Conducting Web-Based Experiments for Numerical Cognition Research.

It is becoming increasingly popular and straightforward to collect data in cognitive psychology through web-based studies. In this paper, I review issues around web-based data collection for the purpose of numerical cognition research. Provided that the desired type of data can be collected through a web-browser, such online studies offer numerous advantages over traditional forms of physical lab-based data collection, such as gathering data from larger sample sizes in shorter time-windows and easier access to non-local populations.

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.

A review of computational models of basic rule learning: The neural-symbolic debate and beyond.

We present a critical review of computational models of generalization of simple grammar-like rules, such as ABA and ABB. In particular, we focus on models attempting to account for the empirical results of Marcus et al. (Science, 283(5398), 77-80 1999).

I still hear a melody: investigating temporal dynamics of the Speech-to-Song Illusion.

The Speech-to-Song Illusion (STS) refers to a dramatic shift in our perception of short speech fragments which, when repeatedly presented, may start to sound-like song. Anecdotally, once it is perceived as a song, it is difficult to unhear the melody of a speech fragment, and such temporal dynamics of the STS illusion has theoretical implications. The goal of the current study is to capture this temporal effect.

Simple Hyperintensional Belief Revision.

I present a possible worlds semantics for a hyperintensional belief revision operator, which reduces the logical idealization of cognitive agents affecting similar operators in doxastic and epistemic logics, as well as in standard AGM belief revision theory. (Revised) belief states are not closed under classical logical consequence; revising by inconsistent information does not perforce lead to trivialization; and revision can be subject to 'framing effects': logically or necessarily equivalent contents can lead to different revisions. Such results are obtained without resorting to non-classical logics, or to non-normal or impossible worlds semantics.

Cancellation, negation, and rejection.

In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, & Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by (a) a conversational implicature, (b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or (c) a conventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses, and the accumulating evidence from other studies as well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature.

Exposure to a musically-enriched environment; Its relationship with executive functions, short-term memory and verbal IQ in primary school children.

Background: Previous literature has shown a putative relationship between playing a musical instrument and a benefit in various cognitive domains. However, to date it still remains unknown whether the exposure to a musically-enriched environment instead of playing an instrument yourself might also increase cognitive domains such as language, mathematics or executive sub-functions such as for example planning or working memory in primary school children.

Design: Cross-sectional.

People making deontological judgments in the Trapdoor dilemma are perceived to be more prosocial in economic games than they actually are.

Why do people make deontological decisions, although they often lead to overall unfavorable outcomes? One account is receiving considerable attention: deontological judgments may signal commitment to prosociality and thus may increase people's chances of being selected as social partners-which carries obvious long-term benefits. Here we test this framework by experimentally exploring whether people making deontological judgments are expected to be more prosocial than those making consequentialist judgments and whether they are actually so. In line with previous studies, we identified deontological choices using the Trapdoor dilemma.

A blooming and buzzing confusion: Buffon, Reimarus, and Kant on animal cognition.

Kant's views on animals have received much attention in recent years. According to some, Kant attributed the capacity for objective perceptual awareness to non-human animals, even though he denied that they have concepts. This position is difficult to square with a conceptualist reading of Kant, according to which objective perceptual awareness requires concepts.

Coevolution of Lexical Meaning and Pragmatic Use.

According to standard linguistic theory, the meaning of an utterance is the product of conventional semantic meaning and general pragmatic rules on language use. We investigate how such a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics could evolve under general processes of selection and learning. We present a game-theoretic model of the competition between types of language users, each endowed with certain lexical representations and a particular pragmatic disposition to act on them.

Rhesus Monkeys () Sense Isochrony in Rhythm, but Not the Beat: Additional Support for the Gradual Audiomotor Evolution Hypothesis.

Charles Darwin suggested the perception of rhythm to be common to all animals. While only recently experimental research is finding some support for this claim, there are also aspects of rhythm cognition that appear to be species-specific, such as the capability to perceive a regular pulse (or beat) in a varying rhythm. In the current study, using EEG, we adapted an auditory oddball paradigm that allows for disentangling the contributions of beat perception and isochrony to the temporal predictability of the stimulus.

Free-energy minimization in joint agent-environment systems: A niche construction perspective.

The free-energy principle is an attempt to explain the structure of the agent and its brain, starting from the fact that an agent exists (Friston and Stephan, 2007; Friston et al., 2010). More specifically, it can be regarded as a systematic attempt to understand the 'fit' between an embodied agent and its niche, where the quantity of free-energy is a measure for the 'misfit' or disattunement (Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014) between agent and environment.

The effect of handedness on spatial and motor representation of pitch patterns in pianists.

This study investigated the effect of handedness on pianists' abilities to adjust their keyboard performance skills to new spatial and motor mappings. Left- and right-handed pianists practiced simple melodies on a regular MIDI piano keyboard (practice) and were then asked to perform these with modified melodic contours (the same or reversed melodic contour causing a change of fingering) and on a reversed MIDI piano keyboard (test). The difference of performance duration between the practice and the test phase as well as the amount of errors played were used as test measures.

Continuous-variable protocol for oblivious transfer in the noisy-storage model.

Cryptographic protocols are the backbone of our information society. This includes two-party protocols which offer protection against distrustful players. Such protocols can be built from a basic primitive called oblivious transfer.

On the biological basis of musicality.

In recent years, music and musicality have been the focus of an increasing amount of research effort. This has led to a growing role and visibility of the contribution of (bio)musicology to the field of neuroscience and cognitive sciences at large. While it has been widely acknowledged that there are commonalities between speech, language, and musicality, several researchers explain this by considering musicality as an epiphenomenon of language.

Longitudinal Analysis of Music Education on Executive Functions in Primary School Children.

Research on the effects of music education on cognitive abilities has generated increasing interest across the scientific community. Nonetheless, longitudinal studies investigating the effects of structured music education on cognitive sub-functions are still rare. Prime candidates for investigating a relationship between academic achievement and music education appear to be executive functions such as planning, working memory, and inhibition.

Prospective memory in autism: theory and literature review.

Objective: The current article set out to review all research conducted to date investigating prospective memory (PM) in autism.

Method: All studies on PM in autism are first described, followed by a critical review and discussion of experimental findings within the multiprocess framework. PM in autism is then considered through an embodied predictive-coding account of autism.

Decision Making Strategy and the Simultaneous Processing of Syntactic Dependencies in Language and Music.

Despite differences in their function and domain-specific elements, syntactic processing in music and language is believed to share cognitive resources. This study aims to investigate whether the simultaneous processing of language and music share the use of a common syntactic processor or more general attentional resources. To investigate this matter we tested musicians and non-musicians using visually presented sentences and aurally presented melodies containing syntactic local and long-distance dependencies.

Selecting the model that best fits the data.

Leibovich et al. argue that that none of the experiments they review really establishes that human adults, infants, or nonhuman animals are sensitive to numerosity independent of a range of continuous quantities. We do not dispute their claim that the empirical record is inconclusive but argue that model-based data analysis does offer a way to make progress.

What makes a rhythm complex? The influence of musical training and accent type on beat perception.

Perception of a regular beat in music is inferred from different types of accents. For example, increases in loudness cause intensity accents, and the grouping of time intervals in a rhythm creates temporal accents. Accents are expected to occur on the beat: when accents are "missing" on the beat, the beat is more difficult to find.

Introducing a replication-first rule for Ph.D. projects.

Zwaan et al. mention that young researchers should conduct replications as a small part of their portfolio. We extend this proposal and suggest that conducting and reporting replications should become an integral part of Ph.

Conceivability and possibility: some dilemmas for Humeans.

The Humean view that conceivability entails possibility can be criticized via input from cognitive psychology. A mainstream view here has it that there are two candidate codings for mental representations (one of them being, according to some, reducible to the other): the linguistic and the pictorial, the difference between the two consisting in the degree of arbitrariness of the representation relation. If the conceivability of at issue for Humeans involves the having of a linguistic mental representation, then it is easy to show that we can conceive the impossible, for impossibilities can be represented by meaningful bits of language.

Aboutness in imagination.

I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine's works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers' : the intentional state of a subject who conceives that by imagining a situation-a configuration of objects and properties-verifying .

Building an ACT-R Reader for Eye-Tracking Corpus Data.

Cognitive architectures have often been applied to data from individual experiments. In this paper, I develop an ACT-R reader that can model a much larger set of data, eye-tracking corpus data. It is shown that the resulting model has a good fit to the data for the considered low-level processes.