Introduction to <i>topiCS</i> Volume 17, Issue 2

The spring issue of Topics in Cognitive Science hosts two distinct themes: one contribution to the ongoing topic that honors the Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society, and a special issue devoted to human-computer collaboration. If I recall correctly, more than ten anthropologists have received this award since the inception of the Society's Fellows program, and today it is a great honor for me to present the first contribution by one of them in this journal. A central goal of the topic that introduces the Society's Fellows to a broader and more diverse audience, is to build bridges between the disciplines that together constitute cognitive science (Bender, 2022). The Fellows topic is almost predestined for this, as many Fellows themselves are doing so—and today's candidate is no exception: Tanya Marie Luhrmann (Stanford University, USA) was trained as a social anthropologist and turned to psychology for tackling profound questions regarding the human mind, including a major research program on “how people know what is real.” Her distinctions are many: She has received numerous awards for scholarship, she served as president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2018, to name a few. Her Fellows contribution, “Shifting between models of mind: New insights into how human minds give rise to experiences of spiritual presence and alternative realities,” is coauthored with her close collaborator, psychologist Kara Weisman (Weisman & Luhrmann, 2025). It provides an in-depth look at the latest findings from their Mind and Spirit project, a large-scale comparative study of how mental models and cognitive-epistemic attitudes interact to generate spiritual experiences. This contribution on humans’ relationships with the spiritual world is complemented by a thematic topic targeting a much more “material” type of relationship: those between humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate collaborative teams. Building the Socio-Cognitive Architecture of COHUMAIN: Collective Human-Machine Intelligence (Gonzalez, Admoni, Brown, & Woolley, 2025) is edited by Cleotilde Gonzalez, Henny Admoni, and Anita W. Woolley (all three from Carnegie Mellon University, USA) as well as Scott Brown (University of Newcastle, Australia), and is devoted to improving our understanding of what the editors coin “Collective Human-Machine Intelligence (COHUMAIN).” It brings together ten papers that jointly address the conceptual foundation of a sociocognitive architecture of COHUMAIN, present approaches to assess and improve interactions, and discuss, on a meta-level, whether such interactions truly qualify as collaboration in the strict sense. topiCS encourages letters and commentaries on all topics, as well as proposals for new topics. Letters are not longer than two published pages (ca. 400–1000 words). Commentaries (between 1000 and 2000 words) are often solicited by Topic Editors prior to the publication of their topic, but they may also be considered after publication. Letters and commentaries typically come without abstract and with few references, if any. The Executive Editor and the Senior Editorial Board (SEB) are constantly searching for new and exciting topics for topiCS. Feel free to open communications with a short note to the Executive Editor ([email protected]) or a member of the SEB (for a list, see the publisher's homepage for topiCS: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1756-8765/homepage/EditorialBoard.html).