Zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) demonstrate cognitive flexibility in using phonology and sequence of syllables in auditory discrimination.

Zebra finches rely mainly on syllable phonology rather than on syllable sequence when they discriminate between two songs. However, they can also learn to discriminate two strings containing the same set of syllables by their sequence. How learning about the phonological characteristics of syllables and their sequence relate to each other and to the composition of the stimuli is still an open question.

Being ostensive (reply to commentaries on "Expression unleashed").

One of our main goals with "Expression unleashed" was to highlight the distinctive, ostensive nature of human communication, and the many roles that ostension can play in human behavior and society. The commentaries we received forced us to be more precise about several aspects of this thesis. At the same time, no commentary challenged the central idea that the manifest diversity of human expression is underpinned by a common cognitive unity.

Semantic Adaptation to the Interpretation of Gradable Adjectives via Active Linguistic Interaction.

When communicating, people adapt their linguistic representations to those of their interlocutors. Previous studies have shown that this also occurs at the semantic level for vague and context-dependent terms such as quantifiers and uncertainty expressions. However, work to date has mostly focused on passive exposure to a given speaker's interpretation, without considering the possible role of active linguistic interaction.

Williamson on conditionals and testimony.

In , Williamson makes a new case for the material conditional account. He tries to explain away apparently countervailing data by arguing that these have been misinterpreted because researchers have overlooked the role of heuristics in the processing of conditionals. Cases involving the receipt of apparently conflicting conditionals play an important dialectical role in Williamson's book: they are supposed to provide evidence for the material conditional account as well as for the defeasibility of a key procedure underlying our everyday assessments of conditionals.

Communication and deniability: Moral and epistemic reactions to denials.

People often deny having meant what the audience understood. Such denials occur in both interpersonal and institutional contexts, such as in political discourse, the interpretation of laws and the perception of lies. In practice, denials have a wide range of possible effects on the audience, such as conversational repair, reinterpretation of the original utterance, moral judgements about the speaker, and rejection of the denial.

Intensive Care Unit Physicians' Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence-Based Clinical Decision Support Tools: Preimplementation Survey Study.

Background: Artificial intelligence-based clinical decision support (AI-CDS) tools have great potential to benefit intensive care unit (ICU) patients and physicians. There is a gap between the development and implementation of these tools.

Objective: We aimed to investigate physicians' perspectives and their current decision-making behavior before implementing a discharge AI-CDS tool for predicting readmission and mortality risk after ICU discharge.

Quantifiers satisfying semantic universals have shorter minimal description length.

Despite wide variation among natural languages, there are linguistic properties thought to be universal to all or nearly all languages. Here, we consider universals at the semantic level, in the domain of quantifiers, which are given by the properties of monotonicity, quantity, and conservativity, and we investigate whether these universals might be explained by differences in complexity. First, we use a minimal pair methodology and compare the complexities of individual quantifiers using approximate Kolmogorov complexity.

Neural Networks Track the Logical Complexity of Boolean Concepts.

The language of thought hypothesis and connectionism provide two main accounts of category acquisition in the cognitive sciences. However, it is unclear to what extent their predictions agree. In this article, we tackle this problem by comparing the two accounts with respect to a common set of predictions about the effort required to acquire categories.

Evaluating the validity of animal models of mental disorder: from modeling syndromes to modeling endophenotypes.

This paper provides a historical analysis of a shift in the way animal models of mental disorders were conceptualized: the shift from the mid-twentieth-century view, adopted by some, that animal models model syndromes classified in manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), to the later widespread view that animal models model component parts of psychiatric syndromes. I argue that in the middle of the twentieth century the attempt to maximize the face validity of animal models sometimes led to the pursuit of the ideal of an animal model that represented a behaviorally defined psychiatric syndrome as described in manuals such as the DSM. I show how developments within psychiatric genetics and related criticism of the DSM in the 1990s and 2000s led to the rejection of this ideal and how researchers in the first decade of the twenty-first century came to believe that animal models of mental disorders should model component parts of mental disorders, adopting a so-called endophenotype approach.

The Effects of Iconicity and Conventionalization on Word Order Preferences.

Of the six possible orderings of the three main constituents of language (subject, verb, and object), two-SOV and SVO-are predominant cross-linguistically. Previous research using the silent gesture paradigm in which hearing participants produce or respond to gestures without speech has shown that different factors such as reversibility, salience, and animacy can affect the preferences for different orders. Here, we test whether participants' preferences for orders that are conditioned on the semantics of the event change depending on (i) the iconicity of individual gestural elements and (ii) the prior knowledge of a conventional lexicon.

The role of blogs and news sites in science communication during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We present a brief review of literature related to blogs and news sites; our focus is on publications related to COVID-19. We primarily focus on the role of blogs and news sites in disseminating research on COVID-19 to the wider public, that is knowledge transfer channels. The review is for researchers and practitioners in scholarly communication and social media studies of science who would like to find out more about the role of blogs and news sites during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Prospects for a Monist Theory of Non-causal Explanation in Science and Mathematics.

We explore the prospects of a monist account of explanation for both non-causal explanations in science and pure mathematics. Our starting point is the counterfactual theory of explanation (CTE) for explanations in science, as advocated in the recent literature on explanation. We argue that, despite the obvious differences between mathematical and scientific explanation, the CTE can be extended to cover both non-causal explanations in science and mathematical explanations.

Heavy Tails and the Shape of Modified Numerals.

The pattern of implicatures of the modified numeral "more than n" depends on the roundness of n. Cummins et al. (2012) present experimental evidence for the relation between roundness and implicature patterns and propose a pragmatic account of the phenomenon.

Indefinite Pronouns Optimize the Simplicity/Informativeness Trade-Off.

The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-off between simplicity and informativeness. The argument has been originally based on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of content words, such as kinship, color, and number terms. The present work applies this analysis to a category of function words: indefinite pronouns (e.

Investigating Word Order Emergence: Constraints From Cognition and Communication.

How do cognitive biases and mechanisms from learning and use interact when a system of language conventions emerges? We investigate this question by focusing on how transitive events are conveyed in silent gesture production and interaction. Silent gesture experiments (in which participants improvise to use gesture but no speech) have been used to investigate cognitive biases that shape utterances produced in the absence of a conventional language system. In this mode of communication, participants do not follow the dominant order of their native language (e.

Animal languages in eighteenth-century German philosophy and science.

This paper analyzes debates on animal language in eighteenth-century German philosophy and science. Adopting a history of ideas approach, I explain how the study of animal language became tied to the investigation into the origin and development of language towards the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that for large parts of the eighteenth century, the question of the existence of animal languages was studied within the context of the philosophical question of whether animals possess reason.

Williamson on indicatives and suppositional heuristics.

Timothy Williamson has defended the claim that the semantics of the indicative 'if' is given by the material conditional. Putative counterexamples can be handled by better understanding the role played in our assessment of indicatives by a fallible cognitive heuristic, called the Suppositional Procedure. Williamson's Suppositional Conjecture has it that the Suppositional Procedure is humans' primary way of prospectively assessing conditionals.

Kant's theory of scientific hypotheses in its historical context.

This paper analyzes the historical context and systematic importance of Kant's hypothetical use of reason. It does so by investigating the role of hypotheses in Kant's philosophy of science. We first situate Kant's account of hypotheses in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy of science, focusing on the works of Wolff, Meier, and Crusius.

Neural Advantages of Older Musicians Involve the Cerebellum: Implications for Healthy Aging Through Lifelong Musical Instrument Training.

This study compared 30 older musicians and 30 age-matched non-musicians to investigate the association between lifelong musical instrument training and age-related cognitive decline and brain atrophy (musicians: mean age 70.8 years, musical experience 52.7 years; non-musicians: mean age 71.

Computational complexity explains neural differences in quantifier verification.

Different classes of quantifiers provably require different verification algorithms with different complexity profiles. The algorithm for proportional quantifiers, like 'most', is more complex than that for nonproportional quantifiers, like 'all' and 'three'. We tested the hypothesis that different complexity profiles affect ERP responses during sentence verification, but not during sentence comprehension.

Expression unleashed: The evolutionary and cognitive foundations of human communication.

Human expression is open-ended, versatile, and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how expression is unleashed in humans.

Naturalism, tractability and the adaptive toolbox.

Many compelling examples have recently been provided in which people can achieve impressive epistemic success, e.g. draw highly accurate inferences, by using simple heuristics and very little information.

Are Gettier cases disturbing?

We examine a prominent naturalistic line on the method of cases (MoC), exemplified by Timothy Williamson and Edouard Machery: MoC is given a fallibilist and non-exceptionalist treatment, accommodating moderate modal skepticism. But Gettier cases are in dispute: Williamson takes them to induce substantive philosophical knowledge; Machery claims that the ambitious use of MoC should be abandoned entirely. We defend an intermediate position.

Music in Quarantine: Connections Between Changes in Lifestyle, Psychological States, and Musical Behaviors During COVID-19 Pandemic.

Music is not only the art of organized sound but also a compound of social interaction among people, built upon social and environmental foundations. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, containment measures such as shelter-in-place, lockdown, social distancing, and self-quarantine have severely impacted the foundation of human society, resulting in a drastic change in our everyday experience. In this paper, the relationships between musical behavior, lifestyle, and psychological states during the shelter-in-place period of the COVID-19 pandemic are investigated.

Unravelling the origins of musicality: Beyond music as an epiphenomenon of language.

The two target articles address the origins of music in complementary ways. However, both proposals focus on overt musical behaviour, largely ignoring the role of perception and cognition, and they blur the boundaries between the potential origins of language and music. To resolve this, an alternative research strategy is proposed that focuses on the core cognitive components of musicality.