In this article we present a fuzzy logic based method for the construction of thoughts of artificial animals (animats). Due to the substantial increase of the processing power of personal computers in the last decade there was a notable progress in the field of animat construction and simulation. Regardless of the achieved results, the coding of the animat’s behaviour is very inaccurate and can...

According to Beck's cognitive model of depression the activation of dysfunctional beliefs triggers negative automatic thoughts, which can be interpreted as the proximal "cause" for emotional, somatic, and motivational symptoms of depression. This top-down processes of beliefs causing thoughts and furthermore of thoughts causing symptoms can be called "cognitive hierarchy." Besides these process...

OBJECTIVE This study tested the reciprocal relationships between automatic thoughts about eating and the actual-ideal weight discrepancies, and their role in the formation and maintenance of eating disorders (ED) symptoms in a non-clinical sample of adolescents. In particular, we investigated whether thoughts about eating mediated the effects of weight discrepancies on ED formation and whether ...

Spontaneous thoughts can arise from past memories, future tasks, and environmental cues. We developed a paradigm to investigate the stream of consciousness leading to spontaneous thoughts. While performing a concentration exercise (9 min) requiring one to focus only on one’s breathing, subjects observed spontaneous thoughts and counted the number of cognitions/percepts (‘links’) that they belie...

Cognitive models state that cognitions are organized hierarchically, so that the underlying schemas affect behavior via more automatic, superficial cognitive processes. This study aimed to demonstrate that early maladaptive schemas predict anxious automatic thoughts, and to show that such automatic thoughts act as mediators between schemas and prospective changes in social anxiety symptoms. The...

PURPOSE Little is known about students who seriously consider dropping out of medical school. The authors assessed the severity of thoughts of dropping out and explored the relationship of such thoughts with burnout and other indicators of distress. METHOD The authors surveyed medical students attending five medical schools in 2006 and 2007 (prospective cohort) and included two additional med...

Standard logic tends to reduce propositions to their truth conditions. However propositions with the same truth conditions are not the contents of the same thoughts just as they are not the senses of synonymous sentences. I will first define a much finer criterion of propositional identity that takes into account predications that we make in expressing propositions. In my view, propositions hav...