The cognitive appraisal of an event is crucial for the elicitation and differentiation of emotions. Similar appraisals will result in similar emotions, but the appraisal of one and the same event may depend on culturally defined concepts. Appraising an event as unjust, for instance, and its agent as responsible are cognitive determinants for anger. Justice, however, is defined through cultural ...

Characterizing the neural implementation of abstract conceptual representations has long been a contentious topic in cognitive science. At the heart of the debate is whether the "sensorimotor" machinery of the brain plays a central role in representing concepts, or whether the involvement of these perceptual and motor regions is merely peripheral or epiphenomenal. The domain of science, technol...

The application of dynamical systems methods and concepts to cognitive phenomena has broadened the range of testable hypotheses and theoretical narratives available to cognitive scientists. Most research in cognitive dynamics tests the degree to which observed cognitive performance is consistent with one or another core phenomena associated with complex dynamical systems, such as tests for phas...

Which words do children learn earliest, and why? These questions bear on how humans organize the world into semantic concepts, and how children acquire this parsing . A useful perspective is to think of how bits of experience are conflated into the same concept . One possibility is that children are born with the set of conceptual conflations that figures in human language . But assuming (as we...

In social psychology, cognitive consistency is a powerful principle for organizing psychological concepts. There have been few tests of cognitive consistency in children and no research about cognitive consistency in children from Asian cultures, who pose an interesting developmental case. A sample of 172 Singaporean elementary school children completed implicit and explicit measures of math-ge...

Understanding scientific theories like evolution by natural selection, classical mechanics, or plate tectonics requires knowledge restructuring at the level of individual concepts, or conceptual change. Here, we investigate the role of cognitive reflection (Frederick, 2005) in achieving conceptual change. College undergraduates (n = 184) were administered a 45question survey probing their under...

Society depends on knowledge workers (KWs) to identify, characterize and propose solutions to the many significant challenges it faces. KWs contend with ever changing information technology (IT) and bemoan ”information overload.” They commonly consult literature (e.g., Allen, 2001) and use productivity software that, regrettably, fail to leverage key findings in cognitive science. Can cognitive...

Cognitive maps are valuable tools for understanding individual and group perceptions. But developing such maps is a resource intensive activity. To reduce required resources, group support system (GSS) technology is proposed as an aid in uncovering cognitive maps. A GSS session was used to develop a cognitive map of users' of object-oriented (OO) techniques perceptions of OO system complexity. ...

Hyperknowledge is formed as a system of sets of interlinked concepts, much in the same way as hypertext is built with interlinked text strings; then hyperknowledgefunctions would be constructs which link concepts / systems of concepts in some predetermined or wanted way. Under hyperknowledge representation we mean the identification (or approximation) of hyperknowledge-functions in order to exp...