Music information retrieval background. The perception and cognition of musically similar songs is a well-known research topic in the MIR community. There has been much work in the auditive area [e.g. Logan, 2001; Aucouturier, 2002]. More recent approaches investigate the influence of cultural factors on similarity through the use of metadata [Whitman 2002]. Possible bi-modal combinations of au...

This review outlines the development of religious cognition, with a particular focus on cultural processes involved in transmission concepts and beliefs. The mechanisms beliefs are made salient by fact that these ( a) unavailable for direct observation or experimentation child b) involve deeply held personal collective commitments part adult members distinct groups defined specific practices. A...

The goal of the Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts symposium was to investigate agents and environments for behavior in social and cultural contexts and for realistic adaptation of such agents to changing situations. Computational human behavior models, in extending a conventional information-processing approach, face two complex problems: adaptation and evolution of behavior, and the cultura...

Social class reflects more than the material conditions of people’s lives. Objective resources (e.g., income) shape cultural practices and behaviors that signal social class. These signals create cultural identities among upperand lower-class individuals— identities that are rooted in subjective perceptions of social-class rank vis-à-vis others. Empirical studies find that perceptions of social...

Culture-as-situated-cognition (CSC) theory proposes that culture can be thought of at three levels. At the highest level, culture is a human universal, a “good enough” solution to universal needs. At the intermediate level, culture is a specific meaning-making framework, a “mindset” that influences what is attended to, which goals or mental procedure is salient. At the most proximal level, cult...

This paper describes a cross-cultural and developmental research project on naïve or folk biology – that is, the study of how people conceptualize nature. Our methods and results integrate three distinct perspectives into a complex and coherent account of biological cognition. From the standpoint of mainstream cognitive psychology, we find that results gathered from “standard populations” in in...

This paper states the case for applying the conceptual and analytic tools associated with the study of entropy in physical systems to cognition, focusing on creative cognition. It is proposed that minds modify their contents and adapt to their environments to minimize psychological entropy: arousal-provoking uncertainty, which can be experienced negatively as anxiety, or positively as a wellspr...

In an article in Cognition [Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). Semantics cross-cultural style. Cognition, 92, B1-B12] present data which purports to show that East Asian Cantonese-speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while Western English-speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al. ta...

Meta-analytic procedures were used to test the effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, empathy/desensitization, and prosocial behavior. Unique features of this meta-analytic review include (a) more restrictive methodological quality inclusion criteria than in past meta-analyses; (b) cross-cultural comparisons; (c) lo...