Investigations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis often ask whether there is a difference in the non-linguistic behavior of speakers of two languages, generally without modeling the underlying process. Such an approach leaves underexplored the relative contributions of language and universal aspects of cognition, and how those contributions differ across languages. We explore the naming and non-ling...

Embodied cognition is the hypothesis that behavior is not simply caused by the brain. Instead, behavior emerges from the interactions between brains in particular kinds of bodies embedded in environments that provide certain kinds of opportunities for activity. Theories of embodied cognition require a mechanism to support how these distributed resources can remain in contact with one another so...

Brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) are obligate brood parasites. Only females search for host nests and they find host nests one or more days before placing eggs in them. Past work has shown that females have a larger hippocampus than males, but sex differences in spatial cognition have not been extensively investigated. We tested cowbirds for sex and seasonal differences in spatial memory ...

Glutamatergic neurotransmission mediated by N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptors is vital for the cortical computations underlying cognition and might be disrupted in severe neuropsychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia. Studies on this topic have been limited to processes in local circuits; however, cognition involves large-scale brain systems with multiple interacting regions. A prominent...

Cognitive remediation training has been shown to improve both cognitive and social cognitive deficits in people with schizophrenia, but the mechanisms that support this behavioral improvement are largely unknown. One hypothesis is that intensive behavioral training in cognition and/or social cognition restores the underlying neural mechanisms that support targeted skills. However, there is litt...

Clark and Chalmers (1998) introduced the extended mind hypothesis, according to which some mental states can be realized by non-biological external resources. A lively debate has flourished around this hypothesis, connected with the issues of embodiment, embeddedness, situatedness and enaction (cf. Clark, 2008; Menary, 2010; Shapiro, 2011). Two of the main criticisms addressed to the functional...

The dynamical hypothesis threatens computationalism and its commitment to mental representations: the continuous, reciprocally causative nature of cognition renders impossible such an analysis. Andy Clark and Rick Grush have suggested a hybrid approach that models cog-nitive systems using dynamical systems theory but employs mental representation via emulation to aid its explanations. I will ca...

There is a large body of research indicating that speakers of (familiar) European languages tend to encode and conceptualize space from an egocentric perspective, but linguistic fieldworkers have shown that speakers of certain other languages (e.g. Tzeltal) often describe the same spatial scenes based on fixed coordinates of the environment. This has led some researcher to challenge longstandin...