Equisalience analysis: A new window into the functional architecture of human cognition.

Author(s):  
Charles E. Wright ◽  
Charles Chubb ◽  
Alissa Winkler ◽  
Hal S. Stern
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Stocco ◽  
Catherine Sibert ◽  
Zoe Steine-Hanson ◽  
Natalie Koh ◽  
John E. Laird ◽  
...  

AbstractThe Common Model of Cognition (CMC) is a recently proposed, consensus architecture intended to capture decades of progress in cognitive science on modeling human and human-like intelligence. Because of the broad agreement around it and preliminary mappings of its components to specific brain areas, we hypothesized that the CMC could be a candidate model of the large-scale functional architecture of the human brain. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed functional MRI data from 200 participants and seven different tasks that cover a broad range of cognitive domains. The CMC components were identified with functionally homologous brain regions through canonical fMRI analysis, and their communication pathways were translated into predicted patterns of effective connectivity between regions. The resulting dynamic linear model was implemented and fitted using Dynamic Causal Modeling, and compared against six alternative brain architectures that had been previously proposed in the field of neuroscience (three hierarchical architectures and three hub-and-spoke architectures) using a Bayesian approach. The results show that, in all cases, the CMC vastly outperforms all other architectures, both within each domain and across all tasks. The results suggest that a common, general architecture underpins human cognition across multiple cognitive domains, from the overall functional architecture of the human brain to higher-level thought processes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles P. Davis ◽  
Gerry T. M. Altmann ◽  
Eiling Yee

Abstract Gilead et al.'s approach to human cognition places abstraction and prediction at the heart of “mental travel” under a “representational diversity” perspective that embraces foundational concepts in cognitive science. But, it gives insufficient credit to the possibility that the process of abstraction produces a gradient, and underestimates the importance of a highly influential domain in predictive cognition: language, and related, the emergence of experientially based structure through time.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aba Szollosi ◽  
Ben R. Newell

Abstract The purpose of human cognition depends on the problem people try to solve. Defining the purpose is difficult, because people seem capable of representing problems in an infinite number of ways. The way in which the function of cognition develops needs to be central to our theories.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Povinelli ◽  
Gabrielle C. Glorioso ◽  
Shannon L. Kuznar ◽  
Mateja Pavlic

Abstract Hoerl and McCormack demonstrate that although animals possess a sophisticated temporal updating system, there is no evidence that they also possess a temporal reasoning system. This important case study is directly related to the broader claim that although animals are manifestly capable of first-order (perceptually-based) relational reasoning, they lack the capacity for higher-order, role-based relational reasoning. We argue this distinction applies to all domains of cognition.


Author(s):  
Kim Uittenhove ◽  
Patrick Lemaire

In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that strategy performance on a given trial is influenced by the difficulty of the strategy executed on the immediately preceding trial, an effect that we call strategy sequential difficulty effect. Participants’ task was to provide approximate sums to two-digit addition problems by using cued rounding strategies. Results showed that performance was poorer after a difficult strategy than after an easy strategy. Our results have important theoretical and empirical implications for computational models of strategy choices and for furthering our understanding of strategic variations in arithmetic as well as in human cognition in general.


Author(s):  
Pierre Aubenque

Pierre Aubenque’s “Science Regained” (1962; translated by Clayton Shoppa) was originally published as the concluding chapter of Le Problème de l’Être chez Aristote, one of the most important and original books on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In this essay, Aubenque contends that the impasses which beset the project of first philosophy paradoxically become its greatest accomplishments. Although science stabilizes motion and thereby introduces necessity into human cognition, human thought always occurs amidst an inescapable movement of change and contingency. Aristotle’s ontology, as a discourse that strives to achieve being in its unity, succeeds by means of the failure of the structure of its own approach: the search of philosophy – dialectic – becomes the philosophy of the search. Aubenque traces this same structure of scission, mediation, and recovery across Aristotelian discussions of theology, motion, time, imitation, and human activity.


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