When a population exhibits collective cognitive alignment, such that group members tend to perceive, remember, and reproduce information in similar ways, the features of socially transmitted variants (i.e., artifacts, behaviors) may converge over time towards culture-specific equilibria points, often called cultural attractors. Because cognition…

We propose a cognitive-psychological model of linguistic intuitions about copredication statements. In copredication statements, like "The book is heavy and informative," the nominal denotes two ontologically distinct entities at the same time. This has been considered a problem for standard truth-conditional semantics. In this paper, we…

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. (Kemp & Tenenbaum, 2008). Although this approach…

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases (e.g., "a bottle of pills"). We first show that notional plurality ratings (numerosity judgments for subject noun phrases) predict verb agreement choices in…

Ten years ago, researchers using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study language comprehension were puzzled by what looked like a "Semantic Illusion": Semantically anomalous, but structurally well-formed sentences did not affect the N400 component--traditionally taken to reflect semantic integration--but instead produced a P600…

It is possible to learn multiple layers of non-linear features by backpropagating error derivatives through a feedforward neural network. This is a very effective learning procedure when there is a huge amount of labeled training data, but for many learning tasks very few labeled examples are available. In an effort to overcome the need for…

Recent advances in causal reasoning have given rise to a computational model that emulates the process by which humans generate, evaluate, and distinguish counterfactual sentences. Contrasted with the "possible worlds" account of counterfactuals, this "structural" model enjoys the advantages of representational economy,…

Human control of action in routine situations involves a flexible interplay between (a) task-dependent serial ordering constraints; (b) top-down, or intentional, control processes; and (c) bottom-up, or environmentally triggered, affordances. In addition, the interaction between these influences is modulated by learning mechanisms that, over time,…

Watching another person take actions to complete a goal and making inferences about that person's knowledge is a relatively natural task for people. This ability can be especially important in educational settings, where the inferences can be used for assessment, diagnosing misconceptions, and providing informative feedback. In this paper, we…

This paper introduces a special issue of "Cognitive Science" initiated on the 25th anniversary of the publication of "Parallel Distributed Processing" (PDP), a two-volume work that introduced the use of neural network models as vehicles for understanding cognition. The collection surveys the core commitments of the PDP…

Judea Pearl won the 2010 Rumelhart Prize in computational cognitive science due to his seminal contributions to the development of Bayes nets and causal Bayes nets, frameworks that are central to multiple domains of the computational study of mind. At the heart of the causal Bayes nets formalism is the notion of a counterfactual, a representation…

Cooper et al. (this issue) develop an interactive activation model of spatial and imitative compatibilities that simulates the key results from Catmur and Heyes (2011) and thus conclude that both compatibilities are mediated by the same processes since their single model can predict all the results. Although the model is impressive, the…

Model validation in computational cognitive psychology often relies on methods drawn from the testing of theories in experimental physics. However, applications of these methods to computational models in typical cognitive experiments can hide multiple, plausible sources of variation arising from human participants and from stochastic cognitive…

The utility of an "ecologically rational" recognition-based decision rule in multichoice decision problems is analyzed, varying the type of judgment required (greater or lesser). The maximum size and range of a counterintuitive advantage associated with recognition-based judgment (the "less-is-more effect") is identified for a range of cue…

We show that simple perceptual competences can emerge from an internal simulation of action effects and are thus grounded in behavior. A simulated agent learns to distinguish between dead ends and corridors without the necessity to represent these concepts in the sensory domain. Initially, the agent is only endowed with a simple value system and…