Based on Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis, this study explored the effects of task complexity on the lexical complexity of Iranian EFL students’ argumentative writing.This study was designed to explore the manipulation of cognitive task complexity along +/-single task dimension (a resource dispersing dimension in Robinson’s triadic framework) on Iranian EFL learners’ production in term of lexica...

Studies in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance of metaphors for language teaching. Metaphoric competence, as an important aspect of intelligence, can contribute to the learning of languages. Most textbooks in ESL/EFL avoid the issue of figurative language and concentrate only on the denotative aspects of language. This article reports a study conducted at the Islamic Azad Univ...

Recently tasks, as the basic units of syllabi, and the cognitive complexity, as the criterion for sequencing them, have caught many second language researchers’ attention. This study sought to explore the effect of utilizing the cognitively simple and complex tasks on high- and low-proficient EFL Iranian writers’ linguistic performance, i.e., fluency, accuracy, lexical complexity, and structura...

This paper proposes a new approach to the problem of decision making under risk (and partly under uncertainty) by a simple cellular automaton which can simulates wellknown anomalies of risky choice. This field has been studied mainly by psychologists, economists, management scientists, and more recently neuroscientists so far. Various types of anomalous choice patterns which violate the predict...

In the present article we use the quantum formalism to describe the effects of risk and ambiguity in decision theory. The main idea is that the probabilities in the classic theory of expected utility are estimated probabilities, and thus do not follow the classic laws of probability theory. In particular, we show that it is possible to use consistently the classic expected utility formula, wher...

The "social brain" of humans reflects widespread neural resources dedicated to understanding the conversational language, emotionality, states of mind, and intentions of other persons. A social deafferentation (SDA) hypothesis for induction of active schizophrenia is proposed. Analogous to hallucinations produced by sensory deafferentation, such as phantom limb, the SDA hypothesis assumes that ...

Although intelligence should theoretically evolve to help animals solve specific types of problems posed by the environment, it is unclear which environmental challenges favour enhanced cognition, or how general intelligence evolves along with domain-specific cognitive abilities. The social intelligence hypothesis posits that big brains and great intelligence have evolved to cope with the labil...

Opening Paragraph: In an unforgettable performance by the English comedian Eddie Izzard, he portrays the Spanish Inquisition as conducted by the wimpy Anglican Church. Playing a supremely domesticated inquisitor, he offers the accused heretics the intriguing choice between “Cake or Death?” Apart from the hilariousness of this scene, the social scientist can appreciate it as one of the last safe...

In the movie Legally Blonde, a civil procedure professor tells her first-year students on their first day of class at Harvard Law School that Aristotle stated, “The law is reason free from passion.” Since Aristotle, there has been much written about whether passion and reason are complements or substitutes. In Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation, Professor Dan M. Kahan analyzes two im...

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2010; Palermos 2014) have recently become increasingly receptive to the hypothesis of extended cognition, according to which external artifacts such as our laptops and smartphones can—under appropriate circumstances—feature as material realisers of a person’s cognitive processes. We argue that, to the extent that the...