According to the theory of ‘promiscuous teleology’, we are naturally biased to (mistakenly) construe natural kinds as if they (like artifacts) were intentionally designed ‘for a purpose’. However, this theory introduces two paradoxes. First, if infants readily distinguish natural kinds from artifacts, as evidence suggests, why do school-aged children erroneously conflate this distinction? Secon...

Affective reasoning plays an increasingly important role in cognitive accounts of social interaction. Humans continuously assess one another's situational context, modify their own affective state accordingly, and then respond to these outcomes by expressing empathetic behaviors. Synthetic agents serving as companions should respond similarly. However, empathetic reasoning is riddled with the c...

Introduction: Campus life tends to make social and academic demands on college students. To cope with these demands, students are required to use their neurocognitive skills of problem- solving and planning intentional actions that target towards adaptation to college. This paper presents an illuminating perspective that would inform understanding of a new approach to cognitive neuroscience. Th...

The ability to draw numerical inductive reasoning requires two key cognitive processes, identification and extrapolation. This study aimed to identify the neural correlates of both component processes of numerical inductive reasoning using event-related fMRI. Three kinds of tasks: rule induction (RI), rule induction and application (RIA), and perceptual judgment (Jud) were solved by twenty righ...

Higher-order thinking abilities such as abstract reasoning and meaningful school learning occur sequentially. The fulfillment of these tasks demands that people activate and use all of their working memory resources in a controlled and supervised way. The aims of this work were: (a) to study the interplay between two new reasoning measures, one mathematical (Cognitive Reflection Test) and the o...

1 Software systems are becoming increasingly complex, demanding for more computational resources and better software development methodologies. The software engineer and the CASE tool must work like a team, and for this to happen the CASE tool must be able to understand the user, and to provide new functionalities, such as flexible retrieval of old designs. We think that Case-Based Reasoning ca...

The deployment of home-based smart health services requires effective and reliable systems for personal and environmental data management. Cooperation between Home Area Networks (HAN) and Body Area Networks (BAN) can provide smart systems with ad hoc reasoning information to support health care. This paper details the implementation of an architecture that integrates BAN, HAN and intelligent ag...

To test the domain-specificity of "theory of mind" abilities we compared the performance of a case-series of 11 brain-lesioned patients on a recently developed test of false belief reasoning () and on a matched false photograph task, which did not require belief reasoning and which addressed problems with existing false photograph methods. A strikingly similar pattern of performance was shown a...

A study, investigating the relationship between scientific reasoning and the capacity to discover the strategy to play an hypothetico-deductive game (MasterMind), posits that students being able to discover Complex Strategies (vs. General Strategy, Feedback Related, No Strategy) were also, on average, performing higher on our measure of scientific reasoning, itself composed of evaluative, exper...