It is often assumed that graphemes are a crucial level of orthographic representation above letters. Current connectionist models of reading, however, do not address how the mapping from letters to graphemes is learned. One major challenge for computational modeling is therefore developing a model that learns this mapping and can assign the…

Through computational modeling, here we examine whether visual and task characteristics of writing systems alone can account for lateralization differences in visual word recognition between different languages without assuming influence from left hemisphere (LH) lateralized language processes. We apply a hemispheric processing model of face…

Similarity underlies fundamental cognitive capabilities such as memory, categorization, decision making, problem solving, and reasoning. Although recent approaches to similarity appreciate the structure of mental representations, they differ in the processes posited to operate over these representations. We present an experiment that…

Children improve at word learning during the 2nd year of life--sometimes dramatically. This fact has suggested a change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more referential form of learning. This article presents an associative exemplar-based model that accounts for the improvement without a change in mechanism. It provides a unified…

The mental model theory of naive causal understanding and reasoning (Goldvarg & Johnson-Laird, 2001, Cognitive Science, 25, 565-610) claims that people distinguish between causes and enabling conditions on the basis of sets of models that represent possible causal situations. In the tasks used to test this hypothesis, however, the proposed set of…

The study of human-computer interactions has revealed that highly interactive devices are often easier to learn to use than keyboard-based devices. Describes an integrated cognitive model designed to exhibit interactions between people and computers while learning task-action mappings such as the action sequences for opening a file in a word…