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PubMed2001

Thematic relations in adults' concepts.

Concepts can be organized by their members' similarities, forming a kind (e.g., animal), or by their external relations within scenes or events (e.g., cake and candles). This latter type of relation, known as the thematic relation, is frequently found to be the basis of children's but not adults' classification. However, 10 experiments found that when thematic relations are meaningful and salient, they have significant influence on adults' category construction (sorting), inductive reasoning, and verification of category membership. The authors conclude that concepts function closely with knowledge of scenes and events and that this knowledge has a role in adults' conceptual representations.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Suboptimality in human categorization and identification.

Categorization and identification decision processes were examined and compared in 4 separate experiments. In all tasks, the critical stimulus component was a line that varied across trials in length and orientation, and the optimal decision rules were always complex piecewise quadratic functions. Evidence was found that identification is mediated by separate explicit and implicit systems. In addition, a common type of suboptimality was found in both categorization and identification. In particular, observers apparently approximated the piecewise quadratic functions of the optimal decision rules with simpler piecewise linear functions. A computational model, which was motivated by a recent neuropsychological theory of category learning, successfully accounted for this suboptimal performance in both categorization and identification. The model assigns a key role to the striatum and assumes the observed suboptimality was largely due to massive convergence of visual cortical cells onto single striatal units.

California↗
PubMed2005

Exploring the alcohol expectancy memory network: the utility of free associates.

Alcohol expectancies are theorized to operate through associative memory networks. These networks are thought to differ on the basis of individual experience (direct and vicarious) with alcohol. Free-associate probabilities have been used in cognitive psychology as a metric of the associative strength of words to other words; this method has been used to establish the relationships within a semantic memory network. Participants from a large college sample were asked to free associate to the phrase "Alcohol makes me ______" They were also asked about their quantity of alcohol consumption. Results showed that specific responses were given with different probabilities by individuals who drank at different levels. The heaviest drinkers tended to have more positive and arousing responses than did lighter drinkers, who tended to have more negative and sedating responses. These results underscore the need to take into account relevant individual differences in behavior and experience when characterizing semantic networks.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

George A. Miller, language, and the computer metaphor of mind.

This article asks why the analogy between humans and computers was understood by cognitive psychologists to mean that "minds exist and that it is our job as psychologists to study them". Earlier psychologists, such as Clark Hull, used analogies between humans and complex machines such as telephone switchboards to defend a rigorous behaviorism. How, then, did the computer metaphor of mind come to be seen as the root concept underlying a paradigm shift from behaviorism to cognitivism? To answer this question, this article examines the life and work of George A. Miller, one of the most prominent of a generation of psychologists who began their careers as "good behaviorists" but later came to embrace cognitivism.

Behaviorism↗
PubMed2000

Mystery and meaning: a reply to Green (2000).

In "George A. Miller, Language, and the Computer Metaphor of Mind" (see Note 1), I sought to explain how and why Miller invested the computer metaphor of mind with such strongly revolutionary, antibehaviorist meanings. In reply, Christopher Green (see Note 2) has argued that the answer to this question has to do with the importance of mental representation was an important issue to cognitivists. In response, I argue that, though mental representation was an important issue to cognitivists, there were several other factors of equal or greater importance: specifically, the fascination of Miller and his cohort with language and communication, their frustration with the narrowness of the disciplinary vision of the behaviorists, and their involvement in a different experimental program than that of mainstream behaviorists.

Behaviorism↗
PubMed2005

Was Babbage's Analytical Engine intended to be a mechanical model of the mind?

In the 1830s, Charles Babbage worked on a mechanical computer he dubbed the Analytical Engine. Although some people around Babbage described his invention as though it had authentic mental powers, Babbage refrained from making such claims. He does not, however, seem to have discouraged those he worked with from mooting the idea publicly. This article investigates whether (1) the Analytical Engine was the focus of a covert research program into the mechanism of mentality; (2) Babbage opposed the idea that the Analytical Engine had mental powers but allowed his colleagues to speculate as they saw fit; or (3) Babbage believed such claims to be fanciful, but cleverly used the publicity they engendered to draw public and political attention to his project.

Cognitive Science↗
PubMed2004

Theory and data interactions of the scientific mind: evidence from the molecular and the cognitive laboratory.

A number of researchers and scholars have stressed the importance of disconfirmation in the quest for the development of scientific knowledge (e.g., Popper, 1959). Paradoxically, studies examining human reasoning in the laboratory have typically found that people display a confirmation bias in that they are more likely to seek out and attend to data consistent rather than data inconsistent with their initial theory (Wason, 1968). We examine the strategies that scientists and students use to evaluate data that are either consistent or inconsistent with their expectations. First, we present findings from scientists reasoning "live" in their laboratory meetings. We show that scientists often show an initial reluctance to consider inconsistent data as "real." However, this initial reluctance is often overcome with repeated observations of the inconsistent data such that they modify their theories to account for the new data. We further examine these issues in a controlled scientific causal thinking simulation specifically developed to examine the reasoning strategies we observed in the natural scientific environment. Like the scientists, we found that participants in our simulation initially displayed a propensity to discount data inconsistent with a theory provided. However, with repeated observations of the inconsistent data, the students, like the scientists, began to see the once anomalous data as "real" and the initial bias to discount that data was significantly diminished.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Wanted: a new psychology of exemplars.

Present-day exemplar theory faces difficult challenges, and important questions have arisen about the kinds of exemplar effects and processes that are empirically supported, and about the kind of exemplar theory that could still be constructive. One question concerns whether exemplar generalization in memory and categorization is broad and collective--extending to many related exemplars stored in memory--or whether it is focused and singular--extending only to highly similar (nearly identical) exemplars. The present article considers this continuum from broad to narrow generalization. I demonstrate that in prominent memory and category tasks--tasks in which exemplar theory predicts broad generalization--generalization is in psychological reality very tightly focused. These demonstrations could ground a new, productive exemplar theory that is true to psychological process as humans conduct themselves in memory and category tasks. This new psychology may actually reprise the traditional exemplar theory that predated our sophisticated, mathematical exemplar models.

Association↗
PubMed2005

The blossoms and the weeds.

As attested by the articles in this issue and the papers given at the festschrift, I have had the privilege of working with a talented group of people. In this article, a critique is given on the bouquet of themes that have bound many of us together, sorting the blossoms from some of the weeds. A brief description is then given of how these themes are working out in our current research on categorization.

Cognition↗
PubMed2000

Transcranial magnetic stimulation and cognitive neuroscience.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation has been used to investigate almost all areas of cognitive neuroscience. This article discusses the most important (and least understood) considerations regarding the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation for cognitive neuroscience and outlines advances in the use of this technique for the replication and extension of findings from neuropsychology. We also take a more speculative look forward to the emerging development of strategies for combining transcranial magnetic stimulation with other brain imaging technologies and methods in the cognitive neurosciences.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

Swinging in the brain: shared neural substrates for behaviors related to sequencing and music.

Music consists of precisely patterned sequences of both movement and sound that engage the mind in a multitude of experiences. We move in response to music and we move in order to make music. Because of the intimate coupling between perception and action, music provides a panoramic window through which we can examine the neural organization of complex behaviors that are at the core of human nature. Although the cognitive neuroscience of music is still in its infancy, a considerable behavioral and neuroimaging literature has amassed that pertains to neural mechanisms that underlie musical experience. Here we review neuroimaging studies of explicit sequence learning and temporal production--findings that ultimately lay the groundwork for understanding how more complex musical sequences are represented and produced by the brain. These studies are also brought into an existing framework concerning the interaction of attention and time-keeping mechanisms in perceiving complex patterns of information that are distributed in time, such as those that occur in music.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

The expert mind.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Cognitive Science↗
PubMed1997

Cognitive/concept mapping: a teaching strategy for nursing.

Cognitive/concept mapping is an educational strategy that takes into consideration the principles of educational psychology. The most important single factor that influences learning is what the learner already knows. Nursing students face a great need to understand the larger questions and problems of their chosen field. Unless there is understanding, students may only commit unassimilated data to short-term memory and no meaningful learning will occur. The purpose of the following paper is to present concept mapping as a learning/teaching strategy for nursing students and nursing faculty. Examples of maps will be presented along with suggestions about how they can be used to plan care for a particular client or to learn more about the nursing care of a specific disease process.

Algorithms↗
PubMed1999

Validation of the structure of the perceived meanings of cancer pain inventory.

This study examined the structure of a newly developed instrument measuring the meaning of cancer pain for Taiwanese patients. The Perceived Meanings of Cancer Pain Inventory (PMCPI) was developed based on Lazarus's cognitive theory of emotion and on findings from qualitative interviews. The 27-item PMCPI contains six scales: loss, threat, challenge, blame-others, blame-self, and spiritual awareness. Two hundred cancer patients from three hospitals in northern Taiwan who were experiencing pain were included in the study. A series of confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to test the fit of specified measurement models. The results indicated that only the loss, threat, challenge and spiritual awareness scales possessed good construct validity, while blame-other and blame-self failed to show a satisfactory fit with the data. Correlation coefficients among the scales were also estimated. Parallel-item testing demonstrated that the items of each valid scale had the same factor loading and error variance.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Nursing scripts and the organizational influences on critical thinking: report of a study of neonatal nurses' clinical reasoning.

During 1995-1997 a study was undertaken to explore the extent to which theoretical knowledge acquired through a distance education programme in neonatal nursing was brought to bear in the real-world clinical reasoning of course participants. The study utilized a think aloud technique and included both concurrent (on-the-job) and retrospective verbal reports at 0, 6 and 12 months into the programme. Participants (n=4) were also interviewed individually on completion of the study. Results indicated that important inconsistencies existed between participants' theoretical knowledge and their practice; they also pointed to some organizational influences on these theory-practice inconsistencies. Script (or schema) theory provided a useful explanatory framework for these results. The paper includes a brief description of data collection and analysis techniques; its main emphasis, however, is on these theory-practice inconsistencies and their explanation in terms of the nature and acquisition of nursing practice scripts. The implications of nursing scripts for the promotion of critical thinking and evidence-based practice are discussed.

Adult↗