The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated the contributions of readily observable environmental statistical regularities to semantic organization in childhood. Specifically, we investigated whether co‐occurrence regularities with which entities or their labels more reliably occur together than with others (a) contribute to (...) relations between concepts independently and (b) contribute to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. Using child‐directed speech corpora to estimate reliable co‐occurrences between labels for familiar items, we constructed triads consisting of a target, a related distractor, and an unrelated distractor in which targets and related distractors consistently co‐occurred (e.g., sock‐foot), belonged to the same taxonomic category (e.g., sock‐coat), or both (e.g., sock‐shoe). We used an implicit, eye‐gaze measure of relations between concepts based on the degree to which children (N = 72, age 4–7 years) looked at related versus unrelated distractors when asked to look for a target. The results indicated that co‐occurrence both independently contributes to relations between concepts and contributes to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the regularity with which different entities co‐occur in children's environments shapes the organization of semantic knowledge during development. Implications for theoretical accounts and empirical investigations of semantic organization are discussed. (shrink)

In some circumstances, children of 5 produce identical classifications to 10 year olds when asked to sort a collection of objects. This has been interpreted as meaning that the process of constructing classifications is very similar at 5 and 10 years. But this conclusion rests on a comparison of the product of children's sortings, rather than on a study of their activity in producing sortings. The present paper argues that the process of classifying is in fact very different for 5 (...) and 10 year olds: whereas the older children treat the whole classification as a single unit composed of interrelated classes, the younger children proceed as though each class were independent of the others. At around 7 years, there is evidence for a transitional phase, in which children directly work on the relations between classes and so organize their initially “juxtaposed” procedures into more coherent systems. The tendency to work on the relations between elements in the process of classifying is not, however, simply an age‐related phenomenon: evidence for a similar effect can be observed in children throughout the age range of 5 to 10 years, during the course of short experimental sessions. Furthermore, the effect is not merely a response to errors or difficulties: the tendency to work on classifying relations can be seen in 5‐year‐old children in a task in which they are already successful. It seems that children spontaneously discover and use information about their procedures and the relations between them. This process is an end in itself. It occurs whether or not its results yield more successful performance. The approach taken in this paper is not confined to one area of behavior. This analysis of children's classifying fits closely with work in a very different domain, i.e. Karmiloff‐Smith's work on children's language and other representational systems. The analysis has implications for computer models of skill acquisition, as well as for psychological theories of development. (shrink)

In this response, we clarify several misunderstandings of the understanding/acceptance principle and defend our specific operationalization of that principle. We reiterate the importance of addressing the problem of rational task construal and we elaborate the notion of computational limitations contained in our target article. Our concept of thinking dispositions as variable intentional-level styles of epistemic and behavioral regulation is explained, as is its relation to the rationality debate. Many of the suggestions of the commentators for elaborating two-process models are easily (...) integrated into our generic dual-process account. We further explicate how we view the relation between System 1 and System 2 and evolutionary and normative rationality. We clarify our attempt to fuse the contributions of the cognitive ecologists with the insights of the original heuristics and biases researchers. (shrink)

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make (...) two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives, and that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child’s conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children’s conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences. We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions ; this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening – by both the child and the adult – even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion. (shrink)

Previous neural network models of concept learning were mainly implemented with supervised learning schemes. However, studies of human conceptual memory have shown that concepts may be learned without a teacher who provides the category name to associate with exemplars. A modular neural network architecture that realizes concept acquisition through two functionally distinct operations, categorizing and naming, is proposed as an alternative. An unsupervised algorithm realizes the categorizing module by constructing representations of categories compatible with prototype theory. The naming module associates (...) category names to the output of the categorizing module in a supervised mode. In such a modular architecture, the interface between the modules can be conceived of as an “information relay” that encodes, constrains, and propagates important information. Five experiments were conducted to analyze the relationships among internal conceptual codes and simple conceptual and lexical development. The first two experiments show a prototype effect and illustrate some basic characteristics of the system. The third experiment presents a bottom‐up model of the narrowing down of children's early lexical categories that honors mutual exclusivity. The fourth experiment introduces top‐down constraints on conceptual coding. The fifth experiment exhibits how hierarchical relationships between concepts are learned by the architecture, and also demonstrates how a spectrum of conceptual expertise may gradually emerge as a consequence of experiencing more with certain categories than with others. (shrink)

Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate (...) the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds. (shrink)

In our target article, we argued that there is a profound functional discontinuity between the cognitive abilities of modern humans and those of all other extant species. Unsurprisingly, our hypothesis elicited a wide range of responses from commentators. After responding to the commentaries, we conclude that our hypothesis lies closer to Darwin's views on the matter than to those of many of our contemporaries.

Recent work on the acquisition of number words has emphasized the importance of integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives [Musolino, J. (2004). The semantics and acquisition of number words: Integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives. Cognition93, 1-41; Papafragou, A., Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 253-282; Hurewitz, F., Papafragou, A., Gleitman, L., Gelman, R. (2006). Asymmetries in the acquisition of numbers and quantifiers. Language Learning and Development, 2, 76-97; Huang, Y. T., Snedeker, J., Spelke, (...) L. (submitted for publication). What exactly do numbers mean?]. Specifically, these studies have shown that data from experimental investigations of child language can be used to illuminate core theoretical issues in the semantic and pragmatic analysis of number terms. In this article, I extend this approach to the logico-syntactic properties of number words, focusing on the way numerals interact with each other (e.g. Three boys are holding two balloons) as well as with other quantified expressions (e.g. Three boys are holding each balloon). On the basis of their intuitions, linguists have claimed that such sentences give rise to at least four different interpretations, reflecting the complexity of the linguistic structure and syntactic operations involved. Using psycholinguistic experimentation with preschoolers (n=32) and adult speakers of English (n=32), I show that (a) for adults, the intuitions of linguists can be verified experimentally, (b) by the age of 5, children have knowledge of the core aspects of the logical syntax of number words, (c) in spite of this knowledge, children nevertheless differ from adults in systematic ways, (d) the differences observed between children and adults can be accounted for on the basis of an independently motivated, linguistically-based processing model [Geurts, B. (2003). Quantifying kids. Language Acquisition, 11(4), 197-218]. In doing so, this work ties together research on the acquisition of the number vocabulary with a growing body of work on the development of quantification and sentence processing abilities in young children [Geurts, 2003; Lidz, J., Musolino, J. (2002). Children's command of quantification. Cognition, 84, 113-154; Musolino, J., Lidz, J. (2003). The scope of isomorphism: Turning adults into children. Language Acquisition, 11(4), 277-291; Trueswell, J., Sekerina, I., Hilland, N., Logrip, M. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89-134; Noveck, I. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition, 78, 165-188; Noveck, I., Guelminger, R., Georgieff, N., & Labruyere, N. (2007). What autism can tell us about every. . . not sentences. Journal of Semantics,24(1), 73-90. On a more general level, this work confirms the importance of integrating formal and developmental perspectives [Musolino, 2004], this time by highlighting the explanatory power of linguistically-based models of language acquisition and by showing that the complex structure postulated by linguists has important implications for developmental accounts of the number vocabulary. (shrink)

Both scientists and children make important structural discoveries, yet their computational underpinnings are not well understood. Structure discovery has previously been formalized as probabilistic inference about the right structural form—where form could be a tree, ring, chain, grid, etc.. Although this approach can learn intuitive organizations, including a tree for animals and a ring for the color circle, it assumes a strong inductive bias that considers only these particular forms, and each form is explicitly provided as initial knowledge. Here we (...) introduce a new computational model of how organizing structure can be discovered, utilizing a broad hypothesis space with a preference for sparse connectivity. Given that the inductive bias is more general, the model's initial knowledge shows little qualitative resemblance to some of the discoveries it supports. As a consequence, the model can also learn complex structures for domains that lack intuitive description, as well as predict human property induction judgments without explicit structural forms. By allowing form to emerge from sparsity, our approach clarifies how both the richness and flexibility of human conceptual organization can coexist. (shrink)

Can the general public learn to deal with risk and uncertainty, or do authorities need to steer people’s choices in the right direction? Libertarian paternalists argue that results from psychological research show that our reasoning is systematically flawed and that we are hardly educable because our cognitive biases resemble stable visual illusions. For that reason, they maintain, authorities who know what is best for us need to step in and steer our behavior with the help of “nudges.” Nudges are nothing (...) new, but justifying them on the basis of a latent irrationality is. In this article, I analyze the scientific evidence presented for such a justification. It suffers from narrow logical norms, that is, a misunderstanding of the nature of rational thinking, and from a confirmation bias, that is, selective reporting of research. These two flaws focus the blame on individuals’ minds rather than on external causes, such as industries that spend billions to nudge people into unhealthy behavior. I conclude that the claim that we are hardly educable lacks evidence and forecloses the true alternative to nudging: teaching people to become risk savvy. (shrink)

Forty years of experimentation on class inclusion and its probabilistic relatives have led to inconsistent results and conclusions about human reasoning. Recent research on the conjunction "fallacy" recapitulates this history. In contrast to previous results, we found that a majority of participants adhere to class inclusion in the classic Linda problem. We outline a theoretical framework that attributes the contradictory results to differences in statistical sophistication and to differences in response mode-whether participants are asked for probability estimates or ranks-and propose (...) two precise cognitive algorithms for ranking probabilities. Our framework allows us to make novel predictions about when and why people adhere to class inclusion. Evidence obtained in several studies supports these predictions and demonstrates that the proposed ranking algorithms can account for about three-quarters of participants' inferences in the Linda problem. (shrink)

This study determined the cognitive skills achievement in mathematics of elementary pre-service teachers as a basis for improving problem-solving and critical thinking which was analyzed using Piaget's seven logical operations namely: classification, seriation, logical multiplication, compensation, ratio and proportional thinking, probability thinking, and correlational thinking. This study utilized an adopted Test on Logical Operations (TLO) and descriptive research design to describe the cognitive skills achievement and to determine the affecting factors. Overall, elementary pre-service teachers performed with sufficient understanding in dealing (...) with the TLO. However, in each logical operation, students were found to have insufficient understanding of probability thinking and correlational thinking. These insufficiencies in other logical operations were attributed to their misconceptions on some mathematical terms, misinterpretation of the problems, poor comprehension skills, poor problem-solving skills, and poor performance in mathematics in general. (shrink)

This thesis studies the role of conceptual content in inference and reasoning. The first two chapters offer a theoretical and historical overview of the relation between inference and meaning in philosophy and psychology. In particular, a critical analysis of the formality thesis, i.e., the idea that rational inference is a rule-based and topic-neutral mechanism, is advanced. The origins of this idea in logic and its influence in philosophy and cognitive psychology are discussed. Chapter 3 consists of an analysis of the (...) relationship between inference and representation. It is argued that inference has to be studied from a pluralistic per- spective due to its dependence on different formats of representing information. The following four chapters apply conceptual spaces, a formal theory of concepts within cognitive semantics, to three concept-based inference-types. First, an explication of Sellars notion of material inference is advanced. Later, the model is extended to account for nonmonotonic inference by studying the role expectations in reasoning. Finally, a conceptual space-model of category-based induction is presented. This model predicts most of the empirical properties of this psychological phenomenon and subsumes some of the previous theories in psychology. It is stated that the explanatory fruitfulness of this new approach is evidence for the failure of the formality thesis and calls for a unified model of rational inference that puts semantics at center stage. The last chapter of the thesis discusses how inference and concepts interact in scientific reasoning, which makes constant use of hybrid symbolic structures for representing conceptual information. Stephen Toulmin’s notions of method of representation and inferential technique are developed and applied in a case study about the emergence of the notion of instantaneous speed during the passage from geometrical physics to analytical mechanics. It is claimed that this analysis provides support to the pluralistic perspective for theorizing about reasoning. (shrink)