The Galilean explanatory style is characterized by the search for the underlying structure of phenomena, the positing of "deep" explanatory principles, and a view of the relation between theory and data, on which the search for "crucial data" is of primary importance. In this paper, I trace the dynamics of adopting the Galilean style, focusing on the science of episodic memory. I argue that memory systems, such as episodic and semantic memory, were posited as underlying competences producing the observable phenomena (...) of memory. Considered in idealized isolation from other systems, episodic memory was taken to underlay the ability of individuals to remember events from their personal past. Yet, in reality, memory systems regularly interact, standing in many-to-many relations to actual memory tasks and experiences. Upon this backdrop, I explore a puzzle about the increasing prominence of the notion of autonoetic consciousness in Tulving's theory of episodic memory. I argue that, contrary to widespread belief, the prominence is not best explained by the purported essential link between autonoetic consciousness and episodic memory. Rather, it is explained by the fact that autonoetic consciousness, hypothesized to uniquely accompany episodic retrieval, was considered a source of crucial data, predictable only from theories positing a functionally distinct episodic memory system. However, with the emergence of a new generation of theories, positing wider memory systems for remembering and imagination, the question of the relation between episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness has been reopened. This creates a pressing need for de-idealization, triggering a new search for crucial data. (shrink)

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary research endeavor focusing on human cognitive phenomena such as memory, language use, and reasoning. It emerged in the second half of the 20th century and is charting new directions at the beginning of the 21st century. This chapter begins by identifying the disciplines that contribute to cognitive science and reviewing the history of the interdisciplinary engagements that characterize it. The second section examines the role that mechanistic explanation plays in cognitive science, while the third focuses (...) on the importance of mental representations in specifically cognitive explanations. The fourth section considers the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science and explores how multiple disciplines can contribute to explanations that exceed what any single discipline might accomplish. The conclusion sketches some recent developments in cognitive science and their implications for philosophers. (shrink)

Cognitive psychologists, like biologists, frequently describe mechanisms when explaining phenomena. Unlike biologists, who can often trace material transformations to identify operations, psychologists face a more daunting task in identifying operations that transform information. Behavior provides little guidance as to the nature of the operations involved. While not itself revealing the operations, identification of brain areas involved in psychological mechanisms can help constrain attempts to characterize the operations. In current memory research, evidence that the same brain areas are involved in what (...) are often taken to be different memory phenomena or in other cognitive phenomena is playing such a heuristic function. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 0119, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093‐0119; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

From its genesis in the 1960s, the focus of inquiry in neuroscience has been on the cellular and molecular processes underlying neural activity. In this pursuit neuroscience has been enormously successful. Like any successful scientific inquiry, initial successes have raised new questions that inspire ongoing research. While there is still much that is not known about the molecular processes in brains, a great deal of very important knowledge has been secured, especially in the last 50 years. It has also attracted (...) the attention of a number of philosophers, some of whom have viewed it as evidence for a ruthlessly reductionistic program that will eventually explain how mental processes are performed in the brain in purely molecular terms. As neuroscience developed, however, there emerged a smaller group of researchers who focused on systems, behavioral, and cognitive neuroscience. These investigators have also made impressive advances in the last 50 years and they have been the focus of an even larger group of philosophers, who have appealed to systems level understanding of the brain as providing the appropriate point of connection to the information processing accounts advanced in psychology. (shrink)

We argue that episodic remembering, understood as the ability to re-experience past events, requires a particular kind of introspective ability and understanding. It requires the understanding that first person experiences can represent actual events. In this respect it differs from the understanding required by the traditional false belief test for children, where a third person attribution (to others or self) of a behavior governing representation is sufficient. The understanding of first person experiences as representations is also required for problem solving (...) with images. In support of this argument we review developmental evidence that children's episodic remembering is independent of and emerges after mastery of the false belief task but emerges together with the use of imagery for solving visual rotation tasks. (shrink)

While pointing out important features of cognitive science, Núñez et al. (2019) also argue prematurely for the end of cognitive science. I discuss problematic analytic features in the application of hierarchical cluster analysis to journal citation data. On the conceptual side, I argue that the research programs framework of Lakatos may not be so wisely applied to cognitive science. Further, the diversity of structure in cognitive science departments may represent a rational, strategic adaptation by an interdisciplinary department to cognitive and (...) other resource challenges rather than the sign of low progress on a discipline. (shrink)

Using an observational sample of players of a simple online game, we are able to trace the development of skill in that game. Information on playing time, and player location, allows us to estimate time of day during which practice took place. We compare those whose breaks in practice probably contained a night's sleep and those whose breaks in practice probably did not contain a night's sleep. Our analysis confirms experimental evidence showing a benefit of spacing for skill learning, but (...) it fails to find any additional benefit of sleeping during a break from practice. We discuss reasons why the well-established phenomenon of sleep consolidation might not manifest in an observational study of skill development. We put the spacing effect into the context of the other known influences on skill learning: improvement with practice, and individual differences in initial performance. Analysis of performance data from games allows experimental results to be demonstrated outside of the lab and for experimental phenomenon to be put in the context of the performance of the whole task. (shrink)

Using an observational sample of players of a simple online game, we are able to trace the development of skill in that game. Information on playing time, and player location, allows us to estimate time of day during which practice took place. We compare those whose breaks in practice probably contained a night's sleep and those whose breaks in practice probably did not contain a night's sleep. Our analysis confirms experimental evidence showing a benefit of spacing for skill learning, but (...) it fails to find any additional benefit of sleeping during a break from practice. We discuss reasons why the well-established phenomenon of sleep consolidation might not manifest in an observational study of skill development. We put the spacing effect into the context of the other known influences on skill learning: improvement with practice, and individual differences in initial performance. Analysis of performance data from games allows experimental results to be demonstrated outside of the lab and for experimental phenomenon to be put in the context of the performance of the whole task. (shrink)

How We Know is intended as a summary (and a modest extension) of Objectivist epistemology. Binswanger's treatment of a wide range of epistemological issues is examined. Because his theory of propositions is inadequate and his philosophy of mind is an extreme form of dualism, Binswanger has added little to previous efforts by “official” Objectivists. As a work of epistemology in the broad sense, Binswanger's effort is fatally impaired. It is undone by his bifurcation between consciousness and the physics of the (...) brain, which, if accepted, would largely deprive psychology and even computer science of their subject matter. (shrink)

The field of second language acquisition (SLA) is by nature of its subject a highly interdisciplinary area of research. Learning a (foreign) language, for example, involves encoding new words, consolidating and committing them to long-term memory, and later retrieving them. All of these processes have direct parallels in the domain of human memory and have been thoroughly studied by researchers in that field. Yet, despite these clear links, the two fields have largely developed in parallel and in isolation from one (...) another. The present article aims to promote more cross-talk between SLA and memory science. We focus on foreign language (FL) attrition as an example of a research topic in SLA where the parallels with memory science are especially apparent. We discuss evidence that suggests that competition between languages is one of the mechanisms of FL attrition, paralleling the interference process thought to underlie forgetting in other domains of human memory. Backed up by concrete suggestions, we advocate the use of paradigms from the memory literature to study these interference effects in the language domain. In doing so, we hope to facilitate future cross-talk between the two fields and to further our understanding of FL attrition as a memory phenomenon. (shrink)

The conceptual framework of behaviorism is reconstructed in a logical scheme rather than along chronological lines. The resulting reconstruction is faithful to the history of behaviorism and yet meets the contemporary challenges arising from cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and philosophy. In this reconstruction, the fundamental premise is that psychology is to be a natural science, and the major corollaries are that psychology is to be objective and empirical. To a great extent, the reconstruction of behaviorism is an elaboration of behaviorist views (...) of what it is for a science to be objective and empirical. The reconstruction examines and evaluates behaviorist positions on observation and the rejection of introspection, the behavioral data language, theory construction, stimulus-response psychology, the organization of behavior, complex processes, agency, and the interpretation of mentalistic language. The resulting reconstruction shows behaviorism to be a pragmatic psychological version of positivism based on a behavioral epistemology. (shrink)

How is time transformed when signs appear? In the sign system of the conditioned reflex, the sign (conditioned stimulus) reverses, changes the direction of time, and overcomes its unidirectionality and irreversibility. In a sense, there is a “return” to the past in the form of the future when the sign is introduced. The sign serves as a “Time machine” of sorts. The mechanism of time transformation is possible because a mirror is embedded inside the sign, the surface of which represents (...) the psychological present time. When past experience meets that surface in the present, it may be reflected in the form of a future event. In the course of reflection, time changes its direction: if earlier time flowed from the event (the cause), it subsequently flows to other events (the purpose). Previously inaccessible past experience is now projected into the present, “comes to life” in it and is transformed into the future. In humans, unlike in animals, signs of the second order appear. Inside the signs of the second order, a mirror is built in, and the experience of the past as a subject is reflected in the future form as an object. An individual has the opportunity to consider oneself externally as an object. It goes beyond the subjective form. Thus, secondary signs once again change time direction. Due to this phenomenon, time becomes doubly reversible: first it turns around in a conditioned stimulus, and then in a secondary sign. (shrink)

Human relations are driven by social events—people interact, exchange information, share knowledge and emotions, and gather news from mass media. These events leave traces in human memory, the strength of which depends on cognitive factors such as emotions or attention span. Each trace continuously weakens over time unless another related event activity strengthens it. Here, we introduce a novel cognition-driven social network model that accounts for cognitive aspects of social perception. The model explicitly represents each social interaction as a trace (...) in human memory with its corresponding dynamics. The strength of the trace is the only measure of the influence that the interactions had on a person. For validation, we apply our model to NetSense data on social interactions among university students. The results show that CogSNet significantly improves the quality of modeling of human interactions in social networks. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

Two standard epistemological accounts are conflated in Dienes & Perner's account of knowledge, and this conflation requires the rejection of their four conditions of knowledge. Because their four metarepresentations applied to the explicit-implicit distinction are paired with these conditions, it follows by modus tollens that if the latter are inadequate, then so are the former. Quite simply, their account misses the link between true reasoning and knowledge.

The present empirical study investigates limitations of human visual working memory. The experiments of the present work involve the experimental paradigm of change detection using simple geometrical objects in the form of rectangles of different colour, length, and orientation. It can be shown, that a limited performance in the temporary storage of visual information has multiple sources. Limitations of VWM can be attributed to a limited capacity or a limited duration, but also to limitations in retrieval, which so far has (...) found only little attention. Key findings of the present study show, that a capacity limitation cannot be described by a simple and generally valid size of the store. It is in fact generally acknowledged that the capacity limitation of VWM is object-based, which means that the capacity can roughly be determined by the number of visual objects. However, it could be shown that the complexity of the objects has an influence on memory performance: Experimental evidence shows, e.g., that memory performance decreases, when an object is characterized not only by one feature, but by a number of features. The results are explained by increased storage demands for the binding of the features. Other key findings of the present study relate to the process of retrieval of information from VWM. For example, an asymmetric performance pattern could be observed: In a change detection task a memory performance was observed that corresponds to a capacity of 3 - 4 objects. In contrast a drastic decrease of performance corresponding to a capacity of only 1 object was observed, when the task was to find a matching item among changed distractors. These results lead to the idea of a change signal, by which the empirical data can be explained. The change signal is elicited by a local mismatch between the information stored in VSTM and perceptual online information. The retrieval process is efficient, when the change signal can be used in the memory task. However, retrieval is extremely limited, when in the presence of multiple changes a less efficient strategy has to be applied. In the course of the present study, moreover, it became evident that there are various links between VWM processes and visual attention. Visual attention is probably crucial for feature binding in VWM. In retrieval the change signal probably involves mechanisms of visual attention. The present study could, therefore, contribute to a clarification of the relation between VWM and visual attention. (shrink)