PubMed Health⌕ Search
Home/Archive/PubMed

PubMed · 12876446

A proper metaphysics for cognitive performance.

Guy C Van Orden·Miguel A Moreno·John G Holden
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The general failure to individuate component causes in cognitive performance suggests the need for an alternative metaphysics. The metaphysics of control hierarchy theory accommodates the fact of self-organization in nature and the possibility that intentional actions are self-organized. One key assumption is that interactions among processes dominate their intrinsic dynamics. Scaling relations in response time variability motivate this assumption in cognitive performance.

Explore related subjects

CognitionHumansIntentionMetaphysicsReaction TimeJournal Article

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Guy C Van Orden, Miguel A Moreno, John G Holden. 2003. A proper metaphysics for cognitive performance.. https://doi.org/10.1023/a%3A1020462025387

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related citations

PubMed2003

Culture and point of view.

East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior. Rules used include formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are therefore often mistaken. East Asians are more likely to attend to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and grouping objects based on family resemblance rather than category membership. Causal attributions emphasize the context. Social factors are likely to be important in directing attention. East Asians live in complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is important to effective functioning. More independent Westerners live in less constraining social worlds and have the luxury of attending to the object and their goals with respect to it. The physical "affordances" of the environment may also influence perception. The built environments of the East are more complex and contain more objects than do those of the West. In addition, artistic products of the East emphasize the field and deemphasize individual objects, including people. Western art renders less of the field and emphasizes individual objects and people.

Cognition↗
PubMed2003

The emergence of abstract ideas: evidence from networks and babies.

What is abstraction? In our view, abstraction is generalization. Specifically, we propose that abstract concepts emerge as the natural product of associative learning and generalization by similarity. We support this proposal by presenting evidence for two ideas: first, that children's knowledge about how categories are organized and how words refer to them can be explained as learned generalizations over specific experiences of words referring to categories; and second, that the path of concepts from concrete to more abstract can be observed throughout development and that even in their more abstract form, concepts retain some of their original sensory basis. We illustrate these two facts by examining, in two kinds of learners--networks and young children--the development of three abstract ideas: (i) the idea of word; (ii) the idea of object; and (iii) the idea of substance.

Cognition↗
PubMed2003

Abstraction and context in concept representation.

This paper develops the notion of abstraction in the context of the psychology of concepts, and discusses its relation to context dependence in knowledge representation. Three general approaches to modelling conceptual knowledge from the domain of cognitive psychology are discussed, which serve to illustrate a theoretical dimension of increasing levels of abstraction.

Cognition↗