Producing a specific number of vocalizations with purpose requires a sophisticated combination of numerical abilities and vocal control. Whether this capacity exists in animals other than humans is yet unknown. We show that crows can flexibly produce variable numbers of one to four vocalizations in response to arbitrary cues associated with numerical values. Moreover, the acoustic features of vocal units predicted their order in the sequence and could be used to read out counting errors during vocal production. (Abstract)

Badhi, Gai, et al. Chimpanzee gestural exchanges share temporal structure with human language. Current Biology.. July, 2024. A team of UK, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, USA biobehaviorists are able to now perceive and quantify similarities between our human conversations as they convey informed content with hand wave prosody and our kindred great ape chimpanzee predecessors. What then, in retrospect, might one surmise? By life’s longview maybe some personal procreativity is trying to find its voice, to express itself.

Humans regularly engage in efficient communicative conversations, which serve to socially align individuals. In conversations, we take fast-paced turns using a human-universal structure of deploying and receiving signals which has a consistent timing across cultures. We report here that chimpanzees also engage in rapid signal-to-signal turn-taking during face-to-face gestural exchanges with a similar average latency between turns to that of humans. This correspondence between human and chimpanzee points to shared underlying rules. These structures could be derived from shared ancestral mechanisms or convergent strategies that enhance coordinated interactions or manage competition. (Summary)

Mithen, Stephen. The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved. New York: Basic Books, 2024. The author is a professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading with many academic articles and several books (search) such as  After the Ice and The Singing Neanderthals. This latest work proposes an iconic vocal origins hypothesis whereby rudimentary languages were mainly vocal and iconic in kind, rather than gestural, with symbol use emerging later on.

The emergence of language began with the apelike calls of our earliest hominid ancestors. Today, the world is home to thousands of complex expressions.   In his latest volume, renowned archaeologist Steven Mithen puts forward a novel account which synthesizes research across archaeology, psychology, linguistics, genetics, and neuroscience. A step-by-step explanation of how our human ancestors transitioned from grunts to words and grammar. He explores how language shaped our cognition and vice versa; how metaphor advanced Homo sapiens’ ability to formulate abstract concepts, develop agriculture, and shape the world.

Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twndividuality

Goddu, Mariel and Alison Gopnik. The development of human causal learning and reasoning.. Nature Reviews Psychology.. 3/319, 2024. Stanford University and UC Berkeley psychologists (see websites and search AG) describe their latest work to expansively situate such child psychology endeavors in a deeper span of life’s processional gestation. A further component is an interest to avail new computer science facilities. See also Early-emerging combinatorial thought: Human infants flexibly combine kind and quantity concepts by Barbara Pomiechowska, et al in the PNAS (121/29, 2024) for a similar approach.

Causal understanding is a defining characteristic of human cognition. Like many animals, human children learn to control their bodily movements and act effectively in the environment. Unlike other animals, children grow into adults with the causal reasoning skills to develop abstract theories, invent sophisticated technologies and imagine alternate pasts, distant futures and fictional worlds. In this Review, we explore the development of human-unique causal learning and reasoning from evolutionary and ontogenetic perspectives. We argue that human causal understanding is distinguished by its depersonalized (objective) and decontextualized (general) representations. We conclude with suggestions for collaborations between developmental, cross-cultural, computational, neural and evolutionary approaches to advance these deep continuities.

Mentzou, Aikaterini and Josephine Ross.. The Emergence of Self-Awareness: Insights from Robotics. Human Development.. 68/2, 2024. University of Dundee psychologists cleverly set up a cross-reference between these two realms of how an infant becomes a child and current artificial modes might also gain such faculties. In regard, once again, as this whole chapter attests, it seems that a deep affinity (recapitulation) is becoming evident between our human procession and life’s long evolutionary course.

The ability for self-related thought is considered to be a uniquely human characteristic. As technological knowledge advances, it comes as no surprise that humanoid self-awareness is being explored. By a cross-disciplinary approach, we address this possibility by a comparative overview on the emergence of self-awareness as exemplified in both early childhood and robotics. We argue that developmental psychologists can gain valuable theoretical and methodological insights by such a comparison so as to better understand the behavioural occasions of human self-consciousness. (Abstract)

First Steps towards a Cross-Disciplinary Understanding of the Minimal Self In the last decades, empirical research on the early manifestations of the minimal self radically changed historical assumptions of viewing infants as entering the world in a state of “booming, buzzing, confusion between the self and the world.” From birth, infants demonstrate a pre-reflective level of self-awareness accompanied by a perceptual understanding of their own body as a unique and differentiated from other entities in the world as well as a rudimentary appreciation of their agency. These early experiences provide support for the idea that, from infancy, we are already equipped with a minimal self that is embodied, enactive, and ecologically tuned. (7)

Powell, Nathaniel, et al. Common modular architecture across diverse cortical areas in early development.. PNAS. 121/11, 2024. By this mid year, Optical Imaging and Brain Sciences Medical Discovery Team, University of Minnesota, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and Columbia University neuroscientists are able to discern and report the presence of recurrent patterns and processes that develop to engender our human cerebral endowment.

How the diversity of functional organization across brain areas emerges during development is unclear. By imaging spontaneous activity in both sensory and higher-order cortices, we find that a distributed, modular architecture with long-range correlations is a common feature of the developing cortex. This suggests that instead of specific specializations already in place, cortical areas that reflect diverse representations develop from an initially similar structure. These modular networks exhibit strong quantitative similarity across areas, suggesting that the same organizing principles operate throughout the early cortex. Our findings suggest a generic modular organization serves as a cortical substrate. (Abstract)

Weiss, Stagi, et al. Trajectories of brain and behaviour development in the womb, at birth and through infancy. Nature Human Behaviour.. June, 2024. Cambridge University psychologists describe the latest understandings of a sensitive continuum from fetal stages with their own facilities through the parturient process and onto early infant stirrings.

Birth has long been seen as the starting point to study environmental effects on human development. However, recent imaging advances have revealed that the complex fetal behaviours and uterine features exert influence. The birth event is now viewed as a punctuate phase along a pathway of separation of the child from their mother. Here we highlight (1) physiological autonomy and perceptual sensitivity in the fetus, (2) physiological and neurochemical processes that influence future behaviour, (3) motor and sensory systems in the newborn to adapt to the world and (4) the effect of the prenatal environment on later infant behaviours and brain function.

Courellis, Hristos, et al. Abstract representations emerge in human hippocampal neurons during inference.. Nature. August 14, 2024. We enter this work by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CalTech, Columbia University, University of Toronto and New York State Psychiatric Institute neuroscientists for its findings and also to reflect that we Earth peoples may be inherently made and meant to serve as the universe’s way of achieving its own self-description and recognition.

Humans have a cognitive capacity to rapidly adapt to changing environments which draws on an ability to form abstract representations of regularities in the world to support generalization. How these representations are encoded in populations of neurons, how they emerge through learning and how they relate to behavior remains mostly unknown. Learning to perform inference by trial and error or through verbal instructions led to the formation of hippocampal representations with similar geometric properties. The observed relation between representationalfor complex cognition. (Excerpt)

One solution is to encode variables in an abstract format so they can be re-used in new situations to facilitate generalization and compositionality. Here we show that such an abstract representation emerged in the human hippocampus as a function of learning to perform inference. Inferential reasoning is thought to rely on cognitive maps, which have been observed in the hippocampus and underlie inferential reasoning in various complex spatial domains. Here we show that a cognitive map that organizes stimulus identity and latent context in an ordered manner emerges in the hippocampus. (8)

Fisher, Martin. On the embodied nature of knowledge: From neurons to numbers. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. June, 2024. A University of Potsdam psychologist shows how right and left hemispheric proclivities of vision and detail align with the relative perception of textual versions and digital items. In consequence, these qualities can then be given an embodied occasion.

• Interdisciplinary investigations of the human mind through the cognitive sciences has found a key role of the body in representing knowledge at grounded and situated levels. Specifically number knowledge is analyzed from this hierarchical perspective. Lateralized cortical processing of coarse versus fine detail is then identified as a substrate for the population norm of few/left, many/right, which contributes to number-related sensory and motor biases in their embodiment. Implications of these findings for education and rehabilitation are discussed. (Excerpt)
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Importantly, vision is also cross-lateralized in a differentiated fashion: As you read this text, visual information in the left and right spaces behind this page is projected into your right and left occipital cortices, respectively. This spatial frequency representation of the amount of detail in the visual input is again lateralized, such that the left hemisphere preferentially codes high frequencies with fine detail, while the right hemisphere views lower frequencies, whole patterns. Altogether this results in an anatomy-based predisposition to associate a few visual elements with left space and many visual elements with right space. (3)

Beige, Almut, et al. Women for Quantum -- Manifesto of Values.. arXiv:2407.02612. Thirty-one feminine physicists across Europe, the USA and onto Japan are tired of being sidelined, short-changed, not given fair credit or published and so on. In regard they proceed to define themselves so as to gain an equitable place and appreciation.

Data show that the presence of women in quantum science is affected by a number of detriments. From our shared personal experiences as female tenured quantum physics professors, we believe that the current model of scientific leadership, funding, and authority fails to represent many of us. It is time for a real change that calls for a different kind of ethics and the participation of everyone. Women for quantum calls for a joint effort and aims with this initiative to contribute to such a transformation. (Abstract)

We value acting as a community, enriched by a genuine culture of sharing and collaboration. We value trust, honesty and integrity. We value critical, curiosity-driven, and creative thinking. We value diversity, and believe in empowering others. We value the freedom to express opinions or ask questions without fear of judgment.

Jamli, Mohsen, et al. Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution.. Nature. July, 2024. By way of our Planatural philoSophia view, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School neuroresearchers report that they were able to quantify how neuron cell have an innate ability to discern, represent and relatively comprehend textual content. An interim surmise might be that a genesis uniVerse is made and meant to read and write its own narrative script.

From sequences of speech sounds or letters, humans can extract salient meanings through language. Yet, the their origins in neural tissue at the cellular level and over the timescale of action remains largely unknown. Here we recorded from single cells in the left prefrontal cortex as participants listened to sentences and naturalistic stories. By tracking their activities during natural speech processing, we discover a fine-scale cortical representation of semantic information at the level individual neurons. Together, these findings reveal a finely detailed cortical organization of semantic representations at the neuron scale in humans and the cellular-level processing of meaning during comprehension. (Abstract)

Deppman, Airton, et al. Dynamics of Cities. arXiv:2407.12681. Universidade de Sao Paulo, Universidade Federal de Lavras, Brazil, University of Granada, Spain, University of Lund, Sweden, and National Institute of Science and Technology of Complex Systems, Brazil complexity scientists including Constantino Tsallis and Tiago Ribiero proceed to apply their theories as validated in Evidence of fractal structures in hadrons at arXiv:2308.16888 to a far removed, emergent phase of urban phenomena. By so doing they indeed find the same implicate self-similarity across nested neighborhood scales. See also Multifractal analysis of racial population patterns and residential segregation in the US cities by Tomasz F. Stepinski and Anna Dmowska at arXiv:2407.14977 for a similar perception. Altogether a grand continuity from Physics to Phoenix is just now being filled in, quantified and accomplished.

This present study investigates city dynamics employing a nonextensive diffusion equation suited for addressing a a fractal medium, where the nonadditive parameter, q, plays a relevant role. The dynamic methodology facilitates the correlation of the fractal dimension with both the entropic index and the urban scaling exponent. Moreover, these interpretations underscore the intimate connection between the fractal dimension and social interactions. This research contributes to a deeper comprehension of the interplay between human behaviour, urban dynamics, and the underlying fractal nature of cities. (Abstract)

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