Abstract Understanding the minds of past populations through their material remains presents cognitive archaeologists with a range of inferential challenges. One of these is theory selection: which cognitive models should we choose for archaeological analysis, and why? In this article, we outline three problems facing researchers performing this task, and recommend four heuristics designed to mitigate the extent of those problems: consilience, theoretical pluralism, sample diversity, and robustness. The archaeologist who selects a cognitive model that does well against these heuristics stands to better epistemically licence their inference from archaeological evidence to (some aspect of) hominin cognition in the deep past.

Cognitive styles play a significant role in how individuals attend to, process, evaluate, and interpret information. In this study, we assessed the relationship between cognitive styles (specifically rationality and analytic holism), and religious behavior (God consciousness and formal practices) and religious orientation (intrinsic and extrinsic orientation) among 283 participants from two communities in southern Ghana. Using structural equation modeling, we found the following relationships between dimensions of cognitive styles and religion: (i) Rationality had a direct effect on God consciousness, formal religious practices, and intrinsic religious orientation but no significant relationship with extrinsic religious orientation. (ii) Causality is inversely related to formal practices but positively related to extrinsic religious orientation. No significant relationship was found between causality and God consciousness or intrinsic religious orientation. (iii) Attitude toward contradiction was directly related to both God consciousness and intrinsic religious orientation, but inversely related to extrinsic religious orientation and no significant relations with formal practices. (iv) Perception of change was negatively related to extrinsic religious orientation but did not predict the other variables (God consciousness, formal practices, and intrinsic religious orientation). (v) Holistic thinking (locus of attention) was inversely related to extrinsic religious orientation and positively related to intrinsic religious orientation, but did not predict God consciousness or formal practices. Collectively, our findings suggest that cognitive styles, particularly rationality and analytic holism, play a significant role in shaping religious behavior and orientation. These results have important implications for understanding the complex interplay between cognitive processes and religious experiences.

We investigated the role of cultural experience in the search advantage for happy faces. European British participants living in the UK, Asian Japanese participants living in Japan, and Asian Japanese participants living in the UK, were required to search for a happy or an angry face target against a background of neutral facial expressions, using Asian Japanese and European American faces. Results showed that British participants displayed a search advantage favouring happy facial expressions, while Japanese participants living in Japan showed response time equivalence for happy and angry expressions. However, the Japanese participants residing in the UK showed a detection advantage favouring happy faces, thus resembling British participants. Correlational analyses revealed that it is positive emotional regard towards the host culture that underlies visual search performance rather than the length of exposure to the host culture per se. These results reveal how quality rather than quantity of inter-group contact modulates attentional mechanisms relating to out-group learning of facial expressions of emotion.

In this article, the second author name was incorrectly written as Thomas Lachmannn. The correct name should read as Thomas Lachmann.

Extensive research has shown that phonological awareness including phoneme awareness skills are vital when children acquire literacy skills in alphabetic languages especially in English. Furthermore, research on developmental dyslexia (DD) especially in English has been conducted with research-informed/well-established definitions of DD. This is because compared to other languages, the prevalence of DD in English is high, and thus children with DD form a large minority group. These dyslexia research encompasses cognitive-behavioural, neuroimaging, behavioural and molecular-genetic studies. There seems to be a consensus amongst these researchers that DD manifests itself as a phonological deficit, and thus the phonological deficit hypothesis (as well as naming disfluency) for DD has become prominent in the alphabetic languages, especially in English. This is because print-to-sound or sound-to-print mappings in English are not always one-to-one and thus opaque/inconsistent. Now important questions arise in discussing how children acquire reading skills in non-alphabetic languages especially in Japanese where logographic Kanji and 2-forms of syllabic Kana are used: (i) are phonological awareness skills vital when children learn to read in Japanese? (ii) can the phonological deficit hypothesis explain DD in Japanese? These questions will be addressed in this paper by comparing the behavioural and some neuroimaging studies in alphabetic languages and Japanese Kanji and Kana as well as Chinese, another non-alphabetic languag. It seems that phonological awareness may not be as important for non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese or Japanese at the start of literacy acquisition. Phonological awareness become important skills in Chinese and Japanese only when children are older. Instead of phonological awareness other metalinguistic awareness skills are important for acquisition of reading in Chinese and Japanese such as orthographic or morphological awareness (Chinese), vocabulary size (Japanese), visuo-spatial processing (Chinese and Japanese) and visual-motor integration (Chinese and Japanese) skills. Also available neuroimaging studies will be used to uncover the behavioural dissociation and the neural unity in an English-Japanese bilingual adolescent boy with monolingual dyslexia in English.

The study examined whether a classification of errors based on Hendriks and Kolk’s (1997) proposal would effectively characterize the reading profile of children learning two orthographies varying for regularity, such as Italian and English. The study considered both an age-match and a grade-match comparison. Offline analysis of error production was carried out for two lists of stimuli: List 1 including regular words varying for frequency and matched non-words and List 2 including low-frequency words varying for regularity. In List 1, Italian-reading children made more multiple attempts characterized by a slow and progressive approach to the target (sounding-out behavior) than English-reading children, while the latter made relatively more word substitutions and non-word lexicalizations. As for List 2, Italian-reading children made relatively more multiple attempts and progressive approaches to the target compared to the English-reading children (with more sounding-out behaviors and syllabications), while the opposite occurred for phonological-visual errors, word substitutions, morphological, and semantic errors. Both groups showed a high proportion of phonological-visual and regularization errors (stress assignment in the case of Italian-reading children). Overall, the use of an error coding system specifically tuned to the characteristics of the orthographies investigated allowed a more comprehensive identification of reading difficulties which allowed the different strategies used by children of different languages to emerge more clearly (more reliance on sub-lexical routines in Italian readers and on lexical routines in English readers). These results call for more attention to error patterns in the identification of reading difficulties in children of different languages including those learning a transparent orthography where error analyses have largely been ignored.

Construct validity is essential to evaluate the generalizability of findings on literacy and dyslexia. Operational definitions of reading literacy determine the measurement method, yielding territory or country-wide literacy rates. This practice echoes the norm in diagnosis and prevalence estimates of dyslexia. International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSA) of literacy such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) compare countries’ performances in relation to how well their students are reading. In this paper, we reexamine the validity claims and evidence using the examples of countries in Southeast Asia—Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, purported to have high proportions of poor readers. The challenge of characterizing reading performance and designing suitable measures for valid international comparisons is similar across phases of reading development and proficiency. The importance of the specificity of scripts and languages for reading abilities and impairments is highlighted. We suggest ways in which researchers can approach the assessment of reading proficiency from a cross-cultural and an interdisciplinary perspective. These can foster contextual caveats for generating and interpreting evidence.