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75The cognitive importance of testimonyPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 16 (2): 297-318. 2012.As a belief source, testimony has long been held by theorists of the mind to play a deeply important role in human cognition. It is unclear, however, just why testimony has been afforded such cognitive importance. We distinguish three suggestions on the matter: the number claim, which takes testimony’s cognitive importance to be a function of the number of beliefs it typically yields, relative to other belief sources; the reliability claim, which ties the importance of testimony to its relative …Read more
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16Authority and the Future of Consent in Population-Level Biomedical ResearchPublic Health Ethics. forthcoming.Population-level biomedical research has become crucial to the health system’s ability to improve the health of the population. This form of research raises a number of well-documented ethical concerns, perhaps the most significant of which is the inability of the researcher to obtain fully informed specific consent from participants. Two proposed technical solutions to this problem of consent in large-scale biomedical research that have become increasingly popular are meta-consent and dynamic c…Read more
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21Explaining the illusion of independent agency in imagined persons with a theory of practicePhilosophical Psychology 36 (2): 337-355. 2023.Many mental phenomena involve thinking about people who do not exist. Imagined characters appear in planning, dreams, fantasizing, imaginary companions, bereavement hallucinations, auditory verbal hallucinations, and as characters created in fictional narratives by authors. Sometimes these imagined persons are felt to be completely under our control, as when one fantasizes about having a great time at a party. Other times, characters feel as though they are outside of our conscious control. Drea…Read more
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9The Neural Correlates of Analogy Component ProcessesCognitive Science 46 (3). 2022.Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.
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46Coherence in the Visual ImaginationCognitive Science 42 (3): 885-917. 2018.An incoherent visualization is when aspects of different senses of a word are present in the same visualization. We describe and implement a new model of creating contextual coherence in the visual imagination called Coherencer, based on the SOILIE model of imagination. We show that Coherencer is able to generate scene descriptions that are more coherent than SOILIE's original approach as well as a parallel connectionist algorithm that is considered competitive in the literature on general coher…Read more
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93Visual models in analogical problem solvingFoundations of Science 10 (1): 133-152. 2005.Visual analogy is believed to be important in human problem solving. Yet, there are few computational models of visual analogy. In this paper, we present a preliminary computational model of visual analogy in problem solving. The model is instantiated in a computer program, called Galatea, which uses a language for representing and transferring visual information called Privlan. We describe how the computational model can account for a small slice of a cognitive-historical analysis of Maxwell’s …Read more