Transitions in cognitive evolution.

The evolutionary history of animal cognition appears to involve a few major changes that opened up new phylogenetic possibilities for cognition. Here, we review and contrast current transitional accounts of cognitive evolution. We discuss how an important feature of an evolutionary transition should be that it changes what is evolvable, so that the possible phenotypic spaces before and after a transition are different.

Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19.

Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this change.

Attention and counter-framing in the Black Lives Matter movement on Twitter.

The social media platform Twitter platform has played a crucial role in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The immediate, flexible nature of tweets plays a crucial role both in spreading information about the movement's aims and in organizing individual protests. Twitter has also played an important role in the right-wing reaction to BLM, providing a means to reframe and recontextualize activists' claims in a more sinister light.

The coordination dilemma for epidemiological modelers.

Epidemiological models directly shape policy responses to public health crises. We argue that they also play a less obvious but important role in solving certain coordination problems and social dilemmas that arise during pandemics. This role is both ethically and epistemically valuable.

How experimental neuroscientists can fix the hard problem of consciousness.

For the materialist, the hard problem is fundamentally an explanatory problem. Solving it requires explaining why the relationship between brain and experience is the way it is and not some other way. We use the tools of the interventionist theory of explanation to show how a systematic experimental project could help move beyond the hard problem.

Holistic resource-rational analysis.

We argue that Lieder and Griffiths' method for analyzing rational process models cannot capture an important constraint on resource allocation, which is competition between different processes for shared resources (Klein 2018, Biology and Philosophy33:36). We suggest that holistic interactions between processes on at least three different timescales - episodic, developmental, and evolutionary - must be taken into account by a complete resource-bounded explanation.

Pathways to conspiracy: The social and linguistic precursors of involvement in Reddit's conspiracy theory forum.

Many individuals who engage with conspiracy theories come to do so through a combination of individual and social factors. The interaction between these factors is challenging to study using traditional experimental designs. Reddit.

Decoding the Brain: Neural Representation and the Limits of Multivariate Pattern Analysis in Cognitive Neuroscience.

Since its introduction, multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), or 'neural decoding', has transformed the field of cognitive neuroscience. Underlying its influence is a crucial inference, which we call the decoder's dictum: if information can be decoded from patterns of neural activity, then this provides strong evidence about what information those patterns represent. Although the dictum is a widely held and well-motivated principle in decoding research, it has received scant philosophical attention.

Topic Modeling Reveals Distinct Interests within an Online Conspiracy Forum.

Conspiracy theories play a troubling role in political discourse. Online forums provide a valuable window into everyday conspiracy theorizing, and can give a clue to the motivations and interests of those who post in such forums. Yet this online activity can be difficult to quantify and study.

Taxonomising delusions: content or aetiology?

Introduction: Many theoretical treatments assume (often implicitly) that delusions ought to be taxonomised by the content of aberrant beliefs. A theoretically sound, and comparatively under-explored, alternative would split and combine delusions according to their underlying cognitive aetiology.

Methods: We give a theoretical review of several cases, focusing on monothematic delusions of misidentification and on somatoparaphrenia.

Ghosts in machine learning for cognitive neuroscience: Moving from data to theory.

The application of machine learning methods to neuroimaging data has fundamentally altered the field of cognitive neuroscience. Future progress in understanding brain function using these methods will require addressing a number of key methodological and interpretive challenges. Because these challenges often remain unseen and metaphorically "haunt" our efforts to use these methods to understand the brain, we refer to them as "ghosts".

Interpreting the dimensions of neural feature representations revealed by dimensionality reduction.

Recent progress in understanding the structure of neural representations in the cerebral cortex has centred around the application of multivariate classification analyses to measurements of brain activity. These analyses have proved a sensitive test of whether given brain regions provide information about specific perceptual or cognitive processes. An exciting extension of this approach is to infer the structure of this information, thereby drawing conclusions about the underlying neural representational space.

Opsoclonus myoclonus ataxia associated with West Nile virus infection: A dramatic presentation with benign prognosis?

Opsoclonus myoclonus and ataxia is a combination of severe neurological signs associated with several pathologic agents and conditions. Only few cases of opsoclonus have been related to West Nile virus infection. We report on a 61-year-old woman and on a 55-year-old man who had history of recent fever, who were hospitalized because of acute severe truncal ataxia, opsoclonus and tremor with minimal myoclonic jerks.

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 in Israel: phenotype and genotype of a Jew Yemenite subpopulation.

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 is an autosomal dominant ataxia with various phenotypes affecting Jews of Yemenite origin in Israel. Clinical and family pedigrees data of 125 Yemenite Jewish patients were collected in our clinic. All examined patients underwent a detailed neurological and bedside vestibular examination.

What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness.

How, why, and when consciousness evolved remain hotly debated topics. Addressing these issues requires considering the distribution of consciousness across the animal phylogenetic tree. Here we propose that at least one invertebrate clade, the insects, has a capacity for the most basic aspect of consciousness: subjective experience.

Did the Chinese have a change of heart?

In their "The Prevalence of Mind-Body Dualism in Early China," Slingerland and Chudek use a statistical analysis of the early Chinese corpus to argue for Weak Folk Dualism (WFD). We raise three methodological objections to their analysis. First, the change over time that they find is largely driven by genre.

The effects of immediate and short-term retest on the latencies and amplitudes of the auditory event-related potentials in healthy adults.

Objective: To evaluate the immediate and short-term effects of repeated within session trials on N1, P2, N2 and P3 latencies and P2, N2 and P3 amplitudes in healthy adults.

Materials And Methods: ERPs were elicited by the auditory oddball paradigm and recorded over Fz, Cz and Pz in 18 healthy adults over two sessions, one to three days apart, and two within session trials with one to three minutes trial-retrial interval. The ERPs' latencies and amplitudes were blindly calculated and were analyzed by Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures.

Carotid artery stenting in high risk patients with carotid artery stenosis not eligible for endarterectomy: clinical outcome after 5 years.

Background: Carotid artery stenting is used as an alternative to surgical endarterectomy.

Objectives: To determine the outcome of CAS in a retrospective cohort of patients.

Methods: Between July 1999 and March 2003, 56 consecutive patients with carotid artery stenosis who were considered ineligible for surgery were treated (45 males, 11 females, mean age 69).

Phenytoin intoxication in a clozapine-related prolonged seizure.

Phenytoin is a first-line drug for the treatment of status epilepticus. We report a case of phenytoin intoxication after intravenous phenytoin loading in a patient with clozapine-related seizures. To our knowledge, this is the first description of phenytoin intoxication due to CYP2C9 inhibition by clozapine.

Distal lesion of the lateral femoral cutaneous nerve.

We report three patients with a typical clinical picture of unilateral meralgia paresthetica in whom routine nerve conduction studies were normal. However, cortical somatosensory evoked potentials were absent after lateral femoral cutaneous nerve (LFCN) stimulation on the affected side. After stimulation of the LFCN in the anterosuperior iliac spine (ASIS) region and recording the responses distal to conventional sites (20 cm from the ASIS), sensory nerve action potentials (SNAPs) were absent in the symptomatic leg, but present in the normal leg.