Remember Chomsky's arguments about language innateness based on its putative un-learnability? Those arguments hinge on a pretty crazy theory of grammar. Here is Ted Gibson's summary of the original claims and a proposed solution in the form of dependency grammar:
tinyurl.com/yzjrpbb8

How developing prosocial motivations shape children’s altruism Developmental perspectives are crucial to harnessing the human potential for altruism. We synthesise and highlight recent research on the motivations underlying children’s (costly) prosocial behaviour. The order in which children develop intrinsic, extrinsic, and strategic motivations to benefit others has implications for efforts to positively impact young people’s lives.

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Online Now: Dependency syntax as the simplest theory of grammar

I put forward an alternative to the language-of-thought hypothesis for geometry, the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry: Human geometry may originate from the interaction between ancient, navigation-like mental processes that approximate Euclidean geometry and our human capacity for natural language.

Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks? Some of the strongest evidence that human minds should be thought of in terms of symbolic systems has been the way they combine ideas, produce novelty, and learn quickly. We argue that modern neural networks—and the artificial intelligence systems built upon them—exhibit similar abilities. This potentially undermines the argument that the cognitive processes and representations used by human minds are symbolic. We consider possible interpretations of these results—that modern neural networks implement symbolic systems, or that they approximate them subsymbolically—and the theoretical consequences of these two possibilities for explanations of human cognition at different levels of analysis. This consideration leads us to offer a new agenda for research on the symbolic basis of the mind.

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Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics and information integration during percept formation often distinguish clinical from nonclinical populations. Computational psychiatry can elucidate these variations through two primary approaches: (i) Bayesian modeling, which treats perception as an unconscious inference, and (ii) an active, information-seeking perspective (e.g., reinforcement learning), which frames perceptual switches as internal actions. Our synthesis aims to leverage multistability to bridge these computational psychiatry subfields, linking human and animal studies as well as connecting behavior to underlying neural mechanisms. Perceptual multistability emerges as a promising noninvasive tool for clinical applications, facilitating translational research and enhancing our mechanistic understanding of cognitive processes and their impairments.

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Online Now: Explanation, scope, and perspective: sources of schismogenesis in consciousness science

The cognitive origins of geometry Geometry is often considered the paradigmatic model of abstract thought, with thinkers since at least Plato exploring its origins. A dominant hypothesis posits that a specialized, modular language of thought underpins our species’ unique geometric abilities. Challenging this view, I propose the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry, which suggests that human geometry is primarily rooted in navigation-like mental processes shared by humans and nonhuman animals and that these processes approximate Euclidean geometry. Drawing on infant studies, cross-cultural experiments, and cognitive modeling, I argue that humans access these primitive processes through natural language, enabling flexible application and supporting our capacity for formal learning. This perspective broadens our understanding of geometric cognition and the nature of the human mind.

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Looking inside and beyond eye fixations in reading

Opinion by Elizabeth R. Schotter & Brennan R. Payne

Free access before May 17: tinyurl.com/bde7p834

Voice information processing by the primate brain

Charly Lamothe (@charlylamothe.bsky.social), Margherita Giamundo, & Pascal Belin

Free access before May 17: tinyurl.com/2nna2272

Looking inside and beyond eye fixations in reading Co-registration of neural and behavioral measures is key in developing a holistic understanding of reading. However, researchers must study not only n…

How do we read faster than our brains process each word?
Out now in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, @lizschotter.bsky.social and I explore how co-registering eye-tracking and EEG helps solve this paradox by looking "beyond" the individual fixation to probe dynamic coupling between the brain and eyes.

The Global Neuronal Workspace as a multilevel model of conscious processing Debates in consciousness science increasingly question whether computational functionalism is sufficient to explain conscious processing. We summarize three core features of the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) theory that highlight the multilevel architecture of conscious processing, extending from cellular and molecular mechanisms to large-scale network dynamics. On this interpretation, GNW is not a functionalist computational theory, unlike the Global Workspace theory, with which it is frequently conflated.

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The pursuit of happiness: pitfalls and promises

Review by Iris B. Mauss & Brett Q. Ford

Free access before May 15: tinyurl.com/33ur58bs

Coupled neural timescales in social interaction

Review by Annemarie Wolff & Guillaume Dumas (@introspection.bsky.social)

Free access before May 14: tinyurl.com/cpahjmv9

Check out our March issue, now online!

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Empathy as a predictive signal: why we devalue AI empathy

Science & Society by Anat Perry (@anatperry.bsky.social)
Free access before May 12: tinyurl.com/mr476e23

Scalable psychological solutions to environmental problems

Review by P. Wesley Schultz & Kathy Pezdek
Free access before May 9: tinyurl.com/4w38bf3r

People think of women as one thing, men as many People seem to represent men and women in a conceptually balanced manner: for example, seeing women as warm (not agentic) and men as agentic (not warm). Emerging evidence, however, suggests people mig...

People represent men and women as balanced, mirror images of each other... right? e.g., women as communal but men as agentic

We argue that people actually often see women as one thing but men as MANY

New open-access piece out in TiCS, with @rachelesh.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

State-dependent spatial maps for navigation Internal behavioral states influence many brain circuits, with well-known effects in sensory areas. Less is known about how these states shape downstr…

Really enjoyed writing up this article with Lavonna Mark for @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social on how internal states - like attention, arousal, or goals - can reshape our brain's map of space, helping the brain adapt navigation to what matters most.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📢 BREAKING! TiCS just published a paper by @lamalab.bsky.social and me that synthesizes co-registration (and related) studies of reading that resolve the apparent paradox that the eyes move faster through the text than the brain can understand it!

Looking inside and beyond eye fixations in reading Co-registration of neural and behavioral measures is key in developing a holistic understanding of reading. However, researchers must study not only neural effects inside fixations, early enough to initiate saccade decisions, but also later effects that are linguistically driven. Furthermore, researchers must not only use co-registration to allow for naturalistic reading but also to look beyond individual fixations to examine the coupling between temporally extended neural language processing and saccade decisions. Such an approach has revealed that saccade decisions are triggered at an intermediate point of lexical processing, followed by complete recognition and integration of a word into its context. This account can resolve the apparent paradox that the eyes can move through text faster than the brain understands it.

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Voice information processing by the primate brain Voices are among the most socially informative sounds in our auditory landscape, but only recently has a coherent picture of the neural machinery supporting their perception begun to emerge. New evidence from intracranial recordings, fMRI, and comparative primate research reveals specialized voice patches and neural pathways for rapid parallel extraction of identity, emotion, and social cues. These findings point to an evolutionarily conserved system with striking parallels to face processing. Emerging computational models further show how the brain may transform complex acoustic signals into abstract, low-dimensional representations. These advances raise key outstanding questions about the organisation, causal role, and computational principles of voice-selective circuits across primates.

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The pursuit of happiness: pitfalls and promises All humans strive to be happy in some form. Yet the pursuit of happiness is sometimes successful and sometimes self-defeating. This review aims to resolve when and why pursuing happiness is successful or self-defeating by showing that it depends on how people pursue happiness. Building on process models of goal pursuit, we consider five aspects of pursuing happiness: the happiness goals people pursue, affect regulation, monitoring of one’s happiness, responses to one’s happiness, and the broader context. Each of these aspects entails not only pitfalls but also promises, and we review recent empirical work on them. Taken together, this review offers a theoretically and empirically informed understanding of the pursuit of happiness. While there are pitfalls, attaining greater happiness is possible.

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Coupled neural timescales in social interaction Social interactions require integrating information across multiple timescales, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We review evidence suggesting that intrinsic neural timescales (INTs) may be a key mechanism enabling this integration, with the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) serving as a critical hub during social interactions. INTs form a cortical hierarchy for multiscale temporal processing, and differences in this hierarchy are linked to social impairments across neuropsychiatric conditions. The rTPJ dynamically integrates fast mirroring and slow mentalizing processes; interbrain synchrony there predicts success in social interactions, while mismatched timescales between individuals cause communication breakdowns. We propose that this INT and rTPJ framework unifies dual-process theories within a single neurophysiological mechanism, providing a novel, testable account of social interactions and their impairments.

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Online Now: Empathy as a predictive signal: why we devalue AI empathy

How the mouth became symbolic Before we name, we touch. We propose that the roots of language lie not in abstract, amodal symbols but in early bodily experience. Early haptic and oral interactions ground conceptual knowledge through active exploration. The mouth, acting as a cognitive organ, functions not only as a site of articulation but also as a locus of tactile perception and intersubjective exchange. We suggest that language may have evolved through the neural reuse of circuits originally dedicated to ingestion and action understanding. These circuits were progressively shaped by affordances, embodied simulation, and sound symbolism. From sensorimotor patterns to iconic vocal forms, we trace a pathway linking bodily experience to symbolic reference, through which language acquisition could arise.

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People think of women as one thing, men as many People seem to represent men and women in a conceptually balanced manner: for example, seeing women as warm (not agentic) and men as agentic (not warm). Emerging evidence, however, suggests people might represent them as imbalanced: women as one thing and men as many things. We argue that people describe men and women as balanced, symmetrical opposites when thinking of them in terms of their gender category—a gender framing often evoked by common methods. However, in the absence of this framing (e.g., in naturalistic contexts), women stand out as a gender category more than men, creating conceptual imbalance. In these contexts, people represent women more narrowly while affording men a wider array of attributes—even attributes traditionally linked to women (e.g., warmth).

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Scalable psychological solutions to environmental problems Current levels of human consumption are unsustainable, and large changes are needed to both mitigate and adapt to environmental problems. In this review, we examine psychological interventions aimed at pro-environmental behavior, focusing on five scalable strategies: nudges, social norms, education, financial incentives, and contact with nature. Research has shown that each of these approaches can effectively promote pro-environmental behavior, although with varying degrees of effectiveness. This review article explores the cognitive processes that underlie these interventions, including heuristics, priming, and self-schemas. We discuss how drawing insights from cognitive science can help to enhance the effectiveness of efforts to promote change and, perhaps even more importantly, how these insights can help to prevent harmful, unintended environmental consequences.

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A decade of research on parenthood regret

Review by Konrad Piotrowski, Isabelle Roskam, & Moïra Mikolajczak

Free access before April 30: tinyurl.com/ycyyttmz

State-dependent spatial maps for navigation Internal behavioral states influence many brain circuits, with well-known effects in sensory areas. Less is known about how these states shape downstream navigation circuits, such as the medial entorhinal cortex and hippocampus, which construct spatial maps from grid and place cells. Emerging evidence suggests that these maps can spontaneously switch (‘remap’) in stable environments and that remapping is linked to behavioral changes that are state related. We consider the circuit mechanisms underlying this spontaneous remapping and its role in facilitating state-dependent goal-directed behavior. We suggest that behavioral state shifts may trigger remapping similarly to external environmental changes, enabling spatial maps to adapt to current goals. This dynamic mapping could help encode distinct memories across different experiences, aligning neural representations with behavioral states.

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