Constraining Cognitive Theories PDF Download

Author: Zenon W. Pylyshyn
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This book presents a collection of essays on foundational and methodological issues in cognitive science. Topics range from the philosophical problems surrounding intentionality and holism to specific scientific issues concerned with the architecture of systems for problem solving, planning, language processing, vision and visual-motor coordination. The larger theme is cognitive architecture and the twelve chapters show the generality of the problems associated with this theme as it impinges on almost every area of cognitive science and most methodological approaches adopted to date.

Author: Karl S. Rosengren
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199909180
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
A recent poll revealed that one in four Americans believe in both creationism and evolution, while another 41% believe that creationism is true and evolution is false. A minority (only 13%) believe only in evolution. Given the widespread resistance to the idea that humans and other animals have evolved and given the attention to the ongoing debate of what should be taught in public schools, issues related to the teaching and learning of evolution are quite timely. Evolution Challenges: Integrating Research and Practice in Teaching and Learning about Evolution goes beyond the science versus religion dispute to ask why evolution is so often rejected as a legitimate scientific fact, focusing on a wide range of cognitive, socio-cultural, and motivational factors that make concepts such as evolution difficult to grasp. The volume brings together researchers with diverse backgrounds in cognitive development and education to examine children's and adults' thinking, learning, and motivation, and how aspects of representational and symbolic knowledge influence learning about evolution. The book is organized around three main challenges inherent in teaching and learning evolutionary concepts: folk theories and conceptual biases, motivational and epistemological biases, and educational aspects in both formal and informal settings. Commentaries across the three main themes tie the book together thematically, and contributors provide ideas for future research and methods for improving the manner in which evolutionary concepts are conveyed in the classroom and in informal learning experiences. Evolution Challenges is a unique text that extends far beyond the traditional evolution debate and is an invaluable resource to researchers in cognitive development, science education and the philosophy of science, science teachers, and exhibit and curriculum developers.

Author: Jean-Pierre Corriveau
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317780116
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
This book tries to answer the question posed by Minsky at the beginning of The Society of Mind: "to explain the mind, we have to show how minds are built from mindless stuff, from parts that are much smaller and simpler than anything we'd considered smart." The author believes that cognition should not be rooted in innate rules and primitives, but rather grounded in human memory. More specifically, he suggests viewing linguistic comprehension as a time-constrained process -- a race for building an interpretation in short term memory. After reviewing existing psychological and computational approaches to text understanding and concluding that they generally rely on self-validating primitives, the author abandons this objectivist and normative approach to meaning and develops a set of requirements for a grounded cognitive architecture. He then goes on to explain how this architecture must avoid all epistemological commitments, be tractable both with respect to space and time, and, most importantly, account for the diachronic and non-deterministic nature of comprehension. In other words, a text may or may not lead to an interpretation for a specific reader, and may be associated with several interpretations over time by one reader. Throughout the remainder of the book, the author demonstrates that rules for all major facets of comprehension -- syntax, reference resolution, quantification, lexical and structural disambiguation, inference and subject matter -- can be expressed in terms of the simple mechanistic computing elements of a massively parallel network modeling memory. These elements, called knowledge units, work in a limited amount of time and have the ability not only to recognize but also to build the structures that make up an interpretation. Designed as a main text for graduate courses, this volume is essential to the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, memory modeling, text understanding, computational linguistics and natural language understanding. Other areas of application are schema-matching, hermeneutics, local connectionism, and text linguistics. With its extensive bibliography, the book is also valuable as supplemental reading for introductory undergraduate courses in cognitive science and computational linguistics.

Author: Allen Newell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674921016
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
Newell introduces Soar, an architecture for general cognition. A pioneer system in AI, Soar is the first problem-solver to create its own subgoals and learn continuously from its own experience. Its ability to operate within the real-time constraints of intelligent behavior illustrates important characteristics of human cognition.

Author: Susan Carey
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317784634
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Reflecting the focus of a Jean Piaget Symposium entitled Biology and Knowledge: Structural Constraints on Development, this volume presents many of the emergent themes discussed. Among these themes are: Structural constraints on cognitive development and learning come in many shapes and forms and involve appeal to more than one level of analysis. To postulate innate knowledge is not to deny that humans can acquire new concepts. It is unlikely that there is only one learning mechanism, even if one prefers to work with general as opposed to domain-specific mechanisms. The problems of induction with respect to concept acquisition are even harder than originally thought.

Author: G. Uswatte
Publisher: Ios PressInc
ISBN: 9781586036591
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
Constraint-Induced Movement therapy (CI therapy) is a behavioral approach to neurorehabilitation based on a program of neuroscience experiments conducted with monkeys. Evidence has accumulated to support the efficacy of CI therapy for rehabilitating hemiparetic arm use in individuals with chronic stroke. This book addresses the related topics.

Author: Dan Simon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
We suggest that making decisions from multiple pieces of evidence is performed by mechanisms of constraint satisfaction. Such reasoning is bi-directional - decisions follow from the evidence, but evaluations of the evidence shift towards coherence with the emerging decision. Using a factually complex legal case, we found that patterns of coherence shifts remained constant even when the distribution of decisions was manipulated by changes in the strength of the evidence (Study 1) and standard of proof (Study 2). Similar shifts were found across participants with different attitudes (Study 3). When participants changed their preferred decision, the evaluation of the facts dovetailed with the new preference (Study 4). Supporting the bi-directionality of reasoning, Study 5 showed that assigning participants to a verdict strongly affected their evaluation of the evidence. Coherence mechanisms also influenced evaluations of related background knowledge. Implications for algebraic models of judgment (Bayes Theorem and Information Integration Theory) and for the Story Model (Pennington & Hastie, 1986) are discussed. This research argues that Cognitive Consistency Theories should play a greater role in the understanding of human cognition.

Author: Bernard J. Baars
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521427432
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena with comparable unconscious ones, such as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended or habituated. By adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of workplace in the nervous system, Baars helps clarify the problem.

Author: Irwin G. Sarason
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317843886
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
In this volume, the first synthesis of work on cognitive interference, leading researchers, theorists, and clinicians from around the world confront a number of important questions about intrusive thoughts and suggest a challenging agenda for the future.

Author: Leonard L. Martin
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135682232
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Approaching the topic from a social psychological viewpoint, this book provides a forum for some currently active theorists to provide concise descriptions of their models in a way that addresses four of the most central issues in the field: How does affect influence memory, judgment, information processing, and creativity? Each presentation includes a concise description of the theory's underlying assumptions, an application of these assumptions to the four central issues, and some answers to questions posed by the other theorists. Thus, in one volume, the reader is presented with a single authoritative source for current theories of affect and information processing and is given a chance to "listen in" on a conversation among the theorists in the form of questions and answers related to each theory. Students and researchers alike will benefit from the clarity and brevity of this volume.