A replication and re-analysis of a classic texture segmentation study.

A classic finding reported in Beck (1966a) is that observers tend to indicate a more natural texture break between a set of T's and tilted T's than between a set of T's and backward L's. This finding has played a prominent role in discussions about the properties of texture segmentation and in the development of computational theories of texture segmentation. Due to the small sample size of the original study, we replicated the original experiment with a larger sample.

Human verifications: Computable with truth values outside logic.

Cognitive scientists treat verification as a computation in which descriptions that match the relevant situation are true, but otherwise false. The claim is controversial: The logician Gödel and the physicist Penrose have argued that human verifications are not computable. In contrast, the theory of mental models treats verification as computable, but the two truth values of standard logics, and , as insufficient.

Attentional Strategies and the Transition From Subitizing to Estimation in Numerosity Perception.

The common view of the transition between subitizing and numerosity estimation regimes is that there is a hard bound on the subitizing range, and beyond this range, people estimate. However, this view does not adequately address the behavioral signatures of enumeration under conditions of attentional load or in the immediate post-subitizing range. The possibility that there might exist a numerosity range where both processes of subitizing and estimation operate in conjunction has so far been ignored.

Iconicity bias and duration.

Descriptions of durational relations can be ambiguous, for example, the description "one meeting happened during another" could mean that one meeting started before the other ended, or it could mean that the meetings started and ended simultaneously. A recent theory posits that people mentally simulate descriptions of durational events by representing their starts and ends along a spatial axis, that is, an iconic representation of time. To draw conclusions from this iconic mental model, reasoners consciously scan it in the direction of earlier to later timepoints.

Perceptual grouping strategies and texture segmentation: Strategic connections and selection.

In a series of articles, Jacob Beck proposed that a variety of texture segmentation phenomena occurs due to emergent features that arise from "links" between elements with appropriate local properties, such as alignment, orientation, and proximity. His findings and ideas guided theoretical and computational models, and some of his demonstrations became textbook knowledge about visual perception. We build on this work in two ways.

Quantifying the Magnitude and Longevity of the Effect of Repetitive Head Impacts in Adolescent Soccer Players: Deleterious Effect of Long Headers Extend Beyond a Month.

There is growing interest in the effects of sports-related repetitive head impacts (RHIs) on athletes' cognitive capabilities. This study examines the effect of RHIs in data collected from adolescent athletes to estimate the magnitude and longevity of RHIs on sensorimotor and cognitive performance. A non-linear regression model estimated the longevity of RHI effects by adding a half-life parameter embedded in an exponential decay function.

Temporal explanations.

People can explain phenomena by appealing to temporal relations, for example, you might explain a colleague's absence at a meeting by inferring that their prior meeting ended late. Previous explanatory reasoning research shows that people construct causal explanations to resolve causal conflicts. Accordingly, temporal explanations may help reasoners resolve temporal conflicts, and we describe four experimental tests of the hypothesis ( = 240).

Reasoning About Want.

No present theory explains the inferences people draw about the real world when reasoning about "bouletic" relations, that is, predicates that express desires, such as want in "Lee wants to be in love". Linguistic accounts of want define it in terms of a relation to a desirer's beliefs, and how its complement is deemed desirable. In contrast, we describe a new model-based theory that posits that by default, desire predicates such as want contrast desires against facts.

Validating and Refining Cognitive Process Models Using Probabilistic Graphical Models.

We describe a new approach for developing and validating cognitive process models. In our methodology, graphical models (specifically, hidden Markov models) are developed both from human empirical data on a task and synthetic data traces generated by a cognitive process model of human behavior on the task. Differences between the two graphical models can then be used to drive model refinement.

Confidence and gradation in causal judgment.

When comparing the roles of the lightning strike and the dry climate in causing the forest fire, one might think that the lightning strike is more of a cause than the dry climate, or one might think that the lightning strike completely caused the fire while the dry conditions did not cause it at all. Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether such causal judgments are graded; that is, whether people treat some causes as stronger than others. To address this debate, we first reanalyzed data from four recent studies.

Recursion in programs, thought, and language.

This article presents a theory of recursion in thinking and language. In the logic of computability, a function maps one or more sets to another, and it can have a recursive definition that is semi-circular, i.e.

Reasoning about properties: A computational theory.

We present a theory of how people reason about properties. Such inferences have been studied since Aristotle's invention of Western logic. But, no previous psychological theory gives an adequate account of them, and most theories do not go beyond syllogistic inferences, such as: ? The present theory postulates that such assertions establish relations between properties, which mental models represent in corresponding relations between sets of entities.

Apophatic science: how computational modeling can explain consciousness.

This study introduces a novel methodology for consciousness science. Consciousness as we understand it pretheoretically is inherently subjective, yet the data available to science are irreducibly intersubjective. This poses a unique challenge for attempts to investigate consciousness empirically.

Much Ado About Nothing: The Mental Representation of Omissive Relations.

When the absence of an event causes some outcome, it is an instance of omissive causation. For instance, not eating lunch may cause you to be hungry. Recent psychological proposals concur that the mind represents causal relations, including omissive causal relations, through mental simulation, but they disagree on the form of that simulation.

Norms Affect Prospective Causal Judgments.

People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments-that is, judgments about the cause of some future outcome.

Causal conflicts produce domino effects.

Inconsistent beliefs call for revision-but which of them should individuals revise? A long-standing view is that they should make minimal changes that restore consistency. An alternative view is that their primary task is to explain how the inconsistency arose. Hence, they are likely to violate minimalism in two ways: they should infer more information than is strictly necessary to establish consistency and they should reject more information than is strictly necessary to establish consistency.

Delay induced swarm pattern bifurcations in mixed reality experiments.

Swarms of coupled mobile agents subject to inter-agent wireless communication delays are known to exhibit multiple dynamic patterns in space that depend on the strength of the interactions and the magnitude of the communication delays. We experimentally demonstrate communication delay-induced bifurcations in the spatiotemporal patterns of robot swarms using two distinct hardware platforms in a mixed reality framework. Additionally, we make steps toward experimentally validating theoretically predicted parameter regions where transitions between swarm patterns occur.

Torus bifurcations of large-scale swarms having range dependent communication delay.

Dynamical emergent patterns of swarms are now fairly well established in nature and include flocking and rotational states. Recently, there has been great interest in engineering and physics to create artificial self-propelled agents that communicate over a network and operate with simple rules, with the goal of creating emergent self-organizing swarm patterns. In this paper, we show that when communicating networks have range dependent delays, rotational states, which are typically periodic, undergo a bifurcation and create swarm dynamics on a torus.

Teleological generics.

Certain "generic" generalizations concern functions and purposes, e.g., cars are for driving.

Unstable modes and bistability in delay-coupled swarms.

It is known that introducing time delays into the communication network of mobile-agent swarms produces coherent rotational patterns, from both theory and experiments. Often such spatiotemporal rotations can be bistable with other swarming patterns, such as milling and flocking. Yet, most known bifurcation results related to delay-coupled swarms rely on inaccurate mean-field techniques.

The role of attention in the enumeration of canonical patterns.

We report novel findings from experiments on the enumeration of canonical patterns under attentional load. While previous studies have shown that the process of enumerating randomized arrangements can be disrupted by attentional load, the effect of attentional load on canonical patterns has been unexplored. To investigate this case, we adapted a spatial dual-task paradigm previously used to study attentional disruption during the enumeration of randomized arrangements.

Prior Knowledge, Episodic Control and Theory of Mind in Autism: Toward an Integrative Account of Social Cognition.

Over the last 30 years, research has explored theory of mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others. Work on ToM in typical and atypical populations has shed light on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social understanding and interaction. The ToM hypothesis has long been regarded as one comprehensive explanation of the severe cognitive and behavioral impairments encountered by individuals with autism.

Mental models and omissive causation.

Some causal relations refer to causation by commission (e.g., "A gunshot causes death"), and others refer to causation by omission (e.

Simulation in children's conscious recursive reasoning.

When do children acquire the ability to understand recursion-that is, repeated loops of actions, as in cookery recipes or computer programs? Hitherto, studies have focused either on unconscious recursions in language and vision or on the difficulty of conscious recursions-even for adults-when learning to program. In contrast, we examined 10- to 11-year-old fifth-graders' ability to deduce the consequences of loops of actions in informal algorithms and to create such algorithms for themselves. In our experiments, the children tackled problems requiring the rearrangement of cars on a toy railway with a single track and a siding-an environment that in principle allows for the execution of any algorithm-that is, it has the power of a universal Turing machine.

Facts and Possibilities: A Model-Based Theory of Sentential Reasoning.

This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals (if) and disjunctions (or), unlike those in logic, refer to conjunctions of epistemic possibilities that hold in default of information to the contrary. Various factors such as general knowledge can modulate these interpretations.