In these highly selective and condensed considerations, I could only offer a comparison of the main sociological themes in Gurwitsch's inaugural dissertation with the corresponding themes in Schutz's first book. Other sociological themes were not discussed, mainly because they were not developed far enough in one or the other or both sources. The crucial theme of explicit and implicit ontological presuppositions had to be ignored because it demands an extensive treatment of its own. The same goes for the proper consideration (...) of the particular conceptions of Husserl mobilized by each author for his purposes.Even so, I hope to have conveyed an idea of the convergences and differences in the early views of Gurwitsch and Schutz, as mirrored in the studies which were compared. This article should be seen as a small beginning of the huge task of studying comprehensively the unique personal and intellectual friendship of two seminal thinkers and the influences they exercised upon each other's work, even though they operated in substantively quite different areas. (shrink)

An allocation problem is a type of aggregation problem in which the values of individuals' opinions on some set of variables (canonically a set of mutually exclusive and exhaustive possibilities) sum to a constant. This paper shows that for realistic allocation problems, namely ones in which the set of possible opinion values is finite, the only universal aggregation methods that satisfy two commonly invoked conditions are the dictatorial ones. The two conditions are, first, that the aggregate opinion on any variable (...) depends only on the individuals' opinions on that variable and not on their opinions on any other variable and, secondly, that the aggregate opinion minimally preserves unanimous individual opinion. Connections between this result and similar ones in the literature on judgment aggregation are explored and their significance assessed. (shrink)

Prior knowledge structures (or schemas) confer multiple behavioral benefits. First, when we encounter information that fits with prior knowledge structures, this information is generally better learned and remembered. Second, prior knowledge can support prospective planning. In humans, memory enhancements related to prior knowledge have been suggested to be supported, in part, by computations in prefrontal and medial temporal lobe cortex. Moreover, animal studies further implicate a role for the hippocampus in schema-based facilitation and in the emergence of prospective planning signals (...) following new learning. To date, convergence across the schema-enhanced learning and memory literature may be constrained by the predominant use of hippocampally dependent spatial navigation paradigms in rodents, and non-spatial list-based learning paradigms in humans. Here, we targeted this missing link by examining the effects of prior knowledge on human navigational learning in a hippocampally dependent virtual navigation paradigm that closely relates to foundational studies in rodents. Outside the scanner, participants overlearned Old Paired Associates (OPA – item-location associations) in multiple spatial environments, and they subsequently learned New Paired Associates (NPA – new item-location associations) in the environments while undergoing fMRI. We hypothesized that greater OPA knowledge precision would positively affect NPA learning, and that the hippocampus would be instrumental in translating this new learning into prospective planning of navigational paths to NPA locations. Behavioral results revealed that OPA knowledge predicted one-shot learning of NPA locations, and neural results indicated that one-shot learning was predicted by the rapid emergence of performance-predictive prospective planning signals in hippocampus. Prospective memory relationships were not significant in parahippocampal cortex and were marginally dissociable from the primary hippocampal effect. Collectively, these results extend understanding of how schemas impact learning and performance, showing that the precision of prior spatial knowledge is important for future learning in humans, and that the hippocampus is involved in translating this knowledge into new goal-directed behaviors. (shrink)

Dienes & Perner (D&P) argue that nondeclarative knowledge can take multiple forms. We provide empirical support for this from two related lines of research about the development of mathematical reasoning. We then describe how different forms of procedural and declarative knowledge can be effectively modeled in Anderson's ACT-R theory, contrasting this computational approach with D&P's logical approach. The computational approach suggests that the commonly observed developmental progression from more implicit to more explicit knowledge can be viewed as a consequence of (...) accumulating and strengthening mental representations. (shrink)