Two very different insights motivate characterizing the brain as a computer. One depends on mathematical theory that defines computability in a highly abstract sense. Here the foundational idea is that of a Turing machine. Not an actual machine, the Turing machine is really a conceptual way of making the point that any well-defined function could be executed, step by step, according to simple 'if-you-are-in-state-P-and-have-input-Q-then-do-R' rules, given enough time (maybe infinite time) [see COMPUTATION]. Insofar as the brain is a device whose (...) input and output can be characterized in terms of some mathematical function -- however complicated -- then in that very abstract sense, it can be mimicked by a Turning machine. Given what is known so far brains do seem to depend on cause-effect operations, and hence brains appear to be, in some formal sense, equivalent to a Turing machine [see CHURCH-TURING THESIS]. On its own, however, this reveals nothing at all of how the mind-brain actually works. The second insight depends on looking at the brain as a biological device that processes information from the environment to build complex representations that enable the brain to make predictions and select advantageous behaviors. Where necessary to avoid ambiguity, we will refer to the first notion of computation as algorithmic computation, and the second as information processing computation. (shrink)
One aspect of truth concerns knowing when to trust others when one’s own knowledge is inadequate. This is an ever more common problem in societies where technological and scientific change seems to be constantly accelerating. There is an increasing need to rely on the expertise of others and consequently to know when others are more likely to be offering an objective opinion as opposed to a biased one. Here, I argue that there are systematic and early emerging cognitive heuristics and (...) biases that profoundly influence our patterns of deference, our ways of assessing expertise, and our sense of when testimony is to be trusted. For the most part, the power and pervasiveness of these biases are ignored or greatly underappreciated. These biases and heuristics can both mislead and inform our understanding and use of others’ expertise; it is therefore critical that we acknowledge their presence and know how to work with them. (shrink)
To cite this Article: Keil, Frank C. (2008) 'Space—The Primal Frontier? Spatial Cognition and the Origins of Concepts', Philosophical Psychology, 21:2, 241 —.
domains as rareiied as a cardiologistRi7;s knowledge of arrhythmia to those as commonplace as everyday folk psychology. Domains can vary from the highly concrete causally rich relations in a naive mechanics of physical objects to the highly abstract noncausal relations of mathematics or natural language syntax. Lumping together all of these different sorts of domains so as to have similar effects on cognitive development is likely to be misleading and un· informative. In this chapter, I consider some distinctions and their (...) implications.. (shrink)
y arguments about the intrinsically interactional nature of development (e.g. Johnston, 1988; Lehrman, 1953; Lemeri983O te learning takes place and an environment to be learned. The use of the term Cngnz`rii*e Psyc/10/0g_v.· An Inrerrzational Review. Edited by Michael W. Eysenck @1990 by John Wiley & Sons Ld..
The assumption of domain specificity has been invaluable to the study of the emergence of biological thought in young children. Yet, domains of thought must be understood within a broader context that explains how those domains relate to the surrounding cultures, to different kinds of cognitive constraints, to framing effects, to abilities to evaluate knowledge and to the ways in which domain-specific knowledge in any individual mind is related to knowledge in other minds. All of these issues must come together (...) to have a full account of conceptual development in biology. (shrink)
This paper reports the results of two sets of studies demonstrating 14-month-olds’ tendency to associate an object’s behavior with internal, rather than external features. In Experiment 1 infants were familiarized to two animated cats that each exhibited a different style of self-generated motion. Infants then saw a novel individual that had an internal feature (stomach color) similar to one cat, but an external feature (hat color) similar to the other. Infants looked reliably longer when the individual’s motion was congruent with (...) the hat than when it was congruent with the stomach. Using a converging method involving object choice, Experiment 2 found that infants prioritized the internal feature over the external feature only when the object’s behavior was self-generated. In the absence of self-generated behaviors, however, infants did not show a preference towards the internal feature. Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)
We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students’ concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects’ awareness of their theological beliefs, we were able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendency to anthropomorphize may be (...) generalizable to other agents. God (and possibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some contexts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood.. (shrink)
Although recent work has emphasised the importance of naı¨ve theories to categorisation, there has been little work examining the grain of analysis at which causal information normally influences categorisation. That level of analysis may often go unappreciated because of an ‘‘illusion of explanatory depth’’, in which people think they mentally represent causal explanatory relations in far more detail than they really do. Naı¨ve theories therefore might seem to be irrelevant to categorisation, or perhaps they only involve noting the presence of (...) unknown essences. I argue instead that adults and children alike effectively track high-level causal patterns, often outside awareness, and that this ability is essential to categorisation. Three examples of such pattern-tracking are described. The shallowness of our explanatory understandings may be further supported by a reliance on the division of cognitive labour that occurs in all cultures, a reliance that arises from welldeveloped abilities to cluster knowledge in the minds of others. (shrink)
The ability to evaluate the quality of explanations is an essential part of children’s intellectual growth. Explanations can be faulty in structural ways such as when they are circular. A circular explanation reiterates the question as if it were an explanation rather than providing any new information. Two experiments (N = 77) examined children’s preferences when faced with circular and noncircular explanations. The results demonstrate that a preference for noncircular explanations is present, albeit in a fragile form, by 5 or (...) 6 years of age and that it appears robustly by 10 years of age. Thus, the ability to evaluate the quality of explanations based on structural grounds appears to develop rapidly during the elementary school years. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)
Two studies with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N 104) examined whether young children can differentiate expertise in the minds of others. Study 1 revealed that all children in the sample could correctly attribute observable knowledge to familiar experts (i.e., a doctor and a car mechanic). Further, 4- and 5-year-olds could correctly attribute knowledge of underlying scientific principles to the appropriate experts. In contrast, Study 2 demonstrated that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds have difficulty making attributions of knowledge of scientific principles to (...) unfamiliar experts. A computational analysis in Study 3 indicated that 4- and 5-year-olds’ successes on the first two studies could not be attributed to the way in which words co-occur in discourse. Overall, these studies showed that young children have a sense of the division of cognitive labor, albeit fragile. (shrink)
The rise of appeals to intuitive theories in many areas of and the results are surprising. Our sense of how the world cognitive science must cope with a powerful fact.
At the most general level I am interested in how we come to make sense of the world around us. Much of this research involves asking how intuitive explanations and understandings emerge in development and how they are related to notions of cause, mechanism and agency. These relations are linked to broader questions of what concepts are, how they change with development and increasing expertise and how they are structured in adults.
empiricist approaches to knowledge acquisition. I say " appears" because so often the debaters seem to be talking past each other, arguing about different things or misunderstanding each other in such basic ways that the debates can seem to an observer as incoherent. For these reasons there has been a powerful need for a systematic treatment of the different senses of nativism and empiricism that considers both their historical contexts and their current manifestations. Cowie's book offers such a treatment, one (...) that goes far beyond prior attempts. It is a remarkably clear and insightful exposition and critique of nativist views from earliest writings to the most current debates. It helps all of us understand better what others are talking about when they don't subscribe to our brand of nativism or empiricism. It also reveals just how much theoretical and empirical work needs to be done before we can get a clear handle what is really the truth about the innateness of language, mathematics, folks psychology, and many other potential domains. Yet, despite these powerful virtues, the book also falls short on some key issues that seem necessary to laying an agenda for future empirical or theoretical work on nativism. I will tend to focus in this essay on those missing links, while also repeatedly stating that this book represents a major leap forward in making sense of what it means to say that some aspect of the mind is innate. Mystery and Modularity. (shrink)
H actually ran the program on a number of large pieces of English text, though from my point of view, it’s the ability and the willingness to do this that is the motivation of learning Perl. H’s Perl code takes all periods ‘.’ to mark sentence breaks, and of course not all periods really do mark sentence breaks: the previous one earlier in this sentence does not, nor does the period after an abbreviation, most of the time—though the next one (...) does, e.g. The task of writing a program that can distinguish sentence-final periods from all other periods is quite an interesting and challenging one. (shrink)
& Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to genervs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience inate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific..
Although there have been several reviews of the The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, the six reviews in this issue of Artificial Intelligence represent an unusual opportunity to see in one collection how scholars from a wide range of perspectives evaluate MITECS. I found it very useful to consider the reviews side by side and am grateful to the reviewers for providing a number of new insights into the nature of the cognitive sciences. It is also gratifying to see (...) such generally positive assessments from five of the six reviewers (Carr, Dorr, Husbands, Okamato and Peterson) and it is intriguing to consider the more negative comments by Lakoff. In this essay, rather than consider in detail the many points raised by the reviews, I examine more globally how a project like MITECS might be evaluated and how it seemed to fare in light of these reviews. (shrink)
What would it be like to have never learned English, but instead only to know Hopi, Mandarin Chinese, or American Sign Language? Would that change the way you think? Imagine entirely losing your language, as the result of stroke or trauma. You are aphasic, unable to speak or listen, read or write. What would your thoughts now be like? As the most extreme case, imagine having been raised without any language at all, as a wild child. What—if anything—would it be (...) like to be such a person? Could you be smart; could you reminisce about the past, plan the future? (shrink)
We investigate how people use causal knowledge to design interventions to affect the outcomes of causal systems. We propose that in addition to using content or mechanism knowledge to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, people are also influenced by the abstract structural properties of a causal system. In particular, we investigated two factors that influence whether people tend to intervene proximally (on the immediate cause of an outcome of interest) or distally (on the root cause of a chain leading to (...) the outcome). We presented people with causal chains describing a variety of real-world and artificial causal systems and asked them where they would intervene to affect the outcome. In Experiment 1, participants who were asked to choose the best long-term intervention intervened more distally than participants asked to choose the best short-term intervention. In Experiment 2, participants presented with a branching structure in which there were two distinct causal pathways from the root cause to the outcome were more likely to intervene on the root cause than participants presented with only one of the pathways. Our findings demonstrate two ways in which people integrate content knowledge and knowledge of a system’s causal structure to design effective interventions. (shrink)
The present studies investigated children’s and adults’ intuitive beliefs about the physical nature of essences. Adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 10 years old) were asked to reason about two different ways of determining an unknown object’s category: taking a tiny internal sample from any part of the object (distributed view of essence), or taking a sample from one specific region (localized view of essence). Results from three studies indicated that adults strongly endorsed the distributed view, and (...) children showed a developmental shift from a localized to distributed view with increasing age. These results suggest that even children go beyond mere placeholder notions of essence, committing to conceptual frameworks of how essences might be physically instantiated. (shrink)
If folk science means individuals having well worked out mechanistic theories of the workings of the world, then it is not feasible. Laypeople’s explanatory understandings are remarkably coarse, full of gaps, and often full of inconsistencies. Even worse, most people overestimate their own understandings. Yet recent views suggest that formal scientists may not be so different. In spite of these limitations, science somehow works and its success offers hope for the feasibility of folk science as well. The success of science (...) arises from the ways in which scientists learn to leverage understandings in other minds and to outsource explanatory work through sophisticated methods of deference and simplification of complex systems. Three studies ask whether analogous processes might be present not only in laypeople but also in young children and thereby form a foundation for supplementing explanatory understandings almost from the start of our first attempts to make sense of the world. (shrink)
The more carefully we look, the more impressive the repertoire of infant concepts seems to be. Across a wide range of tasks, infants seem to be using concepts corresponding to surprisingly high-level and abstract categories and relations. It is tempting to try to explain these abilities in terms of a core capacity in spatial cognition that emerges very early in development and then gets extended beyond reasoning about direct spatial arrays and events. Although such a spatial cognitive capacity may indeed (...) form one valuable basis for later cognitive growth, it seems unlikely that it can be the sole or even primary explanation for either the impressive conceptual capacities of infants or the ways in which concepts develop. (shrink)
What would it be like to have never learned English, but instead only to know Hopi, Mandarin Chinese, or American Sign Language? Would that change the way you think? Imagine entirely losing your language, as the result of stroke or trauma. You are aphasic, unable to speak or listen, read or write. What would your thoughts now be like? As the most extreme case, imagine having been raised without any language at all, as a wild child. What—if anything—would it be (...) like to be such a person? Could you be smart; could you reminisce about the past, plan the future? (shrink)
Bloom makes a strong case that word meaning acquisition does not require a dedicated word learning system. This conclusion, however, does not argue against a dedicated language acquisition system for syntax, morphology, and aspects of semantics. Critical questions are raised as to why word meaning should be so different from other aspects of language in the course of acquisition.
These essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual...
Thinking of concepts as explicit lists of features used to pick out referents neatly is indeed mistaken; but there are other alternatives than making concepts mere pointers. These alternatives are suggested by the difference between meaning X and having the concept X, problems of conceptual change, implicit conceptual schemata, the conceptual requirements of the division of cognitive labor, and how concepts figure in perception versus language.
We introduce two notions–the shadows and the shallows of explanation–in opening up explanation to broader, interdisciplinary investigation. The shadows of explanation refer to past philosophical efforts to provide either a conceptual analysis of explanation or in some other way to pinpoint the essence of explanation. The shallows of explanation refer to the phenomenon of having surprisingly limited everyday, individual cognitive abilities when it comes to explanation. Explanations are ubiquitous, but they typically are not accompanied by the depth that we might, (...) prima facie, expect. We explain the existence of the shadows and shallows of explanation in terms of there being a theoretical abyss between explanation and richer, theoretical structures that are often attributed to people. We offer an account of the shallows, in particular, both in terms of shorn-down, internal, mental machinery, and in terms of an enriched, public symbolic environment, relative to the currently dominant ways of thinking about cognition and the world. (shrink)
The article examines the question of how learning multiple tasks interacts with neural architectures and the flow of information through those architectures. It approaches the question by using the idealization of an artificial neural network where it is possible to ask more precise questions about the effects of modular versus nonmodular architectures as well as the effects of sequential versus simultaneous learning of tasks. A prior work has demonstrated a clear advantage of modular architectures when the two tasks must be (...) learned at the same time from the start, but this advantage may disappear when one task is first learned to a criterion before the second task is undertaken. Indeed, in some cases of sequential learning, nonmodular networks achieve success levels comparable to those of modular networks. In particular, if a nonmodular network is to learn two tasks of different difficulty and the more difficult task is presented first and learned to a criterion, then the network will learn the second, easier one without permanent degradation of the first one. In contrast, if the easier task is learned first, a nonmodular task may perform significantly less well than a modular one. It seems that the reason for this difference has to do with the fact that the sequential presentation of the more difficult task first minimizes interference between the two tasks. More broadly, the studies summarized in this article seem to imply that no single learning architecture is optimal for all situations. (shrink)
