Categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most differentiated from one another. The four experiments of Part I define basic objects by demonstrating that in taxonomies of common concrete nouns in English based on class inclusion, basic objects are the most inclusive categories whose members: (a) possess significant numbers of attributes in common, (b) have motor programs which are similar to one another, (c) have similar shapes, and (d) can be identified from averaged shapes of members of the class. The eight experiments of Part II explore implications of the structure of categories. Basic objects are shown to be the most inclusive categories for which a concrete image of the category as a whole can be formed, to be the first categorizations made during perception of the environment, to be the earliest categories sorted and earliest named by children, and to be the categories

SUSTAIN (Supervised and Unsupervised STratified Adaptive Incremental Network) is a model of how humans learn categories from examples. SUS-TAIN initially assumes a simple category structure. If simple solutions prove inadequate and SUSTAIN is confronted with a surprising event (e.g., it is told that a bat is a mammal instead of a bird), SUSTAIN recruits an additional cluster to represent the surprising event. Newly recruited clusters are available to explain future events and can themselves evolve into

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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

this paper is to examine the structure and meaning of a common DP construction, the kind-construction, shown in (1), against the background of partitives (2) and OF/Z possessives (3).

(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.

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.

The cognitive process of analogical reasoning has generally been thought to occur in at least three stages: retrieval of a source description from memory, mapping of that source description to the target description, and transfer of relationships from source to target. Here we are concerned with the first stage, the retrieval of relevant sources from long-term memory for their use in analogical reasoning. Specifically we ask: what can people retrieve from long-term memory when stimulated by a description of some situation, and how do they do it? Psychological experiments suggest that subjects display two sorts of retrieval patterns: a novice pattern and an expert pattern. Those subjects that show the novice pattern are much more likely to retrieve so-called merely-apparently-similar sources to a target description rather than analogically-related sources. Merelyapparently-similar sources for a target are characterized by the two descriptions sharing superficial features, such as the types or identities of objects or actors involved, whereas in an analogical relationship the source and target share description structure that is useful for making analogical inferences. In contrast to those who show the novice pattern, those subjects who show the expert pattern are much more likely to retrieve analogically-related sources to a target stimulus, as long as the target and sources fall into a domain in which

In Latin America alone, more than two and a half million hectares are under traditional agriculture, in the form of raised fields, polycultures and agroforestry systems, documenting the successful adaptation of a set of farming practices to difficult environments (Altieri 1991). Many of these traditional agroecosystems, still found throughout the Andes, Meso America and the lowland tropics, constitute major in situ repositories of both crop and wild plant germplasm. These plant resources are directly dependent upon management by human groups; thus, they have evolved in part under the influence of farming practices shaped by particular cultures and the forms of sophisticated knowledge they represent. It is no coincidence that countries containing the highest diversity of plant forms also contain the greatest number of ethnic groups. The existence of such genetic diversity, particularly in centers of origin, has special significance for the maintenance and enhancement of productivity of agricultural crops in developing countries characterized by variable agro-climates and heterogeneous environments. Such diversity provides security to farmers against diseases, pests, droughts and other stresses and also allows them to exploit the full range of

Abstract: Strong adaptationists explore complex organic design as task-specific adaptations to ancestral environments. This strategy seems best when there is evidence of homology. Weak adaptationists don’t assume that complex organic (including cognitive and linguistic) functioning necessarily or primarily represents task-specific adaptation. This approach to cognition resembles physicists ’ attempts to deductively explain the most facts with fewest hypotheses. For certain domain-specific competencies (folkbiology) strong adaptationism is useful but not necessary to research. With group-level belief systems (religion) strong adaptationism degenerates into spurious notions of social function and cultural selection. In other cases (language, especially universal grammar) weak adaptationism’s ‘minimalist ’ approach seems productive. 1.