Within cognitive science, research on human cognition relies on the idea of a normative human; that we can study and generalize from normal humans to understand human cognition. This assumption is the only way that using convenience samples to describe cognitive universals makes sense. Cognitive Science is not alone in falling for the idea of a normative person; other social sciences and medical research have sometimes featured this idea. The idea that Cognitive Science research should or could describe normative human cognition is a misleading waste of time for the field. I draw on work from a wide range of fields, including psychology, medicine, disability studies, and biology, to contend that the idea of normative human cognition is mostly useless but not mostly harmless. Rejection of the idea of normative human cognition and reevaluating past work that relies on it is an important step forward for the field.

Who will achieve high marks in school, flourish in their career or become an Olympian? Current theories of achievement provide answers that are intuitively appealing but scientifically flawed. Consequently, most of what people believe about how to achieve success is likely to be incorrect.

New perspectives on executive functions propose a greater involvement of context. These perspectives have implications for research in mathematical cognition. We tackle the problem that although individuals clearly exercise inhibitory control in mathematical contexts, researchers find that the relations between inhibitory control and mathematics are sometimes “weaker than expected.” In this review, we identify how children and adults use inhibitory control in specific foundational symbolic and non-symbolic mathematical contexts, with attention to concepts learned in primary (6 to 12) years. Then, we argue that considering context (e.g., task features, participant’s state, and prior knowledge) will allow researchers to thoroughly investigate the mechanistic role of cognitive processes involved in mathematical tasks.

Mastery of mathematics depends on the people’s ability to manipulate and abstract values such as negative numbers. Knowledge of arithmetic principles does not necessarily generalize from positive number arithmetic to arithmetic involving negative numbers (Prather & Alibali, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1080/03640210701864147). In this study, we evaluate the relationship between participant’s knowledge of the Relation to Operands arithmetic principle in both positive and negative numbers and their spontaneous on numerical relations. Additionally, we tested if the feedback that directs attention to relations affects participants’ attention to relation and their arithmetic principle knowledge. This study contributes to our understanding of the specific skills and cognitive processes that are associated with understanding high-level mathematics.

The issue of generalizability in psychological and cognitive sciences is best understood in the broader context and history of the disciplines and human research in general. Interrelated issues around the use of normativity in supporting hierarchical (e.g., White supremacist) views of humanity demonstrate the need for the discipline to reconsider currently accepted ways of doing things. Bauer (2023) contributes to this needed discussion by focusing on the seemingly intractable problem of dealing with generalization in psychological research. In the current piece, I pick up on Bauer's suggestion of a new path for the discipline and outline a framework for a critical approach to psychological and cognitive sciences. This broad approach represents an alternative way forward for researchers in our understanding of how normativity and generalization interact with our work. A critical approach also necessitates a reevaluation of our current characterization of humans' cognitive and psychological processes.

BACKGROUND/AIM PM₂.₅ concentration differs by environment type (indoor, outdoor, automobile). Elevated PM₂.₅ exposure is associated with children's poor cognitive/mathematical performance, a strong predictor of poor later academic performance. The Bridging the Environment and Neurodevelopment for Children's Health Study provided low-cost personal air quality sensors to 30 Washington, D.C. metro-area children to investigate the relationship between daily air pollution exposures and children's cognitive performance. We investigated whether, between COVID-19 lockdown and post-lockdown periods, there were significant differences between measured location-specific (indoor, outdoor, automobile) PM₂.₅ values and time spent in these locations, as well as these exposures' correlation with children's cognitive performance. METHODS Each data collection round included children (age 8-11) wearing the air quality sensor for 3 days during which parents recorded their activities; on day 3, children completed cognitive assessments. We collected data during winter 2020-2021 (Round 1) and spring/summer 2021 (Round 2). We used: Friedman tests to assess differences in average PM₂.₅ and time spent by activity location for each round, Wilcoxon signed-rank tests to evaluate change over time and Spearman correlation tests to evaluate correlation between location-specific PM₂.₅/time exposure and cognitive performance. RESULTS We found that there were significant differences in PM₂.₅ exposure by activity type during the post-lockdown period--PM₂.₅ exposure outside was significantly greater than that measured indoors or in an automobile (median outdoors = 5.11 µg/m³; indoors = 3.25 µg/m³; automobile = 2.66 µg/m³). There were significant differences based on average time spent (logged in quarter-hour increments) in these locations rounds 1 vs. 2: outdoors (median=0.92 hours vs. 2.17 hours) and in automobiles (median=1.25 hours vs. 2.75 hours). These exposures weakly correlated with cognitive performance. CONCLUSION Our findings suggest seasonal effects of place-based PM₂.₅ exposure and the effects of the cessation/the resumption of "normal life" during the COVID-19 pandemic's phases. KEYWORDS--air pollution-child health-cognitive outcomes

The study of human cognition has made great progress, yet concerns about common approaches persist. Specifically, that many approaches may not account for the range of human experiences embedded in diverse cultural contexts. How might researchers of human cognition and development address these concerns in future research?

The critical question for Cognitive Scientists is what does Cognitive Science do, if anything, for people? Cognitive Science is primarily concerned with human cognition but has fallen short in continuously and critically assessing the who in human cognition. This complacency in a world where white supremacist and patriarchal structures leave Cognitive Science in the unfortunate position of potentially supporting those structures. We take it that many Cognitive Scientists operate on the assumption that the study of human cognition is both interesting and important. We want to invoke that importance to note that Cognitive Scientists must continue to work to show how the field is useful to all of humanity and reflects a humanity that is not white by default. We wonder how much the field has done, and can do, to show that it is useful not only in the sense that we might make connections with researchers in other fields, win grants and write papers, even of the highest quality, but useful in some material way to the billions of non-Cognitive Scientists across the globe.

Research suggests that children's exposure to pollutants may impact their neurocognitive development. While researchers have found associations between air pollutants and cognitive development, these associations remain underspecified. Further, these exposures occur in the context of the built environment and may be exacerbated by local social vulnerability; in this context, individuals may experience a suite of socioenvironmental stressors that lead to increased cumulative risk exposure. In this pilot study, we tested whether real-time-measured personal exposure to PM2.5 relates to children's executive function and mathematical skills, outcomes that may predict later mathematical performance, general academic performance and even employment outcomes. We recruited 30 families to participate in two rounds in Winter 2020 and Summer 2021. We collected children's demographic data, as well as data about their living environment. In each round, children carried a small device that collected real-time ambient air pollution data for 3 days; parents logged their children's activities each day. On the last day, children completed cognitive assessments indexing their working memory (n-back), inhibitory control (Go/No-Go), nonsymbolic math skills (dot comparison), and arithmetic skills (equation verification). Overall, 29 participants had pollutant readings from both rounds, and 21 had a full dataset. Nonparametric statistical analysis revealed no significant differences in ambient air pollution and cognitive performance over time, Spearman's rho correlation assessment found that PM2.5 was not significantly correlated with cognitive outcomes in R1 and R2. However, the correlations suggested that an increase in PM2.5 was associated with worse working memory, inhibitory control, nonsymbolic skills, and arithmetic skills, at least in R1. We used each participant's zip code-aggregated Social Vulnerability Index, which range from 0 to 1, with higher numbers indicating more social vulnerability. Wilcoxon Rank-Sum tests indicated that participants living in higher SVI zip codes (≥0.70; n = 15) were not significantly different from those living in lower SVI zip codes (<0.70; n = 14), in terms of their PM2.5 exposures and cognitive performance in each round. We also found that socioeconomic characteristics mattered, such that children whose parent (s) had at least a Master's degree or earned more than $100,000 a year had lower PM2.5 exposures than children in the other end.

In visual search tasks, physically large target stimuli are more easily identified among small distractors than are small targets among large distractors. The present study extends this finding by presenting preliminary evidence of a new search asymmetry: stimuli that symbolically represent larger magnitude are identified more easily among featurally equivalent distractors that represent smaller magnitude. Participants performed a visual search task using line-segment digits representing the numbers 2 and 5, and the numbers 6 and 9, as well as comparable non-numeric control stimuli. In three experiments, we found that search times are faster when the target is a digit that represents a larger magnitude than the distractor, although this pattern was not evident in one additional experiment. The results provide suggestive evidence that the magnitude of a number symbol can affect perceptual comparisons between number symbols, and that the semantic meaning of a target stimulus can systematically affect visual search.

The study of human cognition is a prominent part of psychology and related disciplines. While the modern approach begun during the Cognitive Revolution hasbeen seemingly successful, it is not without concerns. I address five concerns with how human cognition is studied: (1) reliance on homogeneous participant sampleswhen trying to generalize behavior to real-world contexts; (2) focus on controlling for or ignoring "extraneous" variables; (3) assumption of a generic human actor instead of a focus on individual and contextual variation; (4) insufficient theory building.I contend that these concerns are deeply connected and that the solution is a significant change in how we study human cognition, similar in scope to the Cognitive Revolution. We need to reconsider the assumption of cognitive universals and how that assumption is built into the norms of the discipline. I propose a reconstruction of how researchers study human cognition by implementing acombination of methodological approaches and theoretical positions. These combined approaches (1) integrate human heterogeneity, (2) consider human behavior in context, (3) incorporate multiple levels of analysis and non-cognitivefactors, (4) focus not only on averaged behavior but variation across individuals and context, (5) create theory that combines cognition and context.

Very few questions have cast such an enduring effect in cognitive science as the question of “symbol-grounding”: Do human-invented symbol systems have to be grounded to physical objects to gain meanings? This question has strongly influenced research and practice in education involving the use of physical models and manipulatives. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of physical models is mixed. We suggest that rethinking physical models in terms of analogies, rather than groundings, offers useful insights. Three experiments with 4- to 6-year-old children showed that they can learn about how written multi-digit numbers are named and how they are used to represent relative magnitudes based on exposure to either a few pairs of written multi-digit numbers and their corresponding names, or exposure to multi-digit number names and their corresponding physical models made up by simple shapes (e.g., big-medium-small discs); but they failed to learn with traditional mathematical manipulatives (i.e., base-10 blocks, abacus) that provide a more complete grounding of the base-10 principles. These findings have implications for place value instruction in schools and for the determination of principles to guide the use of physical models.

The mathematical talk that parents use when engaging with their children is important for children’s early math development. However, parents vary in the amount and type of mathematical input they provide. Because early math knowledge is predictive of later achievement, understanding contributors to this variation has implications for children’s math development. The current study examined how individual parent and child cognitive factors, including math ability and spontaneous focus on number (SFON), relate and contribute to math talk during parent-child play. Findings indicate that SFON relates to math ability for both parents and children. SFON was not a significant predictor of math talk, but parent and child math ability related to talk about advanced math concepts and numbers in context. These results suggest that the relation of SFON and math ability is consistent in adulthood, and that more research is needed to understand factors that contribute to variation in math talk.

Children's knowledge of arithmetic principles is a key aspect of early mathematics knowledge. Knowledge of arithmetic principles predicts how children approach solving arithmetic problems and the likelihood of their success. Prior work has begun to address how children might learn arithmetic principles in a classroom setting. Understanding of arithmetic principles involves understanding how numbers in arithmetic equations relate to another. For example, the relation to operands principle is that for subtracting natural numbers (A - B = C), the difference (C) must be smaller than the minuend (A). In the current study we evaluate if individual differences in arithmetic principle knowledge can be predicted by the learners' spontaneous attention to relations (SAR) and if feedback can increase their attention to relations. Results suggest that participants' Spontaneous Attention to Number does not predict their knowledge of the Relation to Operands principle for symbolic arithmetic. Feedback regarding the attention to relations did not show a significant effect on SAR or participants' arithmetic principle knowledge. We also did not find significant relations between reports of parent talk and the home environment with individual differences in Spontaneous Attention to Number. The amount of parent's talk about relations was not significantly associated with learner's spontaneous attention to relations and arithmetic principle knowledge. We conclude that children's Spontaneous Attention to Relations with non-symbolic number does not generalize to attention to relations with symbolic arithmetic.

Background: The combined effects of multiple environmental toxicants and social stressor exposures are widely recognized as important public health problems, likely contributing to health inequities. However cumulative environmental health risk and impacts have received little attention by US policy makers at state and federal levels to develop comprehensive strategies to reduce these exposures, mitigate cumulative risks and prevent harm. An area for which the inherent limitations of current approaches to cumulative environmental health risk are well illustrated is children's neurodevelopment which exhibits dynamic complexity, intergenerational effects and interdependent and causally linked nature of multiple factors. Systems science methods enable investigators to examine the dynamic relationships of variables at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously, while also studying the impact of the non-linear behavior of the system as a whole over time. Thus we contend that a systems approach, specifically system dynamics, may be better suited for devising policy solutions to address cumulative effects of multiple chemical, physical, biological and social environmental stressors. Methods: We convened a 2 1/2-day system dynamics workshop involving experts across multiple disciplines to formally describe the multiple interacting streams of social stressors and environmental neurotoxicants impacting children's neurodevelopment through the use of qualitative system maps and formal system dynamics simulation models. Results: An initial system dynamics causal map was developed, incorporating feedback mechanisms relevant to diverse disciplines. Potential high leverage intervention points for reducing disparities in children's cumulative neurotoxicant exposures and effects were identified. Workshop participants developed deeper level of understanding about the complexity of cumulative environmental health risks, increased their agreement about underlying causes, and enhanced their capabilities for integrating diverse forms of knowledge about the complex multi-level problem of cumulative chemical and nonchemical exposures. Conclusion: We conclude that this approach successfully enabled a multidisciplinary group to explore relationships in a complex dynamic system.

Numeracy, as measured by performance on the non-symbolic numerical comparison task, is a key construct in numerical and mathematical cognition. The current study examines individual variation in performance on the numerical comparison task. We contrast the hypothesis that performance on the numerical comparison task is primarily due to more accurate representations of numbers with the hypothesis that performance dependent on decision-making factors. We present data from two behavioral experiments and a mathematical model. In both behavioral experiments we measure the precision of participant’s numerical value representation using a free response estimation task. Taken together, results suggest that individual variation in numerical comparison performance is not predicted by variation in the precision of participants’ numerical value representation.

The number-line task has been extensively used to study the mental representation of numbers in children. However, studies suggest that proportional reasoning provides a better account of children's performance. Ninety 4- to 6-year-olds were given a number-line task with symbolic numbers, with clustered dot arrays that resembled a perceptual scaling task, or with spread-out dot arrays that involved numerical estimation. Children performed well with clustered dot arrays, but poorly with symbolic numbers and spread-out dot arrays. Performances with symbolic numbers and spread-out dot arrays were highly correlated and were related to counting skill; neither was true for clustered dot arrays. Overall, results provide evidence for the role of mental representation of numbers in the symbolic number-line task.

Numerous studies from developmental psychology have suggested that human symbolic representation of numbers is built upon the evolutionally old capacity for representing quantities that is shared with other species. Substantial research from mathematics education also supports the idea that mathematical concepts are best learned through their corresponding physical representations. We argue for an independent pathway to learning "big" multi-digit symbolic numbers that focuses on the symbol system itself. Across five experiments using both between- and within-subject designs, we asked preschoolers to identify written multi-digit numbers with their spoken names in a two-alternative-choice-test or to indicate the larger quantity between two written numbers. Results showed that preschoolers could reliably map spoken number names to written forms and compare the magnitudes of two written multi-digit numbers. Importantly, these abilities were not related to their non-symbolic representation of quantities. These findings have important implications for numerical cognition, symbolic development, teaching, and education.

Numerical comparison is a primary measure of the acuity of children's approximate number system. Approximate number system acuity is associated with key developmental outcomes such as symbolic number skill, standardized test scores, and even employment outcomes (Halberda, Mazzocco, & Feigenson, 2008; Parsons & Bynner, 1997). We examined the relation between children's performance on the numerical comparison task and the number-line estimation task. It is important to characterize the relation between tasks to develop mathematics interventions that lead to transfer across tasks. We found that number-line performance was significantly predicted by nonsymbolic comparison performance for participants ranging in age from 5 to 8 years. We also evaluated, using a computational model, whether the relation between the 2 tasks could be adequately explained based on known neural correlates of number perception. Data from humans and nonhuman primates characterized neural activity corresponding to the perception of numerosities. Results of behavioral experimentation and computational modeling suggested that though neural coding of numbers predicted a correlation in participants' performance on the 2 tasks, it could not account for all the variability in the human data. This finding was interpreted as being consistent with accounts of number-line estimation in which number-line estimation does not rely solely on participants' numerical perception.