Although theories of mental simulations have used different formulations of the premises of ‘thought experiments’, they can be fitted under a minimalist hypothesis stating that mental simulations are run under situations of uncertainty to turn that uncertainty into approximate answers. Three basic assumptions of mental simulations were tested by using naturalistic data from engineering design. ...

This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grants SBR-9520107 (Luce) and SBR-9730076 (Grofman, Marley, Regenwetter) to the University of California, Irvine. We thank Rolf Johnson and Bethany Knapp for pointing out that an earlier version of this result worked only for subjective expected utility, not the rank-dependent generalization. Address correspondence and reprint reque...

Theories and tools to measure the efficiency of neural codes have been important in understanding neural responses to external stimuli. However, similar principles to describe the efficiency of brain responses to tasks demanding higher-order cognitive processes remain underdeveloped. A key domain to study such efficiency is learning, where patterns of activity across the entire brain provide in...

Previous studies have demonstrated significant relationships among various cognitive variables such as negative cognition, self-efficacy, and social anxiety. Unfortunately, few studies focus on the role of cognition among youth, and researchers often fail to use domain-specific measures when examining cognitive variables. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to examine domain-specifi...

We introduce and empirically evaluate the strategy-affordance hypothesis, which holds that individual differences in strategy use will mediate the relationship between performance on a working memory (WM) span task and another cognitive task only when the same strategies are afforded by both tasks. One-hundred and forty eight participants completed basic memory tasks and verbal span tasks that ...

The social intelligence hypothesis posits that complex cognition and enlarged "executive brains" evolved in response to challenges that are associated with social complexity. This hypothesis has been well supported, but some recent data are inconsistent with its predictions. It is becoming increasingly clear that multiple selective agents, and non-selective constraints, must have acted to shape...

The idea that something about cognition lies outside the brain and even the skin is central to a number of significant recent developments in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Loosely grouped under the label, ‘situated cognition’, all variants of this view hold that the various contexts of cognition are crucial to it in some way. However, there is a big division over what way. Indeed, t...

The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) claims that the cognitive processes materially realise thinking are sometimes partially constituted by entities located external to an agent’s body in its local environment. We show how proponents HEC need not claim agent must have a central nervous system, or physically instantiate organised such way as play causal role equivalent brain if is be capab...

BACKGROUND Although cognition has been studied extensively among patients with schizophrenia, social cognition has only recently emerged as an area of interest. The objective of the current study was to use structural equation modelling to test the hypothesis that the relation between cognitive performance and social function is mediated by patients' social cognitive abilities. METHODS We ass...

How language and cognition interact in thinking? Is language just used for communication of completed thoughts, or is it fundamental for thinking? Existing approaches have not led to a computational theory. We develop a hypothesis that language and cognition are two separate but closely interacting mechanisms. Language accumulates cultural wisdom; cognition develops mental representations model...