Mechanistic explanations of cognitive activities are ubiquitous in cognitive science. Humanist critics often object that mechanistic accounts of the mind are incapable of accounting for the moral agency exhibited by humans. We counter this objection by offering a sketch of how the mechanistic perspective can accommodate moral agency. We ground our argument in the requirement that biological sys...

Four reaction time experiments examined the mental rotation process using a psychological refractory period paradigm. On each trial, participants made speeded responses to both a tone (S1) and a rotated letter (S2), presented with varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). If mental rotation of the stimulus letter can proceed while central mechanisms are busy with S1, then the effect of orient...

An important goal of the cognitive sciences is to explain mental phenomena in terms of mechanisms. A mechanistic explanation requires characterizing the operations of the mechanism’s parts. The challenge in characterizing such operations is illustrated by an example from biology in which some investigators tried to characterize the internal operations in the same terms as the overall physiologi...

Mental imagery research has weathered both disbelief of the phenomenon and inherent methodological limitations. Here we review recent behavioral, brain imaging, and clinical research that has reshaped our understanding of mental imagery. Research supports the claim that visual mental imagery is a depictive internal representation that functions like a weak form of perception. Brain imaging work...

Simulation theory accounts of mind-reading propose that the observer generates a mental state that matches the state of the target and then uses this state as the basis for an attribution of a similar state to the target. The key proposal is thus that mechanisms that are primarily used online, when a person experiences a kind of mental state, are then co-opted to run Simulations of similar stat...

background following the tenets of world polity and innovation diffusion theories, i focus on the coercive and mimetic forces that influence the diffusion of mental health policy across nations. international organizations’ mandates influence government behavior. dependency on external resources, namely foreign aid, also affects governments’ formulation of national policy. and finally, mounting...

conclusions it seems that implementation of an appropriate interventional program related to adaptive ways of coping in order to deal with stress is effective in mental health and quality of life promotion. results the most and the least used ways in coping with stress were planful problem solving and confronting coping. considering the quality of life, the most and the least scores were relate...