Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Dependency grammar remains the simplest theory of grammar: a reply to Fujita

dlvr.itDependency grammar remains the simplest theory of grammar: a reply to FujitaIn the original article [1], I claimed that dependency grammar is the simplest theory of grammar. All theories of grammar have rules for connecting words together to make larger units. In dependency grammar, these connections are directly between words. In phrase structure grammars, there is slightly more structure than in dependency grammar, consisting of nonterminal categories for the connected elements, such as the noun phrase and the verb phrase. I argued that these two alternatives are somewhat interchangeable.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Evidence supports constituency-based syntax, movement, and unpronounced elements

dlvr.itEvidence supports constituency-based syntax, movement, and unpronounced elementsGibson advocates dependency grammar [1], contrasting it with constituency-based accounts that posit movement and phonologically null (unpronounced) syntactic elements [2,3]. Dependency grammar represents sentence structure through word-to-word relations, whereas constituency-based accounts represent sentence structure by grouping words into larger hierarchical constituents. Movement accounts for cases in which a constituent appears in one position but is interpreted in another. For example, in ‘Who did you call?’, ‘Who’ appears sentence-initially but is interpreted as the object of ‘call’; this is analysed as movement from the object position to the sentence-initial position.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Selection-for-prediction: rethinking early cognitive development

dlvr.itSelection-for-prediction: rethinking early cognitive developmentFor decades, core knowledge accounts have proposed that early cognition is organized by innate, domain-specific conceptual or concept-like representations of objects, physical events, number, and agents. I propose a different starting point: infants’ behaviors may arise from domain-general attentional priors—evolutionarily shaped selection biases—interacting with perceptual mechanisms that organize information and support perceptual prediction, rather than from abstract, postperceptual representations. Attentional priors favor ecologically consequential information, including continuity, contact, and synchrony. When such information is disrupted, perceptual prediction error—rather than conceptual contradiction—may produce violation-of-expectation effects. Grounded in constraints on visual input and neural processing, this framework accounts for early successes and systematic failures, suggesting that development begins with perceptual-attentional mechanisms that shape selection, organization, prediction, and learning.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: The ongoing urgency of diversity science

dlvr.itThe ongoing urgency of diversity scienceEfforts to extinguish DEI provoke questions about the ongoing significance of diversity science. We argue that this evolving context makes such research increasingly pressing, and we pose four questions that this environment both calls for and newly allows research to answer. Such science remains indispensable to society’s capacity to manage social differences.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Beyond attention: performance pressure shifts information-processing complexity

dlvr.itBeyond attention: performance pressure shifts information-processing complexityWhy does performance pressure sometimes cause choking but sometimes elicit exceptional performance? We propose that pressure shifts the complexity of information-processing rules that guide action. Performance improves when shifts move processing toward task-matched complexity and deteriorates when they promote maladaptive simplification, overcomplexification, or the use of rules that exceed available processing resources.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences reposted

Laura Gwilliams
@lauragwilliams.bsky.social

delighted to share my review article, out now in Trends in Cognitive Sciences! i have been thinking a lot about dynamics lately. this article outlines three key principles - persistence, parallelism, and time-stamped encoding - that support human speech comprehension 🧠✨🌀

Trends in Cognitive Sciences@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Online Now: Time after time: neural codes of speech comprehension

dlvr.itTime after time: neural codes of speech comprehensionThe acoustic signal of speech is fleeting and unfolds linearly; yet listeners must derive temporally extended and hierarchically organized linguistic structures to comprehend it. This article reviews evidence that the human brain transforms the transient auditory signal into neural representations that are persistent, parallel, and time-stamped. First, neural persistence allows information to remain available after it has disappeared from the acoustic input. Second, parallel encoding of recent inputs across multiple levels of language structure enables composition and interactions across the speech hierarchy. Third, dynamic neural representations encode both content and elapsed time, providing a flexible mechanism for preserving sequence order. Together, these representational properties reveal how the human brain transforms a continuously disappearing signal into temporally extended linguistic structures.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Sound asleep, yet still listening: auditory processing during human sleep

dlvr.itSound asleep, yet still listening: auditory processing during human sleepSleepers can wake to their name, but ignore louder irrelevant sounds, a paradox that suggests more than simple sensory gating. Growing evidence reveals flexible auditory coupling during human sleep, ranging from complete disconnection to high-level cognitive processing and even to physical responses. Here, we synthesize the multiple cognitive levels at which auditory stimuli are processed (or not) during human sleep and outline factors modulating this processing. Moments of sensory isolation may promote restoration and memory consolidation, while moments of environmental coupling enable threat detection. We speculate that no single optimal balance exists; rather, the ideal degree of sensory coupling shifts with individuals and contexts. Chronic dysregulation of this balance may contribute to the clinical picture of sleep disorders, including insomnia and hypersomnia.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Every (slow) breath you take, every choice you make

dlvr.itEvery (slow) breath you take, every choice you makeHuang and colleagues investigated how slow-paced breathing shapes physiological and brain-related signals during financial decisions under risk. Their findings elucidate neurovisceral pathways linking prolonged exhalation to increased risk-taking, whereby heightened cardiac parasympathetic modulation increases reward sensitivity and neural activity in brain regions involved in valuation and interoception.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Beyond accuracy: interoceptive self-appraisal and the meaning of bodily signals

dlvr.itBeyond accuracy: interoceptive self-appraisal and the meaning of bodily signalsFor decades, accuracy in detecting internal bodily signals has been considered an important component of emotional experience. Yet this link remains elusive. Across methods and domains, interoceptive accuracy shows inconsistent associations with emotion and psychopathology. We argue this mismatch reflects a hierarchy of interoceptive processing: accuracy measures capture how bodily signals are detected, whereas emotion depends on metacognitive appraisals of what those signals mean, their reliability, and what they imply about the self. We introduce interoceptive self-appraisal (ISA) as a higher-order process through which bodily sensations are interpreted in context and assigned significance. ISA provides a framework for investigating affective vulnerability and developmental pathways to psychopathology. By integrating disparate theories of bodily appraisal, we outline a roadmap for interoception research.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Time after time: neural codes of speech comprehension

dlvr.itTime after time: neural codes of speech comprehensionThe acoustic signal of speech is fleeting and unfolds linearly; yet listeners must derive temporally extended and hierarchically organized linguistic structures to comprehend it. This article reviews evidence that the human brain transforms the transient auditory signal into neural representations that are persistent, parallel, and time-stamped. First, neural persistence allows information to remain available after it has disappeared from the acoustic input. Second, parallel encoding of recent inputs across multiple levels of language structure enables composition and interactions across the speech hierarchy. Third, dynamic neural representations encode both content and elapsed time, providing a flexible mechanism for preserving sequence order. Together, these representational properties reveal how the human brain transforms a continuously disappearing signal into temporally extended linguistic structures.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Childhood maltreatment and the developing brain: toward individualized models of psychiatric risk

dlvr.itChildhood maltreatment and the developing brain: toward individualized models of psychiatric riskChildhood maltreatment shapes brain development in ways that vary by adversity type, developmental timing, and genetic vulnerability to psychiatric illness—a heterogeneity that conventional approaches capture poorly. We contend that normative modeling, multivariate methods, and polygenic risk scores offer complementary frameworks for parsing this variability and advancing mechanistic insights and clinical stratification.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: From maps to new thoughts: can place-cell indexing generate novel cortical states?

dlvr.itFrom maps to new thoughts: can place-cell indexing generate novel cortical states?Constructing novel states from experience underpins imagination and abstraction. The hippocampal formation is thought to contribute by capturing the relational structure of experiences, but it remains unclear how its abstract relational codes are eventually translated into cortical content representations. I highlight that hippocampal–cortical indexing may scaffold the generation of new states.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: The next generation of fear generalization

dlvr.itThe next generation of fear generalizationGeneralizing from past experience is a fundamental feature of cognition. Although generalization has been of long-standing interest to diverse domains in psychological science, the past decade has seen a rapid acceleration of fear generalization research in particular. The field of human fear generalization is at a pivotal juncture where it is now possible to synthesize extensive behavioral work, competing theoretical models, animal and human neuroscience, and clinical and individual-differences research to address enduring gaps. In this review, we provide an updated account of where the field of human fear generalization currently resides and offer concrete avenues for new research emphasizing tighter integration between animal and human neuroscience, prioritizing cross-disciplinary perspectives, and updating conceptual frameworks to align with rapidly advancing methods.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences reposted

Jake Quilty-Dunn
@quiltydunn.bsky.social

New paper, co-authored with Justin Wood, in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: The Nativist-Empiricist Debate Is Broken We argue that radical nativism and radical empiricism are compatible and, in some cases, both plausibly true. So something is wrong. 🧵 Author share link here, valid til Oct 31:

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Trends in Cognitive Sciences@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Online Now: The nativist–empiricist debate is broken

dlvr.itThe nativist–empiricist debate is brokenThe nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Language structure as training for executive functions

dlvr.itLanguage structure as training for executive functionsLanguage plays a central role in the development of executive functions (EFs). This forum article discusses how language, as a structured environmental stimulus, can shape EF systems and impact EF outcomes. This has implications for developmental and clinical conditions in which language and EFs are jointly affected, and for congenitally deaf children and adults, who often experience reduced access to natural language during development.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Online Now: The nativist–empiricist debate is broken

dlvr.itThe nativist–empiricist debate is brokenThe nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Valuation as a bridge between aesthetics and creativity

dlvr.itValuation as a bridge between aesthetics and creativityEvidence shows that aesthetic evaluations are underpinned by mechanisms in the reward system that compute value for objects of interest. In turn, recent behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that creativity involves a similar valuation process, as people generate and evaluate the originality and adequacy of their ideas—two standard criteria of creativity. These findings suggest that creativity and aesthetic evaluation may be supported by a domain-general mechanism for computing subjective value. We offer a proposal in which creators’ value computations are conveyed by the structure and content of their works and recovered during aesthetic evaluation through shared reward-system mechanisms and associated processes. On this view, creating and appreciating are two related expressions of a shared value-based process.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Toward an interdisciplinary mind science of advanced meditation

dlvr.itToward an interdisciplinary mind science of advanced meditationMeditation research is increasingly moving beyond mindfulness and other early-stage practices toward advanced meditation, encompassing states, stages, and endpoints that progressively unfold with increasing expertise through meditative development. This emerging subfield consists of interdisciplinary research that brings advanced meditation within reach of systematic scientific investigation. Here we articulate this research subfield, including its constitutive conceptual and methodological components and interrelated translational domains: philosophical and theoretical foundations, computational phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, epidemiology and public health, clinical and well-being outcomes, and relations with psychedelic experiences. This subfield represents an important development for meditation research and the mind sciences more broadly, with implications for health and well-being and for empirical understanding of the human mind.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Science from the bottom up

dlvr.itScience from the bottom upHow a scientific community is organized can affect whether disagreement drives progress or leads to isolation. Students and postdocs are uniquely placed to build communities that bridge theoretical and methodological divides. Drawing on a student-led society in consciousness science, we show how empowering early-career researchers can turn fragmentation into collaboration.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences reposted

Jay Van Bavel, PhD
@jayvanbavel.bsky.social

Cognitive diversity in language, perspective, and reasoning is not only vital to human creativity and problem-solving but also carries rich personal and cultural information. Studies have found that LLMs are homogenizing people’s language, perspectives, and reasoning. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility: a translational perspective

dlvr.itNeurocomputational mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility: a translational perspectiveCognitive flexibility allows us to adjust behavior when environmental rules change and to recombine prior knowledge in novel situations. However, the computations underlying rule discovery remain unclear: how do rule representations emerge as we interact with the environment? While it is often considered a hallmark of human behavior, converging evidence highlights comparable forms of abstract learning in rodents. Across species, prefrontal activity patterns encode structured representations that support generalization and monitor for rule switches. In this review, we synthesize recent behavioral, neural, and computational work highlighting models that formalize rule inference and creation. We consider how a translational framework linking circuit-level mechanisms to computational principles can help us understand disruptions in cognitive flexibility in disorders such as schizophrenia.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences reposted

Sami Yousif
@samiyousif.bsky.social

Excited about a new paper (w @russellepstein.bsky.social): "Cognitive maps as a medium for thought", in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! We discuss how maps are an important 'middle ground' rep. medium, and how they may interact with a 'language of thought'. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.comCognitive maps as a medium for thoughtCognitive maps are essential for navigation, but to what extent are they involved in thinking more broadly? In this opinion article, we examine whethe…
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Cognitive maps as a medium for thought

dlvr.itCognitive maps as a medium for thoughtCognitive maps are essential for navigation, but to what extent are they involved in thinking more broadly? In this opinion article, we examine whether cognitive maps constitute a genuine vehicle for thought and how they relate to the notion of a language of thought. Integrating work from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, we suggest that map-like representations offer a distinct, flexible medium for encoding information and exhibit compositionality in both spatial and nonspatial domains. We then consider how dynamic neural mechanisms—replay, theta sequences, and vector computation—may transform map-based representations into sequential routelike formats that interface with cortical systems supporting propositional thinking. Cognitive maps may be complementary to symbolic cognition, jointly enabling flexible human reasoning.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Beyond arousal: pupil fluctuations, neural activity, and behavior

dlvr.itBeyond arousal: pupil fluctuations, neural activity, and behaviorSpontaneous fluctuations in pupil size are correlated with neural activity and behavior in many ways. This is generally attributed to a single underlying cause: arousal. This unitary account disregards other potential underlying causes. To address this gap, we propose a comprehensive framework of four mechanisms that jointly underlie the complex and context-dependent relationships between spontaneous pupil-size fluctuations, neural activity, and behavior. In addition to arousal, we consider optical effects, brightness constancy, and self-generated visual stimulation. Based on this framework, we argue that pupil fluctuations should be considered beyond arousal, as a functionally important, yet still poorly understood, component of visual processing.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Working memory, exploration, and cognitive development

dlvr.itWorking memory, exploration, and cognitive developmentChildren tend to explore broadly, and, despite its costs, exploration confers important benefits, especially early in development, when they know little. What drives this exploratory behavior? In contrast to accounts that emphasize heightened curiosity or increased randomness, we propose that early exploration reflects the immaturity of the working memory–selective attention system.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: The hidden weight of the body

dlvr.itThe hidden weight of the bodyThe weight of body parts is largely hidden from conscious experience. People underestimate the weight of their limbs, whereas individuals in clinical populations often experience them as abnormally heavy. We argue that limb weight is a fundamental dimension of internal body representations and a conscious reflection of the functional state of sensorimotor processing.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Toward a psychology of real-life decision-making

dlvr.itToward a psychology of real-life decision-makingUnderstanding human decision-making processes in everyday life is a central, yet rarely addressed, challenge in psychology. Either real-life complexity is reduced by isolating specific aspects of decision-making in highly constrained experimental settings, yielding insights into specific cognitive mechanisms under idealized conditions, or decision-making is studied in real-life contexts, using high-level descriptions of behavior that do not afford fine-grained, process-level insights. Bridging this gap poses a challenge of both measurement and inference. Recent advances in high-resolution tracking technologies provide novel solutions to many measurement challenges but are rarely integrated with formal psychological theory. In this article, we review tracking technologies and statistical tools, proposing a cognitive–computational framework that uses high-resolution spatiotemporal data to investigate the mechanisms of real-life decision-making in a theory-driven manner.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Neural reactivation supports memory formation when events end

dlvr.itNeural reactivation supports memory formation when events endMemory routinely transforms continuous experience into discrete episodes that support flexible retrieval. We propose that these structured representations are established via rapid neural reactivation occurring at the completion of an event. A growing body of evidence across tasks and recording modalities shows that event termination elicits rapid reinstatement of recently encoded neural representations. We review findings revealing that end-of-event reactivation is a robust and functionally meaningful phenomenon, describing when it occurs, how it is measured, and which neural signatures characterize it. We propose that neural reactivation at event offsets offers an efficient neural mechanism for stabilizing newly formed traces against interference, binding relational features into a coherent event index, integrating episodes into pre-existing schemas, and preserving temporal continuity across events.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Rethinking musicians as a model for plasticity and transfer

dlvr.itRethinking musicians as a model for plasticity and transferDifferences between musicians and nonmusicians are routinely attributed to training-induced plasticity and transfer, even though pre-existing factors provide equally plausible explanations. We propose repositioning correlational research not to infer training effects, but to constrain causal accounts, reveal the neurocognitive organization of abilities, guide experimental studies, and integrate with genetically informed designs.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: The Umwelt Representation Hypothesis: rethinking Universality

dlvr.itThe Umwelt Representation Hypothesis: rethinking UniversalityRecent studies reveal striking representational alignment between artificial neural networks (ANNs) and biological brains, leading to proposals that all sufficiently capable systems converge on universal representations of reality. We argue that this claim of Universality is premature. We introduce the Umwelt Representation Hypothesis, which proposes that alignment arises not from convergence toward a single global optimum but from overlap in the ecological constraints under which systems develop. We review empirical evidence showing that representational differences between species, individuals, and ANNs are systematic and adaptive, which is difficult to reconcile with Universality. Finally, we reframe ANN model comparison as a method for mapping clusters of alignment in the ecological constraint space rather than as a search for a single optimal world model.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Addressing longstanding challenges in cognitive science with language models

dlvr.itAddressing longstanding challenges in cognitive science with language modelsCognitive science faces ongoing challenges in research integration, formalization, conceptual clarity, and other areas, partly due to its multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly the development of language models, offer tools that may help address these longstanding issues. Specifically, they can help map fragmented literatures, formalize verbal theories, identify overlap among constructs and measures, generate predictions across tasks, and extract cultural or ecological structure from naturalistic data. However, these opportunities come with risks, including oversimplification, opacity, deskilling, and bias. Taken together, we conclude that language models could serve as tools for a more integrative and cumulative cognitive science when used judiciously to complement, rather than replace, human agency.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Do animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteria

dlvr.itDo animals use names? Conceptual and empirical criteriaIn recent years, several claims have been put forth suggesting that animals of different species address each other using receiver-specific calls that function as individual names. If accurate, this would demonstrate a capacity for symbolic social reference that has rarely been documented in nonhuman communication systems. To evaluate such claims, we propose three minimal criteria for identifying names: individual reference, symbolic representation, and shared meaning. We then review the evidence relevant to these criteria in the species for which name-like calls have been suggested: spectacled parrotlets, common marmosets, African elephants, and bottlenose dolphins. Together, these criteria provide a clear and theoretically grounded framework for exploring the use of name-like calls in nonhuman animals.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Wired for coherence: a network theory of self

dlvr.itWired for coherence: a network theory of selfPeople change across daily situations and life transformations, yet maintain a stable sense of self. Explaining this stability requires understanding how identities, traits, values, and memories interact—what changes together, what resists change, and how. We propose that the self is represented as a dynamic causal network of self-aspects linked by beliefs about how they influence one another. Coherence arises when activated self-aspects align with internal beliefs and contextual demands. When disrupted, the network restores coherence through activation shifts that preserve structure or through structural reorganization that reshapes it. This perspective distinguishes the self from associative, categorical, or hierarchical accounts by specifying directional dependencies that constrain change, and highlights how modifying connections among self-aspects promotes coherence and well-being.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Four missing keystones in the evolutionary origins of music

dlvr.itFour missing keystones in the evolutionary origins of musicMusic is pervasive across human history, cultures, and development, yet its evolutionary origins remain unresolved due to the interplay of cultural and biological influences. We argue that identifying uniquely human musicality requires cross-primate comparative research that integrates rhythm and melody processing with exposure, computational principles, and intrinsic reward.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: The emerging field of cognitive brain–computer interfaces

dlvr.itThe emerging field of cognitive brain–computer interfacesBrain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have achieved transformative success in restoring movement and communication. However, extending these approaches to decoding or recovery of cognitive function, such as attention or memory, poses fundamentally new challenges. Cognitive BCIs will need to contend with distributed and dynamic neural processes that differ sharply from the more localized, stable representations underlying motor and language control, imposing new technical and conceptual demands. Conversely, neuromodulation, long used in neurological and psychiatric therapies, offers a complementary methodological path and initial translational applications through causal modulation of cognitive circuits. Integrating these approaches into adaptive, closed-loop systems could allow cognitive BCIs to restore mental function and bridge systems neuroscience and next-generation neurotherapeutics capable of monitoring and shaping human cognition in real time.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: A decade of comparing brains to DNNs: Progress and perspectives

dlvr.itA decade of comparing brains to DNNs: Progress and perspectivesOver the past decade, comparisons between deep neural networks (DNNs) and the human brain have become central to cognitive neuroscience. Early work focused on vision, driven by the success of convolutional neural networks in object recognition, before such comparisons later gained traction in language with the rise of large-scale language models. These comparisons have validated existing hypotheses and generated new ones, challenging views of information processing, connectivity, and computational goals. Despite progress, debates persist over the interpretability and validity of mapping DNNs to brains, underscoring the need for more refined models and methods. Looking ahead, integrating cross-modal insights from vision and language, together with improved modeling and experimental frameworks, promises to advance the mechanistic understanding of cognition.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Multidimensional social cognitive profiles: implications for adolescent internalizing psychopathology

dlvr.itMultidimensional social cognitive profiles: implications for adolescent internalizing psychopathologyAdolescence is a period of vulnerability for internalizing mental health disorders. One underappreciated mechanism of internalizing psychopathology is higher-order social cognition (i.e., cognitive processing of information about the self and others), which is highly salient during adolescence. We propose that the protracted development of social cognition during adolescence results in highly individualized, multidimensional profiles that can be characterized across four core dimensions (Propensity, Degree, Positivity, and Negativity). A social cognitive profile with greater Propensity, Degree, and Negativity, and decreased Positivity, along with associated decreases in Accuracy, may confer greater risk for internalizing psychopathology, particularly if applied inflexibly across contexts. Future research may test the utility of these profiles for stratification, prediction, or intervention targeting.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Online Now: Clarifications about there being two necessary conditions for consciousness

dlvr.itClarifications about there being two necessary conditions for consciousnessWe recently proposed a modification to an influential conceptual framework in consciousness science: Ned Block’s distinction between phenomenal (P) consciousness and access (A) consciousness [1]. Instead, we proposed that there is only one type of consciousness, requiring two necessary conditions [2]. Importantly, we did not propose a new definition of consciousness; we agree with the current consensus that it is a ‘subjective experience’ in the here and now, or ‘what it is like’ from a first-person perspective.