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Human Cognition (human + cognition)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Psychology44%
Humanities and Social Sciences44%

Selected Abstracts

Adaptationism for Human Cognition: Strong, Spurious or Weak?

MIND & LANGUAGE, Issue 1 2005
Scott Atran
This strategy seems best when there is evidence of homology. Weak adaptationists don't assume that complex organic (including cognitive and linguistic) functioning necessarily or primarily represents task-specific adaptation. This approach to cognition resembles physicists' attempts to deductively explain the most facts with fewest hypotheses. For certain domain-specific competencies (folkbiology) strong adaptationism is useful but not necessary to research. With group-level belief systems (religion) strong adaptationism degenerates into spurious notions of social function and cultural selection. In other cases (language, especially universal grammar) weak adaptationism's ,minimalist' approach seems productive. [source]

An evolutionist approach to information bipolarity: Representations and affects in human cognition

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, Issue 8 2008
Eric Raufaste
This paper investigates the psychological plausibility of the bipolarity concept, i.e., that positive and negative kinds of information are treated differently. Sections 2 and 3 review relevant investigations of the representational and affective systems in the experimental psychology literature. Section 4 provides new data supporting the idea that even when considering how affective changes occur, a certain level of independence exists between the positive and negative sides of affect. Together the studies reported here strongly support the psychological plausibility of bipolarity: Positive and negative kinds of information are not processed in the same way whichever domain is considered, preferences (affect) or beliefs (mental categories). © 2008 Wiley Periodicals Inc. [source]

The Trinitarian Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards and Nicolas Malebranche

THE HEYTHROP JOURNAL, Issue 2 2002
Jasper Reid
This paper explores both the striking similarities and also the differences between Jonathan Edwards and Nicolas Malebranche's philosophical views on the Holy Trinity and, in particular, the ways in which they both gave important roles to specific Persons of the Trinity in the various different branches of their respective metaphysical systems,ontological, epistemological and ethical. It is shown that Edwards and Malebranche were in very close agreement on ontological questions pertaining to the Trinity, both with respect to the internal, triune nature of the divine substance (characterising the Three Persons as the divine power, as the consubstantial idea of God which was generated as He eternally reflected on Himself, and as the mutual love which proceeded between the Father and this idea), and also with respect to the various roles these Three Persons played in the creation of the world. In epistemology, Malebranche postulated an illuminating union between the mind of man and the divine Word, insisting on an absolutely direct involvement of the Second Person in all human cognition, both intellectual and sensible. On this point Edwards did differ, endorsing instead an empiricist epistemology which left no room for such a direct union with the Word. However, when it came to ethics, Edwards and Malebranche both gave the Third Person an utterly central role, postulating much the same kind of union as Malebranche alone had postulated in the epistemological case, only now between the will of man and the Holy Spirit. [source]

The First Congress of Ethnozoological Nomenclature

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2006
Brent Berlin
Folk names for fundamental ethnobiological categories have been shown to be governed by regular nomenclatural principles. Two principles at work in ethnozoological nomenclature , onomatopoeia and metaphorical description of some observable property of the organism , are fairly well established as the basis for naming many folk genera. A third but less understood principle is that associated with what has been called sound symbolism. In the languages of traditional peoples, semantically opaque names for animals often exhibit sound-symbolic properties that humans unconsciously recognize as capturing some aspect of the fundamental essence or nature of the creature being named. How is this to be explained, in spite of the changes that have taken place in human verbal communication since the beginnings of what one might call full-blown language? In what ways are these principles related to more general principles of natural classification based on shape and movement? If verbal mimesis represents a critical stage in the evolution of human cognition, what informed speculations can be brought to bear on what might be called the First Congress of Ethnozoological Nomenclature? [source]

I,Andy Clark COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY AND THE SENSORIMOTOR FRONTIER

ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY SUPPLEMENTARY VOLUME, Issue 1 2006
Andy Clark
ABSTRACT What is the relation between perceptual experience and the suite of sensorimotor skills that enable us to act in the very world we perceive? The relation, according to ,sensorimotor models' (O'Regan and Noë 2001, Noë 2004) is tight indeed. Perceptual experience, on these accounts, is enacted via skilled sensorimotor activity, and gains its content and character courtesy of our knowledge of the relations between (typically) movement and sensory stimulation. I shall argue that this formulation is too extreme, and that it fails to accommodate the substantial firewalls, dis-integrations, and special-purpose streamings that form the massed strata of human cognition. In particular, such strong sensorimotor models threaten to obscure the computationally potent insensitivity of key information-processing events to the full subtleties of embodied cycles of sensing and moving. [source]

Verbal,Behavioral Dissociations in Development

CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 6 2006
Jacqueline D. Woolley
Verbal and behavioral measures of children's knowledge are frequently dissociated. These situations represent a largely untapped but important resource for furthering an understanding of human cognition. In this paper, verbal,behavioral dissociations in children are discussed and analyzed, drawing from a wide range of domains. The article explores what might lead to different responses in different modalities, and it is proposed that children's goals may be an important factor. It is concluded that a variety of factors are involved in producing these dissociations, and that a richer picture of development will result from attention to these factors. [source]

Cooperation and Communication in the 2nd Year of Life

CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES, Issue 1 2007
Michael Tomasello
ABSTRACT,Although primates have evolved complex cognitive skills and strategies for competing with others in their social group, only humans have developed complex cognitive skills and motivations for collaborating with one another in joint endeavors. This cooperative dimension of human cognition emerges most clearly around the first birthday as children begin to collaborate and communicate with joint intentions and joint attention. This collaboration is also grounded in social motivations for helping and sharing with others that are unique to humans. In using the skills of shared intentionality that underlie these cooperative interactions, 1-year-olds come to create perspectival cognitive representations. [source]

Semantic Interpretation as Computation in Nonmonotonic Logic: The Real Meaning of the Suppression Task

COGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 6 2005
Keith Stenning
Abstract Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular interest for human cognition. Byrne's "suppression" data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning. [source]

The Nature and Processing of Errors in Interactive Behavior

COGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 2 2000
Wayne D. Gray
Understanding the nature of errors in a simple, rule-based task,programming a VCR,required analyzing the interactions among human cognition, the artifact, and the task. This analysis was guided by least-effort principles and yielded a control structure that combined a rule hierarchy task-to-device with display-based difference-reduction. A model based on this analysis was used to trace action protocols collected from participants as they programmed a simulated VCR. Trials that ended without success (the show was not correctly programmed) were interrogated to yield insights regarding problems in acquiring the control structure. For successful trials (the show was correctly programmed), steps that the model would make were categorized as matches to the model; steps that the model would not make were violations of the model. The model was able to trace the vast majority of correct keystrokes and yielded a business-as-usual account of the detection and correction of errors. Violations of the model fell into one of two fundamental categories. The model provided insights into certain subcategories of errors; whereas, regularities within other subcategories of error suggested limitations to the model. Although errors were rare when compared to the total number of correct actions, they were important. Errors were made on 4% of the keypresses that, if not detected, would have prevented two-thirds of the shows from being successfully recorded. A misprogrammed show is a minor annoyance to the user. However, devices with the approximate complexity of a VCR are ubiquitous and have found their way into emergency rooms, airplane cockpits, power plants, and so on. Errors of ignorance may be reduced by training; however, errors in the routine performance of skilled users can only be reduced by design. [source]