Autobiographical-episodic memory is considered to be the most complex of the five long-term memory systems. It is autonoetic, which means, self-reflective, relies on emotional colorization, and needs the features of place and time; it allows mental time traveling. Compared to the other four long-term memory systems-procedural memory, priming, perceptual, and semantic memory-it develops the latest in phylogeny and ontogeny, and is the most vulnerable of the five systems, being easily impaired by brain damage and psychiatric disorders. Furthermore, it is characterized by its fragility and proneness to distortion due to environmental influences and subsequent information. On the brain level, a distinction has to be made between memory encoding and consolidating, memory storage, and memory retrieval. For encoding, structures of the limbic system, with the hippocampus in its center, are crucial, for storage of widespread cortical networks, and for retrieval again a distributed recollection network, in which the prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role, is engaged. Brain damage and psychiatric diseases can lead to what is called "focal retrograde amnesia." In this context, the clinical picture of dissociative or functional or psychogenic amnesia is central, as it may result in autobiographical-emotional amnesia of the total past with the consequence of an impairment of the self as well. The social environment therefore can have a major impact on the brain and on autobiographical-episodic memory processing. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory.

We review how despite advances in our understanding of early word representations, there remains an overemphasis on the mapping problem. After outlining the consquences of the mapping focus, we also discuss more inclusive approaches to the study of word learning.

Our understanding of implicit bias and how to measure it has yet to be settled. Various debates between cognitive scientists are unresolved. Moreover, the public's understanding of implicit bias tests continues to lag behind cognitive scientists'. These discrepancies pose potential problems. After all, a great deal of implicit bias research has been publicly funded. Further, implicit bias tests continue to feature in discourse about public- and private-sector policies surrounding discrimination, inequality, and even the purpose of science. We aim to do our part by reconstructing some of the recent arguments in ordinary language and then revealing some of the operative norms or values that are often hidden beneath the surface of these arguments. This may help the public learn more about the science of implicit bias. It may also help both laypeople and scientists reflect on the values, interests, and stakeholders involved in establishing, justifying, and communicating scientific research. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Social Development.

What are the properties of mind that make language the way it is, and languages the way they are? To answer those questions, it is necessary to look at the causal processes by which languages become the way they are. The relevant dynamic processes take place in different causal frames, including the familiar diachronic, phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and microgenetic frames. One frame is less frequently acknowledged and yet is arguably central to cognitive-scientific explanations of language. This is the enchronic frame, which critically involves a public semiotic process (running at the time-course of milliseconds and seconds) by which each utterance serves as an interpretant of-that is, a meaningful response to-what came before it, driving the progression of social interaction, the most experience-near context of language usage. The notion of enchrony is needed for bringing together certain aspects of language that are typically handled by quite disparate conceptual and methodological approaches (e.g., lexical semantics, morphological typology, conversation analysis, sociolinguistic typology, diachronic linguistics). Situated within an integrated set of causal frames for language, enchrony provides conceptual tools for an account of language that foregrounds social cognition and interaction in a usage-based model. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Cognitive Linguistics.

In the past decade, decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics have developed many new insights in the study of decision making. This review provides an overarching update on how the field has advanced in this time period. Although our initial review a decade ago outlined several theoretical, conceptual, methodological, empirical, and practical challenges, there has only been limited progress in resolving these challenges. We summarize significant trends in decision neuroscience through the lens of the challenges outlined for the field and review examples where the field has had significant, direct, and applicable impacts across economics and psychology. First, we review progress on topics including reward learning, explore-exploit decisions, risk and ambiguity, intertemporal choice, and valuation. Next, we assess the impacts of emotion, social rewards, and social context on decision making. Then, we follow up with how individual differences impact choices and new exciting developments in the prediction and neuroforecasting of future decisions. Finally, we consider how trends in decision-neuroscience research reflect progress toward resolving past challenges, discuss new and exciting applications of recent research, and identify new challenges for the field. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making Psychology > Emotion and Motivation.

The three human at‐rest postures of sitting, standing, and lying are basic, recurring features of human behavior and may reasonably be called primary postures. The three postures share the property of being stable through time, but they are also differentiated in terms of their overall shape, their physiological properties, and typical associated behaviors such as the association of sitting with social interaction, and lying with sleeping. The experiential realities of the three postures underlie and motivate a range of cross‐linguistic phenomena involving morphemes with meanings of “sit”, “stand,” and “lie”. The relevant linguistic phenomena include higher frequencies of occurrence compared with other kinds of posture verbs and differential behavior with respect to some morphosyntactic patterns involving notions such as agentivity. The posture morphemes can also be the source for a variety of semantic extensions reflecting experiential realities of the postures, such as the extension of “lie” to mean “sleep” in some languages. Extensions also include grammaticalizations of the posture morphemes to locative and aspectual markers which reflect the temporal stability and spatial fixedness of the postures themselves.This article is categorized under:Linguistics > Cognitive LinguisticsLinguistics > Language in Mind and Brain

Everyone knows what paying attention is, yet not everybody knows what this means in cognitive and brain function terms. The attentive state can be defined as a state of optimal activation that allows selecting the sources of information and courses of action in order to optimize our interaction with the environment in accordance with either the saliency of the stimulation or internal goals and intentions. In this article we argue that paying attention consists in tuning the mind with the environment in a conscious and controlled mode in order to enable the strategic and flexible adaptation of responses in accordance with internal motivations and goals. We discuss the anatomy and neural mechanisms involved in attention functions and present a brief overview of the neurocognitive development of this seminal cognitive function on the grounds of self-regulated behavior. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Attention (BEAB) Brain Function and Dysfunction (BEAC) Cognitive Development (BAAD).

The lion's share of research on secrecy focuses on how deciding to keep or share a secret impacts a secret-keeper's well-being. However, secrets always involve more than one person: the secret-keeper and those from whom the secret is kept or shared with. Although secrets are inherently social, their consequences for people's reputations and social relationships have been relatively ignored. Secrets serve a variety of social functions, including (1) changing or maintaining one's reputation, (2) conveying social utility, and (3) establishing friendship. For example, if Beth has a secret about a past misdemeanor, she might not tell any of her friends in order to maintain her reputation as an outstanding citizen. If Beth does share this secret with her friend Amy, Amy could interpret this as a sign of trust and think that their friendship is special. However, Amy could also choose to share Beth's secret with the rest of the friend group to show that she is a useful member with access to valuable information about others. Attention to these social functions of secrets emerges from a young age, and secrets play a prominent role in human relationships throughout the lifespan. After providing an overview of what is currently known about the relational consequences of secrecy in childhood and adulthood, we discuss how social and developmental psychologists could work together to broaden our understanding of the sociality of secrets. Future steps include incorporating more dyadic and social network analyses into research on secrets and looking at similar questions across ages. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making.

False and misleading information is readily accessible in people's environments, oftentimes reaching people repeatedly. This repeated exposure can significantly affect people's beliefs about the world, as has been noted by scholars in political science, communication, and cognitive, developmental, and social psychology. In particular, repetition increases belief in false information, even when the misinformation contradicts prior knowledge. We review work across these disciplines, identifying factors that may heighten, diminish, or have no impact on these adverse effects of repetition on belief. Specifically, we organize our discussion around variations in what information is repeated, to whom the information is repeated, how people interact with this repetition, and how people's beliefs are measured. A key cross-disciplinary theme is that the most influential factor is how carefully or critically people process the false information. However, several open questions remain when comparing findings across different fields and approaches. We conclude by noting a need for more interdisciplinary work to help resolve these questions, as well as a need for more work in naturalistic settings so that we can better understand and combat the effects of repeated circulation of false and misleading information in society. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making.