This paper offers a simple but powerful model of wishful thinking, cognitive dissonance, and related biases. Choices maximize subjective expected utility, but beliefs depend on the decision maker's interests as well as on relevant information. Simplifying assumptions yield a representation in which the payoff in an event affects beliefs as if it were part of the evidence about its likelihood. A...

Lawrence A. Shapiro University of Wisconsin – Madison Department of Philosophy 5185 H.C. White Hall Madison, WI 53706 [email protected] REVIEW OF: The Bounds of Cognition, Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, 2008, Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa have done a fine thing in this short and engaging challenge to the hypothesis of extended cognition. In brief, they have (i) su...

In recent years evolutionary psychologists have developed and defended the Massive Modularity Hypothesis, which maintains that our cognitive architecture—including the part that subserves 'central processing'—is largely or perhaps even entirely composed of innate, domain-specific computational mechanisms or 'modules'. In this paper I argue for two claims. First, I show that the two main argumen...

This paper offers a simple but powerful model of wishful thinking, cognitive dissonance, and related biases. Choices maximize subjective expected utility, but beliefs depend on the decision maker’s interests as well as on relevant information. Simplifying assumptions yield a representation in which the payoff in an event affects beliefs as if it were part of the evidence about its likelihood. A...

Many studies have demonstrated that the sensory and motor systems are activated during conceptual processing. Such results have been interpreted as indicating that concepts, and important aspects of cognition more broadly, are embodied. That conclusion does not follow from the empirical evidence. The reason why is that the empirical evidence can equally be accommodated by a ‘disembodied’ view o...

Fractal dimensionality (FD) measures the complexity within folds and ridges of cortical subcortical structures. We tested degree that FD might provide a new perspective on atrophy-compensation hypothesis: age or disease-related atrophy causes compensatory neural response in form increased brain activity prefrontal cortex to maintain cognition. Brain structural functional data were collected fro...

This paper discusses the relevance of the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys and of the mirror neuron system in humans to a neuroscientific account of primates' social cognition and its evolution. It is proposed that mirror neurons and the functional mechanism they underpin, embodied simulation, can ground within a unitary neurophysiological explanatory framework important aspects of human ...

The ‘simulation hypothesis’ is an intriguing explanation for cognition, and holds that ‘thinking consists of simulated interaction with the environment’ ([4], p.242). However, the neuroscientific proof for a simulation mechanism in the brain is indirect. In this paper we present a minimal-model approach to investigate the ‘simulation hypothesis’. Our minimal model is called ACP? and is an exten...

In their original report [Kunde, W., Kiesel, A., & Hoffmann, J. (2003). Conscious control over the content of unconscious cognition. Cognition, 88, 223–242] maintain that “unconscious stimuli [do not] owe their impact [.] to automatic semantic categorization” (p.223), and instead propose the action-trigger theory of unconscious priming. In a reply to our paper [Kunde, W., Kiesel, A., & Hoffmann...