The aim of this present study was to examine whether scientific authors active in English-speaking countries differ from those in non-English-speaking countries in their use of the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. Based on earlier science, findings have shown that the first language (L1) and second language (L2) differ in the neural processes of the brain and working memory. Research has also shown that women tend to communicate in a more polite and involved manner compared to men. Based on such findings, we compare authors’ tendency to use the terms sex and gender correctly, as a function of their sex and whether they were affiliated to a country with English as first language (EFL) or English as second language (ESL). The hypothesises of this study were (1) scientists affiliated to universities located in EFL countries are more likely to use the terms sex and gender correctly, compared to scientists affiliated to universities in ESL countries, and (2) female scientists are more likely to use the term gender, when they are actually referring to sex, than male scientists and are also less likely to use the term sex when they are referring to gender, compared to male scientists. Results supported the first but not the second hypothesis. Further results are analyzed and discussed based on theories from cognitive science. / Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka om vetenskapliga författare som är verksamma i engelsktalande länder skiljer sig från dem i icke-engelsktalande länder när det gäller att använda de engelska termerna ”sex” och ”gender”. Baserat på tidigare vetenskap har fynd visat att första språket (L1) och andraspråket (L2) skiljer sig åt i arbetsminne och hjärnans neurala processer. Forskning har också visat att kvinnor tenderar att kommunicera på ett mer artigt och involverat sätt jämfört med män. Baserat på sådana resultat jämför vi författarnas tendens att använda termerna kön och kön korrekt, som en funktion av deras kön och om de var affilierade till ett land med engelska som första språk (EFL) eller engelska som andraspråk (ESL). Hypoteser i denna studie var (1) forskare som är anslutna till universitet i EFL-länder är mer benägna att använda termerna kön och kön korrekt, jämfört med forskare som är anslutna till universitet i ESL-länder, och (2) kvinnliga forskare är mer benägna att använda begreppet gender, när de faktiskt menar sex, än manliga forskare och är också mindre benägna att använda termen sex när de menar gender, jämfört med manliga forskare. Resultaten stödde den första men inte den andra hypotesen. Ytterligare resultat analyseras och diskuteras utifrån teorier från kognitionsvetenskap.

In this era of increasingly rapid availability of resources of all kinds, a widespread need to characterize, filtrate, use, and evaluate what could be necessary and useful becomes a crucially vital everyday task. Neither research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) nor in cognitive science (CogSci) is an exception (let alone within a crossing of both paths). A promised goal of AI was to primarily focus on the study and design of intelligent artifacts that show aspects of human-like general intelligence (GI). That is, facets of intelligence similar to those exhibited by human beings in solving problems related to cognition. However, the focus in achieving AI’s original goal is scattered over time. The initial ambitions in the 1960s and 1970s had grown by the 1980s into an "industry", where not only researchers and engineers but also entire companies developed the AI technologies in building specialized hardware. But the result is that technology afforded us with many, many devices that allegedly work like humans, though they can only be considered as life facilitators (if they even do). This is mainly due to, I propose, basic changes on viewing what true essences of intelligence should have been considered within scientific research when modeling systems with GI capacities. A modern scientific approach to achieving AI by simulating cognition is mainly based on representations and implementations of higher cognition in artificial systems. Luckily, such systems are essentially designed with the intention to be acquired with a "human like" level of GI, so that their functionalities are supported by results (and solution methodologies) from many cognitive scientific disciplines. In classical AI, only a few number of attempts have tried to integrate forms of higher cognitive abilities in a uniform framework that model, in particular, cross-domain reasoning abilities, and solve baffling cognition problems —the kind of problems that a cognitive being (endowed with traits of GI) could only solve. Unlike classical AI, the intersection between the recent research disciplines: artificial general intelligence (AGI) and CogSci, is promising in this regard. The new direction is mostly concerned with studying, modeling, and computing AI capabilities that simulate facets of GI and functioning of higher cognitive mechanisms. Whence, the focus in this thesis is on examining general problem solving capabilities of cognitive beings that are both: "human-comparable" and "cognitively inspired", in order to contribute to answering two substantial research questions. The first seeks to find whether it is still necessary to model higher cognitive abilities in models of AGI, and the second asks about the possibility to utilize cognitive mechanisms to enable cognitive agents demonstrate clear signs of human-like (general) intelligence. Solutions to cross-domain reasoning problems (that characterize human-like thinking) need to be modeled in a way that reflects essences of cognition and GI of the reasoner. This could actually be achieved (among other things) through utilizing cross-domain, higher cognitive mechanisms. Examples of such cognitive mechanisms include analogy-making and concept blending (CB), which are exceptional as active areas of recent research in cognitive science, though not enough attention has been given to the rewards and benefits one gets when they interact. A basic claim of the thesis is that several aspects of human-comparable level of GI are based on forms of (cross-domain) representations and (creative) productions of conceptions. The thesis shows that computing these aspects within AGI-based systems is indispensable for their modeling. In addition, the aspects can be modeled by employing certain cognitive mechanisms. The specific examples of mechanisms most relevant to the current text are computation of generalizations (i.e. abstractions) using analogy-making (i.e. transferring a conceptualization from one domain into another domain) and CB (i.e. merging parts of conceptualizations of two domains into a new domain). Several ideas are presented and discussed in the thesis to support this claim, by showing how the utilization of these mechanisms can be modeled within a logic-based framework. The framework to be used is Heuristic-Driven Theory Projection (HDTP), which can model solutions to a concrete set of cognition problems (including creativity, rationality, noun-noun combinations, and the analysis of counterfactual conditionals). The resulting contributions may be considered as a necessary, although not by any means a sufficient, step to achieve intelligence on a human-comparable scale in AGI-based systems. The thesis thus fills an important gap in models of AGI, because computing intelligence on a human-comparable scale (which is, indeed, an ultimate goal of AGI) needs to consider the modeling of solutions to, in particular, the aforementioned problems.

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[pt] A tese aborda criticamente questões conceituais e metodológicas ligadas ao estudo das bases neurais da religiosidade. No intuito de melhor inserir a neuropsicologia da religião em um contexto de estudos interdisciplinares, investigamos, num primeiro momento, as características metodológicas desse tipo de pesquisa, tecendo análises críticas acerca das suas virtudes e limitações. Posteriormente, apresentamos uma hipótese de classificação e uma revisão crítica da produção mais recente no campo. Num terceiro momento, desenvolvemos uma hipótese sobre a importância da prática ritual na evolução de capacidades cognitivas distintivamente humanas. Finalmente, apresentamos o delineamento de um experimento piloto em neurocognição religiosa cuja hipótese de pesquisa articula alguns dos resultados previamente desenvolvidos. / [en] This dissertation critically addresses conceptual and methodological issues related to the study of the neural bases of religiosity. The aim is to promote the neuropsychology of religion in a context of interdisciplinary studies. For this, we first investigate the methodological aspects of this kind of research, presenting critical analyzes about its virtues and limitations. Subsequently, we propose a hypothesis of classification and develop a critical review of the most recent results in the field. In a third study, we develop a hypothesis about the importance of ritual practice in the evolution of distinctively human cognitive abilities. Finally, we design a pilot experiment in religious neurocognition whose research hypothesis articulates some of the previously results.

Many modern-day industries share features of tight coupling and high complexity, making it difficult to describe incidents in terms of direct attribution. This situation has been answered by novel theories on the bonds between people and their environment. Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) offers a new way of analysing human activities, acknowledging the impact of complex interaction and unpredictability. Doing so allows for innovative ways of pursuing work safety. In this study, the concept of safety culture has been interpreted from a CSE perspective and applied in a qualitative assessment of current safety work of at SSAB EMEA. A total number of 26 SSAB employees were interviewed, probing attitudes, perceptions and safety system structures at the Oxelösund steel mill, rolling mill and upper organizational layers. Additional data was collected using informers, SSAB documentation and participatory observation. Data was processed using a combination of top-down and bottom-up analytical approaches, creating a qualitative assessment of safety culture from salient themes. Results reveal an advanced state of safety management. However, management’s intentions are inhibited by issues in management presence and communication, management training, worker influence, forms and content of operator training, reporting, feedback, flow of communication and safety-related core assumptions. Revisiting lessons learned within the field of CSE, suggestions are made to possible areas of improvement and future research. These suggestions concern employee involvement in safety work, work identities, forms of training, manager roles and communication.

Mental illness and language disorders are rarely linked together as a way of making a comparison. In this study, a comprehensive scoping review was initiated to discuss the differential diagnostic characteristics of expressive language in Schizophrenia and Wernicke’s Aphasia (WA). This study will examine the domains of language where there are overlaps between the characteristics of expressive language. Semantics, pragmatics, and discourse will be further examined while comparing what aspects of expressive language are key in each domain. Schizophrenia being classified as a mental illness and WA being classified as an acquired language disorder, there are fundamental properties of language that are synonymous; however, the terms used can be different. This study will discuss the process and reasoning behind a scoping review. The results of this scoping review will identify the gaps in the literature addressing similarities between the patterns of expressive language use in these two diagnoses.

This dissertation contributes an enhanced understanding of team cognition, in general, and collaborative problem solving (CPS), specifically, through an integration of methods that measure team interaction dynamics and knowledge building as it occurs during a complex CPS task. The need for better understanding CPS has risen in prominence as many organizations have increasingly worked to address complex problems requiring the combination of diverse sets of individual expertise to achieve solutions for novel problems. Towards this end, the present research drew from theoretical and empirical work on Macrocognition in Teams that describes the knowledge coordination arising from team communications during CPS. It built from this by incorporating the study of team interaction during complex collaborative cognition. Interaction between team members in such contexts has proven to be inherently dynamic and exhibiting nonlinear patterns not accounted for by extant research methods. To redress this gap, the present research drew from work in cognitive science designed to study social and team interaction as a nonlinear dynamical system. CPS was examined by studying knowledge building and interaction processes of 43 dyads working on NASA's Moonbase Alpha simulation, a CPS task. Both non-verbal and verbal interaction dynamics were examined. Specifically, frame-differencing, an automated video analysis technique, was used to capture the bodily movements of participants and content coding was applied to the teams' communications to characterize their CPS processes. A combination of linear (i.e., multiple regression, t-test, and time-lagged cross-correlation analysis), as well as nonlinear analytic techniques (i.e., recurrence quantification analysis; RQA) were applied. In terms of the predicted interaction dynamics, it was hypothesized that teams would exhibit synchronization in their bodily movements and complementarity in their communications and further, that teams more strongly exhibiting these forms of coordination will produce better problem solving outcomes. Results showed that teams did exhibit a pattern of bodily movements that could be characterized as synchronized, but higher synchronization was not systematically related to performance. Further, results showed that teams did exhibit communicative interaction that was complementary, but this was not predictive of better problem solving performance. Several exploratory research questions were proposed as a way of refining the application of these techniques to the investigation of CPS. Results showed that semantic code-based communications time-series and %REC and ENTROPY recurrence-based measures were most sensitive to differences in performance. Overall, this dissertation adds to the scientific body of knowledge by advancing theory and empirical knowledge on the forms of verbal and non-verbal team interaction during CPS, but future work remains to be conducted to identify the relationship between interaction dynamics and CPS performance.

Humans have a tendency to impute structure spontaneously even in simple learning tasks, however the way they approach structure learning can vary drastically. The present study sought to determine why individuals learn structure differently. One hypothesized explanation for differences in structure learning is individual differences in cognitive control. Cognitive control allows individuals to maintain representations of a task and may interact with reinforcement learning systems. It was expected that individual differences in propensity to apply cognitive control, which shares component processes with hierarchical reinforcement learning, may explain how individuals learn structure differently in a simple structure learning task. Results showed that proactive control and model-based control explained differences in the rate at which individuals applied structure learning.

The current study aimed to investigate the effects of disfluencies, specifically filled pauses (FP) and unfilled pauses (UP), on reaction time (RT) to target words and hyponyms of target hypernyms(targets = target words + hyponyms of target hypernyms). Two experiments were conducted, withthe first experiment examining the impact of disfluencies on RTs to target words in utterances, whilethe second experiment explored their effect on hyponyms of target hypernyms. The experiments wereconducted on six participants, comprising two females and four males, following a within-subjectdesign.Unlike previous studies that have examined disfluencies in the Swedish language, this study dis-tinguished between two categories of filled pauses, namely ehm (E:m, @:m, œ:m, or æ:m) and öh (E:,@:, œ:, or æ:). However, the results revealed that this distinction had no significant effect on RTs.Conversely, a significant difference in RTs was observed between genders, with women exhibitingfaster reaction times compared to men. Participants generally reacted more swiftly to target wordsthan to hyponyms of target hypernyms.Interestingly, filled pauses were found to reduce reaction times to target hypernyms compared tounfilled pauses. However, they did not demonstrate a similar effect on reaction times to target words.Caution should be exercised in interpreting these results due to the limited sample size. Nevertheless,these findings have intriguing implications for the entropy hypothesis (EH) and attention-heighteninghypothesis (AHH) concerning filled pause production.

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