Reviews the general orientation of cognitive psychology, some contemporary difficulties and problems noted by cognitive psychologists, and apparent commonalities between phenomenological and cognitive psychologies. It is argued that the problems of cognitive psychology are inevitable consequences of its natural scientific orientation, which is far more traditional than it is revolutionary. A phenomenologically based, human science approach to psychology is offered as a solution of fundamental disciplinary problems. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

This book summarizes the ideas about cognitive psychology expressed in the writings of medieval Europeans. Up until the 13th century, Christians who wrote about cognitive psychology, foremost of whom was St. Augustine, did so in the Neoplatonic tradition. The translation of the works of Aristotle and some of the works of Arab scholars into Latin during the 12th and 13th centuries brought a high level of sophistication to the theories. The author touches upon the works of (...) Augustine, Averro^Des, Avicenna, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and others. (shrink)

Walsh (2020) underscores how dementia leads to a cognitive transformative experience, which can result in a change in preferences, values, and beliefs. This transformation supports placing greater...

This handbook is an essential, comprehensive resource for students and academics interested in topics in cognitive psychology, including perceptual issues, attention, memory, knowledge representation, language, emotional influences, judgment, problem solving, and the study of individual differences in cognition.

is normative in the sense that it aims to make recommendations for improving human judgment; it aims to have a practical impact on morally and politically significant human decisions and actions; and it studies normative, rational judgment qua rational judgment. These nonstandard ways of understanding ACP as normative collectively suggest a new interpretation of the strong replacement thesis that does not call for replacing normative epistemic concepts, relations, and inquiries with descriptive, causal ones. Rather, it calls for recognizing that the (...) aims and normative inquiries of epistemology and normative psychology have become intermutual in nature. Key Words: Heuristics and biases • applied cognitive psychology • normative psychology • rationality • naturalized epistemology • Epistemics • Applied Naturalized Epistemology • strong replacement • strategic reliabilism • ameliorative psychology. (shrink)

Various proposals for generalizing event spaces for probability functions have been put forth in the mathematical, scientific, and philosophic literatures. In cognitive psychology such generalizations are used for explaining puzzling results in decision theory and for modeling the influence of context effects. This commentary discusses proposals for generalizing probability theory to event spaces that are not necessarily boolean algebras. Two prominent examples are quantum probability theory, which is based on the set of closed subspaces of a Hilbert space, (...) and topological probability theory, which is based on the set of open sets of a topology. Both have been applied to a variety of cognitive situations. This commentary focuses on how event space properties can influence probability concepts and impact cognitive modeling. (shrink)

This work aims to solve the complex problems of non-linearity, instability, and multiple economic factors in the tax forecast of the ceramic industry to ensure the sustainable development of the ceramic industry. The key influential indicators of the tax forecast are obtained by analyzing the principal components affecting the tax index. In addition, a human-computer interaction system is established based on cognitive psychology theory to improve the user-friendliness of tax analysis. At the same time, the tax data of (...) the ceramic industry in Jingdezhen City, Jiangxi Province in different years are used for the empirical analysis of the tax prediction of different prediction models, including particle swarm optimization algorithm, and fusion algorithm, and support vector machine. This work comprehensively analyzes the influence of the optimized tax supervision mode on the economic development of the ceramic industry and provides ideas for the development of the ceramic industry in Jingdezhen. The research results demonstrate that the main indicator affecting tax revenue is the added value of the primary and secondary industries. The optimized SVM based on grid search method can provide a comprehensive data base for tax forecasting. The optimization of the computer system based on cognitive psychology improves the model prediction accuracy by 10%, and the absolute error decreases from 6.9 to 1.8%. The tax forecast results indicate that the tax imbalance in Jingdezhen is increasing. Therefore, the government needs to attach great importance to the development of the ceramic industry and strictly implement the tax policy. The tax supervision model can alleviate the problems of low fiscal contribution rate, tax evasion, and management loopholes. In addition, the SVM tax prediction model optimized by grid search method will lay a theoretical foundation for the research and application of taxation in the ceramic industry. (shrink)

Cowan's analysis of human short-term memory (STM) and attention in terms of processing limits in the range of 4 items (or “chunks”) is discussed from the point of view of cognitive neuroscience. Although, Cowan already provides many important theoretical insights, we need to learn more about how to build further bridges between cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Cognitive psychologists, like biologists, frequently describe mechanisms when explaining phenomena. Unlike biologists, who can often trace material transformations to identify operations, psychologists face a more daunting task in identifying operations that transform information. Behavior provides little guidance as to the nature of the operations involved. While not itself revealing the operations, identification of brain areas involved in psychological mechanisms can help constrain attempts to characterize the operations. In current memory research, evidence that the same brain areas are involved in (...) what are often taken to be different memory phenomena or in other cognitive phenomena is playing such a heuristic function. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 0119, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093‐0119; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

I offer support for the view that physicalist theories of cognition don't reduce to neurophysiological theories. On my view, the mind-brain relationship is to be explained in terms of evolutionary forces, some of which tug in the direction of a reductionistic mind-brain relationship, and some of which which tug in the opposite direction. This theory of forces makes possible an anti-reductionist account of the cognitive mind-brain relationship which avoids psychophysical anomalism. This theory thus also responds to the complaint which (...) arguably lies behind the Churchlands' strongest criticisms of anti-reductionism — namely the complaint that anti-reductionists fail to supply principled explanations for the character of the mind-brain relationship. While lending support to anti-reductionism, the view defended here also insures a permanent place for mind-brain reduction as an explanatory ideal analogous to Newtonian inertial motion or Aristotelian natural motion. (shrink)

In 1955, Egon Brunswik presented a paper in which he argued that neglect of the environment and over emphasis of the organism was the major downfall of cognitive psychology. His critiques have largely been ignored and research is discussed that demonstrates the same organismic- asymmetry Brunswik detailed in 1955. This research is discussed in attribution terms since experimental psychologists make behavioral attributions. This organismic-asymmetry has resulted in a body of research that is guilty of the fundamental attribution error. (...) Brunswik's theory of representative design, proposed to address organismic-asymmetry, is discussed and contrasted with calls for ecological validity. Although calls for ecological validity are well intentioned, they lack any systematic theory of the environment and fall significantly short of Brunswik's ideal. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Quite unexpectedly, cognitive psychologists find their field intimately connected to a whole new intellectual landscape that had previously seemed remote, unfamiliar, and all but irrelevant. Yet the proliferating connections tying together the cognitive and evolutionary communities promise to transform both fields, with each supplying necessary principles, methods, and a species of rigor that the other lacks. (Cosmides and Tooby, 1994, p. 85).

Concept representation is still an open problem in the field of ontology engineering and, more generally, of knowledge representation. In particular, the issue of representing “non classical” concepts, i.e. concepts that cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, remains unresolved. In this paper we review empirical evidence from cognitive psychology, according to which concept representation is not a unitary phenomenon. On this basis, we sketch some proposals for concept representation, taking into account suggestions from psychological (...) research. In particular, it seems that human beings employ both prototype-based and exemplar-based representations in order to represent non classical concepts. We suggest that a similar, hybrid prototype-exemplar based approach could also prove useful in the field of knowledge representation technology. Finally, we propose conceptual spaces as a suitable framework for developing some aspects of this proposal. (shrink)

The paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined.The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional (...) dispute between “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes toitself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior.The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful. (shrink)

This short commentary argues that the potentiality argument against abortion derives its appeal from features embedded in our cognitive structure.

Pothos's analysis is difficult to relate to real human mental processes. He tackles four quite different areas of psychology and adduces evidence from a large number of paradigms. Yet despite this very large scope, he employs a single, simplistic descriptive framework. An epistemological analysis, supported by illustrations from real world decision-making, shows that this steers us away from, rather than towards, an understanding of real human cognitive processes.

The ArgumentScientific tools—measurement and calculation instruments, techniques of inference—straddle the line between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In discovery, new scientific tools suggest new theoretical metaphors and concepts; and in justification, these tool-derived theoretical metaphors and concepts are morelikely to be accepted by the scientific community if the tools are already entrenched in scientific practice.Techniques of statistical inference and hypothesis testing entered American psychology first as tools in the 1940s and 1950s and then as (...) class='Hi'>cognitive theories in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did psychologists resists statistical metaphors of mind prior to the institutionalization of inference techniques in their own practice; the cognitive theories they ultimately developed about “the mind as intuitive statistician” still bear the telltale marks of the practical laboratory context in which the tool was used. (shrink)

This paper continues the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of ontic structural realism, which begun in the first part of the paper. Non-eliminative versions of this approach are considered, which try to find a compromise between the ontology of structures and the ontology of objects. It is shown that the semirealism of A. Chakravartti and the constructive structural realism of T. Cao have a number of limitations caused by the authors’ desire to strictly distinguish between the nature of the (...) existence of objects and structures. Then the version of the relationship between structures and entities is presented. Firstly, two concepts are divided according to their content: “object” and “entity”. Second, to solve the problem of causality, I suggest that the nature of entities and structures lie in their ability to act. It is this ability that I propose to use instead of the popular concepts of “causal powers”, “causal properties” or “dispositions”. Third, instead of a rigid alternative to ontological primitives – either essence, or causal relations, or structures – the concept of ontological pluralism and inherited existence is proposed. There each entity is represented as a derivative of another structure and, in turn, creates other entities and structures. Thus, both structures and entities at each level of the complexity hierarchy partially inherit the ability to act and a certain degree of existence from the structures and entities of the previous levels. Finally, I am trying to clarify the modal aspects of the ontic structural realism. Following the popular interpretations of quantum theory, the ability to act, and hence the existence of structures and entities, are considered separately in two worlds – potential and actual ones. The potential world is associated with a set of possible objects and structures of quantum theory, and the actual world is associated with a set of real (observable) objects and structures of classical physical theories. The transition from the potential to the actual world is proposed to be considered as a primitive metaphysical event. The proposed concept partially overcomes the objections to ontic structural realism, thereby strengthening its position in the discussion about the reality of quantum objects. (shrink)