143 found
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  1.  93
    Bayesian Rationality: The Probabilistic Approach to Human Reasoning.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2007 - Oxford University Press.
    Are people rational? This question was central to Greek thought and has been at the heart of psychology and philosophy for millennia. This book provides a radical and controversial reappraisal of conventional wisdom in the psychology of reasoning, proposing that the Western conception of the mind as a logical system is flawed at the very outset. It argues that cognition should be understood in terms of probability theory, the calculus of uncertain reasoning, rather than in terms of logic, the calculus (...)
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  2.  72
    A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal data selection.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 1994 - Psychological Review 101 (4):608-631.
  3. Précis of bayesian rationality: The probabilistic approach to human reasoning.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (1):69-84.
    According to Aristotle, humans are the rational animal. The borderline between rationality and irrationality is fundamental to many aspects of human life including the law, mental health, and language interpretation. But what is it to be rational? One answer, deeply embedded in the Western intellectual tradition since ancient Greece, is that rationality concerns reasoning according to the rules of logic – the formal theory that specifies the inferential connections that hold with certainty between propositions. Piaget viewed logical reasoning as defining (...)
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  4. Language as shaped by the brain.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (5):489-509.
    It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change (...)
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  5.  87
    The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39:e62.
    Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build (...)
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  6. Against Logicist Cognitive Science.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 1991 - Mind and Language 6 (1):1-38.
  7. The Probabilistic Mind: Prospects for Bayesian Cognitive Science.Nick Chater & Mike Oaksford (eds.) - 2008 - Oxford University Press.
    'The Probabilistic Mind' is a follow-up to the influential and highly cited 'Rational Models of Cognition'. It brings together developments in understanding how, and how far, high-level cognitive processes can be understood in rational terms, and particularly using probabilistic Bayesian methods.
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  8. (1 other version)Probabilistic models of cognition: Conceptual foundations.Nick Chater & Alan Yuille - 2006 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (7):287-291.
    Remarkable progress in the mathematics and computer science of probability has led to a revolution in the scope of probabilistic models. In particular, ‘sophisticated’ probabilistic methods apply to structured relational systems such as graphs and grammars, of immediate relevance to the cognitive sciences. This Special Issue outlines progress in this rapidly developing field, which provides a potentially unifying perspective across a wide range of domains and levels of explanation. Here, we introduce the historical and conceptual foundations of the approach, explore (...)
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  9.  50
    Cognition and Conditionals: Probability and Logic in Human Thought.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater (eds.) - 2010 - Oxford University Press.
    This book shows how these developments have led researchers to view people's conditional reasoning behaviour more as succesful probabilistic reasoning rather ...
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  10. Simplicity: A unifying principle in cognitive science?Nick Chater & Paul Vitányi - 2003 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (1):19-22.
  11.  23
    Rational Models of Cognition.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater (eds.) - 1998 - Oxford University Press UK.
    This book explores a new approach to understanding the human mind - rational analysis - that regards thinking as a facility adapted to the structure of the world. This approach is most closely associated with the work of John R Anderson, who published the original book on rational analysis in 1990. Since then, a great deal of work has been carried out in a number of laboratories around the world, and the aim of this book is to bring this work (...)
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  12. Logicism, Mental Models and Everyday Reasoning: Reply to Garnham.Nick Chater & Mike Oaksford - 1993 - Mind and Language 8 (1):72-89.
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  13. Networks in Cognitive Science.Andrea Baronchelli, Ramon Ferrer-I.-Cancho, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, Nick Chater & Morten H. Christiansen - 2013 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17 (7):348-360.
  14.  88
    Autonomy, implementation and cognitive architecture: A reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn.Nick Chater & Mike Oaksford - 1990 - Cognition 34 (1):93-107.
  15.  55
    Toward a Connectionist Model of Recursion in Human Linguistic Performance.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 1999 - Cognitive Science 23 (2):157-205.
    Naturally occurring speech contains only a limited amount of complex recursive structure, and this is reflected in the empirically documented difficulties that people experience when processing such structures. We present a connectionist model of human performance in processing recursive language structures. The model is trained on simple artificial languages. We find that the qualitative performance profile of the model matches human behavior, both on the relative difficulty of center‐embedding and cross‐dependency, and between the processing of these complex recursive structures and (...)
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  16. The probabilistic approach to human reasoning.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2001 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (8):349-357.
    A recent development in the cognitive science of reasoning has been the emergence of a probabilistic approach to the behaviour observed on ostensibly logical tasks. According to this approach the errors and biases documented on these tasks occur because people import their everyday uncertain reasoning strategies into the laboratory. Consequently participants' apparently irrational behaviour is the result of comparing it with an inappropriate logical standard. In this article, we contrast the probabilistic approach with other approaches to explaining rationality, and then (...)
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  17.  54
    Distributional Information: A Powerful Cue for Acquiring Syntactic Categories.Martin Redington, Nick Chater & Steven Finch - 1998 - Cognitive Science 22 (4):425-469.
    Many theorists have dismissed a priori the idea that distributional information could play a significant role in syntactic category acquisition. We demonstrate empirically that such information provides a powerful cue to syntactic category membership, which can be exploited by a variety of simple, psychologically plausible mechanisms. We present a range of results using a large corpus of child‐directed speech and explore their psychological implications. While our results show that a considerable amount of information concerning the syntactic categories can be obtained (...)
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  18.  54
    Dynamic inference and everyday conditional reasoning in the new paradigm.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2013 - Thinking and Reasoning 19 (3-4):346-379.
  19.  78
    The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray.Nick Chater & George Loewenstein - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e147.
    An influential line of thinking in behavioral science, to which the two authors have long subscribed, is that many of society's most pressing problems can be addressed cheaply and effectively at the level of the individual, without modifying the system in which the individual operates. We now believe this was a mistake, along with, we suspect, many colleagues in both the academic and policy communities. Results from such interventions have been disappointingly modest. But more importantly, they have guided many (though (...)
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  20.  27
    The Bayesian sampler: Generic Bayesian inference causes incoherence in human probability judgments.Jian-Qiao Zhu, Adam N. Sanborn & Nick Chater - 2020 - Psychological Review 127 (5):719-748.
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  21. Probabilistic models of language processing and acquisition.Nick Chater & Christopher D. Manning - 2006 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (7):335–344.
    Probabilistic methods are providing new explanatory approaches to fundamental cognitive science questions of how humans structure, process and acquire language. This review examines probabilistic models defined over traditional symbolic structures. Language comprehension and production involve probabilistic inference in such models; and acquisition involves choosing the best model, given innate constraints and linguistic and other input. Probabilistic models can account for the learning and processing of language, while maintaining the sophistication of symbolic models. A recent burgeoning of theoretical developments and online (...)
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  22.  41
    A temporal ratio model of memory.Gordon D. A. Brown, Ian Neath & Nick Chater - 2007 - Psychological Review 114 (3):539-576.
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  23. New Axioms for Probability and Likelihood Ratio Measures.Vincenzo Crupi, Nick Chater & Katya Tentori - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (1):189-204.
    Probability ratio and likelihood ratio measures of inductive support and related notions have appeared as theoretical tools for probabilistic approaches in the philosophy of science, the psychology of reasoning, and artificial intelligence. In an effort of conceptual clarification, several authors have pursued axiomatic foundations for these two families of measures. Such results have been criticized, however, as relying on unduly demanding or poorly motivated mathematical assumptions. We provide two novel theorems showing that probability ratio and likelihood ratio measures can be (...)
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  24. Decision by sampling.Nick Chater & Gordon D. A. Brown - unknown
    We present a theory of decision by sampling (DbS) in which, in contrast with traditional models, there are no underlying psychoeconomic scales. Instead, we assume that an attribute’s subjective value is constructed from a series of binary, ordinal comparisons to a sample of attribute values drawn from memory and is its rank within the sample. We assume that the sample reflects both the immediate distribution of attribute values from the current decision’s context and also the background, real-world distribution of attribute (...)
     
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  25.  30
    Rational explanation of the selection task.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 1996 - Psychological Review 103 (2):381-391.
  26.  76
    The mental representation of causal conditional reasoning: Mental models or causal models.Nilufa Ali, Nick Chater & Mike Oaksford - 2011 - Cognition 119 (3):403-418.
  27.  38
    Reconciling simplicity and likelihood principles in perceptual organization.Nick Chater - 1996 - Psychological Review 103 (3):566-581.
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  28. Language Acquisition Meets Language Evolution.Nick Chater & Morten H. Christiansen - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (7):1131-1157.
    Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the (...)
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  29.  32
    Fast, frugal, and rational: How rational norms explain behavior.Nick Chater, Mike Oaksford, Ramin Nakisa & Martin Redington - 2003 - Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 90 (1):63-86.
    Much research on judgment and decision making has focussed on the adequacy of classical rationality as a description of human reasoning. But more recently it has been argued that classical rationality should also be rejected even as normative standards for human reasoning. For example, Gigerenzer and Goldstein and Gigerenzer and Todd argue that reasoning involves “fast and frugal” algorithms which are not justified by rational norms, but which succeed in the environment. They provide three lines of argument for this view, (...)
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  30.  54
    The differential role of phonological and distributional cues in grammatical categorisation.Padraic Monaghan, Nick Chater & Morten H. Christiansen - 2005 - Cognition 96 (2):143-182.
  31.  21
    When rules are over-ruled: Virtual bargaining as a contractualist method of moral judgment.Sydney Levine, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Nick Chater, Fiery Cushman & Joshua B. Tenenbaum - 2024 - Cognition 250 (C):105790.
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  32.  26
    Noise in cognition : bug or feature?Adam N. Sanborn, Jian-Qiao Zhu, Jake Spicer, Pablo León-Villagrá, Lucas Castillo, Johanna K. Falbén, Yun-Xiao Li, Aidan Tee & Nick Chater - forthcoming - .
    Noise in behavior is often viewed as a nuisance: while the mind aims to take the best possible action, it is let down by unreliability in the sensory and response systems. How researchers study cognition reflects this viewpoint – averaging over trials and participants to discover the deterministic relationships between experimental manipulations and their behavioral consequences, with noise represented as additive, often Gaussian, and independent. Yet a careful look at behavioral noise reveals rich structure that defies easy explanation. First, both (...)
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  33.  44
    Probability logic and the Modus Ponens-Modus Tollens asymmetry in conditional inference.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2008 - In Nick Chater & Mike Oaksford (eds.), The Probabilistic Mind: Prospects for Bayesian Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press. pp. 97--120.
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  34.  48
    Absolute Identification by Relative Judgment.Neil Stewart, Gordon D. A. Brown & Nick Chater - 2005 - Psychological Review 112 (4):881-911.
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  35.  73
    Similarity as transformation.Ulrike Hahn, Nick Chater & Lucy B. Richardson - 2003 - Cognition 87 (1):1-32.
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  36.  64
    A simplicity principle in unsupervised human categorization.Emmanuel M. Pothos & Nick Chater - 2002 - Cognitive Science 26 (3):303-343.
    We address the problem of predicting how people will spontaneously divide into groups a set of novel items. This is a process akin to perceptual organization. We therefore employ the simplicity principle from perceptual organization to propose a simplicity model of unconstrained spontaneous grouping. The simplicity model predicts that people would prefer the categories for a set of novel items that provide the simplest encoding of these items. Classification predictions are derived from the model without information either about the number (...)
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  37.  43
    Transfer in artificial grammar learning: A reevaluation.Martin Redington & Nick Chater - 1996 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 125 (2):123.
  38.  37
    The language faculty that wasn't: a usage-based account of natural language recursion.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6:150920.
    In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking—perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerges gradually by piggybacking on (...)
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  39.  36
    Empiricism and Language Learnability.Nick Chater, Alexander Simon Clark, John A. Goldsmith & Amy Perfors - 2015 - Oxford University Press UK.
    This interdisciplinary new work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. The authors, from different backgrounds---linguistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology and cognitive science-explore the idea that language acquisition proceeds through general purpose learning mechanisms, an approach that is broadly empiricist both methodologically and psychologically. Written by four researchers in the full range of relevant fields: linguistics, psychology, computer science, and cognitive science, the book sheds light on the central problems of learnability and language, and traces their implications (...)
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  40.  82
    The imaginary fundamentalists: The unshocking truth about Bayesian cognitive science.Nick Chater, Noah Goodman, Thomas L. Griffiths, Charles Kemp, Mike Oaksford & Joshua B. Tenenbaum - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (4):194-196.
    If Bayesian Fundamentalism existed, Jones & Love's (J&L's) arguments would provide a necessary corrective. But it does not. Bayesian cognitive science is deeply concerned with characterizing algorithms and representations, and, ultimately, implementations in neural circuits; it pays close attention to environmental structure and the constraints of behavioral data, when available; and it rigorously compares multiple models, both within and across papers. J&L's recommendation of Bayesian Enlightenment corresponds to past, present, and, we hope, future practice in Bayesian cognitive science.
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  41.  88
    Probabilistic effects in data selection.Mike Oaksford, Nick Chater & Becki Grainger - 1999 - Thinking and Reasoning 5 (3):193 – 243.
    Four experiments investigated the effects of probability manipulations on the indicative four card selection task (Wason, 1966, 1968). All looked at the effects of high and low probability antecedents (p) and consequents (q) on participants' data selections when determining the truth or falsity of a conditional rule, if p then q . Experiments 1 and 2 also manipulated believability. In Experiment 1, 128 participants performed the task using rules with varied contents pretested for probability of occurrence. Probabilistic effects were observed (...)
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  42.  72
    Similarity and rules: distinct? exhaustive? empirically distinguishable?Ulrike Hahn & Nick Chater - 1998 - Cognition 65 (2-3):197-230.
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  43.  75
    Dual processes, probabilities, and cognitive architecture.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2012 - Mind and Society 11 (1):15-26.
    It has been argued that dual process theories are not consistent with Oaksford and Chater’s probabilistic approach to human reasoning (Oaksford and Chater in Psychol Rev 101:608–631, 1994 , 2007 ; Oaksford et al. 2000 ), which has been characterised as a “single-level probabilistic treatment[s]” (Evans 2007 ). In this paper, it is argued that this characterisation conflates levels of computational explanation. The probabilistic approach is a computational level theory which is consistent with theories of general cognitive architecture that invoke (...)
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  44.  10
    Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition.Sydney Levine, Nick Chater, Joshua B. Tenenbaum & Fiery Cushman - forthcoming - Behavioral and Brain Sciences:1-38.
    It is widely agreed upon that morality guides people with conflicting interests towards agreements of mutual benefit. We therefore might expect numerous proposals for organizing human moral cognition around the logic of bargaining, negotiation, and agreement. Yet, while “contractualist” ideas play an important role in moral philosophy, they are starkly underrepresented in the field of moral psychology. From a contractualist perspective, ideal moral judgments are those that would be agreed to by rational bargaining agents—an idea with wide-spread support in philosophy, (...)
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  45.  68
    (1 other version)Connectionist Natural Language Processing: The State of the Art.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 1999 - Cognitive Science 23 (4):417-437.
    This Special Issue on Connectionist Models of Human Language Processing provides an opportunity for an appraisal both of specific connectionist models and of the status and utility of connectionist models of language in general. This introduction provides the background for the papers in the Special Issue. The development of connectionist models of language is traced, from their intellectual origins, to the state of current research. Key themes that arise throughout different areas of connectionist psycholinguistics are highlighted, and recent developments in (...)
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  46. The rational analysis of mind and behavior.Nick Chater & Mike Oaksford - 2000 - Synthese 122 (1-2):93-131.
    Rational analysis (Anderson 1990, 1991a) is an empiricalprogram of attempting to explain why the cognitive system isadaptive, with respect to its goals and the structure of itsenvironment. We argue that rational analysis has two importantimplications for philosophical debate concerning rationality. First,rational analysis provides a model for the relationship betweenformal principles of rationality (such as probability or decisiontheory) and everyday rationality, in the sense of successfulthought and action in daily life. Second, applying the program ofrational analysis to research on human reasoning (...)
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  47.  17
    Instantaneous systems of communicative conventions through virtual bargaining.Jennifer Misyak & Nick Chater - 2022 - Cognition 225 (C):105097.
  48.  50
    Probabilistic single function dual process theory and logic programming as approaches to non-monotonicity in human vs. artificial reasoning.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2014 - Thinking and Reasoning 20 (2):269-295.
  49. The uncertain reasoner: Bayes, logic, and rationality.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (1):105-120.
    Human cognition requires coping with a complex and uncertain world. This suggests that dealing with uncertainty may be the central challenge for human reasoning. In Bayesian Rationality we argue that probability theory, the calculus of uncertainty, is the right framework in which to understand everyday reasoning. We also argue that probability theory explains behavior, even on experimental tasks that have been designed to probe people's logical reasoning abilities. Most commentators agree on the centrality of uncertainty; some suggest that there is (...)
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  50.  89
    The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition: A Probabilistic Perspective.Anne S. Hsu & Nick Chater - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (6):972-1016.
    Natural language is full of patterns that appear to fit with general linguistic rules but are ungrammatical. There has been much debate over how children acquire these “linguistic restrictions,” and whether innate language knowledge is needed. Recently, it has been shown that restrictions in language can be learned asymptotically via probabilistic inference using the minimum description length (MDL) principle. Here, we extend the MDL approach to give a simple and practical methodology for estimating how much linguistic data are required to (...)
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