This review proposes that implicit learning processes are the cognitive substrate of social intuition. This hypothesis is supported by (a) the conceptual correspondence between implicit learning and social intuition (nonverbal communication) and (b) a review of relevant neuropsychological (Huntington's and Parkinson's disease), neuroimaging, neurophysiological, and neuroanatomical data. It is concluded that the caudate and putamen, in the basal ganglia, are central components of both intuition and implicit learning, supporting the proposed relationship. Parallel, but distinct, processes of judgment and action are demonstrated at each of the social, cognitive, and neural levels of analysis. Additionally, explicit attempts to learn a sequence can interfere with implicit learning. The possible relevance of the computations of the basal ganglia to emotional appraisal, automatic evaluation, script processing, and decision making are discussed. These "feelings " have an efficiency of operation which it is impossi-ble for thought to match. Even our most highly intellectualized operations depend upon them as a "fringe " by which to guide our inferential movements. They give us our sense of rightness and wrongness, of what to select and emphasize and follow up, and what

Recent constraint-satisfaction models of explanation, analogy, and decision making claim that these processes are influenced by bidirectional constraints that promote coherence. College students were asked to reach a verdict in a complex legal case involving multiple conflicting arguments, including alternative analogies to the target case. Participants rated agreement with the individual arguments both in isolation before seeing the case, and again after reaching a verdict. Assessments of the individual arguments (including the competing analogies) shifted so as to cohere with their emerging verdict. Information about the character of the defendant in the initial case triggered a cascade of "spreading coherence", influencing decisions made about a subsequent case involving very different legal issues. Participants ' memory for their initial positions also shifted so as to cohere with their final positions. The coherence shifts were simulated by a constraint satisfaction model. The results demonstrate that an alogical process of constraint satisfaction can transform highly ambiguous inputs into coherent decisions. Bidirectional Reasoning 3 One of the most deep-rooted assumptions about human reasoning is that the flow of

This article presents a neural network simulation of the out-group homogeneity effect (OHE). The model is a feedback network with delta-rule learning that has been previously used to simulate other aspects of stereotype learning, as well as causal learning and reasoning, and human memory. This simulation achieves 2 goals: First, we show that the model could successfully simulate the OHE. We argue that this is due to the error-correcting nature of delta-rule learning. Second, we show that each of 5 aspects of the simulation influences the size of the OHE: (a) the ratio of in-group to out-group size, (b) the overall population size, (c) the learning rate, (d) the decay rate for weights, and (e) increased learning for extreme cases. The psychological relevance of these parameters and ways to study them are presented. Advantages of the model in terms of breadth of coverage for studying social cognitive phenomena are discussed. The tendency to perceive out-group members as relatively similar to one another and in-group members as relatively more heterogeneous or dissimilar is known as the out-group homogeneity effect (OHE). This tendency to perceive out-group members as “all the same ” is argued to increase stereotyping (Judd,

This paper represents an attempt to summarize what is known in cognitive, developmental and social psychology on the nature of human naive theories, The parallel human mind / www is drawn, and it is shown how the challenges addressed in Data Mining and Knowledge Acquisition are present in the mind of the individual as well. The process of cognitive development and knowledge acquisition is such that uncoordinated must result. There is no process active in Long-Term memory to harmonize inconsistent parts. Coordination takes place in Working Memory (WM), and cognitive psychology has long established its extreme smallness. Units of explanation and domains of coherence are therefore small. This is, indeed, a limitation of our cognition, but it is tenable pragmatically. Naive theories on any one issue do not form, psychologically, cognitively, a natural kind.