About Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Essential reading for those working directly in the cognitive sciences or in related specialist areas, Trends in Cognitive Sciences provides an instant overview of current thinking for scientists, students and teachers who want to keep up with the latest developments in the cognitive sciences. The journal brings together research in psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, computer science and neuroscience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences provides a platform for the interaction of these disciplines and the evolution of cognitive science as an independent field of study.

Instructions to Authors

Articles for Trends in Cognitive Sciences are generally commissioned by the Editor, but proposals for articles are welcome. Prospective authors should submit an abstract (120 words) plus a cover letter (two pages maximum) outlining what will be discussed in the article plus up to 20 key recent references (published in the past 2-4 years) via our online submission site ( http://ees.elsevier.com/tics/ ). Full length manuscripts cannot be submitted via this site without prior consultation with the Editor. Authors should note that all articles in Trends in Cognitive Sciences are peer-reviewed, and commissioning does not guarantee publication.

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Online publication ahead of print

Trends in Cognitive Sciences publishes articles online ahead of the print issue. You can find the latest here:

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In this issue

Towards a neural basis of music-evoked emotions A common misconception is that music is incapable of evoking “real” emotions and hence is not well-suited for the study of emotion in general. Stefan Koelsch convincingly argues against this misconception. Koelsch presents an overview of recent research on the neural substrates of music-evoked emotions which demonstrates that emotions evoked with music involve virtually all limbic and paralimbic structures. Given the established role of these structures in the generation and regulation of emotions that have a survival value for the individual, music-evoked emotions actually involve the very core of evolutionarily adaptive neuro-affective mechanisms.

Statistically optimal perception and learning: from behavior to neural representations Perceptual learning, motor learning and automaticity series: It is well-established that the nervous system is adapted to statistical properties of the environment. However, although there is a substantial theoretical and neurophysiological literature on statistically optimal inference in perception, similar work on statistically optimal learning has been lagging behind. In this article József Fiser, Pietro Berkes, Gergö Orbán and Máté Lengyel review recent behavioral and neural evidence for uncertainty representation in learning, argue that learning and perception employ the same statistical inference procedure, and propose a unified representational framework that subsumes both perception and learning.

Click here for the complete table of contents.

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Most Read Articles Article Feed

These are the five most downloaded papers for the 30 days preceding March 10, 2010. See full list of most read articles

The origins of religion : evolved adaptation or by-product?

Ilkka Pyysiäinen, Marc Hauser
10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.007

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Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology

Yuval Nir, Giulio Tononi
10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.001

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How language acquisition builds on cognitive development

Eve V. Clark
10.1016/j.tics.2004.08.012

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Socioeconomic status and the developing brain

Daniel A. Hackman, Martha J. Farah
10.1016/j.tics.2008.11.003

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An embodied cognitive science?

Andy Clark

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