The authors examined inductive reasoning among experts in a domain. Three types of tree experts (landscapers, taxonomists, and parks maintenance personnel) completed 3 reasoning tasks. In Experi-ment 1, participants inferred which of 2 novel diseases would affect "more other kinds of trees " and provided justifications for their choices. In Experiment 2, the authors used modified instructions and asked which disease would be more likely to affect "all trees. " In Experiment 3, the conclusion category was eliminated altogether, and participants were asked to generate a list of other affected trees. Among these populations, typicality and diversity effects were weak to nonexistent. Instead, experts ' reasoning was influenced by "local " coverage (extension of the property to members of the same folk family) and causal-ecological factors. The authors concluded that domain knowledge leads to the use of a variety of reasoning strategies not captured by current models of category-based induction. Cognitive psychologists are increasingly interested in concep-tual functions beyond categorization (e.g., Barsalou & Hale, 1992; Markman, Yamauchi, & Makin, 1997; Pazzani, 1991; Ross, 1996, 1997; Wisniewski, 1995). Particularly, they have focused on the use of categories in reasoning and have proposed a number of formal models of category-based reasoning (e.g., Heit, 1998; Mc-

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conditioning, etc.). Piaget spelled out a list of "formal operations," such as modus ponens, the probability schema, etc., which he regarded as the fundamental deductive and inductive rule schemas necessary to understand the world. The cognitive revolution, from its earliest incarnation in the work of such theorists as George Miller and Herbert Simon, until nearly the end of the 20 century, essentially embraced Piaget's position of extreme formalism and content independence of inferential rules. Cognitive scientists' endorsement of the formalist, universalistic position was undoubtedly encouraged by the analogy between the human mind and the computer: brain = hardware, cognitive procedures = operating principles and factory-installed software (Block, 1995). This analogy both encouraged the universality assumption and discouraged any assumption that cognitive procedures might be alterable. The heuristics and biases movement of Kahneman and Tversky (1974) and their colleagues in social

(Word Count: 100) Memes are hypothetical cultural units passed on by imitation; although non-biological, they undergo Darwinian selection like genes. Cognitive study of multimodular human minds undermines memetics: unlike genetic replication, high fidelity transmission of cultural information is the exception, not the rule. Constant, rapid “mutation ” of information during communication generates endlessly varied creations that nevertheless adhere to modular input conditions. The sort of cultural information most susceptible to modular processing is that most readily acquired by children, most easily transmitted across individuals, most apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration.

A central question in cognitive research concerns how new properties are generalized to categories. This article introduces a model of how generalizations involve a process of causal inference in which people estimate the likely presence of the new property in individual category exemplars and then the prevalence of the property among all category members. Evidence in favor of this causalbased generalization (CBG) view included effects of an existing feature’s base rate (Experiment 1), the direction of the causal relations (Experiments 2 and 4), the number of those relations (Experiment 3), and the distribution of features among category members (Experiments 4 and 5). The results provided no support for an alternative view that generalizations are promoted by the centrality of the to-be-generalized feature. However, there was evidence that a minority of participants based their judgments on simpler associative reasoning processes. Keywords: Causal-based induction; Generalization; Causal reasoning 1.

This paper examines the use of qualitative representations in modeling the similarities and differences in causal reasoning for biological kinds between Menominee Native Americans and US majority culture. Qualitative Concept Maps are used for modeling and analyzing transcripts of interviews conducted with these groups. The individual models are used to construct generalizations for the groups, which are tested both by inspection and by creating a classifier to distinguish models from these two cultures.

this paper to answer." (p. 163)

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Humans are unique among animals for both the diverse complexity of our cognition and our reliance on culture, the socially-transmitted representations and practices that shape experience and behavior. Adopting an evolutionary psychological approach, in this essay we consider four different facets of the relationship between cognition and culture. We begin with a discussion of two well-established research traditions, the investigation of features of mind that are universal despite cultural diversity, and the examination of features of mind that vary across cultures. We then turn to two topics that have only recently begun to receive attention, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of cultural information, and the effects of features of cognition on culture. Throughout, our goal is not to provide comprehensive reviews so much as to frame these issues in such a way as to spur further research.