In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required the participant (...) to abstract away from both perceptual features and common setting associations corresponding to the target image. The normed materials were then used with a population of people with aphasia to assess the relationship of abstract thought to language. While the language-impaired group with aphasia showed lower overall accuracy and longer response times than controls in general, of special note is that their response times were significantly longer as a function of a trial’s degree of abstractness. Further, the aphasia group’s response times in reporting their degree of confidence (a separate, metacognitive measure) were negatively correlated with their language production abilities, with lower language scores predicting longer metacognitive response times. These results provide some support for the hypothesis that language is an important aid to abstract thought and to metacognition about abstract thought. (shrink)

Six experiments investigated variables predicted to influence subjects’ tendency to classify items by a single property instead of overall similarity, following the paradigm of Norenzayan et al., who found that European Americans tended to give more “logical” rule-based responses. However, in five experiments with Mechanical Turk subjects and undergraduates at an American university, we found a consistent preference for similarity-based responding. A sixth experiment with Korean undergraduates revealed an effect of instructions, also reported by Norenzayan et al., in which classification (...) instructions led to majority rule-based responding but similarity instructions led to overall similarity grouping. Our American subjects showed no such difference and used similarity more overall. We conclude that Americans do not have a preference for rule responding in classification and discuss the differences between tasks that reliably show strong rule or unidimensional preferences in contrast to this classification paradigm. (shrink)

Living things can be classified by taxonomic similarity (lions and lynx), or shared ecological habitat (ducks and turtles). The present studies used card-sorting and triad tasks to explore developmental and experiential changes in conceptual flexibility–the ability to switch between taxonomic and ecological construals of living things–as well as two processes underlying conceptual flexibility: salience (i.e., the ease with which relations come to mind outside of contextual influences) and availability (i.e., the presence of relations in one’s mental space) of taxonomic and (...) ecological relations. We were also interested in the extent to which salience and availability of taxonomic and ecological relations predicted inductive inferences. Participants were 452 six to ten-year-olds from urban, suburban, and rural communities in New England. Across two studies, taxonomic relations were overwhelmingly more salient than ecological relations, although salience of ecological relations was higher among children from rural environments (Study 1) and those who engaged in unstructured exploration of nature (Study 2). Availability of ecological relations, as well as conceptual flexibility, increased with age, and was higher among children living in more rural environments. Notably, salience, but not availability, of ecological relations predicted ecological inferences. These findings suggest that taxonomic relations are a default way to organize intuitive biological knowledge and that environmental richness and relevant experience contribute to the salience and availability of ecological knowledge, and thereby, conceptual flexibility in biological thinking. More generally, they highlight important linkages between domain-specific knowledge and domain-general cognitive abilities. (shrink)

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated the contributions of readily observable environmental statistical regularities to semantic organization in childhood. Specifically, we investigated whether co‐occurrence regularities with which entities or their labels more reliably occur together than with others (a) contribute to (...) relations between concepts independently and (b) contribute to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. Using child‐directed speech corpora to estimate reliable co‐occurrences between labels for familiar items, we constructed triads consisting of a target, a related distractor, and an unrelated distractor in which targets and related distractors consistently co‐occurred (e.g., sock‐foot), belonged to the same taxonomic category (e.g., sock‐coat), or both (e.g., sock‐shoe). We used an implicit, eye‐gaze measure of relations between concepts based on the degree to which children (N = 72, age 4–7 years) looked at related versus unrelated distractors when asked to look for a target. The results indicated that co‐occurrence both independently contributes to relations between concepts and contributes to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the regularity with which different entities co‐occur in children's environments shapes the organization of semantic knowledge during development. Implications for theoretical accounts and empirical investigations of semantic organization are discussed. (shrink)

In his enormously influentialThe Modularity of Mind, Jerry Fodor (1983) proposed that the mind was divided into input modules and central processes. Much subsequent research focused on the modules and whether processes like speech perception or spatial vision are truly modular. Much less attention has been given to Fodor's writing on the central processes, what would today be called higher‐level cognition. In “Fodor's First Law of the Nonexistence of Cognitive Science,” he argued that central processes are “bad candidates for scientific (...) study” and would resist attempts at empirical analysis. This essay evaluates his argument for this remarkable claim, concluding that although central processes may well be “messier” than input modules, this does not mean that they cannot be studied and understood. The article briefly reviews the scientific progress made in understanding central processes in the 35 years since the book was published, showing that Fodor's prediction is clearly falsified by massive advances in topics like decision making and analogy. The essay concludes that Fodor's Law was not based on a clear argument for why the complexities of central systems could not be studied but was likely based on intuitions and preferences that were common in psychology at the time. (shrink)

Measuring perceived similarity is an important issue in visual perception of faces, since a measure of the perceived similarity between faces may be used to investigate fundamental tasks like face categorization and recognition. Despite its fundamental role, measuring perceived similarity between faces is not trivial from both a theoretical and methodological point of view. In this paper we present theoretical arguments that undermine the method currently most used to measure perceived similarity between faces in visual perception, and we propose an (...) alternative method. We finally compare the two methods and find some empirical evidence that the proposed method can provide a more reliable evaluation of the perceived similarity between faces. (shrink)