We describe seven challenges that confront the kind of cross-cultural research currently practiced in experimental philosophy, illustrating them in an example in which intuitions about moral responsibility were studied in participants in four different countries. The seven challenge are (1) defining culture, (2) finding representative samples, (3) defining cognition, (4) task variation, (5) ecological validity, (6) interpreting the results, and (7) conducting ethical research. We suggest that these challenges can be overcome or avoided by attending to the ways cognition arises (...) in everyday life, and briefly describe an approach which regards culture not as an independent variable but as the medium of human action and human life, and which regards cognition as situated in time and place. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to review the way in which cultural contributions to human nature have been treated within the field of cognitive science. I was initially motivated to write about this topic when invited to give a talk to a Cognitive Science department at a sister university in California a few years ago. My goal, on that occasion, was to convince my audience, none of whom were predisposed to considering culture an integral part of cognitive science, that (...) they would indeed benefit from recognizing some affinities between the ideas of some of the founders of cognitive science and ideas about culture emanating from the Soviet (now Russian) cultural-historical school. My task in presenting this argument to the readers of Outlines is most likely the mirror image of that earlier effort. On the one hand, the ideas of the cultural-historical school are well known to this readership and you do not need to be lectured on the topic by an American whose knowledge of the topic is no greater than your own. At best, the ways in which I have appropriated those ideas and put them to work might provide an opportunity to reflect on the strange fate of ideas when they move between national traditions of thought. On the other hand, owing to a double twist of fate (after all, what was an American doing in Moscow in 1962 doing post-doctoral work in psychology) I was also present during the discussions leading to the founding of Cognitive Science in the early 1970’s and subsequently became a member of the Cognitive Science Program at UCSD in the early 1980’s, arguably one of the pioneering efforts to institutionalize this new discipline. My hope is this unusual confluence of experiences, and the ideas that they have generated, will be of some use to those who see value in a dialogue between these different intellectual projects. With this goal in mind, I will begin by providing my own brief history of key ideas associated with the origins of cognitive science. My presentation will of necessity be highly selective – it is the relevance of the inclusion of culture in cognitive science that is my major focus. I will then summarize some major milestones in the development of cognitive science at UCSD before turning to describe my own fusion of ideas from cultural-historical psychology and cognitive science as a kind of existence proof of the potential value of inter-disciplinary dialogue. (shrink)

Biologists have replaced the metaphor of “genetic transmission” with a detailed account of the molecular mechanisms underlying the phenomenon which Darwin referred to as “like produces like.” Cultural evolution theorists, in contrast, continue to appeal to “imitation” or “copying.” The notion of ritual and instrumental stances does not resolve this issue, and ignores the institutions in which people live.

The concept of apublic energy fieldis central to public administration discourse theory. Its main idea is the facilitation of dialog between government and the public, on the basis of equality, to construct a public policy consensus. In contemporary society, social media provides new and distinctive channels for such interactions. Social media can, therefore, be conceived as a novel type ofpublic energy field. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, interactions between the Chinese government and the Chinese public (whether located in (...) China or abroad) have been acutely reflected through WeChat official accounts. This article focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic and, through social media text mining and processing, analyzes the text topics and emotions covered. Basic principles of discourse validity, regarding this public energy field and two guarantee conditions, are applied to analyze the information exchange and dialog between the government and the public on COVID-19 through WeChat official accounts. It was found that the government’s WeChat official accounts have not yet formed a harmonious dialog space to balance the public energy field, and that the interaction between the government and the public has to be improved. The government’s social discourse had a significant influence on the public’s social discourse. Using text analysis, the study found that the government has published information on 11 topics related to the prevention and control of the pandemic. It can be argued that the public energyfieldpresented by both the government and the public effectively portrayed and reflected the actual situation of the pandemic in China. (shrink)

AimThe neurocognitive basis of Developmental Coordination Disorder remains an issue of continued debate. This combined systematic review and meta-analysis provides a synthesis of recent experimental studies on the motor control, cognitive, and neural underpinnings of DCD.MethodsThe review included all published work conducted since September 2016 and up to April 2021. One-hundred papers with a DCD-Control comparison were included, with 1,374 effect sizes entered into a multi-level meta-analysis.ResultsThe most profound deficits were shown in: voluntary gaze control during movement; cognitive-motor integration; practice-/context-dependent (...) motor learning; internal modeling; more variable movement kinematics/kinetics; larger safety margins when locomoting, and atypical neural structure and function across sensori-motor and prefrontal regions.InterpretationTaken together, these results on DCD suggest fundamental deficits in visual-motor mapping and cognitive-motor integration, and abnormal maturation of motor networks, but also areas of pragmatic compensation for motor control deficits. Implications for current theory, future research, and evidence-based practice are discussed.Systematic Review RegistrationPROSPERO, identifier: CRD42020185444. (shrink)