|
Showing 1 - 10 of
10 matches in All Departments
This book brings together an influential sequence of papers that
argue for a radical re-conceptualisation of the psychology of
inference, and of cognitive science more generally. The papers
demonstrate that the thesis that logic provides the basis of human
inference is central to much cognitive science, although the
commitment to this view is often implicit. They then note that
almost all human inference is uncertain, whereas logic is the
calculus of certain inference. This mismatch means that logic is
not the appropriate model for human thought. Oaksford and Chater's
argument draws on research in computer science, artificial
intelligence and philosophy of science, in addition to experimental
psychology. The authors propose that probability theory, the
calculus of uncertain inference, provides a more appropriate model
for human thought. They show how a probabilistic account can
provide detailed explanations of experimental data on Wason's
selection task, which many have viewed as providing a paradigmatic
demonstration of human irrationality. Oaksford and Chater show that
people's behaviour appears irrational only from a logical point of
view, whereas it is entirely rational from a probabilistic
perspective. The shift to a probabilistic framework for human
inference has significant implications for the psychology of
reasoning, cognitive science more generally, and forour picture of
ourselves as rational agents.
This book brings together an influential sequence of papers that
argue for a radical re-conceptualisation of the psychology of
inference, and of cognitive science more generally. The papers
demonstrate that the thesis that logic provides the basis of human
inference is central to much cognitive science, although the
commitment to this view is often implicit. They then note that
almost all human inference is uncertain, whereas logic is the
calculus of certain inference. This mismatch means that logic is
not the appropriate model for human thought.
Oaksford and Chater's argument draws on research in computer
science, artificial intelligence and philosophy of science, in
addition to experimental psychology. The authors propose that
probability theory, the calculus of uncertain inference, provides a
more appropriate model for human thought. They show how a
probabilistic account can provide detailed explanations of
experimental data on Wason's selection task, which many have viewed
as providing a paradigmatic demonstration of human irrationality.
Oaksford and Chater show that people's behavior appears irrational
only from a logical point of view, whereas it is entirely rational
from a probabilistic perspective. The shift to a probabilistic
framework for human inference has significant implications for the
psychology of reasoning, cognitive science more generally, and for
our picture of ourselves as rational agents.
A radical reinterpretation of how your mind works - and why it
could change your life 'An astonishing achievement. Nick Chater has
blown my mind' Tim Harford 'A total assault on all lingering
psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths ... Light
the touchpaper and stand well back' New Scientist We all like to
think we have a hidden inner life. Most of us assume that our
beliefs and desires arise from the murky depths of our minds, and,
if only we could work out how to access this mysterious world, we
could truly understand ourselves. For more than a century,
psychologists and psychiatrists have struggled to discover what
lies below our mental surface. In The Mind Is Flat, pre-eminent
behavioural scientist Nick Chater reveals that this entire
enterprise is utterly misguided. Drawing on startling new research
in neuroscience, behavioural psychology and perception, he shows
that we have no hidden depths to plumb, and unconscious thought is
a myth. Instead, we generate our ideas, motives and thoughts in the
moment. This revelation explains many of the quirks of human
behaviour - for example why our supposedly firm political beliefs,
personal preferences and even our romantic attractions are
routinely proven to be inconsistent and changeable. As the reader
discovers, through mind-bending visual examples and
counterintuitive experiments, we are all characters of our own
creation, constantly improvising our behaviour based on our past
experiences. And, as Chater shows us, recognising this can be
liberating.
Imitation is not the low-level, cognitively undemanding behavior it
is often assumed to be, but rather--along with language and the
ability to understand other minds--one of a trio of related
capacities that are fundamental to human mentality. In these
landmark volumes, leading researchers across a range of disciplines
provide a state-of-the-art view of imitation, integrating the
latest findings and theories with reviews of seminal work, and
revealing why imitation is a topic of such intense current
scientific interest. Perspectives are drawn from neuroscience and
brain imaging, animal and developmental psychology, primatology,
ethology, philosophy, anthropology, media studies, economics,
sociology, education, and law. These volumes provide a resource
that makes this research accessible across disciplines and
clarifies its importance for the social sciences and philosophy as
well as for the cognitive sciences. As a further aid to
cross-fertilization, each volume includes extensive
interdisciplinary commentary and discussion. The first volume
considers possible mechanisms of imitation, including discussion of
mirror systems, ideomotor and common coding theories, and the
possibility of "shared circuits" for control, imitation, and
simulation, and then takes up imitation in animals, with
illuminating comparisons to human imitation. The second volume
focuses first on the roles of imitation in human development and in
learning to understand the minds of others, and then on the broader
social and cultural roles and functions of imitation, including
discussions of meme theory and cultural evolution, and of the
pervasive imitative tendencies of normal adults and their relevance
forunderstanding the effects of the media on human behavior.
Are people rational? This question was central to Greek thought;
and has been at the heart of psychology, philosophy, rational
choice in social sciences, and probabilistic approaches to
artificial intelligence. This book provides a radical re-appraisal
of conventional wisdom in the psychology of reasoning.
For almost two and a half thousand years, the Western conception
of what it is to be a human being has been dominated by the idea
that the mind is the seat of reason - humans are, almost by
definition, the rational animal. From Aristotle to the present day,
rationality has been explained by comparison to systems of logic,
which distinguish valid (i.e., rationally justified) from invalid
arguments. Within psychology and cognitive science, such a logicist
conception of the mind was adopted wholeheartedly from Piaget
onwards. Simultaneous with the construction of the logicist program
in cognition, other researchers found that people appeared
surprisingly and systematically illogical in some experiments.
Proposals within the logicist paradigm suggested that these were
mere performance errors, although in some reasoning tasks only as
few as 5% of people's reasoning was logically correct.
In this book a more radical suggestion for explaining these
puzzling aspects of human reasoning is put forward: the Western
conception of the mind as a logical system is flawed at the very
outset. The human mind is primarily concerned with practical action
in the face of a profoundly complex and uncertain world. Oaksford
and Chater argue that cognition should be understood in terms of
probability theory, the calculus of uncertain reasoning, rather
than in terms of logic, the calculus of certainreasoning. Thus, the
logical mind should be replaced by the probabilistic mind - people
may possess not logical rationality, but Bayesian rationality.
Setting forth the state of the art, leading researchers present a
survey on the fast-developing field of Connectionist
Psycholinguistics: using connectionist or "neural" networks, which
are inspired by brain architecture, to model empirical data on
human language processing. Connectionist psycholinguistics has
already had a substantial impact on the study of a wide range of
aspects of language processing, ranging from inflectional
morphology, to word recognition, to parsing and language
production. Christiansen and Chater begin with an extended tutorial
overview of Connectionist Psycholinguistics which is followed by
the latest research by leading figures in each area of research.
The book also focuses on the implications and prospects for
connectionist models of language, not just for psycholinguistics,
but also for computational and linguistic perspectives on natural
language. The interdisciplinary approach will be relevant for, and
accessible to psychologists, cognitive scientists, linguists,
philosophers, and researchers in artificial intelligence.
Setting forth the state of the art, leading researchers present
a survey on the fast-developing field of Connectionist
Psycholinguistics: using connectionist or neural networks, which
are inspired by brain architecture, to model empirical data on
human language processing. Connectionist psycholinguistics has
already had a substantial impact on the study of a wide range of
aspects of language processing, ranging from inflectional
morphology, to word recognition, to parsing and language
production.
Christiansen and Chater begin with an extended tutorial overview
of Connectionist Psycholinguistics which is followed by the latest
research by leading figures in each area of research. The book also
focuses on the implications and prospects for connectionist models
of language, not just for psycholinguistics, but also for
computational and linguistic perspectives on natural language. The
interdisciplinary approach will be relevant for, and accessible to
psychologists, cognitive scientists, linguists, philosophers, and
researchers in artificial intelligence.
The rational analysis method, first proposed by John R. Anderson,
has been enormously influential in helping us understand high-level
cognitive processes.
The Probabilistic Mind is a follow-up to the influential and highly
cited 'Rational Models of Cognition' (OUP, 1998). It brings
together developments in understanding how, and how far, high-level
cognitive processes can be understood in rational terms, and
particularly using probabilistic Bayesian methods. It synthesizes
and evaluates the progress in the past decade, taking into account
developments in Bayesian statistics, statistical analysis of the
cognitive 'environment' and a variety of theoretical and
experimental lines of research. The scope of the book is broad,
covering important recent work in reasoning, decision making,
categorization, and memory. Including chapters from many of the
leading figures in this field,
The Probabilistic Mind will be valuable for psychologists and
philosophers interested in cognition.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|