The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been the subject of intense interest as a locus of cognitive control. Several computational models have been proposed to account for a range of effects, including error detection, conflict monitoring, error likelihood prediction, and numerous other effects observed with single-unit neurophysiology, fMRI, and lesion studies. Here, we review the state of computational models of cognitive control and offer a new theoretical synthesis of the mPFC as signaling response–outcome predictions. This new synthesis has two interacting (...) components. The first component learns to predict the various possible outcomes of a planned action, and the second component detects discrepancies between the actual and intended responses; the detected discrepancies in turn update the outcome predictions. This single construct is consistent with a wide array of performance monitoring effects in mPFC and suggests a unifying account of the cognitive role of medial PFC in performance monitoring. (shrink)

Humans and other animals are able not only to coordinate their actions with their current sensorimotor state, but also to imagine, plan and act in view of the future, and to realize distal goals. In this paper we discuss whether or not their future-oriented conducts imply (future-oriented) representations. We illustrate the role played by anticipatory mechanisms in natural and artificial agents, and we propose a notion of representation that is grounded in the agent’s predictive capabilities. Therefore, we argue that the (...) ability that characterizes and defines a true cognitive mind, as opposed to a merely adaptive system, is that of building representations of the non-existent, of what is not currently (yet) true or perceivable, of what is desired. A real mental activity begins when the organism is able to endogenously (i.e. not as the consequence of current perceptual stimuli) produce an internal representation of the world in order to select and guide its conduct goal-directed: the mind serves to coordinate with the future. (shrink)

Mainstream teleosemantics is the view that mental representation should be understood in terms of biological functions, which, in turn, should be understood in terms of selection processes. One of the traditional criticisms of teleosemantics is the problem of novel contents: how can teleosemantics explain our ability to represent properties that are evolutionarily novel? In response, some have argued that by generalizing the notion of a selection process to include phenomena such as operant conditioning, and the neural selection that underlies it, (...) we can resolve this problem. Here, we do four things: we develop this suggestion in a rigorous way through a simple example, we draw on recent neurobiological research to support its empirical plausibility, we defend the move from a host of objections in the literature, and we sketch how the picture can be extended to help us think about more complex “conceptual” representations and not just perceptual ones. (shrink)

Emotion plays a crucial role, both in general human experience and in psychiatric illnesses. Despite the importance of emotion, the relative lack of objective methodologies to scientifically studying emotional phenomena limits our current understanding and thereby calls for the development of novel methodologies, such us the study of illustrative animal models. Analysis of Drosophila and other insects has unlocked new opportunities to elucidate the behavioral phenotypes of fundamentally emotional phenomena. Here we propose an integrative model of basic emotions based on (...) observations of this animal model. The basic emotions are internal states that are modulated by neuromodulators, and these internal states are externally expressed as certain stereotypical behaviors, such as instinct, which is proposed as ancient mechanisms of survival. There are four kinds of basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger, which are differentially associated with three core affects: reward (happiness), punishment (sadness), and stress (fear and anger). These core affects are analogous to the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) in that they are combined in various proportions to result in more complex “higher order” emotions, such as love and aesthetic emotion. We refer to our proposed model of emotions as called the “ Three Primary Color Model of Basic Emotions.”. (shrink)

Interactions between an intelligent software agent and a human user are ubiquitous in everyday situations such as access to information, entertainment, and purchases. In such interactions, the ISA mediates the user’s access to the content, or controls some other aspect of the user experience, and is not designed to be neutral about outcomes of user choices. Like human users, ISAs are driven by goals, make autonomous decisions, and can learn from experience. Using ideas from bounded rationality, we frame these interactions (...) as instances of an ISA whose reward depends on actions performed by the user. Such agents benefit by steering the user’s behaviour towards outcomes that maximise the ISA’s utility, which may or may not be aligned with that of the user. Video games, news recommendation aggregation engines, and fitness trackers can all be instances of this general case. Our analysis facilitates distinguishing various subcases of interaction, as well as second-order effects that might include the possibility for adaptive interfaces to induce behavioural addiction, and/or change in user belief. We present these types of interaction within a conceptual framework, and review current examples of persuasive technologies and the issues that arise from their use. We argue that the nature of the feedback commonly used by learning agents to update their models and subsequent decisions could steer the behaviour of human users away from what benefits them, and in a direction that can undermine autonomy and cause further disparity between actions and goals as exemplified by addictive and compulsive behaviour. We discuss some of the ethical, social and legal implications of this technology and argue that it can sometimes exploit and reinforce weaknesses in human beings. (shrink)

Autonomy, the ability to make decisions for ourselves about ourselves, is among the most prized of human liberties. In this review we reconsider the key conditions necessary for autonomous decision making, long debated by moral philosophers and ethicists, in light of current neuroscientific evidence. The most widely accepted criteria for autonomy are that decisions are made by a rationally deliberative and reflective agent and that these decisions are free of undue external influences. The corpus of neuroscientific data suggest that human (...) brains are capable of the hierarchical control required for reflective thought, but that decisions conventionally perceived as autonomous may not be rational with respect to the deliberative process itself, and are rarely free from covert external influences. These findings cast doubt upon the capacity for autonomy as traditionally defined, and suggest that we reconsider valorizing the right to autonomy in order to align our moral values with neuroscientific naturalism. (shrink)

I introduce an extension of the Lewis-Skyrms signaling game, analysed from a dynamical perspective via simple reinforcement learning. In Lewis’ (Convention, Blackwell, Oxford, 1969) conception of a signaling game, salience is offered as an explanation for how individuals may come to agree upon a linguistic convention. Skyrms (Signals: evolution, learning & information, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010a) offers a dynamic explanation of how signaling conventions might arise presupposing no salience whatsoever. The extension of the atomic signaling game examined here—which I (...) will refer to as a salience game—introduces a variable parameter into the atomic signaling game which allows for degrees of salience, thus filling in the continuum between Skyrms’ and Lewis’ models. The model does not presuppose any salience at the outset, but illustrates a process by which accidentally evolved salience is amplified, to the benefit of the players. It is shown that increasing degrees of salience allow populations to avoid sub-optimal pooling equilibria and to coordinate upon conventions more quickly. (shrink)

Several attempts have been made previously to provide a biological grounding for cognitive architectures by relating their components to the computations of specific brain circuits. Often, the architecture's action selection system is identified with the basal ganglia. However, this identification overlooks one of the most important features of the basal ganglia—the existence of a direct and an indirect pathway that compete against each other. This characteristic has important consequences in decision-making tasks, which are brought to light by Parkinson's disease as (...) well as genetic differences in dopamine receptors. This paper shows that a standard model of action selection in a cognitive architecture cannot replicate any of these findings, details an alternative solution that reconciles action selection in the architecture with the physiology of the basal ganglia, and extends the domain of application of cognitive architectures. The implication of this solution for other architectures and existing models are discussed. (shrink)

What are the distinctive psychological features that explain why humans are free, but many other creatures, such as simple animals, are not? It is natural to think that the answer has something to do with unique human capacities for decision-making. Philosophical discussions of how decision-making works, however, are tellingly incomplete. In particular, these discussions invariably presuppose an agent who has a mentally represented set of options already fully in hand. The emphasis is largely on the selective processes that identify the (...) options most worth doing and then execute them. But where do mentally represented sets of options come from in the first place? Once we focus on this constructive aspect of decision-making, an important fact becomes apparent: While the option sets of simpler animals are sharply limited, humans have a number of striking psychological powers—including remarkable powers of prospection and creativity—that enable them to construct option sets of unparalleled size and diversity. As a result, humans can express themselves in countless ways. This latitude for self-expression is, I argue, the distinctive feature that explains why humans are free. (shrink)

Addiction is almost universally held to be characterized by a loss of control over drug-seeking and consuming behavior. But the actions of addicts, even of those who seem to want to abstain from drugs, seem to be guided by reasons. In this paper, I argue that we can explain this fact, consistent with continuing to maintain that addiction involves a loss of control, by understanding addiction as involving an oscillation between conflicting judgments. I argue that the dysfunction of the mesolimbic (...) dopamine system that typifies addictions causes the generation of a mismatch between the top-down model of the world that reflects the judgment that the addict ought to refrain from drugs, and bottom-up input caused by cues predictive of drug availability. This constitutes a powerful pressure toward revising the judgment and thereby attenuating the prediction error. But the new model is not stable, and shifts under the pressure of bottom-up inputs in different contexts; hence the oscillation of all-things-considered judgment. Evidence from social psychology is adduced, to suggest that a similar process may be involved in ordinary cases of weakness of will. (shrink)

What place should formal or computational methods occupy in social psychology? We consider this question in historical perspective, survey the current state of the field, introduce the several new contributions to this special issue, and reflect on the future.

In Minds, Brains, and Law, Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson argue that current attempts to use neuroscience to inform the theory and practice of law founder because they are built on confused conceptual foundations. Proponents of neurolaw attribute to the brain or to its parts psychological properties that belong only to people; this mistake vitiates many of the claims they make. Once neurolaw is placed on a sounder conceptual footing, Pardo and Patterson claim, we will see that its more dramatic (...) claims are false or meaningless, though it might be able to provide inductive evidence for particular less dramatic claims (that a defendant may be lying, or lacks control over their behavior, for instance). In response, I argue that the central conceptual confusions identified by Pardo and Patterson are not confusions at all. Though some of the claims made by its proponents are hasty and sometimes they are confused, there are no conceptual barriers to attributing psychological properties to brain states. Neuroscience can play a role in producing evidence that is more reliable than subjective report or behavior; it therefore holds out the possibility of dramatically altering our self-conception as agents and thereby the law. (shrink)

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words—with primary interest on rules—this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation (...) of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon. (shrink)

The current paper investigates the value and application of a range of physiological and neuroscientific techniques in applied marketing research and consumer science, highlighting new insights from research in social psychology and neuroscience. We review measures of sweat secretion, heart rate, facial muscle activity, eye movements, and electrical brain activity, using techniques including skin conductance, pupillometry, eyetracking, and magnetic brain imaging. For each measure, after a brief explanation of the underlying technique, we illustrate concepts and mechanisms that the measure allows (...) researchers in marketing and consumer science to investigate, with a focus on consumer attitudes and behavior. By providing reviews on recent research that applied these methods in consumer science and relevant related fields, we also highlight methodological and theoretical strengths and limitations, with an emphasis on ecological validity. We argue that the inclusion of physiological and neuroscientific techniques can advance consumer research by providing insights into the often unconscious mechanisms underlying consumer behavior. Therefore, such technologies can help researchers and marketing practitioners understand the mechanisms of consumer behavior and improve predictions of consumer behavior. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscience has come to be viewed as the flagship of the cognitive sciences and is transforming our understanding of the nature of mind. In this paper we survey several research fields in cognitive neuroscience (lateralization, neuroeconomics, and cognitive control) and note that they are making rapid progress on fundamental issues. Lateralization research is developing a comparative framework for evolutionary analysis, and is identifying individual- and population-level factors that favor brain asymmetries. Neuroeconomics is creating a research framework for studying valuation (...) mechanisms in the brain that allows investigation of more complex phenomena than traditional reward paradigms. And cognitive control research has cast light on the mechanisms of task learning and top-down control that enable fluid goal-directed behavior in complex situations. Reasons for the success of cognitive neuroscience are varied: technical advances (e.g., in molecular genetics and imaging) are part of the story, but the more important factors have to do with the power of integrating a bottom-up mechanistic approach with larger functional and evolutionary perspectives. The incorporation of a bottom-up component differentiates cognitive neuroscience from the multidisciplinary ambitions of classical cognitive science, which suffered from having limited access to mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper discusses recent evidence that violations of core knowledge offer special learning opportunities for infants and young children. Children make predictions about the world from the youngest ages. When their fail to match observed data, they show an enhanced drive to seek and retain new information about entities that violated their expectations. Finally, the authors draw comparisons between children and adults, and with other species, to explore how surprise shapes thought more broadly.