•  16
    Editorial to the special issue on perspectives on human probabilistic inference and the 'Bayesian brain'
    with Johan Kwisthout, William A. Phillips, Anil K. Seth, and Andy Clark
    Brain and Cognition 112 1-2. 2017.
  •  12
    Naturalism, tractability and the adaptive toolbox
    with Todd Wareham, Marieke Sweers, Maria Otworowska, Ronald de Haan, Mark Blokpoel, and Patricia Rich
    Synthese 198 (6): 5749-5784. 2019.
    Many compelling examples have recently been provided in which people can achieve impressive epistemic success, e.g. draw highly accurate inferences, by using simple heuristics and very little information. This is possible by taking advantage of the features of the environment. The examples suggest an easy and appealing naturalization of rationality: on the one hand, people clearly can apply simple heuristics, and on the other hand, they intuitively ought do so when this brings them high accuracy…Read more
  •  9
    How Intractability Spans the Cognitive and Evolutionary Levels of Explanation
    with Patricia Rich, Mark Blokpoel, and Ronald de Haan
    Topics in Cognitive Science 12 (4): 1382-1402. 2020.
    This paper focuses on the cognitive/computational and evolutionary levels. It describes three proposals to make cognition computationally tractable, namely: Resource Rationality, the Adaptive Toolbox and Massive Modularity. While each of these proposals appeals to evolutionary considerations to dissolve the intractability of cognition, Rich, Blokpoel, de Haan, and van Rooij argue that, in each case, the intractability challenge is not resolved, but just relocated to the level of evolution.
  •  11
    Cognition and Intractability: A Guide to Classical and Parameterized Complexity Analysis
    with Mark Blokpoel, Johan Kwisthout, and Todd Wareham
    Cambridge University Press. 2019.
    Intractability is a growing concern across the cognitive sciences: while many models of cognition can describe and predict human behavior in the lab, it remains unclear how these models can scale to situations of real-world complexity. Cognition and Intractability is the first book to provide an accessible introduction to computational complexity analysis and its application to questions of intractability in cognitive science. Covering both classical and parameterized complexity analysis, it int…Read more
  •  712
    Intractability and the use of heuristics in psychological explanations
    with Cory Wright and Todd Wareham
    Synthese 187 (2): 471-487. 2012.
    Many cognitive scientists, having discovered that some computational-level characterization f of a cognitive capacity φ is intractable, invoke heuristics as algorithmic-level explanations of how cognizers compute f. We argue that such explanations are actually dysfunctional, and rebut five possible objections. We then propose computational-level theory revision as a principled and workable alternative.
  •  108
    Self-Organization Takes Time Too
    Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (1): 63-71. 2012.
    Four articles in this issue of topiCS (volume 4, issue 1) argue against a computational approach in cognitive science in favor of a dynamical approach. I concur that the computational approach faces some considerable explanatory challenges. Yet the dynamicists’ proposal that cognition is self-organized seems to only go so far in addressing these challenges. Take, for instance, the hypothesis that cognitive behavior emerges when brain and body (re-)configure to satisfy task and environmental cons…Read more
  •  20
    The Tractable Cognition Thesis
    Cognitive Science 32 (6): 939-984. 2008.
    The recognition that human minds/brains are finite systems with limited resources for computation has led some researchers to advance theTractable Cognition thesis: Human cognitive capacities are constrained by computational tractability. This thesis, if true, serves cognitive psychology by constraining the space of computational‐level theories of cognition. To utilize this constraint, a precise and workable definition of “computational tractability” is needed. Following computer science traditi…Read more
  •  224
    Advancement in cognitive science depends, in part, on doing some occasional ‘theoretical housekeeping’. We highlight some conceptual confusions lurking in an important attempt at explaining the human capacity for rational or coherent thought: Thagard & Verbeurgt’s computational-level model of humans’ capacity for making reasonable and truth-conducive abductive inferences (1998; Thagard, 2000). Thagard & Verbeurgt’s model assumes that humans make such inferences by computing a coherence function …Read more
  •  908
    Rational analysis, intractability, and the prospects of ‘as if’-explanations
    with Cory D. Wright, Johan Kwisthout, and Todd Wareham
    Synthese 195 (2): 491-510. 2018.
    Despite their success in describing and predicting cognitive behavior, the plausibility of so-called ‘rational explanations’ is often contested on the grounds of computational intractability. Several cognitive scientists have argued that such intractability is an orthogonal pseudoproblem, however, since rational explanations account for the ‘why’ of cognition but are agnostic about the ‘how’. Their central premise is that humans do not actually perform the rational calculations posited by their …Read more
  •  23
    Similarity as tractable transformation
    with Moritz Müller and Todd Wareham
  •  61
    Bayesian Intractability Is Not an Ailment That Approximation Can Cure
    with Johan Kwisthout and Todd Wareham
    Cognitive Science 35 (5): 779-784. 2011.
    Bayesian models are often criticized for postulating computations that are computationally intractable (e.g., NP-hard) and therefore implausibly performed by our resource-bounded minds/brains. Our letter is motivated by the observation that Bayesian modelers have been claiming that they can counter this charge of “intractability” by proposing that Bayesian computations can be tractably approximated. We would like to make the cognitive science community aware of the problematic nature of such cla…Read more
  •  67
    Goals are not implied by actions, but inferred from actions and contexts
    with Willem Haselager and Harold Bekkering
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (1): 38-39. 2008.
    People cannot understand intentions behind observed actions by direct simulation, because goal inference is highly context dependent. Context dependency is a major source of computational intractability in traditional information-processing models. An embodied embedded view of cognition may be able to overcome this problem, but then the problem needs recognition and explication within the context of the new, layered cognitive architecture
  •  22
    Higher-level processes in the formation and application of associations during action understanding
    with Lieke Heil, Stan van Pelt, Johan Kwisthout, and Harold Bekkering
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2): 202-203. 2014.
  •  23
    One wrong does not justify another: Accepting dual processes by fallacy of false alternatives
    with Gideon Keren and Yaacov Schul
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (3): 269-270. 2007.
    Barbey & Sloman (B&S) advocate a dual-process (two-system) approach by comparing it with an alternative perspective (ecological rationality), claiming that the latter is unwarranted. Rejecting this alternative approach cannot serve as sufficient evidence for the viability of the former
  •  25
    Identifying sources of intractability in cognitive models: An illustration using analogical structure mapping
    with Patricia Evans, Moritz Müller, Jason Gedge, and Todd Wareham
    In B. C. Love, K. McRae & V. M. Sloutsky (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. 2008.
  •  13
    Counter-factual mathematics of counterfactual predictive models
    with Maria Otworowska and Johan Kwisthout
    Frontiers in Psychology 5. 2014.
  •  10
    When Can Predictive Brains be Truly Bayesian?
    with Mark Blokpoel and Johan Kwisthout
    Frontiers in Psychology 3. 2012.
  •  18
    A non-representational approach to imagined action
    Cognitive Science 26 (3): 345-375. 2002.
    This study addresses the dynamical nature of a “representation‐hungry” cognitive task involving an imagined action. In our experiment, participants were handed rods that systematically increased or decreased in length on subsequent trials. Participants were asked to judge whether or not they thought they could reach for a distant object with the hand‐held rod. The results are in agreement with a dynamical model, extended from Tuller, Case, Ding, and Kelso (1994). The dynamical effects observed i…Read more
  •  85
    Connectionist semantic systematicity
    with Stefan L. Frank and Willem F. G. Haselager
    Cognition 110 (3): 358-379. 2009.
  •  31
    Parameterized Complexity of Theory of Mind Reasoning in Dynamic Epistemic Logic
    with Iris van de Pol and Jakub Szymanik
    Journal of Logic, Language and Information 27 (3): 255-294. 2018.
    Theory of mind refers to the human capacity for reasoning about others’ mental states based on observations of their actions and unfolding events. This type of reasoning is notorious in the cognitive science literature for its presumed computational intractability. A possible reason could be that it may involve higher-order thinking. To investigate this we formalize theory of mind reasoning as updating of beliefs about beliefs using dynamic epistemic logic, as this formalism allows to parameteri…Read more
  •  31
    Demons of Ecological Rationality
    with Maria Otworowska, Mark Blokpoel, Marieke Sweers, and Todd Wareham
    Cognitive Science 42 (3): 1057-1066. 2018.
  •  92
    What do mirror neurons mirror?
    with Sebo Uithol, Harold Bekkering, and Pim Haselager
    Philosophical Psychology 24 (5). 2011.
    Single cell recordings in monkeys provide strong evidence for an important role of the motor system in action understanding. This evidence is backed up by data from studies of the (human) mirror neuron system using neuroimaging or TMS techniques, and behavioral experiments. Although the data acquired from single cell recordings are generally considered to be robust, several debates have shown that the interpretation of these data is far from straightforward. We will show that research based on s…Read more
  •  16
    Book reviews (review)
    with Christina Behme, Liane Gabora, and Dorothée Legrand
    Philosophical Psychology 20 (5). 2007.
    Paul ThagardCambridge, MA: MIT press, 2006313 pages, ISBN: 026220164X (hbk); $36.00Can human beliefs and inferences be understood as a form of coherence maximization? This question underlies much o...
  •  8
    How action understanding can be rational, Bayesian and tractable
    with Mark Blokpoel, Johan Kwisthout, and T. P. van der Weide
    In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. 2010.