Abstract not found

Over the last several years, researchers have begun to appreciate the ways in which questions of interest to personality and social psychologists can be addressed with neuropyschological case material (e.g., Klein & Kihlstrom, 1998; Klein, Loftus, &

This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, BaronCohen et al.'s (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare dif...

This study addresses the problem of improving the quality of natural language (NL) understanding by means of the involvement of the additional criterion of correct formal representation of the input inquiry. This criterion is based on the logical compatibility between the input inquiry, translated into the formal language, and the domain, encoded in the same language. Inquiry generality is measured as a normalized number of object tuples, which deliver the translation satisfaction for a given domain. Computational experiments in various domains show that the certain diapason of generality indicates the proper translation. Specific heuristics are developed for the transformation of the translation formula to improve the value of the generality criterion. Usually, if the generality is too high (there is a large number of the tuples of objects) then the semantic analyzer has likely ignored some syntactic constraints for the translation formula. On the contrary, when the generality is too ...

Abstract not found

We build the reasoning tool of metalanguage support (MS) with the embedded mechanism of the invention of predicates and metapredicates for the comprehension and synthesis tasks. This tool, based on metalanguage representation with weakened soundness, gains the inference flexibility to represent the formal scenarios (for example, a limited class of "logical" anecdotes, derived from NL). We introduce the concept of formal scenario as an alternative to the traditional axiomatic method (logical program) for the practical applications and develop specific MS means to perform the reasoning within a formal scenario. The anecdote scenario is an appealing object of study in the logical programming because it reflects the top level of human intellectual activity on one hand and is rather compact on the other. We present such applications as scenario comprehension and generation, genetic algorithm of MS formula modifications, NL aspects of scenarios and modeling of the psychological disorder with...

ABSTRACT—Biases in reasoning can provide insight into underlying processing mechanisms. We demonstrate a new bias in children’s belief-desire reasoning. Children between 4 and 8 years of age were told a story in which a character was mistaken about which of three boxes contained some object. The character wanted to go to one of the boxes, but only if it did not contain the object. In this scenario, the character would be expected to avoid the box where she falsely believed the object to be, but might go to either of the remaining boxes. Though the character was equally likely to go to either box, children were biased to predict that the character would go to the box that contained the object. In a control task, the character had the same desire but did not have a false belief; in this case, children showed no bias, choosing the two correct answers equally often. The observed pattern of bias was predicted by a developmental

THE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the human mind and brain, as Darwin himself was the first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural science capable of precision and rapid progress. Yet, nearly a century and a half after The Origin of Species was published, the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences remain largely untouched by these implications, and many of these disciplines continue to be founded on assumptions evolutionarily informed researchers know to be false (Pinker, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences—a framework that not only incorporates the evolutionary sciences on a full and equal basis, but that systematically works out all of the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The long-term scientific goal toward which evolutionary psychologists are working is the mapping of our universal human nature. By this, we mean the construction of a set of empirically validated, high-resolution models of the evolved mechanisms that collectively constitute universal human nature. Because the evolved function of a psychological mechanism is computational—to regulate behavior and the body adaptively in response to informational inputs—such a model consists of a description of the functional circuit logic or information

otion of Agency. The system I describe does not make explicit information of a biological character. I leave it as an open empirical question whether some other part of core systems, not explored here, represents biological information (see chapters by Keil and by Carey, this volume). The central part of the theory of cognitive development deals with core cognitive architecture---it characterises those properties of the information processing system that provide the basis for development, as opposed to those properties that are the result of development. For example, in classical associationism core cognition is assumed to consist purely of statistical associative processing over elementary "sensations". In other views, core architecture is assumed to have a more varied componential character. Core structure will, in the main, reflect specialization for carrying out particular information processing tasks as a result of adaptive evolution. From this point of view, Agents have provided

this paper. They are not responsible for my views, however