Browsing by Subject "Cognitive neuroscience"

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    Long photoperiod impairs learning in male but not female medaka
    (Cell Press, 2021-07-23) López Olmeda, José Fernando; Zhao, Haiyu; Reischl, Markus; Pylatiuk, Christian; Lucon-Xiccato, Tyrone; Loosli, Felix; Foulkes, Nicholas Simon; Fisiología
    Day length in conjunction with seasonal cycles affects many aspects of animal biology. We have studied photoperiod-dependent alterations of complex behavior in the teleost, medaka (Oryzias latipes), a photoperiodic breeder, in a learning paradigm whereby fish have to activate a sensor to obtain a food reward. Medaka were tested under a long (14:10 LD) and short (10:14 LD) photoperiod in three different groups: mixed-sex, all-males, and all-females. Under long photoperiod, medaka mixed-sex groups learned rapidly with a stable response. Unexpectedly, males-only groups showed a strong learning deficit, whereas females-only groups performed efficiently. In mixed-sex groups, female individuals drove group learning, whereas males apparently prioritized mating over feeding behavior resulting in strongly reduced learning performance. Under short photoperiod, where medaka do not mate, male performance improved to a level similar to that of females. Thus, photoperiod has sex-specific effects on the learning performance of a seasonal vertebrate.
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    Similarity-based cognition: radical enactivism meets cognitive neuroscience
    (Springer, 2019-12-10) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Hutto, Daniel D.; Filosofía
    Similarity-based cognition is commonplace. It occurs whenever an agent or system exploits the similarities that hold between two or more items — e.g., events, processes, objects, and so on— in order to perform some cognitive task. This kind of cognition is of special interest to cognitive neuroscientists. This paper explicates how similarity-based cognition can be understood through the lens of radical enactivism and why doing so has advantages over its representationalist rival, which posits the existence of structural representations or S-representations. Specifically, it is argued that there are problems both with accounting for the content of S-representations and with understanding how neurally-based structural similarities can work as representations (even if contentless) in guiding intelligent behavior. Finally, with these clarifications in place, it is revealed how radically enactivism can commit to an account of similarity-based cognition in its understanding of neurodynamics.