Ten simple rules for creating and sustaining antiracist graduate programs.

In 2020, the combination of police killings of unarmed Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic brought about public outrage over long-standing inequalities in society. The events of 2020 ignited global attention to systemic racism and racial inequalities, including the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy and especially in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Racial and ethnic diversity in graduate programs in particular warrants special attention as graduate students of color report experiencing alarming rates of racism, discrimination, microaggressions, and other exclusionary behaviors.

Child language and autism diagnosis impact hierarchical temporal structure of parent-child vocal interactions in early childhood.

Timing is critical to successful social interactions. The temporal structure of dyadic vocal interactions emerges from the rhythm, timing, and frequency of each individuals' vocalizations and reflects how the dyad dynamically organizes and adapts during an interaction. This study investigated the temporal structure of vocal interactions longitudinally in parent-child dyads of typically developing (TD) infants (n = 49; 9-18 months; 48% male) and toddlers with ASD (n = 23; 27.

Individual exploration and selective social learning: balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging.

Search requires balancing exploring for more options and exploiting the ones previously found. Individuals foraging in a group face another trade-off: whether to engage in social learning to exploit the solutions found by others or to solitarily search for unexplored solutions. Social learning can better exploit learned information and decrease the costs of finding new resources, but excessive social learning can lead to over-exploitation and too little exploration for new solutions.

Excessive and less complex body movement in children with autism during face-to-face conversation: An objective approach to behavioral quantification.

The majority of existing studies investigating characteristics of overt social behavior in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relied on informants' evaluation through questionnaires and behavioral coding techniques. As a novelty, this study aimed to quantify the complex movements produced during social interactions in order to test differences in ASD movement dynamics and their convergence, or lack thereof, during social interactions. Twenty children with ASD and twenty-three children with typical development (TD) were videotaped while engaged in a face-to-face conversation with an interviewer.

Individual and collective foraging in autonomous search agents with human intervention.

Humans and other complex organisms exhibit intelligent behaviors as individual agents and as groups of coordinated agents. They can switch between independent and collective modes of behavior, and flexible switching can be advantageous for adapting to ongoing changes in conditions. In the present study, we investigated the flexibility between independent and collective modes of behavior in a simulated social foraging task designed to benefit from both modes: distancing among ten foraging agents promoted faster detection of resources, whereas flocking promoted faster consumption.

Cooperation in sound and motion: Complexity matching in collaborative interaction.

Complex behaviors are layered with processes across timescales that must be coordinated with each other to accomplish cooperative goals. Complexity matching is the coordination of nested layers of behaviors across individuals. We hypothesize that complexity matching extends across individuals and their respective layers of processes when cooperating in joint tasks.

Efficient Lévy walks in virtual human foraging.

Efficient foraging depends on decisions that account for the costs and benefits of various activities like movement, perception, and planning. We conducted a virtual foraging experiment set in the foothills of the Himalayas to examine how time and energy are expended to forage efficiently, and how foraging changes when constrained to a home range. Two hundred players foraged the human-scale landscape with simulated energy expenditure in search of naturally distributed resources.

Exploratory dynamics of vocal foraging during infant-caregiver communication.

We investigated the hypothesis that infants search in an acoustic space for vocalisations that elicit adult utterances and vice versa, inspired by research on animal and human foraging. Infant-worn recorders were used to collect day-long audio recordings, and infant speech-related and adult vocalisation onsets and offsets were automatically identified. We examined vocalisation-to-vocalisation steps, focusing on inter-vocalisation time intervals and distances in an acoustic space defined by mean pitch and mean amplitude, measured from the child's perspective.

On the physical origin of linguistic laws and lognormality in speech.

Physical manifestations of linguistic units include sources of variability due to factors of speech production which are by definition excluded from counts of linguistic symbols. In this work, we examine whether linguistic laws hold with respect to the physical manifestations of linguistic units in spoken English. The data we analyse come from a phonetically transcribed database of acoustic recordings of spontaneous speech known as the Buckeye Speech corpus.

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross-species perspective.

Why does human speech have rhythm? As we cannot travel back in time to witness how speech developed its rhythmic properties and why humans have the cognitive skills to process them, we rely on alternative methods to find out. One powerful tool is the comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other species to determine which traits are shared between species and which are recent human inventions. Vocalizations of many species exhibit temporal structure, but little is known about how these rhythmic structures evolved, are perceived and produced, their biological and developmental bases, and communicative functions.

Complexity matching and coordination in individual and dyadic performance.

Complexity matching is a measure of coordination based on information exchange between complex networks. To date, studies have focused mainly on interpersonal coordination, but complexity matching may generalize to interacting networks within individuals. The present study examined complexity matching in a double, coordinated Fitts' perceptual-motor task with comparable individual and dyadic conditions.

Ontogeny of vocal rhythms in harbor seal pups: an exploratory study.

Puppyhood is a very active social and vocal period in a harbor seal's life . An important feature of vocalizations is their temporal and rhythmic structure, and understanding vocal timing and rhythms in harbor seals is critical to a cross-species hypothesis in evolutionary neuroscience that links vocal learning, rhythm perception, and synchronization. This study utilized analytical techniques that may best capture rhythmic structure in pup vocalizations with the goal of examining whether (1) harbor seal pups show rhythmic structure in their calls and (2) rhythms evolve over time.

Editor's Introduction and Review: Coordination and Context in Cognitive Science.

The role of coordination in cognitive science has been on the rise in recent years, in terms of coordination among neurons, coordination among sensory and motor systems, and coordination among individuals. Research has shown that coordination patterns corresponding to cognitive activities depend on the various contexts in which the underlying interactions are situated. The present issue of Topics in Cognitive Science centers on studies of coordination that address the role of context in shaping or interpreting dynamical patterns of human behavior.

Hierarchical temporal structure in music, speech and animal vocalizations: jazz is like a conversation, humpbacks sing like hermit thrushes.

Humans talk, sing and play music. Some species of birds and whales sing long and complex songs. All these behaviours and sounds exhibit hierarchical structure-syllables and notes are positioned within words and musical phrases, words and motives in sentences and musical phrases, and so on.

Hierarchical organization in the temporal structure of infant-direct speech and song.

Caregivers alter the temporal structure of their utterances when talking and singing to infants compared with adult communication. The present study tested whether temporal variability in infant-directed registers serves to emphasize the hierarchical temporal structure of speech. Fifteen German-speaking mothers sang a play song and told a story to their 6-months-old infants, or to an adult.

Introduction and application of the multiscale coefficient of variation analysis.

Quantifying how patterns of behavior relate across multiple levels of measurement typically requires long time series for reliable parameter estimation. We describe a novel analysis that estimates patterns of variability across multiple scales of analysis suitable for time series of short duration. The multiscale coefficient of variation (MSCV) measures the distance between local coefficient of variation estimates within particular time windows and the overall coefficient of variation across all time samples.

Seeking Synthesis: The Integrative Problem in Understanding Language and Its Evolution.

We discuss two problems for a general scientific understanding of language, sequences and synergies: how language is an intricately sequenced behavior and how language is manifested as a multidimensionally structured behavior. Though both are central in our understanding, we observe that the former tends to be studied more than the latter. We consider very general conditions that hold in human brain evolution and its computational implications, and identify multimodal and multiscale organization as two key characteristics of emerging cognitive function in our species.

Spatial memory in foraging games.

Foraging and foraging-like processes are found in spatial navigation, memory, visual search, and many other search functions in human cognition and behavior. Foraging is commonly theorized using either random or correlated movements based on Lévy walks, or a series of decisions to remain or leave proximal areas known as "patches". Neither class of model makes use of spatial memory, but search performance may be enhanced when information about searched and unsearched locations is encoded.

The segment as the minimal planning unit in speech production and reading aloud: evidence and implications.

Speech production and reading aloud studies have much in common, especially the last stages involved in producing a response. We focus on the minimal planning unit (MPU) in articulation. Although most researchers now assume that the MPU is the syllable, we argue that it is at least as small as the segment based on negative response latencies (i.

Patterns of interaction-dominant dynamics in individual versus collaborative memory foraging.

The extent to which a cognitive system's behavioral dynamics fit a power law distribution is considered indicative of the extent to which that system's behavior is driven by multiplicative, interdependent interactions between its components. Here, we investigate the dynamics of memory processes in individual and collaborating participants. Collaborative dyads showed the characteristic collaborative inhibition effect when compared to nominal groups in terms of the number of items retrieved in a categorical recall task, but they also generate qualitatively different patterns of search behavior.

The Role of Semantic Clustering in Optimal Memory Foraging.

Recent studies of semantic memory have investigated two theories of optimal search adopted from the animal foraging literature: Lévy flights and marginal value theorem. Each theory makes different simplifying assumptions and addresses different findings in search behaviors. In this study, an experiment is conducted to test whether clustering in semantic memory may play a role in evidence for both theories.

Movement dynamics reflect a functional role for weak coupling and role structure in dyadic problem solving.

Successful interaction requires complex coordination of body movements. Previous research has suggested a functional role for coordination and especially synchronization (i.e.

Spectral convergence in tapping and physiological fluctuations: coupling and independence of 1/f noise in the central and autonomic nervous systems.

When humans perform a response task or timing task repeatedly, fluctuations in measures of timing from one action to the next exhibit long-range correlations known as 1/f noise. The origins of 1/f noise in timing have been debated for over 20 years, with one common explanation serving as a default: humans are composed of physiological processes throughout the brain and body that operate over a wide range of timescales, and these processes combine to be expressed as a general source of 1/f noise. To test this explanation, the present study investigated the coupling vs.