Cognitive and Neural Representations of Fractals in Vision, Music, and Action.

The concept of fractal was popularized by Mandelbrot as a tool to tame the geometrical structure of objects with infinite hierarchical depth. The key aspect of fractals is the use of simple parsimonious rules and initial conditions, which when applied recursively can generate unbounded complexity. Fractals are structures ubiquitous in nature, being present in coast lines, bacteria colonies, trees, and physiological time series.

Reproductive Strategies and Romantic Love in Early Modern Europe.

In Western Europe, the Early Modern Period is characterized by the rise of tenderness in romantic relationships and the emergence of companionate marriage. Despite a long research tradition, the origins of these social changes remain elusive. In this paper, we build on recent advances in behavioral sciences, showing that romantic emotional investment, which is more culturally variable than sexual attraction, enhances the cohesion of long-term relationships and increases investment in children.

How to Develop Reliable Instruments to Measure the Cultural Evolution of Preferences and Feelings in History?

While we cannot directly measure the psychological preferences of individuals, and the moral, emotional, and cognitive tendencies of people from the past, we can use cultural artifacts as a window to the zeitgeist of societies in particular historical periods. At present, an increasing number of digitized texts spanning several centuries is available for a computerized analysis. In addition, developments form historical economics have enabled increasingly precise estimations of sociodemographic realities from the past.

The rise of prosociality in fiction preceded democratic revolutions in Early Modern Europe.

The English and French Revolutions represent a turning point in history, marking the beginning of the modern rise of democracy. Recent advances in cultural evolution have put forward the idea that the early modern revolutions may be the product of a long-term psychological shift, from hierarchical and dominance-based interactions to democratic and trust-based relationships. In this study, we tested this hypothesis by analyzing theater plays during the early modern period in England and France.

Hierarchical Structure in Sequence Processing: How to Measure It and Determine Its Neural Implementation.

In many domains of human cognition, hierarchically structured representations are thought to play a key role. In this paper, we start with some foundational definitions of key phenomena like "sequence" and "hierarchy," and then outline potential signatures of hierarchical structure that can be observed in behavioral and neuroimaging data. Appropriate behavioral methods include classic ones from psycholinguistics along with some from the more recent artificial grammar learning and sentence processing literature.

Hierarchy, multidomain modules, and the evolution of intelligence.

In this commentary, we support a complex, mosaic, and multimodal approach to the evolution of intelligence. Using the arcuate fasciculus as an example of discontinuity in the evolution of neurobiological architectures, we argue that the strict dichotomy of modules versus G, adopted by Burkart et al. in the target article, is insufficient to interpret the available statistical and experimental evidence.

Representing visual recursion does not require verbal or motor resources.

The ability to form and use recursive representations while processing hierarchical structures has been hypothesized to rely on language abilities. If so, linguistic resources should inevitably be activated while representing recursion in non-linguistic domains. In this study we use a dual-task paradigm to assess whether verbal resources are required to perform a visual recursion task.