SNIPPETS
A social interaction never starts from zero.
What happened to us before we meet another person may already be shaping how our brain responds to them.
In this study, we asked participants to vividly imagine either a personally stressful interpersonal experience or a relaxing situation and then engage in a naturalistic, gaze-based social interaction during fMRI neuroimaging.
Read more
Traditional education paradigms rooted in propositional knowledge (transfer) are challenged, while the cultivation of neglected modes of knowing (perspectival and participatory) is presented as essential for developing the skills and mindsets needed for successfully navigating the complexities of a dynamically unfolding uncertain world.
The paper argues for a paradigm shift in education that centers on an enactivist perspective, anticipatory sense-making and non-propositional forms of knowing. By reimagining learning as ongoing dialogue with the world, this approach envisions education as a collaborative endeavour of co-becoming.
Read more
All languages have statistically coherent subsequences (e.g., words) whose frequency distribution follows a power law. These properties facilitate language learning in humans, making them good candidates for arising through cultural transmission as a way to help faithful transmission across generations.
Read more
Despite the vast diversity of human languages, specific grammatical patterns appear again and again. A new study reveals that around a third of the long-proposed “linguistic universals” — patterns thought to hold across all languages — are statistically supported when examined with state-of-the-art evolutionary methods.
Read more
Synesthesia is a perceptual experience in which stimuli presented through one modality will spontaneously evoke sensations in an unrelated modality. The condition occurs from increased communication between sensory regions and is involuntary, automatic, and stable over time. While synesthesia can occur in response to drugs, sensory deprivation, or brain damage, research has largely focused on heritable variants comprising roughly 4% of the general population.
Read more
Cultural learning permeates human skill and knowledge acquisition. To understand its importance for nonhuman apes, we analyzed just under 7000 records of behavioral bouts of social and individual learning across wild orangutans’ 8-year dependency period to assess their combined effects on ecological competence, which is crucial for independent survival. Social learning was five times more frequent than individual learning and influenced subsequent learning for hours. Immature orangutans varied substantially in their learning propensities, and those with heightened social and individual learning propensities developed the most expansive diet profiles at independence.
Read more