Special Issue "What is Cognition?"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Charles I. Abramson
Department of Psychology, Oklahoma State University, OK 74078, USA
Website: http://psychology.okstate.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13&Itemid=28#research
E-Mail: charles.abramson@okstate.edu
Interests: behavioral neuroscience; learning; comparative psychology; agrochemicals

Dear Colleagues,

The goal of this special issue is to discuss the history and controversies associated with the term “Cognition.” We believe that a critical look at this term is both important to practicing researchers and to students entering the field of behavioral analysis. The term “cognition” is widely used but seldom defined. When it is defined, definitions vary widely. A brief survey of psychology textbooks, for example, identified 15 different definitions. Some of these definitions focused only on human behavior and others include both human and animal behavior. The term cognition is also making its way into the study of invertebrate behavior. We now read that snails, for example, possess “mini-cognitions” and honey bees and fruit flies can serve as a cognitive model for the study of human behavior.

The history of the term cognition is also unclear and in need of analysis. In an APA interview conducted with Ulric Neisser in 1983 it was suggested that he coined the term “Cognitive Psychology.” This is not true. In 1939, Thomas Moore, a Benedictine Monk and Professor of Psychology at Catholic University published a textbook titled Cognitive Psychology which predates Neisser’s 1967 text by 28 years. Moreover, the “cognitive behaviorism” of neo-behaviorists are seldom discussed in contemporary histories of cognitive psychology as are the contributions of Greek philosophy with the possible exception of the “big three” of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

In addition to an analysis of definitional issues and historical issues, this special issue will tackle a wide range of theoretical problems associated with the term including the lack of a coherent theory (i.e., “cognition is anything I want it to be”), lack of motivational constructs, and no discussion of the work of neo-behaviorists such as Hull, Spence, Tolman, Amsel, and Logan.

Prof. Dr. Charles I. Abramson
Guest Editor

Submission

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• cognitive psychology
• history
• behavior

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Comparative Neural Connectomics and Receptive Field Maturation: An Approach to Explicate The Common Organizational Principles Behind Perception and Cognition
Authors: Roman Fuchs, Richard König, Monika Wagner and Gustav Bernroider *
Affiliation: Neurosignaling Unit, Department of Organismic Biology, University of Salzburg, A-5020 Salzburg, Austria; E-Mail: Gustav.Bernroider@sbg.ac.at
Abstract: Hierarchically organized synaptic connectivity patterns, “neural connectoms”, and their associated electro-chemical signal variation characterize the perceptive function of nervous systems. The ‘role’ of each neuron within this organization is provided by it’s impact on the entire population of downstream neurons involving both, ascending and top-down (recurrent) connections. The emerging activity pattern leads to a segregation of receptive field properties with increasing synaptic distances from the receptive periphery. In this paper we provide a comparative analysis of effective connectoms involving avian and mammalian brain models and demonstrate how to extract linear strings of hierarchically ordered synaptic connections from the product space of their pair-wise neural connections. We show that there is a highly convergent topology within very diverse brain organizations that is characterized by a gradual “bottom-up” maturation of perceptual contents with late stage receptive fields that start to qualify as “concepts”. Applying the principles of “free energy” as suggested by Friston (2010) and the concepts behind “predictive coding” (Rao & Ballard, 1999), we provide evidence that the transient dynamics along the extracted connectoms can reconcile perceptual and cognitive aspects. Further we argue, that the extracted skeleton features behind the effective connectivities across evolutionary diverse brain organizations and their correlations with aspects of so-called “cognitive behaviour” point into a common and unique organizational platform of perceptive and cognitive functions.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Everyday Problem-solving and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living: Support for Domain Specificity
Authors: Kristopher J. Kimbler
Affiliation: Florida Gulf Coast University; E-Mail: kkimbler@fgcu.edu
Abstract: Research has suggested that performance on cognitive tasks that resemble daily challenges (i.e. everyday problem-solving tasks) may be a better indicator of functional ability in old age compared to traditional measures of cognitive ability (e.g., Allaire & Marsiske, 2002). Findings linking performance on cognitive everyday problem-solving tasks to self-reported functional ability, however, have yielded mixed results (Burton, Strauss, Bunce, Hunter, & Hultsch, 2009; Schmitter-Edgecombe, Parsey, & Cook, 2011). The current study examined performance on the Everyday Problems Test (EPT; Willis & Marsiske, 1997) compared to self-reported functional ability as indicated by Lawton and Brody’s (1969) Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs) in a sample of adults aged fifty and older (N = 102). The EPT measures cognitive performance on tasks with domains consistent with IADLs (telephone use, shopping, meal preparation, housekeeping, transportation, health, and finances).  Although overall EPT scores and self-reported IADLs were not significantly related (r = 0.11; p > 0.05), additional analyses revealed that domain specific EPT performance related to IADL reports within the same domain for shopping, food preparation, housekeeping, transportation, and financial management (p < 0.05). For some domains, this significant domain-specific relation between EPT performance and IADLs was maintained after accounting for age, sex, and performance on other measures of cognitive ability (i.e., the Verbal Meaning Test and the Letter Series Test). These findings suggest that domain specific performance on cognitive everyday problem-solving tasks may be more predictive of IADLs than
total scores.