A neuroscientific grasp of concepts: from control to representation

Abstraction denotes the cognitive process by means of which general concepts are formed. The dominant view of abstraction considers it not only as a complex and sophisticated cognitive activity, but also as a distinctive hallmark of mankind. The distinctiveness of abstract thought has indeed been closely related to another feature peculiar to our species: language. Following this perspective, the possibility to entertain conceptual representations is thus precluded to animals devoid of full-blown language. I challenge this view and propose that the representational dynamic of the brain is conceivable as a type of self-organization, in which action plays a crucial part. My aim will be to investigate whether, and to what extent, conceptual knowledge can be attributed to non-linguistic animal species, with particular emphasis on nonhuman primates. I therefore introduce the notion of semantic content as a type of 'relational specification'. A review of recent neurophysiological data on the neural underpinnings of action end-states in the macaque monkey brain is presented. On the basis of this evidence, I propose that conceptual representations can be conceived as the expression of a coherent internal world model. This model decomposes the 'outer' space inhabited by things in a meaningful way only to the extent that it accords to biologically constrained, embodied invariance. Finally, I discuss how the 'comparative' neuroscientific approach to abstraction proposed here may shed some light on its nature and its evolutionary origin.     

Statistical Computations Underlying the Dynamics of Memory Updating

Psychophysical and neurophysiological studies have suggested that memory is not simply a carbon copy of our experience: Memories are modified or new memories are formed depending on the dynamic structure of our experience, and specifically, on how gradually or abruptly the world changes. We present a statistical theory of memory formation in a dynamic environment, based on a nonparametric generalization of the switching Kalman filter. We show that this theory can qualitatively account for several psychophysical and neural phenomena, and present results of a new visual memory experiment aimed at testing the theory directly. Our experimental findings suggest that humans can use temporal discontinuities in the structure of the environment to determine when to form new memory traces. The statistical perspective we offer provides a coherent account of the conditions under which new experience is integrated into an old memory versus forming a new memory, and shows that memory formation depends on inferences about the underlying structure of our experience.     

Impact of professional learning on teachers’ representational strategies and students’ cognitive engagement with molecular genetics concepts

A variety of practices and specialised representational systems are required to understand, communicate and construct molecular genetics knowledge. This study describes teachers’ use of multimodal representations of molecular genetics concepts and how their strategies and choice of resources were interpreted, understood and used by students to demonstrate their conceptual understanding. Recordings of teachers’ and students’ discourse around representations, teacher interviews and student pre- and post-tests were used as data sources. Vignettes of students’ dialogue with teachers around the form and function of representations and teacher interview responses highlight higher order conceptual understanding. Coding for cognitive domains within lesson phases where different modes of representation were utilised showed classrooms operated at higher domains compared to lessons where modalities were absent. This study shows how pedagogy that focuses on representational form and function as well as students’ engagement in critical discussion around affordances and constraints of representations results in a higher cognitive engagement with molecular genetics knowledge.     

Conceptual learning by miniature brains

Concepts act as a cornerstone of human cognition. Humans and non-human primates learn conceptual relationships such as ‘same’, ‘different’, ‘larger than’, ‘better than’, among others. In all cases, the relationships have to be encoded by the brain independently of the physical nature of objects linked by the relation. Consequently, concepts are associated with high levels of cognitive sophistication and are not expected in an insect brain. Yet, various works have shown that the miniature brain of honeybees rapidly learns conceptual relationships involving visual stimuli. Concepts such as ‘same’, ‘different’, ‘above/below of’ or ‘left/right are well mastered by bees. We review here evidence about concept learning in honeybees and discuss both its potential adaptive advantage and its possible neural substrates. The results reviewed here challenge the traditional view attributing supremacy to larger brains when it comes to the elaboration of concepts and have wide implications for understanding how brains can form conceptual relations.     

Clathrin-mediated endocytosis before fluorescent proteins

The recent technological advance of using fluorescent proteins to image endocytic protein traffic has resulted in a greater understanding of this dynamic process. However, most of the main concepts for how clathrin-mediated endocytosis functions were formulated long before intrinsically fluorescent proteins were available. These important conceptual breakthroughs came from the clever interpretation of simple observations.     

Evolution of interdisciplinarity in biodiversity science

The study of biodiversity has grown exponentially in the last thirty years in response to demands for greater understanding of the function and importance of Earth's biodiversity and finding solutions to conserve it. Here, we test the hypothesis that biodiversity science has become more interdisciplinary over time. To do so, we analyze 97,945 peer‐reviewed articles over a twenty‐two‐year time period (1990–2012) with a continuous time dynamic model, which classifies articles into concepts (i.e., topics and ideas) based on word co‐occurrences. Using the model output, we then quantify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: concept diversity, that is, the diversity of topics and ideas across subdisciplines in biodiversity science, subdiscipline diversity, that is, the diversity of subdisciplines across concepts, and network structure, which captures interactions between concepts and subdisciplines. We found that, on average, concept and subdiscipline diversity in biodiversity science were either stable or declining, patterns which were driven by the persistence of rare concepts and subdisciplines and a decline in the diversity of common concepts and subdisciplines, respectively. Moreover, our results provide evidence that conceptual homogenization, that is, decreases in temporal β concept diversity, underlies the observed trends in interdisciplinarity. Together, our results reveal that biodiversity science is undergoing a dynamic phase as a scientific discipline that is consolidating around a core set of concepts. Our results suggest that progress toward addressing the biodiversity crisis via greater interdisciplinarity during the study period may have been slowed by extrinsic factors, such as the failure to invest in research spanning across concepts and disciplines. However, recent initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) may attract broader support for biodiversity‐related issues and hence interdisciplinary approaches to address scientific, political, and societal challenges in the coming years.     

Quantum physics in neuroscience and psychology: a neurophysical model of mind-brain interaction

Neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behaviour generally posits that brain mechanisms will ultimately suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This assumption stems from the idea that the brain is made up entirely of material particles and fields, and that all causal mechanisms relevant to neuroscience can therefore be formulated solely in terms of properties of these elements. Thus, terms having intrinsic mentalistic and/or experiential content (e.g. 'feeling', 'knowing' and 'effort') are not included as primary causal factors. This theoretical restriction is motivated primarily by ideas about the natural world that have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three-quarters of a century. Contemporary basic physical theory differs profoundly from classic physics on the important matter of how the consciousness of human agents enters into the structure of empirical phenomena. The new principles contradict the older idea that local mechanical processes alone can account for the structure of all observed empirical data. Contemporary physical theory brings directly and irreducibly into the overall causal structure certain psychologically described choices made by human agents about how they will act. This key development in basic physical theory is applicable to neuroscience, and it provides neuroscientists and psychologists with an alternative conceptual framework for describing neural processes. Indeed, owing to certain structural features of ion channels critical to synaptic function, contemporary physical theory must in principle be used when analysing human brain dynamics. The new framework, unlike its classic-physics-based predecessor, is erected directly upon, and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics. It is able to represent more adequately than classic concepts the neuroplastic mechanisms relevant to the growing number of empirical studies of the capacity of directed attention and mental effort to systematically alter brain function.     

Dynamic analysis of recurrent event data using the additive hazard model

We propose a method for analysis of recurrent event data using information on previous occurrences of the event as a time-dependent covariate. The focus is on understanding how to analyze the effect of such a dynamic covariate while at the same time ensuring that the effects of treatment and other fixed covariates are unbiasedly estimated. By applying an additive regression model for the intensity of the recurrent events, concepts like direct, indirect and total effects of the fixed covariates may be defined in an analogous way as for traditional path analysis. Theoretical considerations as well as simulations are presented, and a data set on recurrent bladder tumors is used to illustrate the methodology.     

Gaming as a Platform for Developing Science Practices

Gaming, an integral part of many students’ lives outside school, can provide an engaging platform for focusing students on important disciplinary core concepts as an entry into developing students’ understanding of these concepts through science practices. This article highlights how S’cape can be used to support student learning aligned with the most recent standards documents. Through combining students’ initial engagement in a motivating gaming experience with a two-experiment scaffolded inquiry sequence enhanced with information literacy-targeted homework, this article reveals how support can be offered for asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, constructing explanations, and engaging in argument from evidence to refine understandings of core concepts. We believe that as science teachers strive to explore important concepts with students through allowing them to actually practice science, games such as S’cape strategically leveraged and sequenced with scaffolded inquiry experiences can support these efforts.     

Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystem Health: Exploring Methodological Relations as a Source of Synergy

Using ecohealth as a transdisciplinary lens to explore the connections among overlapping domains of inquiry, this article examines methodological relations between Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystem Health, two approaches for improving rural health and well-being. The experience of working on a project tasked with developing an integrated, systems-based approach for understanding the nature of rural livelihoods and ecosystems provides the base for analysis. Several key insights are discussed: The overarching goals of health and sustainability facilitate collaboration among disciplines; differences arise from how each approach operationalizes systems as variables and indicators; the dependent variables for one approach can be used as the independent variables for the other. In summary, while broad concepts like health and sustainability help transcend differences across disciplines and scales of analysis, variables and indicators cannot, as they are bound to how an observed system is operationalized. An advantage of using an ecohealth lens is that it creates conceptual and analytical spaces in which differences can be reconciled and used as sources of synergy. A source of synergy revealed in this article is the interdependence of variables used by each approach.     

Does the Segregation of Evolution in Biology Textbooks and Introductory Courses Reinforce Students’ Faulty Mental Models of Biology and Evolution?

The well-established finding that substantial confusion and misconceptions about evolution and natural selection persist after college instruction suggests that these courses neither foster accurate mental models of evolution’s mechanisms nor instill an appreciation of evolution’s centrality to an understanding of the living world. Our essay explores the roles that introductory biology courses and textbooks may play in reinforcing undergraduates’ pre-existing, faulty mental models of the place of evolution in the biological sciences. Our content analyses of the three best-selling introductory biology textbooks for majors revealed the conceptual segregation of evolutionary information. The vast majority of the evolutionary terms and concepts in each book were isolated in sections about evolution and diversity, while remarkably few were employed in other sections of the books. Standardizing the data by number of pages per unit did not alter this pattern. Students may fail to grasp that evolution is the unifying theme of biology because introductory courses and textbooks reinforce such isolation. Two goals are central to resolving this problem: the desegregation of evolution as separate “units” or chapters and the active integration of evolutionary concepts at all levels and across all domains of introductory biology.     

Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept?

We experience the world as a seamless stream of percepts. However, intriguing illusions and recent experiments suggest that the world is not continuously translated into conscious perception. Instead, perception seems to operate in a discrete manner, just like movies appear continuous although they consist of discrete images. To explain how the temporal resolution of human vision can be fast compared to sluggish conscious perception, we propose a novel conceptual framework in which features of objects, such as their color, are quasi-continuously and unconsciously analyzed with high temporal resolution. Like other features, temporal features, such as duration, are coded as quantitative labels. When unconscious processing is “completed,” all features are simultaneously rendered conscious at discrete moments in time, sometimes even hundreds of milliseconds after stimuli were presented.     

The Creativity of Everyday Life in Crafting Resilient Food Systems: a Framework and Case from the Atlantic Forest Coast of Brazil

We introduce everyday creativity as an approach to understanding the role of agency in resilience thinking and as a conceptual lens through which to view the ways that people respond to globalized change. Our focus is on the use of biodiversity in crafting responses within food systems of rural and remote communities. We propose a conceptual framework to understand the flow of biological materials across five phases of a food system and how benefits map to actors. This allows us to locate disruptions that arise from globalized change and the factors that enable and constrain responses. We then present an application of the conceptual framework using a case study from the Atlantic Forest Coast of Brazil, that demonstrates that in a world characterized by globalized change our understanding of resilient food systems requires more analysis of the factors that limit everyday creativity at different phases of the food system.     

Not Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Exploring the Merits of a Student–Teacher–Scientist Partnership

One major emphasis of reform initiatives in science education is the importance of extended inquiry experiences for students through authentic collaborations with scientists. As such, unique partnerships have started to emerge between science and education in an ongoing effort to capture the interest and imaginations of students as they make sense of the world around them. One such partnership is called the student–teacher–scientist partnership, in which teachers and their students participate in and contribute to the research of scientists. This article explores a partnership between a 10th-grade biology teacher, her students, and practicing scientists who collaborated in the design, implementation and evaluation of a horse evolution unit. The primary goal of the collaborative activity was to involve teachers and students in a process of conceptual change as a means of eliminating common misconceptions implicit in horse evolution displays in museums in various parts of the country. The evidence-based lessons developed enhanced students’ understanding of concepts in macroevolution but also connected the science classroom with a community of scientists whose personalization of the horse evolution unit situated biological concepts and the learning experience within the context of real-world issues.     

The living dead: transformative experiences in modelling natural selection

This study considers how students change their coherent conceptual understanding of natural selection through a hands-on simulation. The results show that most students change their understanding. In addition, some students also underwent a transformative experience and used their new knowledge in a leisure time activity. These transformative experiences appear in different categories where students find value both towards biological content, societal value and individual identity. Finally there is a discussion on how to transfer characteristics from the setting of this study to other educational settings in biology and science in general.     

Fast and automatic activation of an abstract representation of money in the human ventral visual pathway

Money, when used as an incentive, activates the same neural circuits as rewards associated with physiological needs. However, unlike physiological rewards, monetary stimuli are cultural artifacts: how are monetary stimuli identified in the first place? How and when does the brain identify a valid coin, i.e. a disc of metal that is, by social agreement, endowed with monetary properties? We took advantage of the changes in the Euro area in 2002 to compare neural responses to valid coins (Euros, Australian Dollars) with neural responses to invalid coins that have lost all monetary properties (French Francs, Finnish Marks). We show in magneto-encephalographic recordings, that the ventral visual pathway automatically distinguishes between valid and invalid coins, within only ∼150 ms. This automatic categorization operates as well on coins subjects were familiar with as on unfamiliar coins. No difference between neural responses to scrambled controls could be detected. These results could suggest the existence of a generic, all-purpose neural representation of money that is independent of experience. This finding is reminiscent of a central assumption in economics, money fungibility, or the fact that a unit of money is substitutable to another. From a neural point of view, our findings may indicate that the ventral visual pathway, a system previously thought to analyze visual features such as shape or color and to be influenced by daily experience, could also able to use conceptual attributes such as monetary validity to categorize familiar as well as unfamiliar visual objects. The symbolic abilities of the posterior fusiform region suggested here could constitute an efficient neural substrate to deal with culturally defined symbols, independently of experience, which probably fostered money''s cultural emergence and success.     

Sensory ecology and perceptual allocation: new prospects for neural networks

Sensory ecology provides a conceptual framework for considering how animals ought to design sensory systems to capture meaningful information from their environments. The framework has been particularly successful at describing how one should allocate sensory receptors to maximize performance on a given task. Neural networks, in contrast, have made unique contributions to understanding how 'hidden preferences' can emerge as a by-product of sensory design. The two frameworks comprise complementary techniques for understanding the design and the evolution of sensation. This article reviews empirical literature from multiple modalities and levels of sensory processing, considering vision, audition and touch from the viewpoints of sensory ecology and neuroethology. In the process, it presents modifications of extant neural network algorithms that would allow a more effective integration of these diverse approaches. Together, the reviewed literature suggests important advances that can be made by explicitly formulating neural network models in terms of sensory ecology, by incorporating neural costs into models of perceptual evolution and by exploring how such demands interact with historical forces.     

Assessing understanding in biology

This paper discusses several new assessment strategies that encourage meaningful learning and conceptual understanding in the biological sciences. Our purpose is to introduce a handful of evaluation and measurement techniques that help students assimilate well-integrated, strongly cohesive frameworks of interrelated concepts as a way of facilitating ‘real understanding’ of natural phenomena. Among these methods are concept maps, V diagrams, SemNet software, image-based test items, clinical interviews, portfolios, written products, performance measures, and conceptual diagnostic tests. Evidence suggests that these methods are most useful at highlighting ‘alternative conceptions’ and assisting students who wish to ‘learn how to learn’.