It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as heuristics for generating causal judgments under uncertainty and are a pervasive source of bias in causal judgment. More sophisticated clues such as mechanism clues and repeated interventions (...) are derived from the 14. Research on the use of empirical information and conditional probabilities to identify causes has used scenarios in which several of the clues are present, and the use of empirical association information for causal judgment depends on the presence of singular clues. It is the singular clues and their origin that are basic to causal understanding, not multiple instance clues such as empirical association, contingency, and conditional probabilities. (shrink)

Much research on cognitive development focuses either on early-emerging domain-specific knowledge or domain-general learning mechanisms. However, little research examines how these sources of knowledge interact. Previous research suggests that young infants can make inferences from samples to populations (Xu & Garcia, 2008) and 11- to 12.5-month-old infants can integrate psychological and physical knowledge in probabilistic reasoning (Teglas, Girotto, Gonzalez, & Bonatti, 2007; Xu & Denison, 2009). Here, we ask whether infants can integrate a physical constraint of immobility into a statistical (...) inference mechanism. Results from three experiments suggest that, first, infants were able to use domain-specific knowledge to override statistical information, reasoning that sometimes a physical constraint is more informative than probabilistic information. Second, we provide the first evidence that infants are capable of applying domain-specific knowledge in probabilistic reasoning by using a physical constraint to exclude one set of objects while computing probabilities over the remaining sets. (shrink)

Although debates continue, studies of cognition in infancy suggest that knowledge begins to emerge early in life and constitutes part of humans' innate endowment. Early-developing knowledge appears to be both domain-specific and task-specific, it appears to capture fundamental constraints on ecologically important classes of entities in the child's environment, and it appears to remain central to the commonsense knowledge systems of adults.

The debate concerning the role of intuitions in philosophy has been characterized by a fundamental disagreement between two main camps. The first, the autonomists, hold that, due to the use in philosophical investigation of appeals to intuition, most of the central questions of philosophy can in principle be answered by philosophical investigation and argument without relying on the sciences. The second, the naturalists, deny the possibility of a priori knowledge and are skeptical of the role of intuition in providing evidence (...) in philosophical inquiry. In spite of the seemingly stark and deep disagreement between the autonomist and the naturalist, in this paper I will attempt to suggest that there is a way to mount a partial defense of intuition-based philosophical practice on naturalist grounds. As will be seen, doing so will require a number of concessions that will satisfy few autonomists while simultaneously disappointing those naturalists who might have thought that all notions of the a priori had been successfully laid to rest. However, I will argue that the account proposed here will preserve those features of traditional philosophical practice that matter most and better explain the history of successes and failures of that practice, thus answering the worries of the autonomist, and that the rejection of the No A Priori Thesis attendant with the account presented here is indeed demanded by the current theories of our best scientific understanding of the mind, thus pacifying the rabid naturalistic critic of any version of apriorism. (shrink)

If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of naturally-evolved alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who (...) accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities. If she then also accepts rabbit consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather dumb group entities. Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings. (shrink)

The ascription of intentional states to the self involves knowledge, or at least claims to knowledge. Armed with the working definition of knowledge as 'the ability to do things, or refrain from doing things, or believe, or want, or doubt things, for reasons that are facts' [Hyman, J. Philos. Quart. 49:432—451], I sketch a simple competence model of acting and believing from knowledge and when knowledge is defeated by un-experienced changes of state. The model takes the form of three concentric (...) circles. The 'periphery' is analogous to Fodor's [(1983), The modularity of mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] input systems. The 'core' contains copies of peripheral representations, and between these representations there is executive competition. At the 'nucleus', operations are performed on the core representations of, at least, negation and recursion. I argue that this provides a fruitful way in which to conceptualise why theory-of-mind tasks challenge pre-school children, how some degree of first-person authority is mental state attribution is possible, and how executive inhibition is achieved. (shrink)

People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real‐time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1–6. Then we show (...) differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7–10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12, and discuss the implications of our findings for the roles of intuitive theories in concepts and cognition. (shrink)

This paper introduces a special issue of Cognitive Science initiated on the 25th anniversary of the publication of Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP), a two-volume work that introduced the use of neural network models as vehicles for understanding cognition. The collection surveys the core commitments of the PDP framework, the key issues the framework has addressed, and the debates the framework has spawned, and presents viewpoints on the current status of these issues. The articles focus on both historical roots and contemporary (...) developments in learning, optimality theory, perception, memory, language, conceptual knowledge, cognitive control, and consciousness. Here we consider the approach more generally, reviewing the original motivations, the resulting framework, and the central tenets of the underlying theory. We then evaluate the impact of PDP both on the field at large and within specific subdomains of cognitive science and consider the current role of PDP models within the broader landscape of contemporary theoretical frameworks in cognitive science. Looking to the future, we consider the implications for cognitive science of the recent success of machine learning systems called “deep networks”—systems that build on key ideas presented in the PDP volumes. (shrink)

Object files (OFs) are hypothesized mid-level representations which mediate our conscious perception of persisting objects—e.g. telling us ‘which went where’. Despite the appeal of the OF framework, not previous research has directly explored whether OFs do indeed correspond to conscious percepts. Here we present at least one case wherein conscious percepts of ‘which went where’ in dynamic ambiguous displays diverge from the analogous correspondence computed by the OF system. Observers viewed a ‘bouncing/streaming’ display in which two identical objects moved such (...) that they could have either bounced off or streamed past each other. We measured two dependent variables: (1) an explicit report of perceived bouncing or streaming; and (2) an implicit ‘object-specific preview benefit’ (OSPB), wherein a ‘preview’ of information on a specific object speeds the recognition of that information at a later point when it appears again on the same object (compared to when it reappears on a different object), beyond display-wide priming. When the displays were manipulated such that observers had a strong bias to perceive streaming (on over 95% of the trials), there was nevertheless a strong OSPB in the opposite direction—such that the object files appeared to have ‘bounced’ even though the percept ‘streamed’. Given that OSPBs have been taken as a hallmark of the operation of object files, the five experiments reported here suggest that in at least some specialized (and perhaps ecologically invalid) cases, conscious percepts of ‘which went where’ in dynamic ambiguous displays can diverge from the mapping computed by the object-file system. (shrink)

Theory-ladenness of perception and cognition is pervasive and variable. Emerging maturationally natural perception and cognition, which are on-line, fast, automatic, unconscious, and, by virtue of their selectivity, theoretical in import, if not in form, define normal development. They contrast with off-line, slow, deliberate, conscious perceptual and cognitive judgments that reflective theories, including scientific ones, inform. Although culture tunes MN systems, their emergence and operation do not rely on culturally distinctive inputs. The sciences advance radically counter-intuitive representations that depart drastically from (...) MN systems’ deliverances. Extensive experience with RCI scientific theories can result in a practiced naturalness with their perceptual and cognitive consequences; nevertheless, automatic MN verdicts persistently intrude. Fodor suggests that the uniformity of the biases MN systems introduce can serve as a theory-neutral means for adjudicating scientific disputes. Findings about vision challenge Fodor’s proposal for circumventing problems that MN theory-ladenness presents. These considerations indicate that RCI scientific ideas are difficult to learn, master, and deploy; consequently, the corrective import of science’s social and institutional arrangements plays a critical role in its epistemic stature. (shrink)

The operationalization of scienti?c notions is instrumental in enabling experimental evidence to bear on scienti?c propositions. Conceptual change should thus translate into operationalization change. This article describes some important experimental works in the psychology of concepts since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is argued that since the early days of this ?eld, psy- chologists.

The visual world of adults consists of objects at various distances, partly occluding one another, substantial and stable across space and time. The visual world of young infants, in contrast, is often fragmented and unstable, consisting not of coherent objects but rather surfaces that move in unpredictable ways. Evidence from computational modeling and from experiments with human infants highlights three kinds of learning that contribute to infants’ knowledge of the visual world: learning via association, learning via active assembly, and learning (...) via visual-manual exploration. Infants acquire knowledge by observing objects move in and out of sight, forming associations of these different views. In addition, the infant’s own self-produced behavior—oculomotor patterns and manual experience, in particular—is an important means by which infants discover and construct their visual world. (shrink)