1. Address correspor\dence to Paul Bloom, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721; e-mail: blooni@u. arizona.edu. 2. Not all object individuation is plausibly viewed as emerging from an innate object module. In particular, the identification of objects in a static scene draws on a person's prior experience with the objects and on sensitivity to cues such as discontinui...

We agree with recent countability research that a satisfactory account of individuation in terms of what counts as ‘one’ unit for counting is highly relevant for characterizing a semantics of the mass/count distinction. However, we argue that an account that rests on individuation alone does not suffice to cover all the relevant mass/count data, in particular the puzzling mass/count variation d...

Variants of the slogan that a succession of experiences (in and of itself ) does not amount to an experience of succession are commonplace in the philosophical literature on temporal experience. I distinguish three quite different arguments that might be captured using this slogan: the individuation argument, the unity argument, and the causal argument. Versions of the unity and the causal argu...

Recent results have shown that participants can enumerate multiple parts of a single object as efficiently as multiple distinct objects, suggesting a shared mechanism for individuation of objects and object parts. Here we used the subitizing phenomenon to investigate the neural mechanism underlying the individuation of object parts. In two experiments, we measured a lateralized EEG response (N2...

This paper focuses on the challenge of building technical agents that act flexibly in modern computing and information environments. Flexibility is approached in terms of both cognition (ranging from reactive to pro-active) and sociability (ranging from isolated to interactive). It is argued that existing agent architectures tend to inherently limit an agent’s flexibility because they imply a d...