In this review-paper, I focus on biopsychological foundations of geometric cognition. Starting from the Kant’s views on mathematics, I attempt to show that contemporary cognitive scientists, alike the famous philosopher, recognize mutual relationships of visuospatial processing and geometric cognition. What I defend is a claim that Tinbergen’s explanatory questions are the most fruitful tool for explaining our “hardwired,” and thus shared with other animals, Euclidean intuitions, which manifest themselves in spatial navigation and shape recognition. I claim, however, that these “hardwired (...) intuitions” cannot capture full-blooded Euclidean geometry, which demands practice with cultural artifacts in various time-scales. (shrink)

This chapter argues that human and animal minds indeed depend on a collection of domain-specific, task-specific, and encapsulated cognitive systems: on a set of cognitive ‘modules’ in Fodor's sense. It also argues that human and animal minds are endowed with domain-general, central systems that orchestrate the information delivered by core knowledge systems. The chapter begins by reviewing the literature on spatial reorientation in animals and in young children, arguing that spatial reorientation bears the hallmarks of core knowledge and of modularity. (...) It then considers studies of older children and adults, arguing that human spatial representations change qualitatively over development and show capacities not found in any other species. Finally, it presents two new experiments that investigate the role of emerging spatial language in uniquely human navigation performance. (shrink)

One of the obstacles facing massive modularity is how a pervasively modular mind might generate non-domain-specific thoughts by integrating the content produced by various domain-specific modules. Peter Carruthers has recently argued that the operations of the language faculty are constitutive of the process by which the human mind is able to integrate content from heterogeneous conceptual domains. In this article, I first argue that Carruthers's data do not provide support for either of two possible interpretations of his thesis. In addition, (...) I provide empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking content integration is performed external to the language faculty. (shrink)

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust’s theory of conscious experience and show how it leads him directly to a theory of aesthetic perception. Proust’s division of awareness into two components roughly corresponds to William (...) James’ division of the stream of thought into a “nucleus” and “fringe.” Proust argues that the function of art is to evoke the underlying associative network indirectly in the mind of the observer by using carefully chosen sensory surfaces to control the stream of thought. I propose a possible neural basis for this Proustian/Jamesian phenomenology, and argue that the general principles of Proustian aesthetics can be applied to all forms of art. I conclude that a scientific theory of art should follow in a straightforward manner from a scientific theory of consciousness. (shrink)

There are two main approaches within classical cognitive science to explaining how humans can entertain mental states that integrate contents across domains. The language-based framework states that this ability arises from higher cognitive domain-specific systems that combine their outputs through the language faculty, whereas the language-independent framework holds that it comes from non-language-involving connections between such systems. This article turns on its head the most influential empirical argument for the language-based framework, an argument that originates from research on spatial reorientation. (...) I make the case that neuroscientific findings about spatial reorientation in rodents and humans bolster the language-independent framework instead. (shrink)

This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is _de facto_ the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include (...) the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts, and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of _conscious_ propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for non-domain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive ‘quasi-modules’). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed, and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate. (shrink)

This study examines the working memory systems involved in human wayfinding. In the learning phase, 24 participants learned two routes in a novel photorealistic virtual environment displayed on a 220° screen while they were disrupted by a visual, a spatial, a verbal, or—in a control group—no secondary task. In the following wayfinding phase, the participants had to find and to “virtually walk” the two routes again. During this wayfinding phase, a number of dependent measures were recorded. This research shows that (...) encoding wayfinding knowledge interfered with the verbal and with the spatial secondary task. These interferences were even stronger than the interference of wayfinding knowledge with the visual secondary task. These findings are consistent with a dual‐coding approach of wayfinding knowledge. (shrink)

It is frequently claimed that the human mind is organized in a modular fashion, a hypothesis linked historically, though not inevitably, to the claim that many aspects of the human mind are innately specified. A specific instance of this line of thought is the proposal of an innately specified geometric module for human reorientation. From a massive modularity position, the reorientation module would be one of a large number that organized the mind. From the core knowledge position, the reorientation module (...) is one of five innate and encapsulated modules that can later be supplemented by use of human language. In this paper, we marshall five lines of evidence that cast doubt on the geometric module hypothesis, unfolded in a series of reasons: (1) Language does not play a necessary role in the integration of feature and geometric cues, although it can be helpful. (2) A model of reorientation requires flexibility to explain variable phenomena. (3) Experience matters over short and long periods. (4) Features are used for true reorientation. (5) The nature of geometric information is not as yet clearly specified. In the final section, we review recent theoretical approaches to the known reorientation phenomena. (shrink)

In this review, we discuss the functional equivalence of the avian and mammalian hippocampus, based mostly on our own research in domestic chicks, which provide an important developmental model. In birds, like in mammals, the hippocampus plays a central role in processing spatial information. However, the structure of this homolog area shows remarkable differences between birds and mammals. To understand the evolutionary origin of the neural mechanisms for spatial navigation, it is important to test how far theories developed for the (...) mammalian hippocampus can also be applied to the avian hippocampal formation. To address this issue, we present a brief overview of studies carried out in domestic chicks, investigating the direct involvement of chicks’ hippocampus homolog in spatial navigation. (shrink)

Recent findings indicate that toddlers can use geometric cues to locate an object hidden in a corner of a rectangular room after being disoriented [Cognition 61 (1996) 195]. It has been suggested that locating the object involves reestablishing one's initial heading. The present experiments examine search behavior after disorientation. We find that toddlers go directly to a particular corner, indicating that they do not have to reestablish their original heading. It also has been suggested that toddlers ability to use geometric (...) cues is limited to surrounding spaces. We find that toddlers can locate an object from outside as well as from inside a space, although the task is harder from outside. Based on these results, we argue that while toddlers do not represent their position relative to a particular portion of a space, they nevertheless may represent their position relative to the entire space (i.e., outside vs. inside). (shrink)