeological record; and (2) that elaborating methods for recognizing archaeological indicators of “symbolically mediated behavior” might represent the most reliable pathway to define what constitutes “modern behavior” and identify surviving tangible expression of it in past material culture.

Examining the Role of General Cognitive Skills in Language Processing: A Window Into Complex Cognition

When we use language, we combine sounds, signs, and letters into words that then form sentences, which together tell a story. Both language production and language comprehension rely on representations that need to be continuously and rapidly activated, selected, and combined. These representations are specific to language, but many processes that regulate their use, such as inhibition of competitors or updating of working memory, are domain-general abilities that apply across different kinds of tasks. Here, we provide an overview of the behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for domain-general abilities underpinning language skills and describe which aspects of production and comprehension draw on such cognitive resources. We discuss how this line of research reveals important similarities between production and comprehension and also helps establish links between language and other cognitive domains. Finally, we argue that studying how domain-general abilities are used in language leads to important insights into the highly dynamic communication between brain networks that is necessary to successfully go from sounds to stories.

Howiesons Poort

The Howiesons Poort is a technological tradition within the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa. This technological tradition shows different characteristics, technical and symbolic (the engraving of ostrich eggshell containers, the appearance of engraved ochre, formal bone tool technology, compound adhesives for hafting and a great variability in hunting techniques), which only developed in an extensive manner much later in other parts of the world. Therefore, the African Middle Stone Age through the material of the Howiesons Poort holds some of the oldest symbolic and complex technologies documented in prehistory. For some researchers, the Howiesons Poort still represents an unusual and ephemeral technological development within the Middle Stone Age, probably related to environmental stress, and as such there are numerous hypotheses for it as an environmental adaptation, whereas for others, on the contrary, it implies that complex cognition, deduced from the elaborated technology and symbolic expressions, was fully developed in the Middle Stone Age.