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Summary Can preverbal infants utilize logical reasoning such as disjunctive inference? This logical operation requires keeping two alternatives open (A or B), until one of them is eliminated (if not A), allowing the inference: B is true. We presented to 10-month-old infants an ambiguous situation in which a female voice was paired with two faces. Subsequently, one of the two faces was presented with the voice of a male. We measured infants' preference for the correct face when both faces and the initial voice were presented again. Infant pupillary response was measured and utilized as an indicator of cognitive load at the critical moment of disjunctive inference. We controlled for other possible explanations in three additional experiments. Our results show that 10-month-olds can correctly deploy disjunction and negation to disambiguate scenes, suggesting that disjunctive inference does not rely on linguistic constructs. Highlights • 10-month-old infants have no logical operators in their lexicon • Nevertheless, they can use logical deduction in case of an ambiguous situation • They correctly deduce which faces and voices are paired through disjunctive inference • Infants' performance in this task can be followed by measuring their pupil dilation Biological Science, Neuroscience, Cognitive neuroscience, Behavioral Neuroscience Graphical abstract

Abstract Sound patterns in heritage languages are often highly variable, potentially with influences from majority languages. Yet, the core phonological system of the heritage language tends to remain stable. This article considers variation in the phonetic and phonological patterns of /r/ in American Norwegian heritage language speakers from neighboring communities in western Wisconsin, in the Upper Midwestern United States. Drawing on acoustic data from speakers born between 1879 and 1957, I examine the distribution of four rhotic allophones, including an English-like approximant, over time. These data reveal an increase of approximants that is structured within the Norwegian phonological system and its processes. Furthermore, analyzing these changes with the proposed modular framework provides clarity for how heritage language sound systems do and do not change under contact and contributes to our understanding of the asymmetric phonetic and phonological heritage language patterns.

It is known that, although the level of light is the primary determinant of pupil size, cognitive factors can also affect pupil diameter. It has been demonstrated that photographs of the sun produce pupil constriction independently of their luminance and other low-level features, suggesting that high-level visual processing may also modulate pupil response. Here, we measure pupil response to artistic paintings of the sun, moon, or containing a uniform lighting, that, being mediated by the artist's interpretation of reality and his technical rendering, require an even higher level of interpretation compared with photographs. We also study how chromatic content and spatial layout affect the results by presenting grey-scale and inverted versions of each painting. Finally, we assess directly with a categorization test how subjective image interpretation affects pupil response. We find that paintings with the sun elicit a smaller pupil size than paintings with the moon, or paintings containing no visible light source. The effect produced by sun paintings is reduced by disrupting contextual information, such as by removing color or manipulating the relations between paintings features that make more difficult to identify the source of light. Finally, and more importantly, pupil diameter changes according to observers' interpretation of the scene represented in the same stimulus. In conclusion, results show that the subcortical pupillary response to light is modulated by subjective interpretation of luminous objects, suggesting the involvement of cortical systems in charge of cognitive processes, such as attention, object recognition, familiarity, memory, and imagination.

AbstractPeter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa and Joseph LeDoux’s The Deep History of Ourselves present radically different big pictures regarding the nature, evolution and distribution of consciousness in animals. In this essay review, I discuss the motivations behind these big pictures and try to steer a course between them.

Historians tend to view public health as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, enabled by the emergence of representative democracies, centralised bureaucracies and advanced biomedicine. While social, urban and religious historians have begun chipping away at the entrenched dichotomy between pre/modernity that this view implies, evidence for community prophylactics in earlier eras also emerges from a group of somewhat unexpected sources, namely military manuals. Texts composed for (and often by) army leaders in medieval Latin Europe, East Rome (Byzantium) and other premodern civilisations reflect the topicality of population-level preventative healthcare well before the nineteenth century, thereby broadening the path for historicising public health from a transregional and even global perspective. Moreover, at least throughout the Mediterranean world, military manuals also attest the enduring appeal of Hippocratic and Galenic prophylactics and how that medical tradition continued for centuries to shape the routines and material culture of vulnerable communities such as armies.

In many languages in Micronesia, clever ways of extending their counting systems to numbers far beyond imagination were developed in precolonial times. Here, we provide an exhaustive overview of these systems, highlight their characteristics, and account for some of their most intriguing features. Based on a critical assessment of the available data and the in-depth analysis of both paradigmatic cases and peculiarities, we draw inferences about some more general patterns that suggest a rather long tradition of specific ways of counting both in Micronesia and the area beyond. publishedVersion

The past is undeniably special for human beings. To a large extent, both individuals and collectives define themselves through history. Moreover, humans seem to have a special way of cognitively representing the past: episodic memory. As opposed to other ways of representing knowledge, remembering the past in episodic memory brings with it the ability to become a witness. Episodic memory allows us to determine what of our knowledge about the past comes from our own experience and thereby what parts of the past we can give testimony about. In this article, we aim to give an account of the special status of the past by asking why humans have developed the ability to give testimony about it. We argue that the past is special for human beings because it is regularly, and often principally, the only thing that can determine present social realities such as commitments, entitlements, and obligations. Because the social effects of the past often do not leave physical traces behind, remembering the past and the ability to bear testimony it brings is necessary for coordinating social realities with other individuals.

AbstractThe smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured for the animal. Koffka made a sharp distinction between the “behavioural environment” and the “geographical environment”. We show how this distinction picks out the difference between the environment as perceived by an individual organism, and the shared publicly available environment. The ecological psychologist James Gibson was later critical of Koffka for inserting a private phenomenal reality in between animals and the shared environment. Gibson tried to make do with just the concept of affordances in his explanation of molar behaviour. We argue however that psychology as a science of molar behaviour will need to make appeal both to the concepts of shared publicly available affordances, and of the multiplicity of relevant affordances that invite an individual to act. A version of Koffka’s distinction between the two environments remains alive today in a distinction we have made between the field and landscape of affordances. Having distinguished the two environments, we go on to provide an account of how the two environments are related. Koffka suggested that the behavioural environment forms out of the causal interaction of the individual with a pre-existing, ready-made geographical environment. We argue that such an account of the relation between the two environments fails to do justice to the complex entanglement of the social with the material aspects of the geographical environment. To better account for this sociomaterial reality of the geographical environment, we propose a process-perspective on our distinction between the landscape and field of affordances. While the two environments can be conceptually distinguished, we argue they should also be viewed as standing in a relation of reciprocal and mutual dependence.

In their recent paper on “Challenges in mathematical cognition”, Alcock and colleagues (Alcock et al. [2016]. Challenges in mathematical cognition: A collaboratively-derived research agenda. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 2, 20-41) defined a research agenda through 26 specific research questions. An important dimension of mathematical cognition almost completely absent from their discussion is the cultural constitution of mathematical cognition. Spanning work from a broad range of disciplines – including anthropology, archaeology, cognitive science, history of science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology – we argue that for any research agenda on mathematical cognition the cultural dimension is indispensable, and we propose a set of exemplary research questions related to it. publishedVersion