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Substances as a core domainBehavioral and Brain Sciences 47. 2024.Central to What Babies Know (Spelke, 2022) is the thesis that infants' understanding is divided into independent modules of core knowledge. As a test case, we consider adding a new domain: core knowledge of substances. Experiments show that infants' understanding of substances meets some criteria of core knowledge, and they raise questions about the relations that hold between core domains.
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20In this paper, we report results from experiments in which people read conversational arguments and then judge the convincingness of each claim and the individual speakers' burden of proof. The results showed an "anti-primacy" effect: People judge the speaker who makes the first claim as having greater burden of proof. This effect persists even when each speaker's claims are rated equally convincing. We also find that people rate claims less convincing when they appear in the first part of an ar…Read more
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OCk, athryn, 163 Byrne, Ruth MJ, 61 Cosmides, Leda, 187 Garnham, Alan, 45, 117Cognition 31 295. 1989.
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1Concepts, categories, and semantic memoryIn K. Holyoak & B. Morrison (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning, Cambridge University Press. pp. 37--72. 2005.
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59Concepts and categories: Memory, meaning, and metaphysicsIn K. Holyoak & B. Morrison (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning, Cambridge University Press. pp. 37--72. 2005.
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6ReasoningIn J. Wixted & H. Pashler (eds.), Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Wiley. 2002.
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9Necessity and Natural CategoriesPsychological Bulletin 127 827-852. 2001.Our knowledge of natural categories includes beliefs not only about what is true of them but also about what would be true if the categories had properties other than (or in addition to) their actual ones. Evidence about these beliefs comes from three lines of research: experiments on category-based induction, on hypothetical transformations of category members, and on definitions of kind terms. The 1st part of this article examines results and theories arising from each of these research stream…Read more
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12Explanation and Evidence in Informal ArgumentCognitive Science 24 (4): 573-604. 2000.A substantial body of evidence shows that people tend to rely too heavily on explanations when trying to justify an opinion. Some research suggests these errors may arise from an inability to distinguish between explanations and the evidence that bears upon them. We examine an alternative account, that many people do distinguish between explanations and evidence, but rely more heavily on unsubstantiated explanations when evidence is scarce or absent. We examine the philosophical and psychologica…Read more
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53Rebooting the bootstrap argument: Two puzzles for bootstrap theories of concept developmentBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (3): 145. 2011.The Origin of Concepts sets out an impressive defense of the view that children construct entirely new systems of concepts. We offer here two questions about this theory. First, why doesn't the bootstrapping process provide a pattern for translating between the old and new systems, contradicting their claimed incommensurability? Second, can the bootstrapping process properly distinguish meaning change from belief change?
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1ReasoningIn George Graham & William Bechtel (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science, Blackwell. 1998.To a first approximation, cognitive science agrees with everyday notions about reasoning: According to both views, reasoning is a special sort of relation between beliefs – a relation that holds when accepting (or rejecting) one or more beliefs causes others to be accepted (rejected). If you learn, for example, that everyone dislikes iguana pudding, that should increase the likelihood of your believing that Calvin, in particular, dislikes iguana pudding. Reasoning could produce an entirely new b…Read more
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23Norms, competence, and the explanation of reasoningBehavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3): 501. 1983.
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239How do we regard fictional people? How do they regard us?Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. forthcoming.Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of fiction about whether real individuals exist in the story’s world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of Jane Eyre, even though Victoria is not mentioned in it? The experiments we report here find that when participants are prompted to consider the world of a fictional individual (“Conside…Read more
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1288Conditionals, Context, and the Suppression EffectCognitive Science 41 (3): 540-589. 2017.Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B. Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people …Read more
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64Explanation and Evidence in Informal ArgumentCognitive Science 24 (4): 573-604. 2000.A substantial body of evidence shows that people tend to rely too heavily on explanations when trying to justify an opinion. Some research suggests these errors may arise from an inability to distinguish between explanations and the evidence that bears upon them. We examine an alternative account, that many people do distinguish between explanations and evidence, but rely more heavily on unsubstantiated explanations when evidence is scarce or absent. We examine the philosophical and psychologica…Read more
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33Out of sorts? Some remedies for theories of object concepts: A reply to Rhemtulla and Xu (2007)Psychological Review 114 (4): 1096-1102. 2007.
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25Five-month-old infants have expectations for the accumulation of nonsolid substancesCognition 175 (C): 1-10. 2018.
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41Structure and process in semantic memory: A featural model for semantic decisionsPsychological Review 81 (3): 214-241. 1974.
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92Identity, Causality, and Pronoun AmbiguityTopics in Cognitive Science 6 (4): 663-680. 2014.This article looks at the way people determine the antecedent of a pronoun in sentence pairs, such as: Albert invited Ron to dinner. He spent hours cleaning the house. The experiment reported here is motivated by the idea that such judgments depend on reasoning about identity . Because the identity of an individual over time depends on the causal-historical path connecting the stages of the individual, the correct antecedent will also depend on causal connections. The experiment varied how likel…Read more
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67Two causal theories of counterfactual conditionalsCognitive Science 34 (2): 175-221. 2010.Bayes nets are formal representations of causal systems that many psychologists have claimed as plausible mental representations. One purported advantage of Bayes nets is that they may provide a theory of counterfactual conditionals, such as If Calvin had been at the party, Miriam would have left early. This article compares two proposed Bayes net theories as models of people's understanding of counterfactuals. Experiments 1-3 show that neither theory makes correct predictions about backtracking…Read more
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16Set-theoretic and network models reconsidered: A comment on Hollan's "Features and semantic memory."Psychological Review 82 (2): 156-157. 1975.
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28Split identity: Intransitive judgments of the identity of objectsCognition 119 (3): 356-373. 2011.Identity is a transitive relation, according to all standard accounts. Necessarily, if x = y and y = z, then x = z. However, people sometimes say that two objects, x and z, are the same as a third, y, even when x and z have different properties (thus, x = y and y = z, but x ≠ z). In the present experiments, participants read stories about an iceberg that breaks into two icebergs, one to the east and the other to the west. Many participants (32–54%, in baseline conditions across experiments) deci…Read more
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75The current status of research on concept combinationMind and Language 10 (1-2): 72-104. 1995.Understanding novel phrases (e.g. upside‐down daisy) and classifying objects in categories named by phrases ought to have common properties, but you'd never know it from current theories. The best candidate for both jobs is the Theory Theory, but it faces difficulties when theories are impoverished. A potential solution is a dual approach that couples theories (representations‐about categories) with fixed mentalese expressions (representations‐of categories). Both representations combine informa…Read more