Abstract not found

Abstract not found

There is evidence, beginning with Cheng (1986), that mobile animals may use the geometry of surrounding areas to reorient following disorientation. Gallistel (1990) proposed that geometry is used to compute the major or minor axes of space and suggested that such information might form an encapsulated cognitive module. Research reviewed here, conducted on a wide variety of species since the initial discovery of the use of geometry and the formulation of the modularity claim, has supported some aspects of the approach, while casting doubt on others. Three possible processing models are presented that vary in the way in which (and the extent to which) they instantiate the modularity claim. The extant data do not permit us to discriminate among them. We propose a modified concept of modularity for which an empirical program of research is more tractable.

In order to understand and create human-level intelligence I have developed the Polyscheme cognitive architecture to build systems that combine several representation and inference schemes when they think.

Although the process of establishing a memory of a location is necessary for navigation, relatively little is known about the information that humans use when forming place memories. We examined the relative importance of distance and angular information about landmarks in place learning. Participants repeatedly learned a target location in relation to three distinct landmarks in an immersive computer-generated (virtual) environment. Later, during testing, they attempted to return to that location. The configurations of landmarks used during testing were altered from those participants learned in order to separate the effects of metric distance information and information about inter-landmark angles. In general, participants showed greater reliance on distance information than angular information. This reliance was affected by nonmetric relationships present during learning, as well as by the degree to which the learned environment contained right or straight angles.

for assistance, and Nora Newcombe and Elliott Blass for advice and comments on the manuscript. Above all, I am grateful to Ariel Grace and Kristin Shutts for their unending support and after-hours labor on this project. Draft, 4/20/05. This paper has not yet been peer reviewed. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission. This report considers three prominent claims that boys and men have greater natural aptitude for high-level careers in mathematics and science. According to the first claim, males are more focused on objects and mechanical systems from the beginning of life. According to the second claim, males have a profile of spatial and numerical abilities that predisposes them to greater aptitude in mathematics. According to the third claim, males show greater variability in mathematical aptitude, yielding a preponderance of males at the upper end of the distribution of mathematical talent. Research on cognitive development in human infants and preschool children, and research on cognitive performance by students at all levels, provides evidence against these claims. Mathematical and scientific reasoning develop from a set of biologically based capacities that males and females share. From these capacities, men and women appear to develop equal talent for mathematics and science.

Goldstone for useful chats about learning, abstraction and surrogate situations. What do linguistic symbols do for minds like ours, and how (if at all) can basic embodied, dynamical and situated approaches do justice to high-level human thought and reason? These two questions are best addressed together, since our answers to the first may inform the second. The key move in ‘scaling-up ’ simple embodied cognitive science is, I argue, to take very seriously the potent role of human-built structures in transforming the spaces of human learning and reason. In particular, in this paper I look at a range of cases involving what I dub ‘surrogate situations’. Here, we actively create restricted artificial environments that allow us to deploy basic perception-actionreason routines in the absence of their proper objects. Examples include the use of real-world models, diagrams and other concrete external symbols to support dense looping interactions with a variety of stable external structures that stand in for the absent states of affairs. 1 Language itself, I shall finally suggest, is the most potent and fundamental form of such surrogacy. Words are both cheap stand-ins for gross behavioral outcomes, and the concrete objects that structure new spaces for basic forms of learning and reason. A good hard look at surrogate situatedness thus turns the standard skeptical challenge on its head. But it raises important questions concerning what really matters about these new approaches, and it helps focus what I see as the major challenge for the future: how, in detail, to conceptualize the role of symbols (both internal and external) in dynamical cognitive processes.

Abstract. Research on human spatial memory and navigational ability has recently shown the strong influence of reference systems in spatial memory on the ways spatial information is accessed in navigation and other spatially oriented tasks. One of the main findings can be characterized as a large cognitive cost, both in terms of speed and accuracy that occurs whenever the reference system used to encode spatial information in memory is not aligned with the reference system required by a particular task. In this paper, the role of aligned and misaligned reference systems is discussed in the context of the built environment and modern architecture. The role of architectural design on the perception and mental representation of space by humans is investigated. The navigability and usability of built space is systematically analysed in the light of cognitive theories of spatial and navigational abilities of humans. It is concluded that a building’s navigability and related wayfinding issues can benefit from architectural design that takes into account basic results of spatial cognition research.

This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal structure. I argue that informational semantics needs to be supplemented by allowing content-constitutive rules of inference (“meaning postulates”). This is because the content of one important class of concepts, the logical terms, is not plausibly informational. And since, it is argued, no principled distinction can be drawn between logical concepts and the rest, the problem that this raises is a general one.

By having subjects drive a virtual taxicab through a computer-rendered town, we examined how landmark and layout information interact during spatial navigation. Subject-drivers searched for passengers, and then attempted to take the most efficient route to the requested destinations (one of several target stores). Experiment 1 demonstrated that subjects rapidly learn to find direct paths from random pickup locations to target stores. Experiment 2 varied the degree to which landmark and layout cues were preserved across two successively learned towns. When spatial layout was preserved, transfer was low if only target stores were altered, and high if both target stores and surrounding buildings were altered, even though in the latter case all local views were changed. This suggests that subjects can rapidly acquire a survey representation based on the spatial layout of the town and independent of local views, but that subjects will rely on local views when present, and are harmed when associations between previously learned landmarks are disrupted. We propose that spatial navigation reflects a hierarchical system in which either layout or landmark information is sufficient for orienting and wayfinding; however, when these types of cues conflict, landmarks are preferentially used. The cities, neighborhoods, and buildings in which we live are rich in spatial structure, and the ability to orient within that structure is crucial for effective navigation. The opportunity to move through an environment allows people to integrate various routes into a cognitive map—a mental model of objects ’ spatial configuration that permits navigation along optimal paths between arbitrary pairs of points (Tolman, 1948). Previous research has pointed to environmental landmarks (salient objects) and environmental layout (geometrical and topological properties of spaces, also known as survey knowledge) as distinct means